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 11^th 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/