Hu Yun
Mount Analogue
Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai

When passing by the newly refurbished facade of the Rockbund Art Museum, one might notice the abnormal flicker of a ceiling-light from the museum’s fourth-floor window. After thorough observation, this seemingly dysfunctional light reveals itself as an elusive art piece, as if sending out a cryptograph awaiting to be decoded. Titled Wind Calls (2024), this site-specific intervention is a part of “Mount Analogue,” Hu Yun’s first solo museum exhibition and first midcareer retrospective in China. The exhibition title is taken from René Daumal’s eponymous adventure novel, about an expedition to a mystical mountain that “hollow,” transparent men inhabit. In the exhibition’s guidebook, Hu thus offers three “expedition routes” of varied duration and difficulty levels that gamify how audiences navigate his disarranged works, obfuscating messages about knowledge representation under colonial epistemology.