This will be the first major presentation of Antony Gormley’s work in China. The exhibition will introduce the major themes that have concerned the artist over the last 40 years: body as space and space as object.

At the core of the exhibition is Critical Mass II (1995) an installation of 60 life-size cast iron body forms. This seminal work has been exhibited worldwide in such locations as Remise, Vienna, Austria; Royal Academy of Arts, London, England; KunsthausBregenz, Austria; Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, (Sau Paulo, Rio de Janiero and Brasilia) and Forte di Belvedere, Florence, Italy. Twelve body forms are installed in the ground floor gallery of the Long Museum in a linear progression, from foetal to stargazing positions, recalling the ‘ascent of man’. Nearby, lies a jumbled pile of the same bodies, whilst further works are suspended from the roof. As the artist states: “Here, abandoned manufactured iron objects, each ten times the specific gravity of a living human body, reflect the shadow side of any idea of human progress, confronting the viewer with an image redolent of the conflict of the past century."

The exhibition will offer the opportunity to show two contrasting works which explore different forms of engagement and participation – Breathing Room IV [RIO] (2012) and Passage II (2017). The first work comprises a number of photo-luminescent interconnected frames which create a three-dimensional environment that the viewer is invited to look at as an object and participate in as a subject. Time and light are the principal materials of the work. Ten minutes of darkness are interrupted by 40 seconds of blinding light. Functioning like a 3d-Mandala, Breathing Room provides both a soothing and confrontational experience during which the meditative is contrasted by the interrogative.

Passage II is a 15.5 metre-long tunnel, whose shape is modelled on a standing human form. It suggests a correlative for the interior of the body and offers a journey into darkness and the unknown. Together, these are two examples of Gormley’s attempt to create an instrument through which the subjects’ experience is catalysed and transformed.

Four additional suspended sculptures (2008 – 2012) function like drawings in space, each revealing an empty body-space at its core. In these dematerialised works the bodies are free, weightless and with no internal determination.

Drawing has always been a core part of the artist’s work and this exhibition will include a wide selection of work on paper from 1981 – 2016. The drawings exhibited here chart intimate movements of the hand, the body and the artist’s unconscious intuition, possessing a range and intensity that characterises them as works in their own right. Through the behaviour of line, mineral and medium the drawings become a means by which the process of “seeing in making” is revealed.

Antony Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. His work has developed the potential opened up by sculpture since the 1960s through a critical engagement with both his own body and those of others in a way that confronts fundamental questions of where human beings stand in relation to nature and the cosmos. Gormley continually tries to identify the space of art as a place of becoming in which new behaviours, thoughts and feelings can arise.

Gormley’s work has been widely exhibited throughout the UK and internationally with exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery, London (2016); Forte di Belvedere, Florence (2015); Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern (2014); Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia (2012); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2012); The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg (2011); KunsthausBregenz, Austria (2010); Hayward Gallery, London (2007); Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (1993) and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (1989). Permanent public works include the Angel of the North (Gateshead, England), Another Place (Crosby Beach, England), Inside Australia (Lake Ballard, Western Australia) Exposure (Lelystad, The Netherlands) and Chord (MIT – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA).

Gormley was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994, the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999, the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture in 2007, the Obayashi Prize in 2012 and the PraemiumImperiale in 2013. In 1997 he was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) and was made a knight in the New Year’s Honours list in 2014. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, an Honorary Doctor of the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity and Jesus Colleges, Cambridge. Gormley has been a Royal Academician since 2003.

Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950.