Lee Ufan and Jorinde Voigt participate in 14th Lyon Biennale, France

The 14th Lyon Biennale, curated by Emma Lavigne, Director of the Center Pompidou-Metz, opens in France on 20 September 2017 and runs until 7 January 2018.

This edition has been organised under the theme 'Floating Models', which explores the concept of modernity in the context of globalisation. Borrowing its title from the Japanese word ukiyô, a Japanese art movement that translates as "picture of the floating world", the 2017 biennale places at the heart of its presentation the libertarian attitudes of artists who never stop pushing the limitations of art. Lavigne says of the biennale: "The works that make up these floating worlds are [joined together] by the awareness that imagination, poetry and art are both revealing and antidotes to the instability of the present time".

As part of the biennale, Jorinde Voigt will debut the final chapter in her ongoing series of drawings titled Song of the Earth. Inspired by Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde of 1908-09, the work merges the worlds of sound and vision into one symphonic panorama in oil, chalk, acrylic, pastel and pencil. Previous chapters of Song of the Earth have also been shown at Kunstraum Innsbruck in Austria, Manifesta 11 in Switzerland, the Sharjah Biennale in UAE and Lisson Gallery London.

On the occasion of the 2017 Biennale, Lee Ufan has been invited to respond to the architecture of La Tourette and will present a new series of sculptures. Built in the Lyon region in the 1950s by Le Corbusier, the convent has been organising art exhibitions for the past nine years with the aim of fostering dialogue between the contemporary and the historic. Lee's sculptures bring together antagonistic elements, confronting natural elements like wood, stone and cotton with industrial materials, including metal, glass and mirrors, to play with the notions of space and energy.

Image: Jorinde Voigt, Song of the Earth: Divine Territory, 2016. Ink, indian ink, acrylic, pastel, pencil on paper. 141 x 200 cm (each panel) 55 1/2 x 78 3/4 in (each panel) © The Artist.