A surprising show by Nalini Malani and Wang Jianwei.
Nalini Malani and Wang Jianwei
Arario Gallery Beijing
November 11 – January 21, 2010
This pairing of two installation artists from developing countries leaves the grim aftertaste of political modernization.
First, Nalini Malani uses semi-abstract video work as meditations on India’s religious and ethnic violence. Most interesting is Unity in Diversity, shown in a dimly-lit red room, including a hardwood table, chairs, and photos of Ghandi – looking as if a seminar were about to take place. The video enhances details of a nineteenth-century painting with the real objects (moving within the painting), and is narrated by fragments of memoir, epistle, and lecture. It takes – as do all his works on display – a “gothic” sensibility and runs it through a specifically Indian context.
Malani’s other works play with similar sensibilities, sometimes considerably more abstract (as in the video installation Hamletmachine), and sometimes much more whimsical (as with the selection of his paintings). All, however, push viewers into accepting the artist does not seek to escape from or transcend his historical circumstances, but to recast them as concepts perceived through an aesthetic lens.
Second, Wang Jianwei’s work meditates on the lost and found of China’s physical history. The video Symptom will probably remind many viewers of the Cremaster Cycle in its historical scope and disorienting narration, but the comparison should stop there. Cryptic enactments on a stage depict late-nineteenth to twenty-first century China, taking a rather chilling – if not exactly Gothic – aesthetic as the starting point.
Wang’s other piece, the installation Notching the Boat to Find the Sword, casts staged and documentary video amongst architectural refuse. More iconic that his somewhat Soviet contribution to the recent Shan Shui exhibition, and unlike politically-engaged minimalist work (such as Ai Weiwei’s World Map) in its diffuseness, the installation distances itself from the viewer walking through it.
This very strong pairing is recommended for fresh voices that do not compromise, and induce thinking and meditation, instead of only commentary.
Breaking Forecast was a good show without enough work by the best of the artists. The curators ought to think twice before following the same methodology. More below.
Breaking Forecast
Nov. 17 – Feb. 28
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art
Since opening two years ago, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art has helped exhibit and solidify reputations of established (ethnically) Chinese artists. For example, Huang Yongping, who was given a solo exhibition there last year, had largely been excluded from intra-Chinese art discourse as a result of his expatriation to France.
Breaking Forecast brings together eight emerging Chinese artists together in a large and visible venue. The art is overwhelmingly impressive on a walk-through, and the exhibition also complicates the artists’ relations to each other. Some rooms are alotted to single artists, while others are mixed. A film, by the artist Yang Fudong, is irregularly shown.
It’s fair to say that the museum’s approach to the exhibition is also analogous to the artists’ individual approaches. The sometimes unclear arrangement of the artists’ works is mirrored in the statements and artworks of the artists themselves – most often eclectic, and, though the work tends towards social critique, hardly long meditations on social problematics. The art is often fresh, but when put into an artworld context it makes more sense than when directly appealing to the kind of activism that urban renewal, pollution, or a host of other very real issues, demands.
For example, RMB City, by Cao Fei, is an animated construction of a fictional city that seems eerily like Beijing. The work is direct social commentary on one hand – it is probably the most powerful of the exhibition in this regard – and commentary on visual verisimilitude on the other. The verisimilitude question is probably the question amongst installation art – how convincing is it, in other words – and as a result of this the work is in a competition with the other artworks in the same room.
Other works that make similar social commentary (though with different materials) are by Qiu Zhijie, Zheng Guoguo, and the artist going by the title MadeIn. All artists employ various kinetic means to achieve disorienting effect, making their works primarily visual art. Too often, however, the social commentary is merely a weight on it. Another artist, Chu Yun, fits a little less comfortably with this group in that he seems to be committed to conceptual processes. With even less visual stimuli, however, the cleverness of his works becomes a haze through which it is difficult to actually see much else.
The artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, billed (I hope, jokingly) as “one of the most important artistic groups in China’s contemporary art scene,” invert the concept-begets-art relationship and have the impressive Smoke installation – a machine that blows giant smoke rings that are whacked with a giant broom (again, by machine). The two contradictory feelings – awe and humor – that the installation invoke, make this a curious and memorable piece.
Yang Fudong also has an interesting series of large-scale photographs that recreate a story of a Shanghai social clique. The materials used (glossy, well-developed) and the places represented (a cocktail lounge, a limousine) are mirror images of each other. It is too bad there wasn’t more of it, so that viewers could see more clearly what kind of narrative – formal, historic – emerges from the photos.
