Shan Shan Sheng’s Open Wall comes to San Francisco at the Italian Cultural Institute

Shan Shan Sheng’s Open Wall is coming to San Francisco. The bold sculpture participated in the 2009 Venice Biennale and is currently taking part in the 2010 World Expo Shanghai. Previously it has participated in exhibitions around the world including London, Munich, and Miami. Starting from October 27th a smaller version of the Open Wall will be found at the Italian Cultural Institute (IIC) at 814 Montgomery Street, San Francisco.

The exhibition will form part of the events for the 10th Annual Italian Language Week and will also feature a selection of Shan Shan Sheng’s other recent works such as paintings, public art, and Murano glass sculptures. The theme of the 10th Annual Italian Language Week is “Una lingua per amica: l’italiano nostro e degli altri”, and wishes to stress the communicative and cultural value of Italian as a language spoken by native speakers as well as foreigners with a special emphasis on Italian language and youth culture.

The week long celebration is organized by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Accademia della Crusca, Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Consulate General of Italy, Consulate General of Switzerland, Humanities West, City Lights, and YBCA. Visual artist Shan Shan Sheng's Open Wall (2009) is a large-scale glass installation, re-interpreting a single section of the Great Wall into a large-scale outdoor artwork. Sheng's Open Wall installation captures an interval of China's heritage, translating the historic structure as a temporary zone of glass architecture.

This installation represents the newfound openness of contemporary China, engaging the dynamic tension of this pivotal moment in history. Open Wall reconstructs a moment of China's Great Wall as an assemblage of Murano glass bricks. The sculpture consists of 2,200 glass bricks, corresponding to the 2,200 years of the Great Wall's construction. It is approximately 20m long, 2m high and 1/2 m deep. The wall is translucent Venetian glass with intermittent layers of red, yellow, gold and crystal.

The Open Wall’s uncanny, iridescent sculpture indicates a threshold of both transparency and opacity, a critical symbol of China's intersection with Western culture. Easily dissembled and reassembled, Sheng’s Open Wall marks this critical threshold of China’s intersection with Western culture, as a site of mutual understanding. Since May 2010 Open Wall has been at the entrance of the Chinese Theme Pavilion at World Expo 2010 Shanghai.

The sculpture will be in China until October 31, 2010, 65 million people have visited the Expo and about 6 million people have seen the piece. During the sculpture’s exhibitions in the Venice Biennale and the World Expo Shanghai, Shan Shan Sheng has also been traveling with the Open Wall project along Marco Polo’s Silk Road in a symbolic journey for cultural exchange: "The wall does not become a barrier but it connects different cultures, races, and values”, explains the artist.

The project's symbolic journey from West to East is aimed at further stressing the attempt for cultural and historical unification through contemporary art. Apart from a segment of the Open Wall, the exhibition at the IIC will feature Sheng’s new triptych painting A Passage to the Silk Road; In the Steps of Marko Polo, two of her new installation works, Music Bells and Bamboo and a selection of smaller scale Murano glass sculptures.

Using glass, color, and transparency and opacity, Sheng creates a startling and elegant vocabulary from primary subjects of Chinese traditional culture, translating these motifs seamlessly into contemporary visual language. Also on view at the Italian Cultural Institute is the exhibition Maria Callas: a Woman, a Voice, a Myth through December 02, 2010. Istituto Italiano di Cultura 814 Montgomery St., San Francisco www.iicsanfrancisco. esteri.it, (415) 788-7142. Admission: Entrance is free for members of the IIC, $5 for the general public.

Also on view at the IIC is “Maria Callas: a Woman, a Voice, a Myth”; admission to both exhibits is $7.