Riding the streets at the dawn of the new millennium

 In this residential community building in northern Guangzhou, an elevator will take you past several exhibitions interwoven into the residential buildings. The roof of the residential building is part of the visual elements of the exhibition wall, and the underground floor houses the museum's archives. These exhibition Spaces together form the Guangdong Times Art Museum.

Art in the local, art and life intertwined. The museum, which opened in 2010, is itself a footnote to the special social, economic and cultural nature of the Pearl River Delta, as well as an interesting chapter in guangzhou's urbanization process. The museum often invites artists to create open resident works, breaking the convention that the museum only presents finished works. The whole museum area gives people a feeling of touchability, vitality and growth.

When you arrive at the 19th floor exhibition hall, came in the 1990 s coastal area in west of guangdong province yangjiang, yangjiang times art museum is holding the youth of the exhibition "winner in the street", the whole area is composed of a cross half of yangjiang city streets, yangjiang construction entity embedded in the exhibition hall, between people in the streets and alleys and the building, Watching the artistic practices in and around Yangjiang from the 1990s to the beginning of the new millennium. These works came from yangjiang art youth in the 1990s, who formed "Yangjiang Group" and created locally.

In addition to the exhibition area itself, the 19th floor of the residential building has terraces overlooking guangzhou's cityscape and two glass exhibition halls, with people walking through Yangjiang in the 1990s and Guangzhou in 2022.

The exhibition's entrance is a dense collection of calligraphic works, one on the front page of a reprinted newspaper from the Southern Metropolis Daily around the turn of the millennium, chronicling Guangdong's exuberance at the beginning of the 21st century. Calligraphy has always been the main creative line of Yangjiang Group. As a writing paradigm before the industrial age, calligraphy is regarded as an art when it loses its practical value at present. The intensity of reality brought by its participation in life also fades along with its tool attribute.

Walk a few steps further and you will be confronted by clothing stalls and sales posters. The content is compact, the pace is fast, the entrance of the exhibition area will quickly bring people into the yangjiang river at that time. As the exhibition explains, "In the 1990s, yangjiang, a coastal city in Guangdong province, was caught between the old and the new, with both challenges and opportunities, as the new order brought about by the modernization process dramatically reshaped daily life."

"Is it an ancient painting?"

A white cloth more than ten meters long was hanging in the museum, and pairs of eyes looked up and down the long marks on the white cloth. In fact, this is the graduation work of Zeng Qingbai, "Yangjiang youth" in Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. He printed the track of bicycle walking on a white cloth with a length of more than 10 meters, and directly hung the work on the wall of the library of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.

At that time, many Korean art academy students gave up Soviet style art education in their graduation works and directly participated in the wave of art innovation. The Chinese new art movement, which started from the folk in 1979, had a direct impact on the students of the Academy of Fine Arts in the 1990s. Zeng Qingbai, a graduate at that time, explored the traditional definition of broad prints by "rubbing" on a bicycle, which was also a new practice directly responding to the external upheaval at that time.