Legendary artist Andy Warhol is having a significant solo exhibition in China’s capital, Beijing, at the private art museum M Woods. Entitled “Andy Warhol: Contact,” the show will run from August 6 through January 7, 2017.Curated by M Woods Director Presca Ahn, the exhibition brings together photography, film, and interactive installations, focusing on the experimental and mechanically produced areas of Warhol’s oeuvre. Viewers will thus gain insights into how the silver-haired man not only pushed boundaries within the field of Contemporary art of his generation, but, more importantly, within portraiture.A rare selection of unseen works will be on view, notably the “Silver Cloud” interactive installation, in which shiny, soft pillow shapes will float throughout the space. The installation was previously shown at New York’s Leo Castelli Gallery in 1966, where viewers were able to walk around, interact, and touch the 'clouds,' making it one of the earliest examples of an immersive art installation.The radical underground film “Kiss” from 1963 will debut at M Woods. The film shows multiple couples kissing, yet these somewhat passionate acts are presented without context or narrative, reducing intimate moments to a cold and anthropological perspective.Other highlights include “Screen Tests,” Warhol’s silent film portraits from the 1960s, which feature various celebrities and artists who were frequent guests at the Factory nightclub, such as Marcel Duchamp, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, and Edie Sedgwick. Polaroid pictures of the artist himself will also be on show, through which he used to obsessively document his life and that of others around him. Warhol’s works are crowd-pleasers for many reasons, yet the one that especially stands out is his relatability to today’s digital age of compulsively and instantaneously documenting moments through channels like Instagram. “Warhol’s radical use of the technologies at his disposal anticipated many defining aspects of today’s art world: the widespread use of social media, the ‘selfie’ photo, immersive art installations, and – perhaps most of all – the idea of the artist as a brand,” said Presca Ahn in a statement.China has rarely displayed the Pop artist’s works, which, according to various sources, is partly due to low interest and lack of knowledge about Warhol. Nonetheless, it has been three years since his previous traveling retrospective “Andy Warhol: 15 Minutes Eternal” in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Beijing, and the city will once again welcome his influential body of work.“Andy Warhol: Contact” runs from August 6 through January 7, 2017 at M Woods, Beijing.
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