“Walking Man”

Sculpture, 1991

Wang Luyan, Gu Dexin and Chen Shaoping’s founding of the New Measurement Group (NMG) (active from 1988–1995) represented a choice to focus their work on rule-based activities that reduced the mark of the individual to a minimum, if not removing it entirely. Wang’s own works to a certain extent also followed this way of thinking and working, but retained a marked stylistic quality that is clearly his own. At the time NMG’s approach and Wang’s work represented a position in contrast to the supposedly illogical, irrational art of what became known as Political Pop. The group’s interest in “logical” forms of presentation and the concepts that they illustrate (sometimes referred to as “rationalist”) become illustrated forms in Wang’s sharply delineated paintings, toying with barely suppressed paradoxes.

The pieces included in this Biennale include a recreation of Walking Man (originally produced in 1991) – a deceptively simple structure in glued pasteboard, seemingly representing a striding figure. Also appearing are a set of plans and descriptions that present the conceptual development of this piece to what the artist considers a point of completion.

Beyond a deceptive understanding of the form as a figure, the drawings and constructed piece display the “logical paradox”1 that—despite being humanoid in character—the form makes it impossible to tell in which direction the figure might be striding. There are no facial features or other aspects of the body that could indicate an asymmetry indicating a direction of movement. A number of the drawings present schematic images of two of these figures next to each other, titled as “Two going towards each other,” or “Two going left,” or “Two going right” – serving to present all the interpretations available through the drawing, without making any “correct” answer obvious. In another piece, what seems to be a photograph of the silhouette of the structure is overdrawn with a sort of flow chart, listing various interpretations of the movement of the figure, which attain complexity, contradiction, and then return to the original statement. Such a set of statements presented as in some way a logical progression, ultimately removes the meaning from them, leaving them as nothing but textual arrangements – much as the ambiguity of the figure ultimately denudes it of its directional meaning.

Wang’s drawn work has all the emotionless certitude of technical illustration. The artist was originally trained as an engineer2 and this shows through in this type of objective drawing where ambiguity perforce must be suppressed to avoid costly mistakes upon realisation. The ambiguity is seen in much of Wang’s works and serves to bring into play both the “normal” actions of the objects presented and also their re-action to that normality, bringing them both into the same arena of meaning, and turning the meaning of the action back on itself.

As well as tools of measurement, such as setsquares and watches, ambiguity is also applied to tools of aggression – various types of guns, tanks and soldiers are illustrated. But the aggression is turned against itself: not only does a gun fire in the regular fashion, but Wang has also adjusted the mechanism to simultaneously fire another bullet in the opposite direction, potentially harming the aggressor.

Another key image of Wang Luyan’s work is the gear. Originally a symbol of smooth-running machinery and symbolically of progress, the teeth of one gear smoothly fit into the facing teeth of its pair. In Wang’s pieces the gears lose their progressive aspect and jam into a locked state. The actions of the gears turn back on themselves, and the energy passes through the system in such a way that it negates or reverses itself.

Wang’s Walking Man takes an alternative look at the inability to proceed that the painted gears illustrate. The figure strides, but it is made clear there is no particular direction, the heightened ambiguity denying the image as referrer, and pulling the viewer back into understanding the image as the physical object in its own right.

Author: Edward Sanderson

1. Wang Xiaojian, “Neo-Rationalistic Drawing: the Visual Form of Logic,” accessed 30 March 2012 http://www.wangluyan.com/EnText.aspx?ID=62&CurrentPageIndex=0.
2. Goodman, Jonathan, “Wang Luyan: New Objects for a New China,” accessed 30 March 2012 http://www.wangluyan.com/EnText.aspx?ID=50&CurrentPageIndex=0.

• Originally published in Liu Ding, Carol Yinghua Lu, Su Wei (eds.) (2012), Accidental Message: Art is Not a System, Not a World, Guangzhou: LingNan Art Publishing House. pp.110–115.

Taikang Space, Red No.1-B2, Caochangdi, Cuigezhuang, Chaoyang District, 100015 Beijing, China

7 April – 2 June, 2012

With an abrupt reference in its title to a book by Roland Barthes (which appeared in English as Camera Lucida), this show gets underway, presenting works by five Chinese artists with a relation to the “phantom” of photography.

The artists’ particular approaches to the medium of photography are varied. In this show Liu Wei is the only artist to include actual photographs, with several examples from his series As Long As I See It, from 2006 on display. These works demonstrate a certain instrumentality by the artist, as he takes a Polaroid of an object and then proceeds to cut away parts of the original object to match the view presented in the photograph, presenting them both together in some kind of cause and effect relationship.

Liu Wei’s view of photography as a process forming the world in its image is the most straightforward use of the photographic medium in this show. The other works in the show proceed from the fact of photography to step away from the object of the photograph into terrain that addresses the meaning of this thing that is called photography.

