Centoventiquattro giorni di cammino I Guangzhou Brera

Five young students and graduates of the Brera Academy and five young students and graduates of the Guangzhou Academy engage in dialogue in the B-Based Space of the Giovanni Bonelli Gallery in Milan. The dialogue is about art; the works speak. The young artist par excellence of the 20th century, Jean-Michel Basquiat, used to say: “I don’t think about art when I’m working. I try to think about life.” This dialogue, perhaps, then becomes a conversation about life. But can they understand each other? The abstract, geometric, symbolic, and disembodied forms of the five Chinese artists seem to speak a different language from the realistic, narrative, and intimate forms of the Italian artists. Milan and Guangzhou are thirteen thousand kilometers apart, fifteen hours of flight, one hundred and twenty-four days of walking without stopping to sleep and eat.(1) Guangzhou has fourteen million inhabitants, Milan barely a tenth, one million four hundred thousand. They seem like two worlds apart. But if we do the math, those figures become one percent of the Chinese population and two percent of the Italian one. In Guangzhou, Zaha Hadid designed the Opera House, in Milan she designed the Generali Tower. In the Chinese metropolis, the futuristic Guangdong Museum and the Guangzhou TV Tower shine, in the Italian one, the futuristic Piazza Gae Aulenti and the Unicredit Tower. And over there are the temples that have remained intact over the centuries, Yuexiu Park, the Pearl River, here are the great, old machine of the Duomo, Parco Sempione, the Navigli. Do they still seem like two such different worlds?
On the walls of the B-Based Space, Huang Zile, Gong Xuyao, Yang Xinyu, Lao Dalun, and Chen Jiachen mingle with Matteo Roversi, Elisa Pini, Mattia Riccardo, Matteo Bianchi, and Tommaso Frattini. (2) Jean-Michel Basquiat also used to repeat, “I am not a black artist, I am an artist”: these ten young people are not Chinese artists or Italian artists, they are simply artists. They chat freely, even in different languages, using the universal language of art, the only one that can convey everyone’s lives to everyone else.
Piersandro Pallavicini

1 source: Google Maps
2 the artists from the Guangzhou Academy were selected by Fabio Cavallucci and Liu Ke; thanks are due to Gherardo Quadrio Curzio for his collaboration in selecting the artists from the Brera Academy