A Tale of Mammals
Duration: September 6,2015 - October 10,2015
Artist: Yuval Shaul （Israel)
Curator: Wei Xing
Location：Being 3 Gallery, Beijing
Sponsor: Blue Mountain Contemporary Art
Supporter: Embassy of the State of Israel in PR. China
Exhibition introduction：
Humans created civilization, and all civilizations were, without exception, born from bloodshed. Humans differentiate themselves from nature and stand opposite to nature. Humans believe that they are superior to animals, that they are the rulers and God of this planet. Friedrich Nietzsche once declared that “God is dead”, I think he was not referring to the true demise of God, but to the human desire to overthrow, indeed to replace God. When I see Yuval Shaul’s works which are full of animal allegories, when I hear the deafening explosions of war, I think, that we are merely animals too, like those endangered tigers, whales and other creatures, trapped on this little blue planet. We live just as those happy, satisfied but numb, poor people that Altos Huxley once described in his magnificent Brave New World, achieving their so-called great and glorious missions through illusion and hypnosis! This is, in my opinion, the significance of Yuval Shaul’s works: whether the huge antlered machine, or the submarine-like whale, they are just allegories pointing to the unpredictable future of mankind.
Artist : Yuval Shaul
Born in Israel, 1961
Lives and works in Tel-Aviv, Israel
Education
1983 – 1984 Zvi Millstein studio, Paris
1984 – 1988 Art studies at Avni Institute, Tel Aviv