PIN Gallery, 798 Art District, No.2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing

6 January – 3 March, 2012

My disappointment with this show stems from the fact that it genuinely appears to be an interesting presentation, focusing on a well-selected group of mid-scale installations. The curator has avoided the temptation to simply place them together within the gallery space, creating appropriate, custom-built spaces that the works inhabit nicely. But it is unfortunate to have to say that Developing Phantom falls down on a conceptual level in its lack of coherent critical engagement with the artists and works, and on a pragmatic level with its confusing organisation and presentation.

Entering Jiang Zhi’s installation you find yourself in a circular, darkened room (I mentioned the photographic and painted works by this artist in my recent review of The Power of Doubt). A turning video projector sits in the centre of the room like a searchlight, intermittently throwing a circular spot of light onto the wall. This spot reveals a person’s face in its dazzling glare. The faces are held fast in the light, illuminated for a few minutes each, before the light is extinguished and tracks around to another part of the room. While the faces are lit up they react in various ways: the light is obviously uncomfortable for them, as they immediately squint and shield their eyes. This piece effectively presents the psychological effect of this exposure, as the faces fidget and in some cases soundlessly nervously chatter, seeking to defuse their predicament.

Behind this installation stands the steel enclosure of Zheng Yunhan’s The Depth of Light (2008) (full disclosure: I used to run a gallery which represented this artist). A large perforated steel cube, its gridded structure made up of large fans blowing air into its interior. Its black structure dominates the space, reaching up to very near the lowest parts of the saw-tooth ceiling. The piece is lit from within by a large hanging searchlight, illuminating and reflecting off of a mesh blanket embedded with large crystals. This piece has always puzzled me, being difficult to contextualise within Zheng’s previous works that had previously displayed a marked historical and geographical concern with China’s recent past, via video and photography. By contrast, this piece seems to deal with more fundamental materials, as it focuses on wind, light, metal, crystal: constituent elements that seem to refer to basic, zen-like concerns with the space it inhabits and the universe.

Artist collective WAZA have worked with “Society Youths (sic)” (a seemingly disparate collection of people from their hometown of Wuhan), to assemble a set of photographs, unprepossessingly presented in a string of frames along one wall. The claim made in the curators text for the participants being “not only inconsequential molecules in the large and miscellaneous historical community but also individuals who pursuit self-realization in the dignity and balance (sic),” is difficult to see in this random series of snapshots.

On one side of Hexie Baroque’s installation a television stands on a polished floor with an old cupboard placed on top of it. The monitor loops a small section of Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration speech, saying: “Well, I do not accept second place for the United States of America.” At the opposite end of the room, the bold letters spelling the words “Shopping Poetic” are formed out of LEDs, progressing through a rainbow of colours. In another section of their installation, a series of turning metal advertising hoardings, clatter through their facets, revealing statements taken from the novel “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau, as well as “a stone within Beijing Huan Tie Art Area” (an area on the outskirts of the city where many artists have their studios). This attempt to create an intertextual effect using the changing facets of the frames is perhaps overly simplistic.

In a confusing anomaly, on one side of the gallery there is a darkened video room and a further installation (only accessible through this room). Neither of these works are mentioned in the text for the show, nor labelled in any obvious way. They also do not seem to be related to any of the artists listed as part of this show. The only relation is that in the installation a rickety structure made up of rings of metal gauze somewhat mirrors the appearance of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International – an image that also appears (in schematic form) on one of Hexie Baroque’s advertising hoardings, but the meaning behind this relation is unclear.

The omission of sufficient conceptual structure and information in situ shifts the development of an understanding of the show very much back into the hands of the audience. Although this is arguably refreshing in its departure from a strict dependence on the cult of particular curators or artists, in this case it very soon becomes frustrating. We are left with what feels like a half-finished show, without the institutional support a group show with any claim to success should provide.

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published 30 January, 2012 on ArtSlant.

Tang Contemporary, 798 Art District, No.2 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing

17 December, 2011 – 25 February, 2012

Photography seems to be the perfect medium for Wang Qingsong’s monumentally theatrical set pieces. In his overblown symbolic constructions and groups of people, the artist addresses issues of both a general and personal nature. In the gallery, these are presented as lush, large-format photographs allowing the artist’s attention to detail in the settings to be held static in front of our eyes for detailed attention. In the spaces of Tang Contemporary the artist is now presenting two set pieces, as well as the photographs, to the audience, which leads to the realisation that the extra dimensions may not benefit the works.

Photography’s power of presentation through the singular viewpoint is put to great use in Wang Qingsong’s epic tableaux. Despite the complexity of his settings, each piece works towards an overall symbolism – a message that each photo presents to the viewer. The works make comments on life, or address social realities in China today (consumerism supplanting the ideologies of the past, for example). Wang’s world is one highlighting the absurdities of the situations, breaking down our assumptions about them. The quality or value of the messages being put across in Wang’s images may be debatable, but the photographs’ effectiveness as spectacle cannot be denied.

Unfortunately, bringing these constructed situations back into real life seems to dissipate the coherence of the image and the symbolism that the photograph so effectively presents – the installations dilute their power.