In a play on the relationship between painting and photography, Zheng Guogu presents The Line In Front of MoMA’s Entrance (2008–2009), a hyper-realistic ink painting based on a photograph. The painted technique relates back to traditional Chinese ink painting, while the subject matter—the photograph as such—is obviously more contemporary. Taking the meaning one level further, the subject matter of the photograph itself is a queue of people waiting outside the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It might be suggested that this particular subject adds a touch of institutional critique into the mix, although it would be a very facile address of the technique, and perhaps I am clutching at straws there. In general this piece is unsatisfactory for its apparently unimaginative and banal presentation of the layers of meaning involved.

Entering a blacked out room next to this triggers a camera at eye level on the far wall to begin shooting, which allows a small amount of light to penetrate the darkness. The shutter clacks off a refrain which the artist Wang Yuyang tells me is binary code for the sentence “And God said: Let there be light.” Such a presentation of the instruments of photography, and their ability to communicate a message aside from the production of a photograph itself (albeit one which cannot be easily interpreted without assistance) is an interesting development for Wang. In a previous series of works by the artist (whose titles begin Breathe…) he reproduced items of machinery—an AC Unit, a mini-van, an ATM, etc.—in pliable rubber. These were then fitted with a fan that caused them to appear to breath in and out, suggesting a form of life that the artist related to Buddhist principles of objects in the world. In this new work the object is now attempting to communicate, not just to express life, marking an interesting step beyond the precious work.

Another interesting work is Liu Chuang’s 15# (2012), a small, featureless, white box of a room built within the gallery space. On the outside, facing the doorway into this room a digital projector is set up which casts an animation of an wobbly, expanding and contracting blue rectangle, overlapping the doorway and the interior wall. This piece plays with the forms of display of an image, in this case the projected image of a blue screen suggesting the projector is not actually projecting any image but in its default state. By projecting against the white cube, this piece treats this object as the medium on which an image can be formed, rather than as the idealised space of the White Cube to be forgotten to allow for concentration on an artwork.

Upstairs artist Zhang Liaoyuan has stacked up boxes of commercial copier paper of various brands and qualities in a saw-tooth arrangement against one wall. This piece, A4 and A4 and A4 (2012), deals with the nature of the potentialised image, embodied within the materials on which it will eventually reside. This, for all its simplicity, represents (for me) an intelligent approach to the subject matter of this show, working effectively on multiple levels, through meaning and form.

At the beginning I said the reference to Barthes was abrupt, by which I meant that this reference was posited but then not developed in the show itself. The curators call this “saluting Barthes” but I think it is not sufficient to leave your engagement at that point. While it’s a shame that the curators did not pursue the reference in a productive or clearly defined manner (which might have led to a deeper engagement with the artworks by themselves and the artists), overall this is a show with great potential, with a good range of works that take the basic premise (the presence of photography in art) in interesting directions.

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published 14 May, 2012 on ArtSlant.

“Kill”

Rubber and nails, 1996–1997

Kill represents a point in Sui Jianguo’s work where his work past from an early “expressionistic” stage through to more conceptual representations, reflecting a more ironic use of symbolic imagery that could be seen as developing in parallel to the emergence of cynical realism in China at the time.

The two, long rubber sheets of Kill hang off lengths of old wood, the whole structure propped up against the wall. The sheets are studded with thousands of small nails forming an intricate, abstract pattern over the rubber surface (these patterns are perhaps more obvious when viewed from the side where the flat heads lie). Overall the strips look somewhat like flayed animal skins, hanging up to dry. Their bristly surface also has a thick, carpet-like appearance, belying the sharpness of the nail’s tips.

At least four similar works using these strips of rubber and nails are recorded as being produced over the period of 1995–1997 (one further installation is recorded in 2001). The forms of each vary: there is the wall-hanging version seen here, and two versions with the wooden structure and rubber strips lying on the floor. The wooden elements are usually more or less revealed in conjunction with the strips, but at least one version dispenses with the wood entirely, being rolled up and presented standing on its end. In this version the loose end of the rubber peels away from the roll to clearly reveal the pattern accentuated by the varying heights of the tips of the nails.

Although usually entitled “Kill” (a literal translation of the Chinese title “殛”), it has been suggested these pieces should rather be named “Execution.”1 This would create a far more politically charged reading of the work – the massed nails perhaps representing hoards of interchangeable people, for example. But—as with much of Sui’s work—this is left unclear from the form of the work itself. Although Sui claims that “Current social contexts are clearly present in my work…” in reality these are left ambiguous at best.2

Later works were to temper the artist’s concerns with brute materiality to add socially and politically symbolic aspects, including the symbol of the “Mao” jacket in his Legacy Mantle series and the ongoing appearances of the red dinosaur (Made in China (Dinosaur) 1999, Dialogue 2004–2007, Windy City’s Dinosaur 2009).

But at this point in the artist’s career, Kill still retains a suggestion of the powerful and emotional outbursts seen in previous works by Sui, such as in his early Unborn Bust Portraits series from 1989 where the plaster shapes, suggestive of heads, are ravaged by deep cracks and fissures, barely held together by wound strips of gauze. With Kill, these outbursts in sculpture are now placed under some kind of control; the masses of nails punched through the resilient rubber surfaces suggesting a far more controlled and enduring action.