But perhaps most impressive in the exhibition are Liu Wei’s paintings. Although (the artist says) conceived as “cyberpunk” critiques of Beijing environs, they are to this viewer the most vivid and original pieces in the whole exhibition, having juxtaposed images of Beijing with other arid landscapes, represented with dayglo hues and even semi-geometric renderings. These are somewhat different from the paintings he recently exhibited at the Boers-Li gallery – vivid large-scale paintings of television interference – but somehow seem a continuation of the project, able to stand apart from it, and to also dominate Breaking Forecast by insisting that painting is not to be displaced by more high-technology arts as a current medium. His paintings seem to have developed confidently at their own pace.
One thought to take with you to this exhibition is the question of whether or not the artists there are truly a “breaking forecast” – breaking into the international art world as artists whose works, while often local in context, produce more than just “Chinese art.” Although the exhibition bills them as “key figures of China’s new generation” of artists, let’s hope that at least some of them are more than that.
A short review of the recent, excellent exhibition of Tang Ke’s paintings.
Tang Ke at Arario Beijing
The paintings by Tang Ke (唐可) in the recent exhibition, RE-CREATE, are, according to the artist’s statement, copies of earlier paintings. These copies consist of the unique “markings” that make up Tang Ke’s technique. According to the artist, his technique is also meant to convey a sense of “vastness.”
Thematically, the paintings are versions of shan shui (山水) paintings – somewhat stylized paintings of rivers and mountains, tinged with a sense of mystery. However, because of the nontraditional materials used in Tang Ke’s work, the represented content of the paintings is de-emphasized.
Tang Ke uses large, transparent “canvases,” that are hung from the ceiling, away from the walls. The intentionally dimly lit gallery allows it to feel like less of a white cube and more like a cavern in which floating landscapes materialize.
This is clever. The paintings do not merely modernize rivers and mountains by replacing them with fountains and skyscrapers, as critics like Hu Fang (胡眆) have suggested that shan shui must now do. They instead insist upon Tang Ke’s shan shui technique, but vis-à-vis the electric light that illuminates them.
This is not mere historical re-creation, but an ontological position. The new materials and their subsequent refraction “marks” the shan shui themes. This kind of philosophical formalism is a rare treat in any case, but especially rare in that it “re-creates” a tradition.
But, the true pleasure of this exhibition is that the paintings float like clouds in the air. Maybe the real theme of the paintings isn’t actually rivers and mountains, but the light going through each, illuminating the gallery. Is this vastness? It seems so to me.
An older review of last summer’s Gu Dexin show.
Gu Dexin at Galleria Continua
Matt Turner
Gu Dexin’s recent show, 2009-05-02, at Galleria Continua, was a powerful meditation cloaked in the plain garb of conceptual art. The installation, consisting of a spare gallery space with large characters and phrases covering the walls, video screens showing the movements of clouds, and a concrete rise in the center – imprinted upon which the sentiment “we can go to heaven” – offered a gut punch to the grim statements (we have killed children, we have eaten people’s hearts, etc.) on the walls.
Often conceptual work is dismissed for being too cerebral, coldness, or supposed anti-formalism. 2009-05-02 was nothing if not an emotionally heightened installation – from the bold, red letters that act as both confession and dictation, to the videos which give the impression of days passing, slowly or quickly, but above all without any kind of the gravitas that the text would imply, so that when at least this viewer reads the redemptive “we can go to heaven,” one can feel pathos at the same time as wondering if the concrete rise isn’t just a grave or mausoleum for all the hopes of those who are confessing.
One leaves the installation with the feeling that you have been forced, vis-à-vis the didactic-appearing text and the austere setting, into the position of unwilling observer and confidant, knowing much more than the gallery-going experience would normally allow.
Another pleasant aspect of 2009-05-02 is the context in which it implicitly inserts itself. Although Gu has exhibited installation work aplenty, 2009-05-02 hearkens back to the formal simplicity of his work with Wang Luyan and Chen Shaoping in the 1980s, as the New Measurement Group. There, they explored a rigidly methodical approach to producing geometric abstractions – in contrast to both the Cynical Realist work as well as the performance art that was emerging at the time. Likewise, 2009-05-02 stands somewhat aloof from the neo-formalist approaches and inside jokes (another sort of conceptual art, though in this viewer’s opinion, of a fallen variety) that often dot local galleries. The installation comes off as very sincere in its statements of affect, and what appears to be its desire to engage at least conceptually with the world outside of artworld cliques and auction-houses.