Tang Contemporary’s main gallery space is taken over by a large installation made up of what appears to be the aftermath of a celebration. The sad remains of half-deflated balloons, and their shiny, cartoon-headed helium counterparts, are bunched together and dispersed around the volume of the room. Most are no longer capable of floating and are attached to strings hanging from the ceiling to keep them in place. In amongst these are objects which also partake of the balloons’ enforced defiance of gravity: a metal bed, a wheelchair and bits of furniture; a bicycle hanging with a Christmas tree; an old coat and a collection of duvets in colourful patterned fabrics. Through it all a long, flying Chinese dragon snakes through the debris, looking like a cheap decoration in the same gaudy aesthetic as the balloons.

More debris is littered around the side room next to the main space, this time with no support and left to grace the floor, adding a more uncontrolled feeling in contrast to the main room where everything is held in suspension.

This suspension relates to the second installation, Poisonous Spider (2011), in the back room of the gallery. This piece is a recreation Wang’s photograph of the same name (also on show in the upstairs galleries). The photograph shows a worker suspended at the centre of a huge, barbed-wire spider’s web. The artist has attached random, everyday rubbish to the web as if the spider uses this to attract its prey. The new installation replaces the suspended man with an empty wheelchair standing in front of the wire structure. The wheelchair appears in both installations, and (particularly with Poisonous Spider) places the body (and its lack) into the installation.

The large photographic prints upstairs show Wang’s elaborately constructed environments and heavily symbolic scenes. Aside from the aforementioned Poisonous Spider (2005), Home from the same year, shows a recreation of a half-destroyed Beijing hutong (alleyway) building with the character for “demolish” (拆) prominently spray-painted on its walls. The character 拆, and its associations with the destruction of traditional residences to make way for the “new,” has become a controversial symbol of the roughshod development of Beijing over recent decades. Wang’s photo shows a lone man with his back to us, leaning against a doorway in what could be a sad or resigned pose. This building is perhaps the figure’s ex-home with all his possessions strewn amongst the rubble.

I find this tendency to heavy-handed symbolism a problem with Wang’s work. This is exemplified with the newest photograph in the show, Goddess (2011). In a photo of another of his large constructed tableaux, in amongst a forest of decrepit scaffolding, discarded artist’s materials and a group of chickens, the torso and head of the Statue of Liberty can be made out. The scene appears to be a sculptors’ studio, with the figure made from large panels of clay applied to a wooden structure. However, the figure is only half-finished (or already beginning to disintegrate), as parts of her crown are missing and there are large cracks showing between the clay panels.

What takes this picture into the region of farce is that the figure of Liberty, instead of wearing the flowing robes of the original, here adopts a “Mao” jacket. This style of jacket, as a symbol, has such a deep resonance in the Chinese psyche and also in Chinese contemporary art that it’s difficult to judge its use here. For many contemporary artists in China it has served as a ubiquitous reference to “recent Chinese history,” appearing in works by Sui Jianguo, Wang Guangyi, Zhan Wang, Zhang Xiaogang, etc. So much so that it is now a cliché of huge proportions. I feel that, to be used now, such an image must be ironic – not of its original use as an item of clothing synonymous with China’s past – but of its use in contemporary art.

The wall-text suggests Goddess and Home represent disillusionment “both for the individual pursuit of basic materials (such as a stable home) or about the country’s political and religious ideals of conception.” Which may well be true, but the mixed messages of Goddess could also represent, on the one hand, a rapprochement reached between Chinese and other cultures (culture is simply a melange of different sources, with the process of assimilation half-finished, half-falling apart); or, on the other hand, this image may inadvertently suggest that China’s recent art history has in itself become a set of clichés ripe to be picked over.

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published 23 January, 2012 on ArtSlant.

Guangdong Times Museum, Times Rose Garden, Huang Bian Bei Lu, Bai Yun Da Dao, 510440 Guangzhou

17 December, 2011 – 6 February, 2012

Doubt is a concept close to my heart (for all the right – and wrong reasons). It is a state of being separated from fixed ideas, moving into a region where certainties flicker out like an ageing fluorescent strip. I feel this movement into doubt is a primary activity of art: simulation, illusion, questioning, all the while leaving the audience open to new thoughts and ways of thinking. The artist does things and I ask: “Why are they doing this?” Doubt is a region of productivity, of investigation, of crossing boundaries in every category, the genesis of potentiality.

The title of Hou Hanru’s show “The Politics of Doubt” at Times Museum immediately suggested a presentation which might display a sense of instability through the works, but what I ended up seeing was a set of rather stable—albeit interesting—works of photography and video, under a fairly simplistic curatorial premise.

To generalize unforgivably, most of the artists worked with the image’s troublesome relationship with fiction and reality, playing on the narratives read into it. Hamra Abbas, Adel Abdessemed, Du Zhenjun, Thierry Fontaine, Jiang Zhi, Sun Xun, and Wong Hoy Cheong, with narrative or political aims, create worlds from scratch or tweak our assumed worlds within the photographic or video frames, opening questions for the audience to interpret.

Bulgarian photographer Dimitar Solakov was invited by Nedko Solakov (his father and a well-known international artist who had a large solo show at Beijing’s Galleria Continua last year) to present his relatively straightforward shots of the “new underground life” of his friends. The father then added his paternal comments to the pictures, admonishing and sympathising in equal measure, usurping the anti-heroism of the images with a touch of sarcasm.

Sarcasm (or humour) also surfaces in Romanian Dan Perjovschi’s incessant cartoons. At Times Museum a series of drawings made during the artist’s previous visit to China in 2009 is shown on a monitor, an endless litany of droll commentary. Around this, snapshots of hastily painted walls record the mistakes and deliberate erasures in the communication of information in the world around us (from the series Corrections 2008–2010).