This controlling aspect already appears in the slightly earlier Earth Mantle (1992–1994) series by Sui. Here, large rocks from a riverbed are caged in tightly fitting steel nets, forming a surface suggestive of the “cracked ice” fretwork of Chinese window frames. The rocks are constrained but also defined by this additional structural work.

The wood, rubber and nail constructions of Kill have been described as “…an eloquent coda to Sui Jianguo’s early career.”3 They mark a change in his work from more expressionistic pieces through “the emergence of a more restrained, contemplative artistic voice and an emotional detachment….” The heavy materiality of Kill (and the artist’s other early works characterised by rawness and emotional expression) represent a more subjective response, which the later works replace with “a more ambitious and capacious critical analysis of contemporary experience…”4

Author: Edward Sanderson

1. Hill, Joe Martin, “Sui Jianguo: Conscientious Observer,” 艺术ISSUE No.8 (2010): p.20.
2. Wall text from the exhibition “Sui Jianguo,” Pace Beijing, 2012.
3. Hill, op. cit.
4. Hill, op. cit.

• Originally published in Liu Ding, Carol Yinghua Lu, Su Wei (eds.) (2012), Accidental Message: Art is Not a System, Not a World, Guangzhou: LingNan Art Publishing House. pp.92–97.

“Breathing”

Colour photography, 1996

These twinned photographs record two actions performed by Song Dong in Beijing during the winter of 1996. Alternately laying face down in Beijing’s Tian’anmen Square (the de facto locus of recent political history in China) and then on the frozen surface of Houhai Lake (one of the man-made lakes fringing the Western edge of the Forbidden City, to the North-West of Tian’anmen Square), in each case Song simply breathed for 40 minutes onto the surface in front of his face. In the sub-zero temperatures of those winter nights his warm, moist breath formed a crust of ice on the flagstones in the former location, but reportedly had little effect on the lake’s thick ice. By the morning all trace of these activities had disappeared leaving these photographs behind as their record.

In these actions the artist used his body and its attributes to effect a slight change in his surroundings, without having any long-term effect on them. This activity also called upon the physical nature of the surroundings to produce the effect and thereby keyed into the meanings of the surrounding through these acts. In this way the nature of the surroundings (their political/historical aspects) informed the actions without it being necessary to overtly call upon them – the immediate vicinity taking the simple act of breathing beyond itself and into a subtle reflection on the context.

This use of the body to make marks or gestures, with a focus on the ephemeral (and perhaps futile) aspect of those gestures, is a strong element in Song Dong’s work. The long-running Throwing a Stone (1994–present) sees the artist writing the time the artist finds a stone on its surface, then throwing it away, finding it again, writing the new time on it, throwing, and repeating this series of actions until he cannot find the stone anymore. Writing Time with Water (1995–present) transposes this gesture of recording the time and applies it to the various sites of the action, allowing it to disappear of its own accord. The water evaporates leaving no record of this activity nor of the information held in watery form for the short period it was visible.

Water also evaporates in the video A Pot of Boiling Water (1995), recording the artist passing along an alleyway carrying a kettle of boiling water, leaving a line of water in his wake that disappears in steam. Stamping the Water (1996) also leaves no trace, as the artist sits in a lake, throwing down a large wooden seal carved with the Chinese symbol for “water,” to make an impossible impression on the water’s surface.

Another important element that extends Song’s work with the body is his relationship with his family. In a way this is already present in the pieces mentioned already: Song’s use of water is attributed to his Father’s recommendation to practice calligraphy with water to save on ink. But in other pieces the presence of the family is more tangible. In the video Touching my Father (1997) Song’s father sits watching the artist’s caressing hands projected onto his body. The link to family members carries on in more recent work such as the encyclopaedic Waste Not (2005) taking as its material his Mother’s possessions, obsessively collected over the course of her life. Presented in the gallery spaces, this mass of objects is arranged by the type as if in a scientific taxonomy of the Mother’s life.

The mass of material in Waste Not becomes the visible trace of Song’s Mother through her urge to hoard as a way to stave off future lack. Breath, in its way marks the artist’s own attempts to “make a mark” on the world, knowing full well that these marks are temporary and destined to disappear – as are we all.

Author: Edward Sanderson

• Originally published in Liu Ding, Carol Yinghua Lu, Su Wei (eds.) (2012), Accidental Message: Art is Not a System, Not a World, Guangzhou: LingNan Art Publishing House. pp.88–91.

“The Mirror Stage”

Performance, 2012

What does our experience of art tell us about ourselves? We might experience the meaning and value of art through our understanding of the work of the ‘genius artist,’ or in a superlative experience that overwhelms us, an ecstatic appreciation, a moment of bliss. These understandings are essentially subjective but have become part of the mythology of Art’s work in the world, to make up in some way for its lack of practical use perhaps. As such the validity and value of these understandings cannot be taken at face value.

