UBS presents legendary Swiss photographer Hannes Schmid at the Today Art Museum, Beijing

Beijing, Tuesday 15 April 2014 UBS today announced that the work of Swiss photographer, Hannes Schmid, will be shown for the first time in Asia at the Today Art Museum in Beijing. MOMENTOUS, amulti-media, interactive exhibition will open to the public on Sunday 22 June 2014.

At the centre of the exhibition five monumental mobile sculptures will turn in perpetual motion uponwhich photographs and moving image will be projected. Visitors will be invited to play an active part inthe creation of this work synthesizing images of their own, uploaded through smart phones and adigital APP, with those of the artist.

(left) Jaques Villeneuve, Villa Cardin,Cannes, Palais Bulle, (Formula 1), 2002. (right) MOMENTOUS, Formula 1, View of exhibition, 2014

The populated work will be framed within Schmid’s multi-media series on Formula 1, Short Stories and Moment of a Moment, featuring high-tech cars and heroic drivers, exploring the themes of speed and time.Large-scale intimate and unconventional portraits of the Formula 1 drivers Jenson Button, Jacques Villeneuve and Takuma Sato will be presented, photographed in Pierre Cardin’s futuristic Bubble House on the French Cote d’Azur. These portraits will sit alongside landscape studies documenting the trial run by BAR-Honda of the envisioned Speed Record on the Salt Flats of Utah.

Hannes Schmid is closely connected to Chinese culture through family, his Chinese wife and two children. He envisions MOMENTOUS as a synthesis of two cultural spheres and invites visitors to consider interweaving approaches to art and philosophy from different cultures: “In recent years it has become increasingly obvious to me how much Chinese civilization has influenced our own. I am interested in further exploring the future of this cultural exchange and I want this exhibition to express above all the energy that this exchange generates.”

Mr. David Li, Chairman and Country Head for China, UBS AG said: “UBS has a rich history of supporting cultural and artistic endeavors that encourage our clients and the public to actively participate in the art world. Located in Beijing, one of the world’s most important commercial metropolises, MOMENTOUS will bring together Eastern and Western aesthetics and culture and will provide insight into contemporary art in one of the world’s fastest developing cultural capitals.”

The exhibition has been curated by Kornelia Imesch, art historian and professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Architecture at the University of Lausanne. Extensive education and public programmes will accompany the exhibition including public talks at the Today Art Museum and CAFA.

Alex Gao, Executive Director of the Today Art Museum said: “It is our pleasure to present Hannes Schmid’s works to the visitors of Today Art Museum. MOMENTOUS is one of the most important exhibitions at Today Art Museum this year. We hope our visitors are provoked into questioning the language of art and contemporary art. The aim of this exhibition is to explore whether interactive multimedia art can become the next art trend.”

Born in Zurich in 1946, Schmid is one of Switzerland’s great visual storytellers. Widely credited with the reinvention of the ‘Malboro Man’ campaign from the mid-1990s, his photographs have shaped the American iconography of the cowboy and have been appropriated by artists including Richard Prince. Since the 1970s he has re-examined and revealed the cultures and heritage of global communities across Africa, Belize, Bolivia, China, India, Indonesia, Singapore and Tibet. From 1977 to 1984, he spent the best part of a decade on tour with over 250 rock bands including Kraftwerk, Queen, Blondie, Depeche Mode and AC/DC. His work was the subject of a major retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Bern last year and has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Rubin Museum of Art, New York, and has been collected by the Museum Folkwang, Essen, the Swiss Foundation for Photography.

Today Art Museum is the organiser of the exhibition and is an ideal platform for Schmid’s multi-media project. It opened its doors in 2001 as the first private and non-profit museum to promote Chinese contemporary art and has impressed with a dynamic and highly visible exhibition programme.

UBS’s sponsorship of MOMENTOUS underlines its commitment to supporting contemporary art in China and across Asia. Complementary activity across Asia includes UBS’s lead partnership with Art Basel in Hong Kong, which will take place from 15 to 18 May 2014 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. The show will present around 245 of the leading galleries from Asia, Europe, the Americas and the rest of the world and more than 3,000 artists, ranging from young emerging artists to the Modern masters from both Asia and the West from the 20th and 21st centuries. UBS is also presenting: Pop Art Factory── 50 years of art and consumer culture at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in Taiwan until 11 May 2014, while the cumulative presentation of the critically acclaimed No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia, the first touring exhibition of a multi-year collaboration, the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, will open on 10 May at the Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA) at the Gillman Barracks, Singapore. Presenting recent works by artists from the region, the CCA’s presentation of No Country showcases 19 mixed-media works from 16 challenging and inventive voices from across South and Southeast Asia.