Overall, this installation was perhaps the most coherent arrangement of the spaces I have seen so far in Times Museum’s tricky galleries. Hou Hanru effectively controls the audiences’ route through the space by the insertion of a wall coated in semi-reflective metal foil, dividing the space lengthwise into two long corridors. Along this route he creates discrete areas for each artist using the many changes in direction. Right in the centre of the show (and the building), Pak Sheung Chuen’s pitch-black room Travel Without Visual Experience 2010 is inserted, organising the spaces around it with some sense of symmetrical progression into and out of this core.

Pak Sheung Chuen’s work also became the most effective arbiter of the theme of the show. The Chinese artist travelled with a tour group to Malaysia, keeping his eyes closed or covered for the whole trip. The artist has stated that he will never step foot in Malaysia again, so the photographs and videos taken by his companions on the tour and his own “blind” images have become his only visual memories. In a further elaboration of the concept, these photographs are displayed within this lightless room and the audience is advised to view the works by taking their own flash photographs within the space. This complex piece, which might have collapsed under the weight of its multiple storylines, manages to keep them all in play, creating a rather brilliant experience of the process of creation and reception of the work.

Leaving things in doubt surely produces some of the most interesting artistic activity, but this show adopts a somewhat controlled approach to the subject. Despite a good selection of artists and works and some interesting installations, the curatorial premise seems misplaced, in the process reducing the power of the art.

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published 2 January, 2012 on ArtSlant.

HEMUSE Gallery, 3-038, North Area, Pinggod Shequ, 32 Baiziwan Road, Chaoyang District, 100022 Beijing

10 December, 2011 – 10 February, 2012

Entering the contested islands of the South China Sea, artist Xu Qu plays with the disjunction between the hopes and wishes that territory embodies and the reality of the places and their constitutive activities.

Looking back over some recent presentations helps to give some background. One of Xu Qu’s contributions to Beijing’s Taikang Space and their 51m2 series, was Upstream (2010–2011) a project tracing the Liangma River from where it passed the artist’s home in the East of Beijing, to the Houhai Lake in the centre of Beijing. Wherever possible the artist and his collaborator followed the canals and waterways, but in many cases this system is in disrepair, or incomplete, forcing them to drag their inflatable dingy out of its element and through the busy ground level streets of the capitol.

This fanciful route expressed a simple desire to see where the river went. The commitment to such an activity by the artist presented the city from an alternative angle, a parallel area overlooked by everyday life.

In Smile, Hemuse Gallery’s group show that Iona Whittaker reviewed on this site, Xu Qu was represented by The Beauty of Distance, a single-channel video work documenting another quixotic action. This began with the artist throwing a large ball of string out of his apartment window. After retrieving it from the ground floor, he brings it back up to the apartment via the stairwell. The two ends are then tied together, forming one unbroken loop of string, from inside to outside and back again, tracing a ring around and through the building.

In this current solo show, Xu Qu has taken this distinctive approach to the meaning of the structures around us to a more remote site with far larger political significance. The South China Sea is an area where the territorial interests of many countries collide and overlap. Although apparently not an easy task, Xu Qu gained access to one of the small coral islands to perform these new works, playing with the islands physical status as a temporary coral platform and its desired status as permanent territory.

In the representations of the island in these works, there is an undercurrent of romanticism that seems to counteract the political issues trying to define them. A lone boat sits on the floor of the gallery, it’s finely-crafted wooden structure suggest a practical vessel, but lines of blue neon fill its floor, distracting from a literal reading of the boat. On the wall next to this, three panels in various shades of deep blue are cut midway by a horizontal gap through which a white neon tube shines.

These two works seem to present a vision of the sea as invisible but ever present for these objects. The blue panels can be read as images of the sea and sky with no demarcation but the bright line of the “horizon”; the boat is built for the sea, implying it in its structure, but in a touch of pathos the “water” seems to have invaded the boat, threatening to capsize it in its bright neon light.

The coconut palm, the cliché of the tropical island, is used several times in other works. In one case wooden cutouts of the palm’s silhouette are used as an informal frame for the video Coconut Graveyard. This documents the wholly artificial grove of palms on the island that, in a strange tradition, have been planted over the years by visiting Chinese dignitaries to record their visits. The palms are all decorated with plaques with the VIP’s name. Planting the trees seems to represent a certain kind of territorial act by the visitors, asserting their nations presence. But these trees provide a link back to the human face of these claims: although the palms are doing well, “What about the people who planted them?” asks the artist.

In Coral Reef (2011) Xu Qu asserts his own opinions on the permanence of these islands and the concept of territorial claims. He is seen collecting coral from the shore and throwing it back into the sea to the point of exhaustion. In this futile way he is here fighting against man, somehow completing nature’s task of entropy, by encouraging the process of the island’s dissolution.

These pieces present a rather wonderful reaction to the situation the artist finds himself in, and with the situation that the islands represent. His responses to the competing natures of the claims, and the physical nature of the island as a temporary coral reef, are measured and considerate. Compared to the earlier pieces that I mentioned, the serious implications of these territorial claims seem to have left the artist more muted in his responses. Nevertheless, his humour in the face of absurd situations still shows through in the romanticism of these pieces.

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published 26 December, 2011 on ArtSlant.

