Looking forward to history repeating

Photo by Jiang Dong/China Daily

The exhibition is based on the collection from the Foundation of Official Credit Institution, which has assembled some of the best Spanish art of the 20th century.

On another floor, Transposition: Motion Is Action moves even further from the classic principals of the visual arts, turning solar panels, electric circuits and computer animation into artworks.

Zhang Ga, the exhibition's curator and art professor with Tsinghua University, explains that the dramatic relationship between motion and human behavior has been the main cause and subject of new media art. He selects the works of 14 artists from home and abroad to show the many possibilities of movements that are caused by a variety of media and tactics.

For instance, there is Gimbaled Klein Basket by American artist Tim Hawkinson. A huge bamboo basket is hung mid-air and revolves under the force of a motor, pulley and drive belt.

"The basket takes on a mathematical ingenuity and a sculptural delight. It renders a sublime fragility in bamboo and invites Zen-like contemplation, which implies, action lies in slow motion," Zhang says.

The exhibition invites the audience to engage with the works, which is how new media art shares common ground with other contemporary art practices.

For example, Belgian artist Lawrence Malstaf installs in his work Transporter two 13-meter-long conveyer belts, which move in opposite directions, and people can lie on it with shoes off. It looks amusingly entertaining, but it attempts to awaken people from self-centeredness and realize that "things and humans are both part of being," according to Zhang.