“Epiphany” is the word used to describe artist Simon Fujiwara’s experience in the mid-‘90s, standing in front of a large colour-field painting by artist Patrick Heron, then on display at the Tate St Ives (an outpost of the Tate Gallery in Britain). Although this event is apparently what set Fujiwara on the road to becoming an artist, we are also led to believe that, rather than a particularly spiritual epiphany, this case of revelation was a sexual one – Fujiwara’s realisation of his own homosexuality.

The Mirror Stage (2009–12) is Fujiwara’s performance and installation that dramatises this event. It has been said that this artist has “…made a career out of mixing his own life story with myths, wider histories and pilferage from the collective unconscious…”.1 So, as with the artist’s other elaborate presentations, this piece not only purposely blurs the line between truth and fiction but places into question the meaning and value of each, leaving the viewer uncertain as to the actual events and to the role of the objects and participants therein.

St Ives is a fishing town in the far South West of England, near where the artist was living with his Mother at that time, his Father being absent for much of this period in Japan. This small town is famous in British art history as the home of the “St Ives School” of artists, a group who decamped from London from the 1930’s onwards causing this out-of-the-way location to become a strong centre of modernist abstraction.

Having grown up very close by the remnants of this activity, Fujiwara was steeped in the mythology of its artistic heritage. He uses this mythology as a formative part of The Mirror Stage, giving free reign to understandings of the history of St Ives as well as his more recent history within his own theatrical setting. In the process this piece addresses multiple subjects and storylines: “the myths and clichés of artistic childhoods, through the sexual psychology of abstract painters, to the history of post-war British art.”2 On the stage, through all of this, the artist is present in a video in which he instructs an 11-year old boy in how to play the artist (himself) as he had his experience in front of the painting.

In this installation Fujiwara also intertwines the prosaic into the remarkable as a means of bringing them closer. Prosaic, through the juxtaposition of the various instances of the Tate’s licensing of the Heron painting’s pattern for use on sundry objects (ironing board covers and bed sheets), into the sociological and art-historical in his positioning of his own life-story in parallel with its retelling, and in parallel with the original art history in its various incarnations.

Fujiwara does not aim to accord each element of his story specific weight or meaning, but places them all as if into a zero gravity environment to allow their assumed values to become malleable material fodder for his own narratives and situations. In this way these presentations serve to create their own realities and reflect upon those around us.

Author: Edward Sanderson

1. Herbert, Martin, “Simon Fujiwara,” Art Review, March 2012, p.121.
2. Artist text.

• Originally published in Liu Ding, Carol Yinghua Lu, Su Wei (eds.) (2012), Accidental Message: Art is Not a System, Not a World, Guangzhou: LingNan Art Publishing House. pp.172–177.

“Un Tour d’Horizon”

Installation and Performance, 2011

“Un Tour d’Horizon” – a French idiom having the meaning of a quick reflection upon the various perspectives of a topic. This is the exclamation made by a viewer upon experiencing this installation/performance work by Belgian artist Kelly Schacht.1 And, to that end, this work literally provides itself with a number of viewers of the ‘installation,’ thereby creating its own demonstration of a number of ‘perspectives.’ However, distinct from ourselves as an independent ‘audience’ per se, these viewers are part and parcel of the piece having been engaged by the artist to remain looking at the ‘installation.’ The ‘installation’ (in this case) being a layered set of minimal white sheets attached to the wall in front of the viewers.

At first glance “Un Tour d’Horizon” is a straightforward presentation of the ‘work’ that the audience does in their engagement with a visual artwork. But such a simple reading is made problematic by the fact that one of the artist’s ‘viewers’ is blind, throwing immediate assumptions about the piece’s activity and meaning back in our faces. The inclusion of the blind ‘viewer’ forces us to re-assess the assumptions we made about the way a piece of art ‘works,’ the way that an installation is provided for contemplation, and this installation’s relationship with the other elements of the piece (the hired audience) which contemplate it. All these stages in the presentation of the artwork by Schacht point out the formalised and institutionalised ways in which we engage with art, particularly visual art. By putting these processes on view, in front of us, as part of the artwork, we are made aware of our own position as a ‘second-level’ audience, in front of the artwork’s own artwork-audience.

The blind ‘viewer’ in this piece forces us to appreciate an always present but overlooked(!) understanding and engagement with art in general. For instance, it’s difficult for me to write about art without making the assumption that the audience are sighted. But this piece makes this patently questionable, indeed this is an assumption that dictates much of what I understand about the experience of art, part of the mythology of art which usually goes unthought.

Kelly Schacht’s work often confronts us with the mechanics of its production and the creation of the myths that art naturally assumes, and we essentially buy into in our appreciation of the artwork. By foregrounding the construction of her pieces, in this case by leaving the ‘installation’ as these ultra-simple unmarked white sheets, Schacht attempts to bring the props and stagecraft of the artwork into view. The tripods, supports, lighting, and in this case the audience all given equal importance as part of the artwork.

Cinematography is mentioned in relation to Schacht’s work,2 and the tropes of the cinema and the theatre all play a part. The performative aspects of the elements of the work are central: the installation does not represent so much as perform itself in a mise en scène. This is equally true of the performers: they play the audience within the piece. In this way, our understanding of the elements is held between their meaning through that which they might be read to represent, and their meaning as themselves being themselves – as elements of an artwork.

