MILAN.- Fondazione Prada presents two new exhibitions opening to the public in Milan on January 30, 2020: Liu Ye: Storytelling, curated by Udo Kittelmann and The Porcelain Room – Chinese Export Porcelain, curated by Jorge Welsh and Luísa Vinhais.
Storytelling
Storytelling is a solo show by Chinese painter Liu Ye curated by Udo Kittelmann. Following the first iteration held in 2018 at Prada Rong Zhai in Shanghai, the exhibition travels to Milan for a new presentation, featuring a selection of 35 paintings realized from 1992 onwards.
In Shanghai Liu Ye's works related harmoniously with the 1918 historical residence’s original furnishings, decorations and colours, creating a symbiotic relationship with the intimate spaces and small rooms of Prada Rong Zhai. In Milan the paintings will generate a chromatic and material contrast with the concrete walls and the industrial environment of Fondazione Prada’s venue, in order to activate a new narrative sequence and an enigmatic contrast with these large exhibition spaces.
Liu Ye expresses an intimate and sensual imagination, that feeds on heterogeneous sources related to literature, history of art and popular culture from the Western and Eastern world, giving rise to atmospheres which evoke introspection, purity and suspension. In the artist’s body of works the stylistic features of fairy-tales coexist with a sense of humor and a parodic vein.
The Porcelain Room - Chinese Export Porcelain
The Porcelain Room – Chinese Export Porcelain is an exhibition curated by Jorge Welsh and Luísa Vinhais that explores the historical context, scope and impact of Chinese export porcelain.
The Porcelain Room brings together examples of porcelains made from the 16th to the 19th centuries for different markets, religions, and social groups. The project illustrates how efficient the Chinese were in understanding the taste and the demand of each segment of the market, and tailoring their production accordingly. Although Chinese ceramics were already well-known outside China as early as the Tang Dynasty (618-907) and had reached Europe by the early 14th century, it was only after the opening of the sea routes to the East by the Portuguese in 1513 that the export of Chinese porcelain took its monumental pace, reaching every corner of the world. During the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) the export market became increasingly important, initially with the appealing celadon and underglaze blue porcelains. Once Europeans started trading and commissioning porcelains to bring back to the West, they quickly became the first truly global commodities.
The Porcelain Room gathers more than 1,700 individual Chinese export porcelains revealing their refined workmanship to a wider audience and not only to experts. Divided in three sections, the display is conceived as a room within-a-room, a brown velvet covered structure, integrating several vitrines and an intimate space decorated in gold.