Boers-Li Gallery, 1-706 Hou Jie, 798 Art District, No.2 Yuan, Jiuxianqiao Lu, Beijing 100015, China

9 December, 2011 – 13 January, 2012

While the basic theme of Lei Benben’s three works in Tilted Horizon at Boers-Li Gallery may be water, a perhaps more interesting and powerful linking element is their conceptual framework, which sees them setting up interactions with the spaces within and outside of the frame.

These videos, in their various formats, deliberately reach beyond the frame, setting up a strong relation to the space. The familiar strips of beach and sea of Horizon (2011) are at an angle within the projection’s rectangle, dipping into the bottom-left corner, exactly fitting into the rectangular space at one end of the gallery. The sea is and is no longer the sea, departing from its cliché, it becomes a line across the screen, across the wall, while the breakers continue to crash against the sand.

The five screens of 48min58sec before Sunset (2011) are arranged in sequence on the wall, displaying the same video running slightly offset in time across the series of panels. The sunset is also not a sunset anymore: it is a series of suns chasing each other. In a strange effect akin to attempting to track the development of clouds, it seems impossible to catch the repetition as it progresses from one monitor to the next. Memory seemed to fail me, as the elements in the scene as they occurred across the five screens never appeared to be quite the same. The crispness of the image and the intensity of the colouring suggest a chiaroscuro night-time scene by Joseph Wright of Derby, and a Warhol-ian repetition with an iteration which introduces a cycle of time into the arrangement, perhaps referencing conceptual experiments in photography by Jan Dibbets.

Out Is (2011) sitting between these two pieces, presents a single monitor sitting atop a plain black plinth, sculpturally filling the space. On screen an outlet continuously disgorges water from a dirty, metal container. Over the discharge is written “OUT IS,” an error in expression but potentially meaningful.

I am very aware that the artist leaves meaning open in these works. Is there a point at which this openness is not enough? Not enough to privilege the pieces as holding any meaning in themselves. Absolute openness is unattainable, an approach to it is certainly possible but are we losing something in that movement? I have a sense of frustration with an artist seeming to rescind responsibility for meaning. There feels like there is an unmooring of my critical faculties if I do not have something to hold onto.

At the same time, it is impossible for the work to lack all meaning, as it is a joint production between the artist, the work, and the audience. So although the artist seems reticent at her end, this is not the end of meaning – it is not that the images are without meaning, but these works they leave space for possible meanings. Lei Benben describes this as making the work “more open and speculative.”

The artist’s other works also follow this line of thought. Her ongoing series One day one photo (2007–ongoing) culls from her daily life one image that for the artist has what she describes as a “special atmosphere,” embodying something of a “natural law of things.” Beyond this feeling she is perhaps wary of assigning special meaning.

Tilted Horizon reduces the artist’s input to several precise setups that remove, in particular, the human figure, which might provide an element with which we could empathise. The installation becomes a formal presentation of phenomena within the frame, encroaching on the phenomena in the room, in their arrangement and the audience experience.

The clarity of Lei Benben’s results with these straightforwardly subtle works makes this a well-controlled, and at times quite beautiful display of conceptual investigations.

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published 19 December, 2011 on ArtSlant.

UCCA Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, 798 Art District, No.4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China 100015

26 November, 2011 – 25 February, 2012

In what might be read as a change in direction for Zhan Wang, the new large-scale installation at UCCA broadens his works’ outlook from the establishment of monuments to the creation of the universe as creative material. In the process the artist addresses some big questions about our place in the universe, but ultimately manages to lose his sympathetic connection with the human body.

His long-running Artificial Rock series of scholars’ rocks recreated in stainless steel now dot the world, playing with the role of the monumental in public space. Critic Huang Du sees them as existing between tradition and modernity, and these contemporary versions of the traditional stones literally and symbolically reflect the appearance of whatever is around them in their polished forms. But this trope has now become ubiquitous, almost a cliché, so how does the artist progress?

My Personal Universe, the installation occupying UCCA’s “Big Space,” is perhaps his answer. Four huge screens (with two more serving as floor and ceiling) demarcate the space. On these are projected films of a large rock sitting on a scaffolding structure in a barren landscape; each screen presenting the face of the rock based on their orientation in the room. Every three minutes this rock explodes into fragments that fly out in all directions in super slow motion. This film is also reflected on the surfaces of some 5000 stainless steel rocks, created from the fragments of the explosion. The fragments hang on wires throughout the space as a forest of shiny forms that intermittently block the view of the film and which the audience must negotiate within the space.

This installation seems to be moving away from the nature of the rocks as coherent objects of contemplation in the tradition of these scholars’ rocks; the Artificial Rock now explodes into fragments that must be considered en masse. The final rocks, their destructive creation, and arrangement, come to represent the theoretical act of formation, encompassing the long-history of their making back to the Big Bang.

This installation looks beyond the cultural manifestations of the monument in space – which, in the artist’s use of polished steel, takes on attributes of its surroundings as relating to the society and culture around it. This also marks a distinct turning point of meaning of the works’ relation to the body. In the past they have referenced a healing aspect of the objects, at times related to religious beliefs. Several projects have served to fill gaps: New Plan to Fill the Sky 2001 in which the artist planned to return a stainless-steel copy of a meteor back to space; and, Project to Inlay the Great Wall 2001 which recreated a missing part of the Great Wall in steel bricks. In his major solo show at the National Art Museum of China in 2008, Zhan Wang also presented the installation Deity Medicine, in which large stainless-steel pills were propped around the room incorporating ATMs on which the audience could research various deities (ATM Deity Search Engine 2008).