This piece, for which Schacht won the “Best Young Belgian Painter Award” in 2011, reveals the unthought mechanisms at play in our experience of art. As the artist says: “I wanted to reflect on the way the art world always seems to approach a theme in the same manner. I wanted to question whether we still had anything meaningful to tell if we continued to do that.”3

Author: Edward Sanderson

1. Clappaert, Sabine, “Young Belgian Painters Award: The young lions of art,” Flanders Today, July 20, 2011, http://www.flanderstoday.eu/content/young-belgian-painters-award. Accessed 13 March, 2012.
2. Benedetti, Lorenzo, “Kelly Schacht: One Voice Makes Two Perspectives,” De Vleeshal, http://vleeshal.nl/en/tentoonstellingen/kelly-schacht-one-voice-makes-two-perspectives. Accessed 13 March, 2012.
3. Clappaert, op. cit.

• Originally published in Liu Ding, Carol Yinghua Lu, Su Wei (eds.) (2012), Accidental Message: Art is Not a System, Not a World, Guangzhou: LingNan Art Publishing House. pp.232–237.

“Adhãn”

Installation, 2009

The elaborate installations of artist Haroon Mirza analyze the formation of sound and noise as a cultural and social mechanism as much as a mechanical one. The various parts of the piece Adhãn build into a work that touches on the way music and noise produce and communicate meaning in context with other objects. The cultural results of these productions of meaning hold particular significance for the artist, especially (as in this case) the role they play in religious and secular society.

Created following a visit to Pakistan in 2007–8, Adhãn reflects the artist’s research into the “uneasy role music plays in the Islamic faith”,1 the title referring to the call to prayer performed by the Muezzin, an official in a mosque. The installation is made up of seemingly disparate objects with their workings and formative elements insistently exposed, as is common in Mirza’s work. Various old items of furniture support or become part of the process of the piece, including a long, low cupboard with integral lamp at one end. Next to the cupboard sits a radio tuned to static, whose aerial pokes up into the canopy of the lamp. The lamp flickers in tandem with music coming from a small TV set at the other end of the cupboard, causing the radio’s interference to modulate in sync with these pulses. The TV is broadcasting an acoustic session by musician Cat Stevens from 1971, who famously converted to Islam some years after the recording, changing his name to Yusuf Islam in the process, so creating a direct link to the recent history of the Islamic faith within the piece.

On the other side of the installation a small projector sits on the floor casting a close-up video of the strings of a cello onto the side of an overturned speaker box. The cello player performs short snatches of notes that themselves never seem to cohere into music as such, although in combination with the simple tune emanating from the TV, it’s almost possible to link them together as music. The final element is a chair with a glass cube embedded in its seat. Inside the clear cube, a milky fluid bubbles and steams, looking somewhat like an arcane alchemical symbol or mechanism embedded in this prosaic furniture.

Another installation by Mirza, Taka Tak (2008), can be seen as something of a companion piece to Adhãn, produced around the same time and continuing to address the place of music in the Islamic faith. Taka Tak is the onomatopoeic word used to describe the sound made by the Pakistani chefs mincing goat offal for the street dish of the same name. One of these chefs is shown working away in a video as part of the piece producing the distinctive rhythm. Next to this, on a turntable, spins a wooden figure of a Sufi, a Muslim ascetic, with a radio sharing space on the disc. Between the turntable and the video sit two small, inlaid Qur’an stands converted to objects of sound and light through the addition of trails of speakers and LED lights.

The major thread running through the artist’s work can be seen to be putting audible production on an equal footing with the visual senses, rebalancing the appreciation of objects and installations in this direction. At the same time both the auditory and visual senses are treated to a similar level of disruption in his installations, in an attempt to put into question the structures on which art and society subsist.

The overall effect of Mirza’s work is somewhat arcane, with their convoluted connections between the elements and their use of sound as a manifestation of things in the world. All the objects, though many and various and not always obviously connected intellectually, work in synergy through the physical processes between them and through association by proximity; the artworks build into small, self-contained environments hinting at a deep complexity of meaning.

Author: Edward Sanderson

1. Bonacina, Andrew, “Haroon Mirza: Music, tradition and Islam; organized noise, film and instability,” Frieze Issue 133, September 2010.

• Originally published in Liu Ding, Carol Yinghua Lu, Su Wei (eds.) (2012), Accidental Message: Art is Not a System, Not a World, Guangzhou: LingNan Art Publishing House. pp.222–227.

Facing East: Chen Hangfeng, Gao Weigang, Ji Wenyu & Zhu Weibing, Pu Jie, Ren Bo, Wu Daxin, Wu Junyong, You Si, Zhang Bojun.

Ausin Tung Gallery, Melbourne, Australia

24 April – 2 June, 2012

Facing East presents the broad range of contemporary art from Chinese artists, covering the continuing presence of China’s deep traditions, the ambiguity of the connections between recent history and daily life, and the place of Chinese society on a precarious balancing point between the influx and outflow of social and culture tides.

