PARIS.- Active Memory brings together eight major figures of the contemporary Chinese art scene and offers a renewed reading of China’s cultural heritage. Rather than opposing past and present, the exhibition opens with a work by Zao Wou-Ki and demonstrates how tradition does not disappear with modernity. It transforms, extends itself, and reinvents its forms.

Huang Rui, Zhang Dali and Yang Yongliang each embody distinct ways of activating memory. Huang Rui initiates a dialogue by revisiting Chinese language and thought through his compositions. Zhang Dali turns his environment into a living material, using it to question history in motion. Yang Yongliang transposes classical landscape painting into a digital realm, where mountains are made of pixels and urban lights.

Technological modernity finds its fullest expression in the work of aaajiao, a key figure of the younger generation whose works are part of the Centre Pompidou collection. His installation Typeface uses a neural network trained on ancient calligraphy to generate characters that resemble language but no longer carry meaning. The gesture evokes both transmission and loss. Li Hongbo, in turn, works with paper, an ancestral material, to create flexible sculptures inspired in particular by Taihu stones, those scholar’s rocks highly prized during the Song dynasty.

Liu Bolin and Zelam Lim conclude the exhibition by reintroducing the body and nature as spaces of reconciliation. Liu Bolin’s sculptures question visibility and erasure in a society saturated with images. Zelam Lim’s works draw on matter, myth and organic forms to reconnect the intimate with cultural heritage.

Artists : aaajiao, Huang Rui, Li Hongbo, Liu Bolin, Yang Yongliang, Zao Wou-Ki, Zelam Lim, Zhang Dali