MadeIn Gallery is pleased to present the group exhibition “Ode to the Unexpected” on January 12, 2024, featuring twelve artists working in installation, sculpture, painting, video, and handicraft. It aims to investigate how a younger generation responds to their lived experiences laden with contingency and heterogeneity, and to kindle a reimagination of the contemporaneity inherent of art ecology and social reality alike.

The exhibition points to the self-questioning and self-criticizing impulse of the art institution, from which stems the shared spiritual cause of participating artists. While embracing chance, contingency, heterogeneity, and uncontrollability as inevitable components of our artistic and social existence, we wish to conceive some contemporary poeticism or sublimity therefrom, composing an “ode” to contemporary experiences. Yet meanwhile, the “ode” is fraught with things unexpected, or rather, that itself is unexpected – in other words, the birth of art or sublimity in general is equally a contingency and resists any thorough institutionalization or rationalization.

Not surprisingly – but not without surprises, the works on view will strike variations and polyphonies out of the heterogeneous tunes of story-telling, which encompass the body and non-human, the everyday and the transcendent, the hands-on and the digital, nature and virtualization, etc. With its youthful and diverse tones, “Ode to the Unexpected” may well be the prelude to yet more unexpected destructions and reconstructions.