Will Ryman: Shanghai 6: Yuz Museum, Shanghai and Panlong Tiandi
As spring turns to summer in 2024, it marks the first anniversary of both Panlong Tiandi and the relocation of Yuz Museum to Panlong, but also celebrates the tenth anniversary of Yuz Museum in Shanghai. In this blooming season, the third chapter of the Public Art Project “Wander”, organized by Yuz Museum in partnership with Panlong Tiandi, opens with “Shanghai 6”, a giant rose installation by artist Will Ryman, putting the icing on the cake for the celebrations.
The theme of the Rose first surfaced in the artist’s internationally acclaimed monumental exhibition “The Roses” (2011), sited along several blocks of Park Avenue in New York City. The subject has since become a throughline in his work; nearly twenty unique large-scale Roses have been exhibited worldwide in over thirty locations, environments ranging from urban settings to public sculpture parks to private properties in nature. Ryman’s larger than life and site-specific sculptures combine fantasy with reality, altering the way of seeing the everyday banality of life as well as how we look at sculptures. In each individual location, works from the celebrated Rose series take on new meanings and perspectives based on their surroundings, creating a unique viewing experience.
As a commercial crop and ornamental flower that is highly popular worldwide, the rose has been domesticated, hybridized and cultivated for thousands of years, and it is also rich in symbolism due to its diverse references to histories and culture from around the world. Myths and tales intertwined the stories of the rose with love, beauty, desire and secrets; the flexible interpretations in poetry, literature, film, painting, and music further depicted it as an eternal image and classic symbol of passion and beauty. In the age embracing consumerism today, the rose is synonymous with romance and love, and has been used to sell almost everything. Capturing this feature of urban life and consumer culture, it occurred to Ryman that “the rose has become a symbol of global consumption”, and such commodification is “another kind of reckless abuse of man and nature”.
Composed of six imposing and beautiful blossoms, Shanghai 6 (2024) is Ryman’s new envision of this archetypal theme. Rising from the ground to eight metres tall, the sculpture’s exaggerated scale, artificial appearance and the fallen petals shed on the lawns on both sides of the road, contribute to an improbable romanticized representation of this paradoxical symbol of both natural beauty and perfection, revealing the imperfect and temporary nature of all things. Ryman intentionally highlights the giant scale and monochrome of the rose, transforming it into an abstract outline and shape like a silhouette, which not only strips the commodified value and labels attached to it, but also wipes off existing perceptions of the rose. In his previous Rose series, the artist would draw inspiration from the cycles and seasons of nature. The flower clusters were inhabited with tiny insects such as ladybirds, aphids, beetles or bees, “for an element of both reality and humor in reference to the viewers’ own bug’s-eye-view of The Roses’ gigantic blossoms,” commented the artist. In Shanghai 6, a site-specific work for the anniversary celebrations of Yuz Museum and Panlong Tiandi, Ryman not only painted the roses and petals with an elegant and brilliant vermilion that is particularly meaningful to the local audience, but also interspersed the flower clusters with spiders, which is a symbol of good luck and auspiciousness in traditional folklore, conveying a sincere blessing and bright hope for the future; it also invites viewers to immerse themselves in the setting, and explore the eternal questions of man and nature, self and the world.