Like the title, named simply for the opening date of the exhibition, the installation itself seems to be one more episode – a tragic episode, but an episode nonetheless – in people’s lives. The clouds, again, indicating time passing. Does this mean the show is inconsequential? On the contrary, 2009-05-02 is that rare combination of concept-oriented work and emotional intensity that, in its drive to document the world as it is, leaves the viewer more committed to the work of art as actor in that world than before.
Another review for eChinacities.com, of a group show with Maya Lin and others:
http://www.echinacities.com/cityguide/Beijing/news/cityspecial.aspx?n=4236
Below is the better, unedited version (no pics).
Review: Shan Shui: Nature on the Horizon of Art
Open this month at the Beijing Center for the Arts, in the Former American Legation at Qianmen, is Shan Shui: Nature on the Horizon of Art. An ambitious assemblage of video and installation work that is also a meditation on environmental crisis, it altogether meditates more indirectly on art’s role in educating about, and thus creating alternative futures to, the exhibition’s grimly forecast path towards environmental catastrophe. Ironically, the art on display most often offers allegories to such catastrophe, as well as replacement scenarios – thus displacing the crisis which it seeks to mediate.
The artwork which most directly engages with a program of environmental education, however, is the projection-installation “What is Missing?” by Maya Lin. In this work viewers are led into a dimly lit room, and given glass plates to hold over what from a distance look like small lights recessed into the floor. Once one is standing over a light, however, one realizes that it is in a fact a projector light – that can be cast onto the glass plate. And although this approach may at at a glance seem whimsical, the content of the projection is a sometimes abstract, sometimes concrete, series of images, facts, and statements regarding disappearing species and their pivotal roles in our planets ecosystem.
First most notable to the gallery-goer will be Wang Jianwei’s castoff mid-twentieth century wooden furniture installation, “Distance.” A tower that appears to be rising through each floor of the gallery, all the way to the rooftop terrace, the fact that in actuality the refuse is reconstructed at each level doesn’t weaken the impact – at each level one can enter the tower at certain points, creating a degree of verisimilitude that trumps what would have been merely the visual totality of the piece. One thing viewers might not notice unless they read the artist’s notes to the installation (available with other literature at the front desk) is that the tower is, however oblique, an elegy to Vladimir Tatlin’s never-constructed 1917 “Monument to the Third International” – what should have been the pinnacle of Soviet modernism.
But the most oblique piece in Shan Shui is not even in the gallery: Zhou Wei’s “Natural System” is a layer of articifial vegatation covering the exterior of the building. Funny enough, at a distance it looks so real that one could easily pass it by, or even take notice at the “ivy”-covered wall. The use of artificial plants, however, demonstrates the often tromp l’oeil effect much of what we call “nature” has on us. But if you feel like “Natural System” is a joke being played on you, don’t take it personally: the world that uses artificial plants is the one he also bought them from. His work is only making these connections apparent.
However it must be said that, like the interesting but out-of-place documentaries being shown in the exhibition (“The 11th Hour,” directed by Leonardo DiCaprio, and “Home,” directed by Yann-Arthus Bertrand), the forms the works take often undermine their message. Like “Natural System,” which is itself victim of the same dilemma it seeks to critique, one has the feeling that the works begin to cancel themselves out. “Distance,” instead of grappling with environmental crisis is a direct way, reduces it to muddled ideas about history, art, and ideology. “What is Missing?” is didactic enough to completely bifurcating the experience: the viewer is simultaneously pleased and guilty.
Although the educational and activist efforts of Shan Shui: Nature on the Horizon of Art are definitely applause-worthy, the exhibition is worth recommending primarily because the art involved, intentionally or unintentionally, articulates urgent problematics in art production when living in a political environment.
Shan Shui: Nature on the Horizon of Art, up until October 31 at the Beijing Center for the Arts. Located inside of the Ch’ien Men 23 compound, at 23 Qianmen Dong Dajie, Dongcheng District. Tuesday through Sunday, 10 AM to 10 PM. 10 6559 8008/5285. http://www.chienmen23.com/
Another review I did for eChinacities.com, of shows by Ai Weiwei and Antony Gormley:
http://www.echinacities.com/Cityguide/beijing/news/cityspecial.aspx?n=4359
Below is the unedited version (no pics).
Ai Weiwei or Antony Gormley: Conceptualisms East and West
Juxtaposing current exhibitions by Ai Weiwei (艾未未) and Antony Gormley, gallery-goers have the chance to enter the present-day conversation on conceptual art. At Faurschou Beijing and Galleria Continua – both in the Dashanzi 798 art district – both shows in turn celebrate and hotly debate their materials. Both shows also play with viewers’ perceptions.