However, technical issues with the installation at UCCA left me unimpressed with the results. For a start, the precision of the hanging stones was in jarring contrast with the fuzziness of the filmed footage. Despite their HD quality, the films have been projected so large, and the audience can approach so close to them, that the perceived quality of the image suffers badly. On top of this, the large gaps between the edges of the projections (through which the audience can walk from the outside to inside spaces of the installation) disconnect each video segment from each other, preventing a connected experience of the space of the explosion event.

On the other hand, the “making of” documentary in the adjoining room (directed by Richard Widmer) provides a counterpoint to the installation, bringing back a human dimension, making evident the trials of producing such an event.

Looking at the installation as a whole, this show reiterates the fact that UCCA’s Big Space remains difficult for monolithic presentations. While to be chosen to work with this space is something of an accolade, the sheer immensity of the room, which should be an opportunity, is often too much of a temptation to produce overblown pieces. In this case Zhan Wang’s response is let down by pushing the installation beyond its technical possibilities. I also feel the treatment of the subject matter prevents the audience from truly engaging with the artist’s world-view as presented in this installation.

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published 12 December, 2011 on ArtSlant.

za jia lab, Hong’En Daoist Temple, Doufuchi Hutong, Dongcheng District, Beijing

20 – 23 November, 2011

Not Only A Taoist Troublemaker! was a short-lived exhibition occupying a leaf-strewn room in a small arts space attached to a bar. A bar with a vegetable market behind; sharing a building that housed a screw factory during the Cultural Revolution. A screw factory built inside a Taoist temple, replacing the site’s original Buddhist temple. This overlapping of every kind of ideology provided an ideal backdrop for the six artists’ work in this show curated by forget art.

forget art is an organisation created by artist Ma Yongfeng, about whose “guerrilla” tactics I have written once before on ArtSlant. It has become well-known for the ironic nature of its exhibitions, interventions, and projects. These activities are knowingly aware of themselves and their contexts, and never take these or themselves too seriously.

Prior to the opening of this new show, Ma Yongfeng had already laid the conceptual and experiential groundwork by initiating a series of “naked” interviews with the artists and academics. Ma’s aims seem to be, on the one hand, to provide a forum for serious discussion that he feels is lacking in the art environment in China. On the other, by performing au naturel he is pushing the situation out of kilter. The participants’ exposure may lead to a more open discussion – at the very least it places the speakers in a new, less comfortable position.

This was also his reasoning behind collecting 20 bags of autumn leaves from a forest in Beijing’s outskirts and transporting them into the gallery. This literal groundwork had the benefit of pulling the whole space together with its softness underfoot and the earthy smell that it brought to the space. Ma explained to me that this was beyond simply an intervention – it was an effort to create an atmosphere or even some kind of aura.

Picking up on this, Liang Ban’s carved radishes rested on an open window-sill and Hu Xiaoxiao’s failed (in a good way) image made of vegetable matter hung in place of honour against a plush red velvet curtain at the back a small stage. The radishes were clumsily carved with figures, as if these were nascent within the vegetables, awaiting their revelation; and the backdrop hung where a Buddha figure or Christian cross would normally be situated, spot-lit on the raised stage, at the focal point of the room. Counteracting any particular readings, a smartly-dressed woman hired by artist Lu Zhengyuan performed as an unreliable guide to the show, providing background to the works with guesswork and rumours, creating an atmosphere of misunderstandings for her audience.

Hanging above the stage, Alessandro Rolandi’s red propaganda banner announced, “MAY YOUR MATTERS BE SAFE.” This statement is typical of the ambiguous situations in his work, subtly raising its issues with reality. These words overlooked and seemed to ironically relate to Wu Yuren’s large rock suspended from the ancient rafters. For the opening, Wu stood under this 200lb stone, forcing himself to remain in this precarious position. While perhaps not long enough to privilege this activity as “durational,” he was there long enough for a call of nature to be performed amongst the leaves – I have to recognise this as (some sort of) commitment to the (in)activity. In discussion with the curator and audience, he finished the piece by removing his clothes and standing naked under his stone – disrobing again appearing as a means of expression with its parallels to the online response to Ai Weiwei’s charges of pornography (although Ma Yongfeng’s original naked interviews antedated this particular meme).

However, I don’t want to sound dismissive of Wu Yuren’s activity, as it had a deeper rationale than its surface appearance might suggest. In 2010 Wu was jailed for ten months under questionable circumstances and since his release has intermittently been called in for “a cup of tea” by the authorities (as questioning is euphemistically referred to). This serious and continual pressure on him is expressed through this work.

Whether that makes it a “good” work, I am not sure; my immediate reaction was that I did not like it, even with the background, feeling it was too literal and unsubtle. But I have to respect the fact that it reflects Wu Yuren’s being on the blunt end of the system, aspects of his situation being more common than one might expect. He has more right than most to comment on this experience, and of course I do not know what it is like to live through his experience or what it is like to be under this continual pressure. The activity was all done in seemingly good spirits – one way to deal with such serious matters, perhaps.

This attitude was reflected in the original Chinese title of the show, “不是吃素的” or “not a vegetarian,” a euphemism for not being a push-over, which the curator described as presenting “a very simple, radical attitude.” The English title refers to the Bohemian reputation of Taoists, saying that this show is not “only” about that, in a typically open move.

Although it is obvious I had many reservations about this show, maybe because of those reservations I still felt this was a powerful show creating a strong impression on me by its scattershot nature.

