The group exhibition Another Tongue of Mine presents a series of paintings and video works by Li Ran, Liu Xiaodong, Laure Prouvost, Wael Shawky, and Shen Xin, exploring how the symbols and systems of language fundamentally shape our perception of the world, creating endless transformations in speaking, translating, listening, contemplation or even silence. This exhibition is curated by Beijing-based curator and researcher Yang Beichen.
The exhibition derives its title from a prose of the same title by Chinese writer Wang Meng, where he recounts his experience of learning Uyghur in Xinjiang during the 1960s. Wang regards language as a medium that bridges narratives and understanding between oneself and others. Through narration, learning, and listening, the image of the other is constructed, outlining the boundaries or touching upon the possibility of coexistence. Language is not a neutral, objective vessel; once filtered through it, consciousness and beliefs shadow every linguistic act and narrative. The similarities and differences in language flow and intersect between individuals, groups, and cultures, forming new constructs of discourse and power. In this presentation, the artists navigate between practices of painting and video, seeking medium specificity while crafting an intertextual system that achieves poetic resonance across forms and texts.
Li Ran presents Life fo the Pilgrim (2017), a video that weaves together archival photos, including images of Xinjiang Construction Corps’ production practices in May Day pasture and news photography. Through a semi-fictional narrative, Li explores his perspective on history, which he describes as complex and shattered, from both third-person and first-person viewpoints. Alongside are four paintings created between 2023 and 2024, an extension of the artist’s 2023 solo exhibition Waiting for the Advent at Lisson London. These paintings, with symbolic motifs and satirical undertones, explore the themes prevalent in Li's work. Evoking the style of satirical cartoons, You People Are So Political (2023) prompts viewers to contemplate the omnipresence of politics; while Repeated Forward (2023) draws its title from Søren Kierkegaard's Repetition, where two figures breaking out from confinement are astonished by what they are confronted with – a form of modernism that somehow has been pre-determined.
Read moreLiu Xiaodong, known for the practice of working from life, presents a film that documents the making of his Hotan Project in 2012. Over two months, Liu captured the lives of local workers in the opencast jade mines in China’s Xinjiang through a group of canvases, sketches, over-painted photographs as well as diaries, highlighting the region's diverse and intricate social and cultural landscape. Likewise, his London series Half Street (2013), which focuses on local pubs and restaurants, also takes a purposefully anthropological approach. Liu writes and draws in a journal and takes photographs before building a temporary studio in situ, to paint en plein air or ‘xiesheng’ as it is known in Chinese, and document the encounters of Londoners over six weeks.
The language employed by Laure Prouvost allows space for multiple interpretations, with images manifesting in the viewer's imagination. Her vocabulary suggests that fixed meanings generally ascribed to objects or utterances can be re-wired. Shown in the presentation, her narrative paintings and video Re-dit-en-un-in-a-learning (2020) both put images against text, testing the fluency in her imagined optical and oral vocabulary to destabilize our understanding of language and its structure of knowledge: for Prouvost, goat means you, flamingo means angry, bread means work and so on. The title of the video work itself is a play on words combining ‘dit’ (a verb meaning ‘to speak’ or ‘speaking’ in French) and ‘learn,’ encapsulating the essence of linguistic evolution and the perpetual process of relearning. Prouvost explains, "You cannot find the words for the images you see... All becomes one."
An expert storyteller, Wael Shawky, takes historiographical and literary references as starting points for his concentrated narratives, in which he interweaves fable, fact and fiction, exploring how myths often become belief. Featuring a variation of Shawky’s archetypal marionette, the film Isles of the Blessed (Oops!...I forgot Europe) (2022) is a recitation of a pivotal lore in the founding of Europe. The figure narrates the classical Greek mythological story of the Isles of the Blessed in Arabic, Shawky’s first language. Through presenting a Greek myth in classical Arabic, Shawky creates an entanglement of cultures and histories in the first instance. By extension, through presenting the story of the birth of the European nations, the artist transforms predominant Western denominations into mythological drama, inviting consideration of today’s truths, myths and stereotypes. Presented alongside the film is a painting from the same series that delves further into the realms of the magical, layering mythological scenes onto historical narratives. Shawky employs the canvas as a space ‘where fictions become realities’, pointing to history as a construct and the paintings explore the fantastical facets of the stories echoed in the film.
For Shen Xin, language is often deeply embodied. In the video but this is the language we met in (2023) from the Grounds of Coherence series, the wide-ranging imagery and multifaceted soundscape is permeated with the artist’s apparent yearning to unearth language in its most primal forms. Their languages are heard in the video – from the chanting of objection in Chinese dialect to Arabic vocabulary of ‘story’, to storytelling about the myth of perception in English. The video evokes how certain aspects of language persist while others have changed, underscoring the ameliorations and limitations of contemporary communication: characters written in the air being captured on a computer screen, voices sounding out words in Arabic and Uyghur accompanied by subtitles, the enduring need for translation for comprehension to occur, a conversation between two people who share a common language though not a mother tongue, and the telling of stories and the singing of songs.
