The exhibition will spotlight work by key modern and contemporary artists, including Zhang Xiaogang, Louise Nevelson, Mao Yan, Irving Penn, Kiki Smith, Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, and other figures. The show will meditate on exchanges between artists across temporal and geographic boundaries.

Zhang is known for his figurative paintings and sculptures that engage with memory to explore both personal and collective histories. Replete with symbolism and allusions, his painting Green Wall – White Bed (2008), on view in Chewing Gum V, examines the intermingling of public and private spaces. This work will be presented in conversation with Nevelson’s 1985 wall sculpture, which brings to the fore the relational and perceptual possibilities of form and space.

Mao’s 2013 painting Oval Portrait of Thomas No. 2 eschews markers of cultural and temporal significance. Rather, the portrait is imbued with spiritual and psychological complexities that encourage introspection and contemplation of the self. Meanwhile, Penn’s black-and- white fashion photographs reflect the idiosyncratic, malleable nature of self-expression.

Smith’s dynamic sculpture Rabbits (1998) examines the relationships between predators and their prey, while Oldenburg and van Bruggen’s 2005 sculpture Collar and Bow 1:16 draws out the madcap qualities of seemingly banal, everyday objects.

In the way of abstract works, a 3D printed sculpture by Sui Jianguo, which features the artist’s fingerprints in white copper, figures in Chewing Gum V. Liu Jianhua’s porcelain sculpture Blank Paper (2014) explores enactments of blankness and their attendant resonances, inviting viewers to conjure their own narratives of the work and the exhibition as a whole.