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published 4 December, 2011 on ArtSlant.

Landgent Center, No.20 East Middle 3rd Ring Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing

17 November – 25 December, 2011

The many forms of site-specificity have a long history and can be the most complex of contexts for art. This idea of a productive connection with a setting, and by implication the users of that setting, is an attractive option for artists trying to boost their degree of “relevance.” However, the public realm outside of galleries is the critical realm par excellence – works existing in it are forced into competition with all sorts of other, “natural” activities in the spaces, and away from the focus afforded by more sympathetic, privileged spaces.

Often one of the stated aims of the work is to engage with the “everyday.” But the prosaic nature of these situations pricks at an artworks’ status, pointing up assumptions that may or may not coalesce with the world into which it is thrust. And, for me, this is when it gets interesting.

The group show Urban Play sees eleven artists and artist groups hosted by the Landgent Center, a large retail and office development south of Beijing’s Central Business District. This project, curated by Tang Zehui, has seen the artists on-site for the last few months developing a series of site-specific works in the public spaces.

Just inside one of the buildings in the Center, a figure in red was struggling to get up from the floor, his bag of presents scattered behind him. In a bizarre premonition of the coming trials of Christmas shopping, a life-like ageing Santa reached out to passers-by for help in his predicament. The piece No Country for Old Men by Xin Yunpeng seemed to be making a statement about our relationship to other people, perhaps reflecting on the issues surrounding “Good Samaritans” which have come to the fore in Chinese society recently.

Outside the entrances to the shopping malls, Wang Yiqiong has placed long boards of absorbent paper, provided for smokers banished from the “smoke-free” interiors. The piece develops as they blow onto the surface, leaving behind the tar smudges from their smoke, which—along with the wide format of the paper—somewhat remind me of traditional Chinese landscapes scrolls. The element of interaction and play, with serious health overtones, and its connection with an existent community works well in this location.

Sound can make the most invasive of works. Its contact with people is less controlled than object-based work, leaving it open to more problems given the multiple environments it impinges upon. Yan Jun’s Floating Clouds was presented over the mall’s PA system, and made up of the cracking sounds of sunflower seeds being eaten (another version of which I reviewed recently on this site < http://www.artslant.com/cn/articles/show/28588>). Here it was presented as a discrete effect on everyday activities – this strange noise in the background of the visitors’ travels through the malls, aiming to put them slightly off balance. This became its undoing, as I believe one of the shops complained that the sound was too upsetting during the opening. So in the end the sound was restricted to just one public area, and when I returned the following day, had apparently been turned off entirely.

The subtlest of interventions, and the most easily missed, were the changes to two seemingly innocuous doors by Giancarlo Norese. The metal doors to two utility rooms had been adjusted by, in one case, the addition of multiple keyholes, and in the other, by the division of the door into two separately hinged parts, the bottom part being maybe 30cm high. These seemed to allow for new relationships with the spaces to be formed – who or what were these changes for? It was as if this was the slight evidence of the presence of another community to whom these elements were addressed.

On the concourse nearby, several new structures had gone up for the show including the architectural intervention, A Floating Organism by the group CAA Core of Architecture & Art Association. This plastic opaque bubble-like form was suspended above an open dining area, visible from the street. The “organism” was lit from within in cycling colours. During the opening it provided a strange aerial presence above the performers Lian Guodong, Lei Yan, Amy Grubb-Han and Liu Zheng who were moving through the public spaces, interpreting their surroundings through dance. Next to the main road, the pyramidal structures of Beijing Obscura by Andrew Toland, created darkened spaces in which the surroundings were projected down through lenses in their apexes onto the outstretched palm of your hand.

In their different ways, all the pieces in the show touched on the sometimes-problematic issues of site-specificity: the ephemeral nature of some of the works, the practical difficulties they came up against, and (in some cases) the requirement of the presence of the artist, resulted in a rather random experience of the show.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing, nor against the meaning of site-specificity. As I said at the beginning, for me these difficulties are where site-specificity becomes interesting. Works which do not play nicely with the environment, that do not stay in place, leaking into surrounding areas, deliberately perform the limits of their work, with failure being as productive as success. In particular Yan Jun’s sound intervention and Wang Yiqiong’s smoker’s paper, were for me the most “successful” for what they revealed about the boundaries and limits of the various physical, institutional and psychological contexts found in these malls.

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published 28 November, 2011 on ArtSlant.

Galerie Urs Meile, No. 104, Caochangdi Cun, Cui Gezhuang Xiang, Chaoyang District, 100015 Beijing, China

5 November, 2011 – 12 February, 2012

The press release for Hot Blood, Warm Blood, Cold Blood proposes that this new work is “not primarily a conceptual work.” This text goes on to lay the groundwork for this new three-channel installation – and for what I see as Cheng Ran’s work as a whole: “The artist hopes to reduce the technical influence to a minimum level through the deliberate use of inappropriate editing to demonstrate the formality embraced in symbolism and imagery, thus representing an unknown image-space.”

Although I could quibble over the subjectivity of a phrase such as “inappropriate editing,” and the vagueness of “an unknown image-space,” this distancing of his work from a conceptual reading is a consistent concern for Cheng Ran. In a conversation I had with him in 2010, he was very clear about this: “I never thought that the artwork should have a core meaning. Inspiration and instinct is very important to me in the creation of the work, not a concept. I really don’t consider myself as a conceptual artist at all.”