The artists take, at times, approaches toward concept-oriented work that flatly contradict the other’s approach. These approaches are manifest in the results of the artists’ work. Although both use sculpture and sculpture-installation, Ai Wewei uses the media so as to offer, in the end, semiological analyses of the media itself – “deconstructions,” in other words. Antony Gormley’s work, however, is at least in spirit closer to the kinetic sculptures of Laszlo Maholy-Nagy than it is to Continental philosophy. His works seem the acts of an artist that are formal and metaphysical snapshots in time.
At Faurschou Beijing, the gallery-goer can expect an underwhelming exhibition that will stay with you afterwards, throwing up puzzling questions and reflections. Ai Weiwei has created a large cotton sculpture that is, as the exhibition title suggests, a map of the world. Although hardly startling, it plays on the viewer’s expectations of what such a work – a large cotton sculpture of a world map – should include: direct political commentary, aesthetic appropriations or play, or photo-realist accuracy. The sculpture, however, gives us all of that and none.
Made from cotton, a major export from China, the sculpture is immediately complicit with the political conditions of its production. The material also provides enough irregularity of surface to allow for the impression of tactile experience that a material like cotton automatically registers with consumers. More than that, it is a soft representation of the “hard” political and geographical maps that we refer to. “World Map” is a thing built from the labor of unknown individuals, mediated by the artist, and observed by people who take the time to appreciate these kinds of projects.
Also in the show are works that document Ai Weiwei’s trip to Kassel, Germany, along with 1001 Chinese laborers. Termed a “social sculpture” by the gallery, included is the lodging of the laborers. It is interesting if considered an outreach project of “World Map.”
Upon entering Galleria Continua, the first thing one will be met with is a cast-iron sculpture of Antony Gormley, naked, with square nipples. The “singularity” of the show’s title, Another Singularity, is Gormley’s body. More importantly, it is his body at different moments in time. His body is depicted in different states – sculptures of his body as figure, as blocks, as loops, as different sizes, and as installation.
The centerpiece of the show, the namesake, is a giant body suspended in space. To say it is actually a body, however, is somewhat misleading. In reality it is a collection of bungee cords pulled taut across the room, intersecting at polyhedra-points, and using those polyhedra to constitute the “body.” The result is a room criss-crossed with cords that one walks in and out of, and only occasionally gets outside of enough to see the larger shape of the body that they, together, make.
According to the literature provided by the gallery, this, like the smaller sculptures, is a version of the body at singular moment in time. The more abstract aim of “Another Singularity,” that differentiates it from the other work, is that Gormley believes it to be an “internalisation” of the Big Bang. The emergence of his body at different temporal nodes is also the creation of a being through multiple tensions and the multi-directional energy in the room.
Both exhibitions illustrate tendencies in conceptual art, and possibly also illustrate geographical tendencies in our time – China and the U.K., in this instance. It may here be worth considering the urgencies individuals in both locales feel to speak about what the world is, what it could be, and where it has come from.
And if you are interested in art that is more conceptually focused, you may want to attend Liu Wei’s exhibition of televisions and paintings, Liu Wei: Yes, That’s All!, up now at the Boers-Li Gallery. In addition, there is a group exhibition at the China Art Archives & Warehouse, Persistence: Qin Ga, Shi Qing, Wang Wei, Wu’er Shan, that continues the work of intelligent, sensuous art.
Liu Wei: Yes, That’s All!, at Boers-Li Gallery. http://www.universalstudios.org.cn
Persistence: Qin Ga, Shi Qing, Wang Wei, Wu’er Shan, at China Art Archives & Warehouse. http://www.archivesandwarehouse.com
Here is a review I did on assignment for eChinacities.com, of some galleries in Beijing:
http://www.echinacities.com/Cityguide/Beijing/news/Best-in-Town.aspx?n=4334
Below is the unedited version, sans photos and directions.
Gallery Review: Underrated Galleries in Beijing Stand Out in Caochangdi
Although the Caochangdi “gallery district” is a mere ten-minute taxi ride from the well-known 798 complex, it receives only a fraction of the foot-traffic. This is unfortunate not only for the galleries, but also for both the critical as well as casual gallery-goer, since so much notable art can be found there. Over all, the galleries in Caochangdi are more geographically spread out than those in 798, serving as an allegory for the wide range of art one can find there. Considering the relatively small size of Caochangdi, the diversity of materials and themes available in the galleries is on par with what one would find in a larger, more populous gallery district.
Below are descriptions of three exceptional galleries that stand out in Caochangdi, and also stand out in Beijing. These galleries – Galerie Urs Meile, the Boers-Li Gallery, and Three Shadows Photography Art Center – may suffer from underexposure, and thus stand somewhat underrated amongst the other “big name” galleries across the way, but they do not suffer from lack of high-concept mission, or lack of high-quality art.
