ACTION TATE 2021
ACTION TURNER CONTEMPORARY 2020
Mad For Real
Mad For Real (Cai Yuan and JJ Xi) present their banner project commissioned by Venice Agendas to mark the new decade. In the giant public space of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, they will lay down large-scale hand-written sheets in Chinese communicating in their own language to further their ongoing critique of the exclusionary nature of the institutional art world. In a climate of decolonisation of art education and the institution, their simple performative act aims to highlight certain blind-spots that continue to affect the non-Western world, playing with boundaries of understanding and recognising the linguistic barriers that limit cross-cultural communication.
By presenting a work for an exclusively Chinese-language readership, Mad For Real circumscribes access by mainstream UK audiences thus diverting the Venice Agendas question, ‘What is the Value of Art?’ towards the question of language, power and ownership in the art world. The idea of ‘the conservation’ is evoked with relation to linguistic accessibility and globalisation.
January 18th2020
2.00 pm
Turbine Hall
Mad For Real
Born in China in 1956 and 1962 respectively, Cai Yuan and Jian Jun Xi have been living and working in the United Kingdom since the 1980s. Cai Yuan trained in oil painting at Nanjing College of Art, Chelsea College of Art and the Royal College of Art. Jian Jun Xi trained at the Central Academy of Applied Arts in Beijing and later at Goldsmiths College. They started working as a performance duo in the late nineties with their action Two Artists Jump on Tracey Emin’s Bed (1999) at Tate Britain’s Turner Prize Exhibition.
Mad For Real (Cai Yuan and Jian Jun Xi)’s oeuvre has continually questioned the relationship of power to the individual. Using a position of resistance Cai and Xi have consistently produced work which is necessarily oppositional yet the warmth and humour of their work also acts to draw viewers in. their performance have taken place as radical gesture calling to mind notorious artists of earlier radical art movements but the historical, linguistic and political context of their practice is often related specifically to their origins: China
Mad For Real storm the Turner Prize
