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.