To “face East” is essentially an act of looking from “here” to an “other” culture, with both sides often conveniently proscribed as monolithic. The assumptions based on this starting point are such common occurrences that we perhaps don’t give them a second thought. Over the years the theories of Post colonialism have developed the idea of the periphery, away from the hegemonic “West,” but equally away from an assumption of a coherent “East.”

China is but one part of this “East” and within China there are many developments, fast and slow, which afford a myriad of images and perspectives. Like any society, China is in continual development, and—if we are paying attention—continually subverts our assumptions about it.

In Facing East we see works by recent generations of artists, living out their own internalised and internationalised histories and cultures in vivid and vibrant ways, taking on or discarding influences as openly as they reflect or reject their own.

The deft practice of artist Ren Bo flies under the radar of our assumptions. Her two videos work with colour in ways that reflect its part in defining form. In Flowers, the camera pans over a border in full bloom, popping with intensity in mesmeric movement as if viewed from the window of a moving vehicle. Dream of Spring sets up blurred swathes of colour that coalesce to reveal paint smeared across the artist’s body and pressed into service by the application of a sheet of glass.

In the documentation of the performance piece Great Wall Project, Wu Daxin records the fleeting moment of his filigree dome hanging with ice panels in the early morning environment of the Great Wall. These domes, with their suggestion of Byzantine shapes, seem to reflect the continual movement of cultures across the expanse of China.

The abstract flows and patterns in You Si’s formidable ink scrolls create a universe of swirling forms. Like leaves blowing in the wind, the patterns take over the space, in an intensely abstract maelstrom of forms.

If You Si’s massed shapes swarm in organic whirling patterns, Zhang Bojun’s masses take on more structured form. Zhang’s complex works are made up of thousands of individuals photographed at one of Beijing’s notoriously overcrowded railway termini. Seen en masse, these swathes of people create orderly patterns of light and dark, reflecting an underlying (or perhaps overlaying) structure, maintaining an order in the chaos.

Rather than overwhelmed in a mass of humanity, Ji Wenyu and Zhu Weibing’s sole observer sits on a stone at the base of the epic outflow from a hydroelectric power station. The natural landscape as presented for contemplation, as represented in Chinese scroll paintings, is now difficult to locate in the highly instrumentalized landscapes throughout the world. The observer must now find their place within a man-made environment. Wonder and the sublime still exist, but must be tempered with an understanding of man’s own responsibility as part of these surroundings.

This awareness of the layering of experience plays a vital part in Pu Jie’s work. The paintings show the hard-edged strokes of a stylized woman’s head overlain with another face that emerges from the monochromatic background. The former seems to represent the world through a simplifying lens, akin to the tropes of advertising or ideology, whereas the background presents something of a less simplistic image from history, where the role of the people represented, their features and expressions are left ambiguous.

The work of Gao Weigang also thrives on its play with reality, mimicking and mocking the forms of objects and their meanings. Nothing can go wrong, a painting of a tiger pelt with a bell attached to its tail, seems to suggest that no matter where this tiger was, it would always be exposed by its accouterment. Looking back at a previous work by Gao, Intuition (2010), which simply presented an original, traditional scroll painting of a realistic tiger skin, one might say this new piece refers to realistic painting itself as a eternal trap for the subject.

This ambiguous nature of symbols is played to the full in Wu Junyong’s works. The detailed worlds that the depicted figures and events inhabit refuse to settle on clear meanings, and the ridiculous and threatening nature of the events casts a pall over the futile activities therein. The reasons behind the complexity of the artist’s lush symbol-world are left vehemently open to interpretation.

Behind every symbol lies a meaning, but the dissolution of the symbol allows for transference of meaning from its intended to a new position where subversion can take place. Chen Hangfeng’s work lifts logos to relocate them in new arrangements, crossing the boundary from the relation of symbol-to-brand, to a terrain in which the symbol dissolves to reveal a new meaning. The Last Supper records chickens pecking away at KFC’s Colonel Sanders’ logo, drawn out using seed. The chickens that eat their fill of the Colonel will ultimately be sacrificed for food, making for an ironic circle of life.

Author: Edward Sanderson

• Wall text for the show Facing East, at Ausin Tung Gallery, Melbourne, Australia.

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

24 March – 29 April, 2012

Two week ago I reviewed Wang Du’s aircraft carrier, sitting in Tang Contemporary’s main spaces, and this week I am returning the same gallery but moving my attention to the group show running alongside, this being the second appearance of the Irrelevant Commission in Beijing.

I was lucky to catch the first appearance of Irrelevant Commission, in their self-organised show ‘We Are Irrelevant Commission’ (curated by Gu Jing) at the Miao Pu Art District, but I remember at the time being troubled by the meaning of this group. Although they are forthright in their self-presentation as a group, I wondered if their chosen name was perhaps an indication of the value (or lack of value) they place on the idea of a group. Their major claim to collectivity was that they all graduated from the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou within a year or two of each other (from 2006–2008). In terms of their work, there was apparently little to connect them, neither in terms of style, content, or theory. So this could perhaps be classed as a institutional grouping, but beyond that this first group show held no particular stylistic cohesion, no clearly expressed curatorial framework, and—although individually there were some nice pieces—there was not enough to really get to grips with or to pull together for a review (speaking for myself).