All are large enough to sustain more than the passing or casual interest, although none of them require the time one would spend in a museum. All are fortunately within a five-minute walk from each other as well. After seeing one gallery, the short walk to the next gallery is a pleasant way to reconsider what you have just seen before moving on. The great thing is that this walk is done in the relative quietness of the area, without the crowds of more popular locations.
Three Shadows Photography Art Center (155 Caochangdi Cun, Chaoyang District. 85 10 6432 2663. info@threeshadows.cn. Tuesday through Sunday, 10 AM to 6 PM.)
The Three Shadows Photography Art Center is probably the best point of entry for the Caochangdi galleries, lying at the center of the district. The center itself is an elegant complex including an open yard, an older, industrial, red brick building, and an elegant gray brick gallery complex that unfolds around the yard, designed to by Ai Weiwei. The center itself was founded by photographer couple Rong Rong and inri in 2007, in order to exhibit works by underrepresented and emerging photographers. In addition to the gallery space, the center also houses a café, shop, and an impressive library of photography history, theory, and monographs.
One aspect of the center that is remarkable is its willingness to take risks through contests and group exhibitions – showing some very surprising work as a result. At present there is an installation by artists Zhuang Hui and Dan’er, documenting and interrogating the history of Yumen, the once oil-rich city in Gansu province. But showing conceptually-inclined work like this is not an exceptional feature of the center; the range of work exhibited will often at least allow room for the conceptual as well as the more normative. And overall, this is the reason that the Three Shadows Photography Art Center is worth visiting. It has an outstanding mission, and shows work that likely would most unfortunately be left sight unseen.
Galerie Urs Meile (104 Caochangdi Cun, Chaoyang District. 86 10 643 333 93. galerie@galerieursmeile.com. Tuesday through Sunday, 11 AM to 6:30 PM.)
Galerie Urs Meile is situated in the actual village of Caochangdi Cun, easily recognized amidst the run-down white-tile buildings that populate the area. The gallery complex is recognizable for its height, unusual design, and also for its gray brickwork. Again, like Three Shadows, Galerie Urs Meile was designed by Ai Weiwei – whom it also represents, along with other well-known experimental artists such as Tracy Snelling or, as with his current controversial (and somewhat repulsive) exhibition called “The Wings of Live Art,” He Yunchang. Galerie Urs Meile, which has a sister gallery in Lucerne, Switzerland, has become known for bold new works from established avant-garde artists in China and the West. In addition to the gallery spaces at the Urs Meile complex, they also play host an artist-in-residence program, allowing Western artists the chance to come live and work in Beijing.
The gallery is notable not only for its location on-site in the village, not only for its buildings, and not only for the artists that give it the reputation it has, but also for what the gallery-goer can expect from any visit there: surprise. For example, the current show has gorey video footage, photographs of family and friends, and somewhat realistic paintings (in addition to the object of the exhibition – the rib the artist had surgically removed). But one could just as easily stumble upon the conceptual videos of Changan Jie traffic that Ai Weiwei once had commissioned. It is this range of work, all under the taut control of professional artists, that make Galerie Urs Meile worth a visit.
Boers-Li Gallery (A-8 Caochangdi Cun, Chaoyang District. 86 10 6432 2620. info@boersligalerry.com. Tuesdays through Sundays, 10 AM to 6 PM.)
The Boers-Li Gallery, oldest of the three reviewed here (founded 2005), stands along the edge of Caochangdi, in its warehouse district. Comprised of two large warehouse-galleries, it is also the largest of the three, indeed one of the largest in the area in terms of square meters. However, the Boers-Li Gallery doesn’t just pack the works in tightly, but rather uses the space to help emphasize the work exhibited – work that is, as in the gallery’s stated purpose, new and experimental.
Going to the Boers-Li Gallery thus gives one the feeling of a more “underground” gallery, probably just as much due to the stark buildings as to the new (not big name) work that pushes the boundaries of what art can say, and what art is allowed to do. As with Galerie Urs Meile, the Boers-Li Gallery is not media specific, although its focus on lesser-known artists is similar to Three Shadows and most of the other, smaller galleries in Caochangdi.
It also has hosted experimental music events, and is also a great place to attend one of its dressed-down openings and see the truly wide variety of people who attend. Of the three galleries reviewed here, Boers-Li stands out for being the place for surprising work by emerging artists, and for being a great place to just casually stroll through the galleries. The amount of interesting work shown at the Boers-Li Gallery stands out in the city for its liveliness.
