The Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation and Arthub Asia, a nonprofit contemporary art organization devoted to artistic creation across Asia, are proud to present Xijing, the first institutional exhibition dedicated to the work of the Xijing Men collective, a unique collaborative team consisting of the artists Chen Shaoxiong (China), Tsuyoshi Ozawa (Japan) and Gimhongsok (South Korea). Hosted in the Foundation’s main venue in St. Mark’s Square, the show is a quixotic journey through the creative universe of Xijing – a life-world of encounters, places and compound narratives that have been evoked by the aforementioned collective since 2007.

Xijing - the capital of the West - exists on a fictitious geopolitical axis created in correspondence to the real cities of Beijing (capital of the North), Nanjing (capital of the South) and Dongjing/Tokyo (capital of the East). Conceived right from the outset as a progressive exploration through five open-ended chapters, the Xijing project is based on the literary exercises of fictional geography and imaginary mapping, traveling instead through the ‘enactment’ of a symbolic territory where there are seamless connections between spatiality and identity in the collective’s production.

Developed over the course of the past five years in different geographical and institutional contexts (Asia, Europe, museums, galleries, alternative art spaces, biennials etc.), the creation of Xijing is put together through an artistic practice which covers a variety of media and formats, conceived to make the process of ‘situating’ Xijing a participatory and productively instable experience. All of the chapters so far created (Do you know Xijing?, Welcome to Xijing, This is Xijing and I Love Xijing) are constituted via performance interventions in the phenomenological world of politics and institutions, as well as that of art, history and society. Alternating between dark humor and existential eccentricity, these abridged scripts are devised to show Xijing as the immanent other side of all things human, be it of memory or mythology, literature or tradition, the foundations of urbanity, the conception of citizenship, the formation of power and authority.

The Xijing exhibition features a new large-scale installation which, as a second interpretation of the fourth chapter (I Love Xijing), constitutes a main sculptural landscape around which a selection of video-based works and a sound installation relating to previous chapters are presented, so as to create an archive of the performances at the core of the artists’ collaborative practices and a visual synthesis of their unique research.