Johan Kleinjan is a Rotterdam-based artist working with painting and illustration. In the past 4 months, he wandered through different hutongs and neighborhoods of the city, with a box of colored pencils and markers, and made sketches of people and buildings. Somehow many restaurants happened to be the perfect places for Johan to draw people without being noticed and made it possible to hide his painting tools between the food and beer. So around the time he needed to start planning this exhibition, he had made about 100 drawings. 

 

A hand-made burial suit is also presented in the exhibition space. After seeing a visitor with a Bao Bao Issey Miyake bag Johan noticed many people had these bags, and probably many had copied versions too. This gave him the idea of mixing the design of the bags with a jade burial suit he had seen in the National Museum. Moreover, something is going to happen out of the exhibition space. During the exhibition period, at some point, Johan will put on this suit, lead us to an unexpected place and implement his intervention as a consumeristic tourist.   

 

Besides spending most of his time making drawings, Johan also decided to make new architectural work during his stay in Beijing. He had noticed his original imagination of the gray hutongs was actually becoming a reality through the government´s relentless bricking up of all the windows and doors of the shops and restaurants that had been welcoming and open when he just arrived here. Seeing this development in combination with a tour of the old run down communist high-rise, led him to build a scaled down high-rise building in the Black Sesame Space and making it collapse during the opening. This performative gesture finally realizes his childhood dream of carrying out a controlled demolition as well as showing his view on the current situation in Beijing.

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Johan Kleinjan是一位生活和工作在鹿特丹的艺术家，主要从事绘画和绘本创作。在过去的四个月中，他习惯性地带着一盒彩铅和马克笔穿梭在北京的各个胡同和社区，描绘建筑物以及形色各异的人。也许是种巧合，在这种经验下Johan偶然发现很多餐馆成了他的理想的“工作室”，因为在那里他可以将绘画工具自然地藏在食物和酒瓶后面，放松地，甚至是轻松地绘画而不被别人注意到。慢慢地，他发现当他开始构思此次展览时，他已经画了一百多张了。

展览中还呈现了艺术家手工制作的“手袋玉衣“。Johan在街上越来越多地发现很多人背着三宅一生的女包，而且很多可能是山寨货。这也使他蒙生了把此包的设计元素与之前在国家博物馆看到的金缕玉衣相结合。另外，这件作品也会在项目空间之外发生，在展览期间的某一时刻，Johan将会穿上这件衣服，将我们引向一个意料之外的地点——作为一个来到该地的游客，实施对消费化的现实的干预。

在北京期间除了花大量时间绘画外，Johan决定制作一件建筑装置作品。他意识到他最开始对灰色胡同的“旧有”想象，通过政府对那些在他刚到北京时还开门的商铺和饭馆的“拆店修墙”，而真的变成了现实。他把这种进展与前往北京老旧的“共产主义大楼”的经历相结合，打算在芝麻空间里建造一个等比例缩小的高楼，并且在开幕期间通过表演的方式使其崩塌。这个表演性的姿态最终实现了他童年希望实施的一场定点爆破的梦想，同时也展现了艺术家对当下北京的观察。