CISB Art Exhibit “Astro World/Exit Tourism” Now at Solana

The Canadian International School of Beijing (CISB) launched its Astro World/Exit Tourism exhibition at Solana art space this past weekend, seeking to answer the question “What motivates our desires for unexplored utopias?”

Featuring a variety of mediums from paintings to performances, sculptures to videos, live music, and installation art, the exhibition showcases work by professional artists as well as CISB’s 2021 graduating class.

Curator Douglas Lewis explained, “My graduating grade 12 IBDP art students titled their recent graduating Visual Art Assessment exhibition, ‘Astro World,’ and later changed it to ‘Temporalities’ as they felt their original title was too childish and so I decided to steal it.” Lewis went on to explain that “a childish idea seem[ed]to be just the thing” to counter the doom and gloom of recent times, what with the coronavirus pandemic, climate change, and economic turbulence currently facing the world.

According to an introduction written by the exhibition’s organizers, “Astro World/Exit Tourism is where mythologies collide with realities and consumer products are reshaped into art, stretching conventions of how contemporary art and art-as-education function.” This brings to mind a piece by the curator himself: an oversized sculpture of earphones titled “Listen Closely,” which I found to be ironic. My personal favorite was Stephen Gleadow‘s series of etchings on paper that incorporated parts of images extracted from xerox copied charts, lexicons of cultural material, and also children’s coloring books, dispassionately named “Dust”. Even my 6-year-old had an opinion: his favorite artwork was Su Yala Sarah‘s “colorful marshmallow lollipops” near the entrance, which he did attempt to remove from the display and put into his mouth before the staff thwarted his plan.

Beijing mom Le Le said of the exhibition, “It’s mind-blowing to walk among some beautiful and creative artworks produced by the young spirits. The paintings of Divina Yue were original, bold, and edgy. It was an amazing experience to embrace and celebrate the art talents with CISB.”

Images: San Hofstede, Vivienne Tseng-Rush