Moleskine Detour 2.0 Shanghai

Do you ever wonder about the thought processes of some of the leading creative thinkers of our time? What does twenty-first-century creativity look like in the making? The Moleskine Detour exhibition ventures inside the notebooks – and therefore the minds – of renowned artists, architects, and thinkers, offering unique and precious insights into their craft.

Detour is a travelling exhibition featuring notebooks filled and decorated by internationally recognized authors. Visitors are invited to explore and discover each author’s creative process as it unfolds page by page. Some works contain extensive stories and illustrated narratives; others turn Moleskine notebooks into sculptures – pieces of contemporary art and design.

The first edition of this unique show toured London, New York, Paris, Berlin, Istanbul, Tokyo, Venice, and Shanghai. Today, Shanghai is the starting point for a new Detour journey. After the successful first edition, Detour is back in China with a new exhibition created in partnership with K-11 Shanghai, featuring 18 new Chinese and international authors.
Below is an overview of the authors participating in the project and their creative inspiration.

Liu Shuwei

Liu Shuweiの写真は、夜の闇から心の風景を描き出します。モレスキンのために、劉書偉は「Vanishing act/消失行?」という写真集を制作しました。これは自己の消失を案内するガイドブックや、一連の消失する瞬間のように見えるかもしれません。彼の写真集は、詩的なテキストやさまざまな要素とともに、観客を彼の神秘的な世界に引き込みます。

Aldo Cibic

「イタリアの風景」の探求の一環として、Aldo Cibicはイタリアの田園地帯のさまざまな自然および文化的要素の再解釈を続けています。彼は子供のように純真にイタリアのアイデンティティの本質を捉えようとしています。モレスキンのために、彼はイタリアの木々の形を遊び心たっぷりに再現しました。

Guo Hongwei

Guo Hongweiの作品は、伝統的な中国絵画に強く影響されています。画家にとってインスピレーションは通常、アイデアからではなく、描くという行為自体から生まれます。そのため、ノートブックに定期的に水彩画を描くことは、Guo Hongweiの芸術的実践の非常に重要な部分となっています。モレスキンのために、Guo Hongweiは超現実的なタッチを加えた一連の野生のキノコを描いた植物画のノートブックを制作しました。

Jiang Zhi

近年、Jiang Zhiは北京のスタジオで毎週即興ダンスセッションを開催しています。これらの瞬間は彼の最新のビデオアート作品《触与知》（Touch and Know）のインスピレーションとなりました。モレスキンのためのJiang Zhiのノートブックは、彼の創作プロセスをバックステージで紹介し、撮影期間のダイアリーからプロジェクトのアカウント、キャスティングやリハーサルから脚本執筆まで、芸術創作が複雑な集団作業であることを示しています。

Lionel Le Gal

「Detourは“フラヌール”の状態にあなたを誘い、定番ルートを外れることを促します。歩き回り、探索し、感覚を研ぎ澄ましてさらなる発見に備えるのです。Detourは旅程があって初めて存在します。Detourには“tour”という言葉が含まれており、ワイナリー巡りが流行しています。中国のワインガーデンを巡るDetourにあなたを案内します。多感覚的アプローチでの“旅”です。これらのページを通じて、中国の“テロワール”とそこで生産されるワインに敬意を表することにしました。さあ、乗り込んでください！」

Lok Ng

「このモレスキンとのコラボレーションの主なインスピレーションは、伝統的な書道と現代のデザインを組み合わせ、若い世代に書道の無限の可能性を示すことです。」

Mao Guanshuai

Sketching has a very important place in Mao Guanshuai’s practice. His notebook for Moleskine shows us a slice of the artist’s creative process in his formal research on shapes. The cover is covered with sawdust from his studio, highlighting the contrast between the reality of manual artistic creation and the perceived glamour of the art world.

Meng Yangyang

For more than a decade, Meng Yangyang has been painting faces and figures. Devoid of any mannerist effects, her paintings are striking in how simple and direct they are, almost ascetic. For Moleskine, Meng Yangyang has made a notebook of her watercolors, creating a rhythmic story where abstract moments are in dialogue with her depictions of the human body.

Nelson Leung Wai

A prominent figure in the local design scene, he studied graphic design, visual art, and photography in Hong Kong. Through his job in photography, he has documented a number of high-profile events, including the Olympic Games. In his creation for Moleskine, he expresses his passion for photography.

Shuting Qiu

Chinese fashion designer Shuting Qiu presents a modern romantic female image: confident and with the courage to express herself, while maintaining a soft and romantic heart. The notebook she has created for the exhibition is inspired by her childhood memories of sketching in nature in her hometown, Hangzhou.

Tango, Gao Youjun

Shanghai-born artist, illustrator and author Tango gained global popularity for his quirky cartoons, which poke fun at the everyday routines and oddities of modern life. Today, Tango is one of China’s most popular illustrators as well as a renowned advertising creative director.

Ren Tianjin

Ren Tianjin is interested in cross-border innovation, digging out power from traditional ink and wash, and borrowing from modern Western art forms to transform traditional art using a contemporary visual language. Many of his works are created on canvas with an oil paint knife and acrylic. In his work, the image is like a shadow of a tree, showing traces of time and change. Another example is the superimposition of Plato's so-called "shadow world" and the world of truth with the interweaving of the unconscious and subconscious in Freudian psychoanalysis. The result is a brand-new artistic language and aesthetic orientation.

Tong Kunniao

Knowledge is a sharp tool. It serves to slice good memories from our lives. “The pen is mightier than the sword”, says the proverb. In a similar spirit and faithful to his sassy attitude, Tong Kunniao turns a Classic Moleskine notebook into a cleaver of knowledge, cutting slices of good memories from life. Using a collage of materials as his main medium for creation, the artist creates subversive and darkly humorous pieces that play on the logical and semiological contradictions between different components.

Wang Ruohan

Renowned for her colorful pop universe, Wang Ruohan’s shapes are combined with simplified figures in a collage style to produce energetic and vibrant images. The artist plays with a wide range of media but has mainly been experimenting with silkscreen printmaking. For Moleskine, she uses silkscreen to show us a dance. Playing with the transparency of the paper, she creates an illusion of movement.

Yann Debelle de Montby

Renowned as an art director, Yann Debelle de Montby also has a secret passion for photography and is an avid collector of vintage cameras. For Moleskine, Yann has made “Imperfect Grains and Potential Blurs”: a unique photobook featuring some of his photographs printed in a large format on translucent paper to give them a dreamlike effect. Like hidden little treasures, the viewer has to unfold each of the images to discover them.

Zhang Xiaoli

Trained as a scientist and ink painter, Zhang Xiaoli is always keen to challenge our views on traditional art forms. Her paintings reinterpret Chinese landscape representation with the use of a Lego-based language. Playful yet serious, she makes dialogue with the past easier and more relatable. For Moleskine, Zhang Xiaoli uses the notebook to recreate a landscape in three dimensions.

Zhuang Ying

Cats have always been considered treasured companions as pets. Their refinement makes them a source of inspiration for many major artists and writers. Staring into her cat's eyes often gives artist Zhuang Ying a sense of penetrating a new world. Her Notebook for Moleskine explores the mysterious and fascinating shape variations of her cat’s eyes.

Ben Wu

“My art comes from my perception and feelings about life. Complete and broken, illusion and reality, sensibility, and rationality: all contradictions stem from our feelings and perception of life. The intuitive feelings brought about by life are diverse. Nature can heal us, and it can also allow us to regain our original self and find the right way to live”.