The most interesting feature of their work in this show, and the only other thing that might have proven them as a group, was some rather mischievous performances, which they called ‘walking projects.’ These included the group attending an opening with ping pong balls stuck in their mouths, intervening in the proceedings and preventing them from communicating in anything other than grunts; and another where they boxed themselves in with metal crash barriers, proceeding to tour the 798 Art District by picking them up and carrying them with them, as if protecting themselves from the environment around them. They describe this as a way to make “possibilities of excess sensitization of public behavior [sic]” which I take to mean some kind of Brechtian intervention in the everyday environment. But in the group show these were downplayed to a single small monitor in one corner.

So how have things changed with the current show at Tang Contemporary? Several structural changes are evident. Most obviously, the venue represents a major step up for them with the context adding consequence to the situation. In real terms this show is far more organised in its presentation, as a series of connected projects. Specifically the artists have extended their questioning of daily life that was seen in the performances, into a series of collaborations with their parents.

The upstairs space is devoted to the more obvious manifestation of this, with Nothing to do with Door, in which the artists replaced a door in their family homes with one that they made in collaboration with their parents. The doors are arrayed in the space, showing off the parents’ and artists’ various skills in woodwork, carving, patchwork, the artistic reuse of materials, and the repurposing of the structure of the door itself. Videos and photography document interviews with the family members and give the process a serious and organised air.

Downstairs, in Something to do with Family, each artist has created a new artwork that directly relates to their parent’s daily work, again in collaboration with them. The pieces range from Gao Fei’s serpentine, double-action wood plane, Guo Lijun’s transplanted garden, Niu Ke’s loom from which Li Liangyong’s rainbow of threads flies out. Ye Nan takes various household pots and kettles, and fits them with bulbs to create a fantastic set of hanging lights; while Chen Zhiyuan worked with his bricklayer father to create a replica of a ancient Chinese cooking vessel called a ding (鼎).

As with the first group show, these works in themselves are disparate, but the theme of working with the family is now consistently present. But returning to my questions about the group, what does this mean for them as a group? And are my issues relevant? Paraphrasing from a document they sent to me outlining this show at Tang, they explain that the two projects presented put them directly under the gaze of their parents and their understanding and appreciation (or lack thereof) of what an artist actually does. It was from this source that the title of the show “Why do we do useless things?” comes – a possibly eternal refrain of incomprehension from any artist’s parents. This show represents their attempts to come to terms with this lack of understanding and advocate intra-family communication.

As such, this is not a bad idea and starting point, touching on artwork that partakes of relational aesthetics. And, as with the first show, there are some nice pieces, with the individual works downstairs seeming much stronger than those seen before, perhaps because of the coherent theme being something the artists can really react effectively to. But, on the negative side, it is also these themes that hold the show back somewhat, the final outcomes (especially the doors) seeming a bit pedestrian in their aspirations to community services.

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published 16 April, 2012 on ArtSlant.

When asked about her working environment, one worker said she would like to feel the sun on her skin for a while – a simple but poetic request, fulfilled by moving her workstation outside the factory for a short period. Another worker took the opportunity to make a fluid sculpture out of the big barrel of grease he was using, giving it the title: “A piece of shit.” These little gestures came about as part of Italian artist Alessandro Rolandi’s Social Sensibility R&D Program, instituted in the factory of Bernard Controls S.A. on the outskirts of Beijing.

Bernard Controls is a French family-owned company producing specialist servo engines for operating valves in water pipes found in nuclear power stations, but also used in places like the Beijing Opera House and the Olympic Swimming Pool (AKA the “Water Cube”) in Beijing.

For a factory to embrace such a distraction from the serious business of production is down to the initiative of the boss, Guillaume Bernard, an engineer with a particular interest in corporate social responsibility. But while Bernard Controls already had a steering committee working to improve management personnel relationships using activities such as exhibition visits and music concerts, M. Bernard was looking beyond this. “He’s one step ahead,” Rolandi says. “He’s an engineer, not a psychologist, sociologist, or a philosopher. We talked a lot about this, and he seems genuinely open to more socially aware activities, which I related to relational practice within the art world.”

Rolandi’s background is in the theatre, which he explains is “very social, but you wonder how you can really go into something real?” In the case of Bernard Controls, he saw the chemistry as being “so random, it provided me with a little door.” The invitation to set up his R&D program became an opportunity to insert a little mischief into the regimented life of the factory.

This particular factory is unlike the cliché of a Chinese factory: you won’t find thousands of workers performing mundane and repetitive tasks over long conveyor belts in an airless hanger. This factory is relatively small, with about 100 staff, of whom only 20–30 actually work on assembling the product. The work areas are also relatively discrete in terms of their interior design. Rolandi says it’s not an environment where you feel you have no way out, where everything is under surveillance. But at the same time “No matter how you look at it, it’s still a factory.”

