PREFACE
STAGE/TIME is a dialogue between images and spaces, bodies and sounds, the visual and performing arts. The exhibition presents multiple generations of artists who work in Asia, Europe and the United States and features works that bring into play a wide array of artistic media. A collection of resonant images, rhythmic bodies, and moving colors, the exhibition provides a view of the multitude of formal and conceptual approaches that characterize contemporary painting, installation, and photography, and it charts how the performative imbues artistic work today.

STAGE/TIME features artworks that were conceived through solitary performances in the artist’s studio and others that were prompted by collaborative acts and thus it surveys the variety of processes and working methods in creative practice. By focusing on the performativity of artistic labor the exhibition argues that, as the California-based artist Allison Smith put it, “art is always in the acting.”

Music, dance and theater appears in many of the exhibited artists’ work as a theme, a reference, and an inspiration along with records of objects and sites that shape and preserve cultural memory. Consisting of works that cross over among various disciplines and engage the viewers' senses, STAGE/TIME is an invitation to see, hear, think and feel the shared affinities among ideas and forms of creative expression in global contemporary art.