ASPEN ART MUSEUM
SUMMER 2024 EDITION
53
Upcoming Shows
Featuring the fiercely individual practices of emerging artists Shuang Li, Jasper Marsalis and Heji Shin, a trio of forthcoming exhibitions at the Aspen Art Museum explores shared themes of audience, celebrity and image, argues Terence Trouillot SEEING STARS
Ye—the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, and ex-husband of Kim Kardashian—has been on my mind these past few months. When his permanent titanium veneers, costing a whopping $850,000, made headlines earlier this year, my brain went numb, as if it had neither room for disap pointment nor reproach, much less amusement. There was simply noth ingness, except perhaps a small sense of relief that his new hysterical act was something mildly innocuous—a
closer to community and perhaps even love. Steeped in internet culture, Li is fixated specifically on the fandom of American pop-punk band My Chemical Romance. Growing up in Wu City in southeast China, Li initially listened to the band’s music to learn English, but her love for My Chemical Romance has grown into something deeper, and more true. In the exhibition’s titular video, I’m Not (2024)—which is itself broadcast on a makeshift set of bleachers covered in fabric and resin sheets—Li presents
the mass image, and the ever-evolving relationship between audience and artist, are all themes addressed by a trio of innovative shows by emerging artists at the Aspen Art Museum in the coming months. For Chinese artist Shuang Li— whose first institutional solo exhibition opened at the Swiss Institute in New York in May and travels to Aspen this year—fandom has an uncanny ability to reveal a person’s basest and truest self, while also bringing that person
reprieve from his toxic and blatantly unhinged antisemitism. In Harmony Holiday’s essay “Ask Me About God: On Ye West”, first published online in the Paris Review in 2023, the artist and poet writes that Ye’s “transac tional shaming and rehabilitation” is “as close as he can get to intimacy with his public, enacted upon him and then, with himself as accomplice, upon his fans and fanatics.” The nature of contemporary celebrity, the invest ments made into and the operations of
Opposite Heji Shin, Thank You for All the Love , 2019. Courtesy: the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York and Los Angeles; photograph: Michael Underwood
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