To begin with he underwent the regular worker’s training, so he could understand the product from a technical as well as an economic point of view. Rolandi found that the practical work that the workers have to do, the physical labour of assembling these objects, led him to fully appreciate that this was a sort of sensibility that has its own value: “It’s not particularly creative work, but I’ve tried myself putting the pieces together for a couple of hours, and without the experience these workers have got, you get quite nervous!”

Also included in his standard training were the ‘5Ss,’ an overbearing work management system from Japan, which is all about efficiency, cleanliness and organisation; and the ‘4Rs’ of security. Within these strictures Rolandi initially despaired: “I was sitting alone in this little space they gave me (which doubled as a kitchen) and just thought to myself: ‘What am I doing here?’ Creativity often deals with messiness, but the rules here were completely set against this. I felt like I was proposing something where I was dead before I’d even started!”

To address this difficulty, and to find his point of entry, he began by approaching the workers with small requests connected to his own knowledge of relational artwork. After talking with them, he showed them photos and videos to get them used to the idea of creating themselves. However, in the process of breaking the ice Rolandi committed his first cultural faux pas. He had taken photos of the workers around the factory and printed them out as little gifts. These black and white photos proved to be not so inspired, as he was politely informed that black and white photos were for dead people. On the plus side, he felt it was significant that the workers felt comfortable enough to give him this information, representing a bridge across the gap between them.

Indeed throughout the project Rolandi has been impressed by the time and courtesy he has been afforded. He trusts this was due to politeness or respect, but he was also very much aware of his privileged position in relation to the workers. At the beginning M. Bernard effectively gave him too much authority, so he took baby steps to gain the trust of the people he was working with. He started by provided the workers with notebooks to records their ideas, then gave them cameras to take photos around the workplace, and then asked them to make drawings and give him an idea of how they would like to develop those drawings in real life.

He found that although their idea of art usually began with painting and sculpture, when they were offered what Rolandi characterised as “the new territory” of these small tasks, they were very creative in their proposals: “One drew a beautiful bird, for instance, but then they said they wanted this beautiful bird to be on a restaurant façade with neon writing.” This additional information intrigued Rolandi, as he saw ways that it connected with contemporary art practice.

A later project involved asking the workers to create small performances. Rolandi was allowed to give a number of workers a 30 minutes break to think up something to do in their environment: “as a gesture, as a thought; I just called it (in Mandarin) ‘suibian’ ‘whatever you want’ (without mentioning too much the word ‘art.’)”

The actions mentioned at the beginning of this article were amongst the results, from which Rolandi felt there was a kind of daring involved, more than just politeness: “I had the feeling they were really taking the chance to use this little bubble that was opening up.”

For eight months now Rolandi has been visiting the factory once or twice a week. This initial period has represented for him the negotiation between himself and his ideas, and the bosses, workers and environment of the factory – for Rolandi the immaterial but most interesting part of the whole process.

To get approval to make the project more sustainable and efficient, Rolandi was asked to make a business presentation to the committee, something which—as an artist—he was somewhat unused to. He brought along images of pieces by various artists, including Francis Alÿs pushing the ice cube through Mexico City (Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing) 1997), Rirkrit Tiravanija’s meals, Joseph Beuys Oak Tree project (7000 Oaks – City Forestation instead of City Administration 1982) and the Chinese artist Song Dong’s installation of his mother’s possessions (Waste Not 2005). The Alÿs piece worked very well; M. Bernard was able to point to it, and suggest: “Look what happens: you’re pushing something for nothing, but eventually this big ice cube becomes a little ball and you can play with it!” This touch of humour proved to be the opening point for Rolandi, after which the committee were on board.

In the future Rolandi understands that the project may well be extended to the company’s other locations in France, Korea, Japan or South America. But for the moment he is planning on becoming a little more discreet in his own involvement, bringing other people in with different approaches. In the last few weeks another Italian artist, Andrea Nacciarriti, has been working in the factory getting the workers to collect objects related to their work and life that are then sealed in the same small boxes used for their product. These are then distributed randomly around another Beijing suburb. Next up is Ma Yongfeng of the forget art collective (whose practice I wrote about last year on GeoSlant), who will investigate the use of graffiti as an subversive information carrier within the factory, and then Japanese performance artist Megumi Shimizu will be invited to create her own work there.

From the outset Rolandi has discussed with M. Bernard all they are doing, and for both of them important questions are on the one hand how radicality enters the artworld? And on the other, what is the value of radicality in the workspace? This, for Rolandi, is the value of social practices, but he hopes to address these questions without the idealism of the ‘60s or as simply an uncritical celebration of those activities. For all that, he is hopeful that they can still open things up without tearing the situations apart, which would mean a swift end to the project. In the positive sense, this opening up would be a situation into which other people can step. But as he says: “This shouldn’t be safe! Otherwise where is the communication?”

[Based on an interview with Alessandro Rolandi, 23 February 2012]

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published 16 April, 2012 on ArtSlant.