The Elephant Escaped attempts to respond to contemporary society and life in the post-pandemic era. Through all-new commissions by five young Chinese artists, Fang Di, Li Ming, Peng Zuqiang, Shen Xin, and Tao Hui, the exhibition will present a dialogue between independent yet enmeshed elements.

The elephant is an allusion that has existed for centuries. The story of the blind men and the elephant shows the difficulties of identifying an elephant and, by extension, of grasping the contours of the truth. In George Orwell’s essay “Shooting an Elephant,” elephants frequently destroying crops intensify the complex relationships between colonists and colonies. The northward journey of Yunnan’s wild elephants that started on March, 2020 revealed humanity’s irreversible influence on the environment amidst longer-term changes in nature. Elephants continue to give us visions of and warnings about power shifts. Here, the elephant escaping leaves a giant void, an indeterminate state: How can we lie fallow when inherent order has run aground, its corresponding temporal structures become invalid, and personal stories no longer follow neat progressive arcs?

In his January 2020 novel Wuxingzhe (Mistwalkers), Lu Nei traces his personal journey, while telling a polyphonic story that stretches from the 1998 floods to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Polyphony, a concept from music, originally referred to the combination of two or more melodic lines in a song, but it was later adopted by literary scholars to discuss the poetic qualities of a novel’s prose. Through non-linear narrative, Mistwalkers presents several characters amidst changing times, each with their own worlds, values, and independent consciousnesses. Through a material world comprised of multiple personalities and stories, we can appreciate the key role that large-scale population flows have had in shaping Chinese society. The drivers of globalization and marketization that underpinned those flows are still worthy of reflection. Considering the present, the last decade of contemporary history provides us with a passageway to memory and a support for psychological constructs.

Despite the mobility and rapid development of Chinese society at the beginning of this century, the pace of society today is transitioning from presto to ritardando. Individuals are troubled by the various obstacles to intellectual and physical communication. The escaped elephant is astonishing, reminding us that we have to confront those obvious yet constantly overlooked issues, restoring exhausted nutrients to the soil. Indeterminacy is not inevitable; what’s important is learning to embrace the eternal present, and even learning to appreciate deadlock. The Elephant Escaped continues the interrogation of a question that Macalline Art Center has explored since its founding: “How can I be plural?” We have continued to interrogate the ever-changing relationship between the individual and the collective, finding renewed hope for polyphonic artistic creation.

The Elephant Escaped is curated by Macalline Art Center artistic director Yuan Fuca, with assistant curators Chen Yujian and Clement Huang. It presents the work of Fang Di, Li Ming, Peng Zuqiang, Shen Xin and Tao Hui. The exhibition space is designed by Ballistic Architecture Machine. Designed with Yetta Chen.