As problematic as I felt his attitude towards core meaning was at the time—I felt that it amounted to an abrogation of responsibility to the work—I’ve come to regard it as allowing for the possibilities for interpretation to be released from taking a stable form. This has the positive aspect of leaving space for the audience to become involved in the works’ production of meaning.

This issue of the adoption of meaning becomes even more complex when the artist produces a work such Hot Blood…, which is focused on that symbolically laden of things: a horse.

If we follow the artist’s lead and view the work as lacking a core meaning, does the work become akin to evocative imagery, such as that used in advertising? Neither too specific, nor too vague, it serves to support a feeling about a “product” while leaving the interpretation open. The product becomes non-specific in this way, leaving room for desire to fill in the gaps.

The horse becomes a signifier of a feeling. The artist has already begun this process by naming the pieces Hot Blood/Warm Blood/Cold Blood. These titles encourage a metaphorical reading, where blood takes on its archaic associations as one of the body’s elemental humors in medieval physiology. As medical science has changed the way we look at the body, these named essences have become subjectivities. So Cheng Ran’s horses are presented as taking on these characteristics, of hot-, warm- and cold-bloodedness. It then becomes all but impossible to view the individual videos without taking on the task of spotting these attributes in the images presented to us.

Cheng’s ambivalence towards the image comes through in the films. Progressing around the installation from left to right: Hot Blood focuses on a close up of a horses head and eye, cut with a man with a bone—perhaps a horse’s skull—roughly bound to his head. He plays a double bass against a doorway with holes perforating its surface. Warm Blood is set in dark stable area under spotlights, beginning with a shot of an eagle standing on a support and pulling back to run along the hay-strewn floor. The sequence ends with a wide shot of the stable, with partitions on either side from which horses’ heads appear. A human figure in silhouette walks into shot and leads a horse out from one of the boxes. Finally, Cold Blood shows a group of horses and riders galloping across a river or beach, sending up sprays of water in their wake.

The films are all drastically slowed down at times, so that the movements become somewhat mesmerising in the concentration on their progression. They all end with a common sequence across all three, of multiple, overlapping shots of the horses on the water in muted colours. In this final scene a horse falls and throws its rider.

The deceleration of the film, the certain strangeness in the crops used, and (I must agree with the press release here) some abrupt editing, all add a level of hyper-reality to the subjects, turning them into heroicised versions of the real. But the horse’s final collapse ultimately adds pathos to this reading.

What can we say about the image of the horse, then? One thing that seems certain is that the horses in these videos are the products of domestication. In most cases the horse is shown with a rider or in the stable, all signs of its societal meaning as an animal with a use to humans.

As with all Cheng Ran’s works, sound or its lack is also an important element. Here, the major sound is the blurred drone from the double bass in the Hot Blood segment, adding to the gravitas of the installation’s overall effect.

By holding the meaning perpetually out of reach, I am left to feel this loss all the more and am firmly placed within the struggle to reach meaning. For me, this process makes the works somewhat magical in their disconnection with any hard meaning. However, in our conversation, Cheng also stressed that: “… even though these are images, I don’t want them to become surreal or ‘image-like’…” This places the viewer in the uncomfortable position of trying to negotiate the mixed messages coming across in the work.

The artist’s ambivalence and its results on film upset our habitual approach to the works, to “read” them in one way or another. The arrangement of the three screens in Hot Blood… can be seen as a minimal approach to placing images into the world and into the world of symbols. The effect is then a powerfully evocative environment that creates muted spectacle without forcing a meaning on the viewer.

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published 14 November, 2011 on ArtSlant.

What we are watching here is a video work from 2002 entitled The Swirl by Chinese artist Ma Yongfeng. This 15 minute video is one of Ma’s very first works at a point where he was displaying an interest in using what might be seen as futile behaviours, as a means of pricking the fabric of reality, and questioning it’s assumptions. Ma has more recently become known for his minimal interventions in daily life and socially aware services, but at the point at which this video was produced, these interests were still nascent.

Well, I can’t ignore the video anymore, and that of course is its problematic – this traumatic activity which is presented to us – these fish which are due for quite a ride, as we will see.

As the commentator for this work, and ostensibly representative of it and of the artist, the unfolding of the piece makes it tempting to expound my own strong opinions about the treatment of animals, which could come into conflict with my respect for the artist. But neither Ma, nor—I guess—you, as the audience, will thank me for making such apologies. What’s done is done, and we (the audience as well as the artist) must deal with the consequences.

I have known Ma and his work for a few years now, and the work I have seen produced by him and which I have written about over that period initially has seemed formally very different from this early piece.

Ma now works less with video and more with events and situations. He aims to formalise a set of projects, which seek to work directly with social reality. He is, for instance, undertaking an ongoing project called forget art, an adaptable undertaking that takes many forms, including exhibitions, art fairs, interventions, online social networks, etc. but aims to play with these institutions and find new ways to turn them to social use.

How then does one get from these fish to an interest in working with the forms of society?

Taking a step back, what is happening in this video? Six live golden Koi fish have been placed in a top-loading washing machine and the washing cycle is set off. As an aside, the top-loading style of washing machine is a very common element in Chinese apartments – perhaps because this top-loading aspect saves space over their front-loading brethren.

