The internationally renowned contemporary video artist Bill Viola is the subject of the solo exhibition Bill Viola: Five Angels for the Millennium at the West Bund Museum in Shanghai, on view from December 10, 2021. Part of the museum’s Centre Pompidou x West Bund Museum Project, running from 2019 to 2024, which presents curatorial and educational programs alongside highlights from the Centre Pompidou’s permanent collection, the exhibition showcases Five Angels for the Millennium (2001), Viola’s monumental installation composed of five videos. Widely known for his unique artistic practice that explores fundamental and existential themes by portraying universal human experiences of life and death through video, Viola presents his immersive installation at the “Box”—the museum’s space dedicated to ambitious multimedia works. Created at the turn of the new millennium, Five Angels for the Millennium features the following five angels: the Departing Angel, Birth Angel, Fire Angel, Ascending Angel, and the Creation Angel. Filmed by the artist in 1999 using an underwater camera in a pool located in Long Beach, California, the installation was previously introduced to the Korean audiences at his solo exhibition Transfiguration (2008), at Kukje Gallery, and subsequently at Bill Viola: ENCOUNTER (2020) at Busan Museum of Art. Throughout the videos, which show each angel plunging into and rising above water, Viola utilizes his signature slow-motion technique, reversing select parts to emphasize an amplified sense of time. The scene of the angels plunging into the mysterious abyss collapse the boundaries between the immortality of the universe and the mortality of the human body, exploring opposing themes of light and dark, time and eternity, life and death. The five videos, each on loop, invite the audience to become immersed in a cosmic environment devoid of gravity. Bill Viola: Five Angels for the Millennium, which restructures and expands viewers’ fixed perceptions of time and space, will remain on view through April 10, 2022.