This is Claude Viallat’s second exhibition in Kunming. The first was held at the Kunming Museum in 1999, during the World Horticultural Exposition, the city’s first major international event in the Reform and Opening era. China has undergone one of the most dramatic economic transformations in history in the 25 years since, and contemporary art has thrived. It is fitting that now, his return to Kunming is being hosted in the city’s first institution dedicated to contemporary art, with a much larger, more comprehensive presentation of his art and life.
Claude Viallat is a seminal figure in French contemporary art. He spearheaded one of the most important French avant-garde movements of the postwar era, Supports / Surfaces, and has continued to explore the most fundamental elements of art to this day. The movement was short lived, but their activities in those few years are still the subject of intense research in French art history. This exhibition presents a comprehensive view of Claude Viallat’s oeuvre and explores the threads of his practice, in hopes of introducing Claude Viallat, his art, and his contributions to art history, to a wider audience.

The exhibition begins with a simple historical primer on the developments in French society and art history that inspired Mr. Viallat and his comrades in Supports / Surfaces, and on the ideas that drove their practice. Their core idea was a simple, yet controversial one: to return to painting at a time when many had declared the death of painting, and to return to art itself at a time when artists seemed to be interested in anything but. Five sections of the main exhibition space explore five major threads in Claude Viallat’s practice through eighty artworks spanning the last four decades: “Repetition: The Sponge”, “The Work Made Visible”, “Persistence”, “The Texture of Reality”, and “Opening the Gaze.” These aspects of his practice are not limited to one particular series or period of the artist’s work, so the artworks are not divided by a rigid typological or stylistic rubric. Instead, the artworks are grouped and arranged by how they interact with each other in time and space, while loosely grouped around these five ideas. The exhibition closes by revisiting Claude Viallat’s 1999 exhibition in Kunming and its lasting impact, with interviews of four key participants: curator Cheng Xindong, artists Liu Jianhua and Li Ji, and Nie Rongqing, who is now director of Contemporary Gallery Kunming.

In many ways, the choice to present Claude Viallat’s work in Kunming has proven prescient. Like the artist’s home region of southern France, Kunming and southwest China have long been on the periphery of a Chinese art scene focused mainly on Beijing and Shanghai. The 1999 exhibition in Kunming, and Viallat’s visit to the city, served as important inspiration for many young artists in Kunming at the time, most of whom did not know about the artist or the Supports / Surfaces movement before. We hope that Retour de Claude Viallat will inspire a new generation of young artists to turn to the possibilities of painting that still are yet to be fully explored.