A rose is a rose is a rose is the title of an upcoming group exhibition in the HOW Art Museum (Wenzhou), which opens on December 21st, 2019.
This exhibition is an attempt to reposition the relationship between the word and the image, and to emphasize the word as the subject of the image itself. The English title of the exhibition borrows from the famous quote Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose by the poet, novelist and literary theorist Gertrude Stein, referring to the dialectical relationship between the object itself and its representation.
Most of the artists participating in the exhibition work with semantics, symbolism, and the phonology of the word. Such is the case with Jeppe Hein, he also refers to the link between viewer and object within a given spatial set. His interactive installations and sculptures are questioning the hierarchy of subject and object.
Either through a direct statement or different juxtaposition and re-arrangement of the “words”, the artists in this exhibition look at the literal text as a ready-made product, and used a variety of materials (metal, neon lights, polysterene, computational images, etc) to attach different meanings to the rearranged text/image.
In this exhibition, the viewer does not see the object pointed to by the “named” words, rather, words are just words and they proliferate. Here, the word is fixed. It can be without meanings, but it is placed in the foreground, like an image to make itself visible.