PsychoanalYSL是个由伦敦和柏林的艺术家/DJ们组成的团体，这个团体的创作着重于对大众文化迷失的解读。此次在岭空间与重庆501当代艺术中心合作的展览是他们首次在中国举行的单场展览。在本次展览中，这些艺术家将反思在他们国家所出现的对中国文化交流进行抵制的现象，对中国当代艺术在英国被作为一种新的政治怪物所展出的方式做出独特的响应，他们的表达包括了视觉装置和一系列唐吉可德式的图片。

艺术家团体（分别是Christopher Thomas, Bjamin Orlow and Joey Holder）的作品堆砌了很多陈词滥调。他们年初在伦敦的Apiary做过类似的展览“虚弱的观众”，早就被视为关于艺术专业化现状的的一次紧急对话。这次，他们把伦敦的展览原封不动带到了中国，将让中国的艺术界人士进入到他们特有的意识形态烟幕阵之中。
PsychoanalYSL将焦点放在艺术市场如何对行为主义进行选择，金钱化和融合，并且对这些日子以来艾未未拘留事件后随即发生的抗议活动很感兴趣，因此艺术家们计划展出一系列作品以表现中国当代艺术市场对于政治气候的依赖，然而这个项目必须面对两层严格的审查，来自中国的主管单位和英国的项目赞助人，毕竟这个展览必须对一些禁忌话题做出回应。

中英文化交流通常被视为软实力，是带着友好面纱的中国权利的强化。这一点是英国一些机构从文化角度抵制中国文化的一个借口。我们拒绝对中国进行文化抵制，因为抵制意味着关闭沟通渠道。

其实，Micah White 和其他一些人都曾经提出，中国当代艺术在西方世界的展出方式都和更广泛的现象相联系，是“市场与行为主义之间的界限的日益消融”。艾未未在泰特当代艺术馆所展览的作品“葵瓜子”所呈现的不仅仅是娱乐大众，更是一剂符合大众的道德良药。本次展览中，PsychoanalYSL在岭空间的展示就是利用这些对表象的观察去引导对国际文化关系的批判性思潮。艺术家们的观察和展示是在对资本在一瞬间就可以操纵艺术的可能性的研究和反应。

正如桑塔格声称，“事实上所有关于艺术内涵的隐喻相当于将内容置于作品里，内涵置于作品外，但是我们颠倒这个隐喻的含义却更能说明这个观点，内容或主题其实是在外部，而内涵其实在内部”。PsychoanalYSL 以此为导向，让内容去揭示自身的内涵，通过中国当代艺术在西方的现状来进行具体的呈现和反应。本次展览将向世人表明激进的主题艺术的活跃，这不是说明政治并非不存在，而是说明单一的抵抗在这个“政治共谋时代”也许是毫无意义的，也许根本就没有一个简单的答案。

London/Berlin-based artist/DJ collective psychoanalYSL specialise in the disorientation of popular entertainment. For their first solo exhibition in China at Ceiling Space (in association with 501 Contemporary Art Centre) the artists respond to the wrong-footed boycotting of Chinese cultural exchange in their home country and the way in which Chinese contemporary art is curated in the UK as novel political curio. Their presentation includes a mute-sensory installation and a series of quixotic prints.

The collective (Christopher Thomas, Benjamin Orlow and Joey Holder) make artworks which stockpile clichés. Their London exhibition THE EMACIATED SPECTATOR at Apiary (London) earlier this year was immediately identified as urgent to current conversations concerning the professionalisation of art. Their hyperreal vision of the scene in London is now being exported to China, enveloping the Chinese art world in their own ideological smoke screen.
Spotlighting how activism has been co-opted, monetized and amalgamated by the marketplace, psychoanalYSL were fascinated by the festival of protest which followed the detention of Ai Weiwei. The artists planned to exhibit an artwork which responded to the market’s dependence on political cache in Chinese contemporary art; however the project faced two levels of censorship from both their hosts in China and supporters of the project in the UK. This exhibition reverberates with these prohibitions.

Cultural exchange is often described as soft power: a reinforcement of Chinese authority, with a friendly face. This is the excuse of a number of UK organisations in culturally boycotting China. We refuse the principal of culturally boycotting China on the grounds that boycotting shuts down discourse.
The curatorial approach to Chinese contemporary art in the West can been associated with a wider phenomenon of “the collapsing distinction between marketing and activism” outlined by Micah White and others. Ai Weiwei’s sunflower seeds at Tate Modern provided not only mass entertainment but a satisfying moral soup. For their exhibition at Ceiling Space the collective utilise these surface observations to build a critical spectacle of the spirit of these international cultural relations. The artist’s process of observation and presentation studies and reflects capital’s operation that with one breath gives and another takes away the possibilities for art.

As Sontag purports “practically all metaphors for style amount to placing matter on the inside, style on the outside. It would be more to the point to reverse the metaphor. The matter, the subject, is on the outside; the style is on the Inside.” With this is mind, psychoanalYSL allows the matter to reveal itself by embodying and reflecting the preferred appearance for Chinese contemporary art in the West. The collective announce the conviviality of the apparently radical thematic art; it is not that the politics is not present, but rather that simple resistance might be futile in our ‘Age of Complicity’ and maybe there is no easy oppositional solution.