Perrotin Shanghai is pleased to present The Cloud Catcher, the first group exhibition of 2025, curated by Evonne Jiawei Yuan.
What, then,
extraordinary stranger,
do you love?
I love the clouds…
the clouds that
pass yonder the marvelous clouds.
The exhibition draws profound inspiration from the prose poem “L’Étranger” (1869) written by Charles Pierre Baudelaire, which was published in Le Spleen de Paris. In this evocative work accomplished more than a century ago, Baudelaire employs the metaphor of clouds to symbolize a lost or departed “homeland.” Emphasizing how clouds in themselves transcend geographical boundaries and limitations, he delves into the complexities of the human psyche and explores the ethereal nature of existence and the transient essence of identity. The point of Baudelaire’s writing is “to capture the beauty of life in the modern city” that arises from “melancholy with no apparent cause” yet “characterized by a disgust with everything.”
Driven by this idea, the 18 artists from different generations and backgrounds featured in the exhibition, 11 of whom collaborate with Perrotin for the first time were born in the 1980s to 1990s across China and Asia, hereby navigate the fluidity of self-positioning through their unique approaches to painting, which trespass the binary between figuration and abstraction with a motivated gesture of “catching clouds.”
On the one hand, their painting practices engage with the nuanced layers of transcultural and post-national experiences, reflecting a rich tapestry of narratives that respond to the disrupted matrix of identity categories that often surround diaspora. Such an inquiry encompasses a wide range of themes, including migration and displacement, transgression and emotional transference, as well as various media that articulate these trajectories. For example, Cao Taiping and Shan Yuhan’s depictions of dirt and snowfields of agricultural and industrial landscapes in their birthplaces both veil the split composition realized through the ground line to reflect their sense of distance and inaccessibility.
Echoing Anna-Eva Bergman’s reflections on the connection between humans and nature in the context of war trauma, as well as the circular disc shapes often adopted by Sigrid Sandström, Kaifan Wang’s abstract gestures relate to the desert plant tumbleweed that pervades his childhood memories and deals with the conflictual nature inherent in Western mythological allusions to images of clouds alternated and draped with fire. On the other hand, they tend to see the vision of clouds as an indication of the mutability of time and space, where the hazy weather rather becomes a trope for the bio-politics in-and-of a new era. Chen Ruofan looks at issues such as dust pollution and global warming through his digital sketches that combine painting and textiles. For James Prapaithong, who splits his time between London and Bangkok, the skyline perhaps influences his perception of his surroundings more often than the horizon.
French art historian and philosopher Hubert Damisch has developed an informative analysis around the formal aspects of clouds in the history of painting in A Theory of /Cloud/ (2002). The exhibition thus provides a compelling platform for examining the interconnectedness of this meta-image and its reflexivity based on its strength compared with linear perspective. Damisch also cites Gaston Bachelard’s expression that clouds serve as “an inductive sign that can serve as a point of departure for an argument which is both logical and analytical.” Additionally, Bachelard notes in Air and Dreams (1943) that “clouds help us to dream of transformation,” and they are “taken as a messenger.” In this vein, The Cloud Catcher applies Gabriel Rico’s Metawoman series as a “guiding symbol” or “signal” to link a series of female artists who use the imagery of halos and smoky mists to reproduce gendered motifs such as flowers, including Kristy Chan, Mathilde Denize, Effie Wanyi Li, Ma Lingli, Kiki Xuebing Wang, Xie Qi and others.
Another set of counterpoints in the exhibition can be found in the symmetrical compositions appropriated by Laurent Grasso and Xu Suyi. Ritualistic geometric iconographies, or imaginatively constructed spiritual totems, overset the irresistible attraction of gravity by a shroud of thick fog rising and burning across the canvas, which challenges the concrete reality and evokes a dialogue between stability and transcendence. In this regard, clouds are either depicted as painting objects or applied as painting methods by the participating artists.
Clouds indeed prompt fluctuations in the viewer’s feeling of security, while the artist captures the trajectories of volitional movement in their fleeting moments of clarity and ambiguity. They engage with the notion of clouds not only as a visual element but also as a concept that embodies the fragility and transience of human beings. What Liang Hao and Thilo Heinzmann have repeatedly tried is to achieve the materiality and even tactility of the smoke as much as possible. This investigation is particularly relevant in today’s chaos introduced by the shadow of the neoliberal order, which further contributes to a process of retribalization. The Cloud Catcher thus invites the viewer to reflect on the ephemeral reveries of belonging and the intricacies of exchange in a rapidly changing world.
All these clouds, with their fantastic and luminous forms, these chaotic shadows, the huge green and pink spaces, hanging suspended and piled one on top of another, these gaping furnaces, these firmaments of black or violet satin, wrinkled, rolled, or torn, these horizons draped in mourning and dripping with molten metal, all of these splendors so straight to my head like a heady wine or the eloquence produced by opium.
