Aurèle Hong Merchant

Biography
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Artwork

Biography

BETTER LIFE, BETTER CITY

For the Shanghai Expo 2010, the theme of which is sustainable development in the urban environment, the French artist Aurèle, in cooperation with the COFRES, will use a living wall to create two giant dog sculptures measuring 4.5 meters (15 ft.) high. These canine bio-filters will be made of a dense jungle of ferns, ivy and other vines that have the ability to neutralize harmful chemicals in polluted air. The green sculptures will purify at the same time as they serve as a prototype for a new generation of art that is aesthetic and that truly works to beautify the environment around it.

The visual artist, Aurele, born in 1963 is now one of the foremost post-industrial plastician artists in the world. Near the end of the 80’s Aurele burst onto the art scene and since then has exhibited in every capital city’s contemporary art museums in locations such as Paris, Tokyo, New York and Shanghai. In 1986 when he met Andy Warhol he came across, by chance, a small poster about a stray dog. The poster showed the text “Bob, The Lost Dog.” Aurele recalls the moment when he spotted the poster and in that instant, found a motif that would become an ongoing source of inspiration for his art.

“At the top of a street light there was a ‘Wanted’ poster, one of a lost dog. There were all the words that run our lives: 100 DOLLARS, REWARD, FRIENDLY, WANTED, LOST, LOST, LOST...” Aurele said.

Aurèle’s work is also inspired by a range of sources including Pop Art, New Realism, Arte Povera, Dadaism and more. Other aspects of society (consumerism, advertising and pollution) provide input for his creations, as, internationally, we are all confronted on a daily basis with a barrage of information and images from the media. Aurèle works therefore with images of loss, wandering, loneliness, the oppression of politics and media, the violation of human rights and diseases.

In May 2005, Aurèle took his first tip to China for the Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair. The Chinese craze for his dog was such that he went back in October for the same Art Fair where he received the same acknowledgement. Then the project of an 80 meter high dog building in Pudong was presented for Shanghai 2010 at the Art Space Museum last March.

For the past three years, Aurele and his Lostdog have lived on a Chinese rhythm. In his last exhibition, the artist revealed work with glamorous glitter and spacecrafts dangling altogether. But the Giant China still in question searches for its cultural identity. Actually the word interface characterises this identity in many ways. At crossroads with traditional and Western style, past and present, this dynamic identity, still moving, has not really taken a firm shape but evolves continuously towards new tendencies, as if reinvented. Therefore there is no need to justify one each other differences, with special formulas, lines and symbolism but to find “the way” in which to achieve ones capacities and go back to simplicity. That is how Aurele has chosen to actively witness the whole process, unstoppable flow between tradition and modernity, past and present. For this exhibition he has worked with traditional Chinese ceramic, bronze but also one ingredient of the actual urban China, the neon.