The exhibition gives us the opportunity to create a dialogue between a selection of established or emerging Chinese artists, a number of whom live in France, and major Western artists who have developed in their aesthetic and critical practices a link with China.

The Institut Culturel becomes the theatre of an unprecedented encounter between twenty artworks of modern and contemporary artists, from Shanghai, with Yan Pei-Ming, Chen Zhen, Huang Yong Ping, Zhang Huan, Shen Yuan, and pieces by the great masters Zao Wou-Ki, Henri Michaux, Pierre Soulages and Andy Warhol, as well as a tribute to Matisse.

Shanghai is also the occasion – in the Pavilion of the Château – to look at the City of Shanghai with new eyes, through the photographic investigations of Chen Zhen carried out in the 1990s as well as those of Gabriele Basilico in 2011, and the monumental artworks by JR spread out on the buildings themselves, paying tribute to the women and the “wrinkles of Shanghai”.

This nomadic, poetic and fragmented journey offers an elusive image of a vibrant and paradoxical China that sways in a spectacular manner from exuberance to spirituality, from materiality to interiority.

The artists of the exhibition

Ai Weiwei, Gabriele Basilico, Chen Zhen, Alexander Gronsky, Huang Yong Ping, JR, Lu Chunsheng, MadeIn Company, Henri Matisse, Henri Michaux, Shen Yuan, Shi Yong, Pierre Soulages, Thomas Struth, Wang Guangyi, Andy Warhol, Yan Pei-Ming, Zao Wou-Ki, Zhang Huan, Zhang Jian-Jun

 “After having built a career in the Grands Crus Classés of Bordeaux, where perfection is the key word, I wish to give back in life the luck it has given me, through artistic patronage.

I have therefore created the Institut Culturel to carry out a program of multidisciplinary events that take place in my properties, namely Château Labottière. The latter supports young creation by welcoming artists for residencies and rewarding laureates in different domains. The goal of the exhibitions – whose curating I entrusted to Ashok Adicéam, director of the Institut – is to contribute to the access of the public at large to modern and contemporary art.”

Bernard Magrez, president of the Institut Culturel Bernard Magrez