So the wash cycle starts innocuously enough with the bright metal drum filling with water, the water falling from all sides to douse the fish. Once filled, the drum begins to turn clockwise, then anticlockwise agitating the water and the fish in the process. This continues, back and forth, for about 10 minutes. The water then drains out of the drum, leaving the fish high and dry on the metal base of the machine. Followed by a fade to black.

But such a cold description of the facts of this video leaves out the affective aspect of the action, both on the fish in their tormenting and violent situation, and on the audience with their feelings when placed in front of such an act by the artist.

It is probably best if I say at this point, that the fish were relatively unharmed after their washing, living out the rest of their natural lives with a friend of the artist’s.

So what causes an artist to undertake such an action on these helpless animals? What does it mean?

Ma’s other works of video and photography at that time were concerned with the place of “nature” in our understanding of the world, and nature’s place and use value in our attempts to understand the world through our depictions of it. This would appear as Ma’s own creations or by his filming of natural history museum dioramas and reconstructions, sometimes with subtle interventions and changes by the artist, sometimes simply re-presenting the facts in front of us. Equally these constructions—with their original didactic purposes and the artists own twisting of them—serve to point up the arbitrary and fake nature of the presentation, a nature which often blatantly ignores the real needs of the animals and plants contained therein, giving the presentation for the audience priority over any welfare issues.

The Swirl presents a demonstration of a completely man-made, machine-like setting in which nature is placed to face its fate. The piece’s apparent simplicity leads to some broad claims about its significance. Is it possible to see The Swirl as a piece of social criticism, or a commentary on the artist’s existence, as critic Dorothée Brill has suggested? Are these claims a step too far?

Symbolic meaning is a well-developed part of culture. Especially in the visual arts, objects and scenes are interpreted based on their symbolic status, various objects have deep and significant meanings developed over the course of centuries, which the enlightened viewer can piece together as a further layer of meaning for the image.

So what can be said about these fish? Koi have value in Chinese tradition as symbols of abundance and prosperity. Traditional Chinese paintings will include Koi to represent these values within the overall symbolic schema they present. In neighbouring Japan, the meaning of Koi fish is slightly different, where they present an ideal of strength of purpose, and perseverance in adversity. A meaning that seems particularly appropriate to this artwork and a meaning the artist may well have been aware of when putting the fish into this predicament.

Does the washing machine have a symbolic meaning and value in itself, which when combined with the fish creates some new, composite symbolic value, designed to enlighten us as to the piece’s “higher” meaning? By placing them in a washing machine and subjecting the Koi to the swirling of the drum, what does that mean for this set of values?

The round opening of the washing machine could be said to have some formal connection with a common way of framing scenes with wall openings in Chinese gardens. These openings take various shapes, but are all designed to provide a viewpoint out into the landscape which presents the scene as an aid for contemplation. The video work titled Beijing Zoological Garden, produced by Ma a couple of years after The Swirl, makes reference to this technique as the artist wanders the animal houses of the eponymous Zoo presenting the animals and spectators therein through this idealising, round vignette.

So, is it fair to make comparisons between the roles of Koi or these framing methods in the Chinese view of landscape, with Ma’s work? How about out modern interpretations of animals and landscapes, which we present in our museums and in our imagery?

In his works Ma seems to be picking up on these traditional tropes of the role of these animals and settings, while putting them in new contexts to play with their ultimate meanings when they come into contact with their audiences, a context which also alters with time and knowledge.

However once stepping beyond the highly codified set of symbols which make up the various cultural systems, symbolic value becomes something of a futile task, as the values become arbitrary and open to re-interpretation at any point. Any value can be read into anything – with a bit of effort. Indeed, artists have a tendency to reinterpret symbols, and twist meanings to reveal hidden factors within their assumed status. Ma Yongfeng in particular playfully questions many of these assumptions in his work, playing off the symbols against each other to open up the possibility of new meanings to appear.

In his latest works, where Ma has taken on the social aspect of art as his tool, although his intentions are sincere in his attempts to engage and create an effect on society, I cannot help but notice that in every case the subjects are not dealt with as hard and fast rules, but with a canny sense of humour which lightens the tone and prevents them from becoming too sterile.

So Ma’s fish may or may not mean abundance, and the washing machine may or may not refer to traditional scenery; the action may mean many things which we can read into the video from our position of safety away from the actual creation of the work, a point from which we can make judgements about the responsibility of the artist that perpetrated such an act.

The relatively simple set up in this video allows one to look beyond the reality of the situation and try to piece together some kind of symbolic meaning behind it. But the piece never makes it too easy to remain focused on one or the other, the reality or the symbol. The Koi’s predicament is never far from our minds – nor should it be if we have any sense of empathy in us. But then neither should the reality that this is just a video of an incident which took place almost ten years ago, and which can now be looked at with some perspective and from many other points of view besides the shock value that the activity immediately proposed.

Inevitably Ma’s work reflects aspects of the artist’s experiences and is an expression of his thoughts and ideas about the world. But how far one should go to create a symbol out of this very real action seen in the video? Keeping these two readings in process is important I think. Certainly the fish are being tormented. But equally they come to represent something beyond themselves in the process. Being able to keep those two readings in view perhaps can prevent lapsing into an essentialist reading of the piece as either a brutal mistreatment of animals or an aesthetic display divorced from real-world travails.

The Swirl forces me to never to forget the reality of the fishes’ dilemma, but at the same time to hold that reality as one amongst a number of readings of the work, which makes the work important as going beyond itself, to take on a wider significance within the artist’s work and in society at large.

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published November, 2011 in ASPECT Magazine.