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.

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