For me, the classic, single-viewpoint photograph is a seduction. It threatens to convince us that it is imparting a “truth” about the world by its seemingly straightforward presentation of a view. Art’s use (and more importantly, abuse) of the medium and its formats has been instrumental in disabusing us of the static image’s privileged status as a purveyor of truth. So these days no one should be under any illusion about these fixed perspective, mono-directional images—neither for their depiction of reality nor for the value of their meanings.

Siemens Home Appliance Art Space, Taoci 2nd Street, 798 Art District, 100015 Beijing, China

23 July – 7 August, 2011

In 2010, on a side street behind the main drag of 798, the German appliance company Siemens opened a small art space as part of their mission to “finance young artists’ projects and provide community service around China.” As part of this worthy cause, this month the gallery is hosting Overstep, a show of two young Chinese artists Shen Yi Elsie and Lei Benben, curated by Pi Li (Director of Boers-Li Gallery).

Over the past few years both Shen Yi Elsie and Lei Benben have moved from photographic works to a more expansive approach to media – in Lei’s case into video and for Shen a practice that has developed through video into public interventions. For Pi Li, their work “oversteps” discredited boundaries of objectivity, fragmenting narrative into disjointed personal histories, creating a situation he characterises as “the inversion of time and space, [where] reality starts to drift into illusion and no longer firmly detains us.”

The video China Utopia (2009) by Lei Benben, is constructed in three short “chapters” each presenting scenes in which preoccupied figures are placed in sensuous environments. In the first chapter a riverbank scene bisected by a thin tree is interrupted by a man gazing out with us at the view. Stepping forward he removes his tie and drops it to the ground, but any thought that this might be a prelude to a full disrobing and leap into the water is denied as he sits to contemplate the scene. Following this, a two-part chapter begins with a view down another river into which a boat is paddled. On the boat four figures stand becoming dark shapes extending up from the boat, against the colourful, mountainous surroundings. The figures look around them, while the boat comes to rest in the middle of the river. The scene then changes to three figures in army fatigues in a cleared patch of field. They seem uncertain and walk in different directions, never coming into contact with each other. In the third and final chapter, a young urbanite wanders a bucolic wood, the ground covered with flowering plants. Sitting down against a tree he seems to doze, whereupon we are taken to a boldly coloured garden in blurred focus where on a traditional pavilion a duo of characters in Chinese opera dress languidly dance.

China Utopia, while giving over a clear feeling of contemplation, perhaps suffers from the lack of direction that may be representative of this “overstepping.” In many ways the purposelessness of the characters reminds me of Yang Fudong’s work, but (as with Yang Fudong) this can become tiresome without an obvious resolution or point to the activity. Taking a look at Lei’s other works (not on show), it is clear she has an eye for the purposeful/purposeless movements of figures within landscape – for example in the short video Tuanjiehu Park from 2009, where she surreptitiously films people performing their personal exercise routines in the titular Beijing park, a theme which recurs in Fresh Air (2010) but with far more emphasis on non-diegetic sounds creating an idealised backing to the gestures.

In the other rooms, Shen Yi Elsie presents works produced over the past few years that move beyond her earlier photographic tableaux, bringing in a social awareness, which greatly energises the pieces for me. The video work The Neon God (2008) takes her still shots of teenage migrant labourers performing menial work, and adds light trails which animate the figures as if revealing their hidden powers through photography. The video takes the photographs a step beyond static shots, animating the scenes through fades and tracking shots, however I am not sure that this additional manipulation adds much more than spectacle to the photos. It may be the case that the narrativity of the photographs themselves works well enough in its own right.

That said, this video reveals the artist’s urge to push her photography ever further, something that takes a leap in the public interactions of the Breath series. Her initial foray was in 2010 when she inserted little strips of pink paper, with the Chinese characters for “Breathe” on them, into closed walnuts shells. These were then mixed with unadulterated nuts on a market stall that the artist manned. These acted like messages in a bottle, sending the artist’s little reminders of life out into the world for the public to accidentally come across, beyond the control of the artist.

Shen has taken this method further with her works in other settings. Working in a dry cleaning establishment she inserted little folded paper objects—which she describes as “a common form of a folded letter or delivering a message in old times”—into the cleaned clothes. On the paper is written “please breath” ready for the client to discover. Other works in this series involve the artist creating a set of small ink stamps, whose impression she applies inside of newspapers to match the existing fonts, but highlighted in red ink. She then takes on the role of delivering these adjusted papers, the additions again reminding people to breathe. A fourth piece sees the artist handwriting signs offering to teach people to breathe if they phone the number provided. These signs are pasted on walls amongst other homemade adverts, inviting strangers to contact her for this unusual service.

Each piece is presented as a vertical series of photos accompanied by examples of the artefact involved – a very important and effective way of presenting the intervention without resorting to cliché. However, one point of concern for me in these pieces, is the relationship that the artist sets up with the labourers and the roles she takes on – which risks becoming patronising. The relationship between these two sections of society is an issue it is clear she is concerned with, but the focus of the pieces seems to be more on the artist performing the role interacting with the customers, which somehow precludes the body of the labourer themselves.

That criticism aside, I loved the way these actions step beyond themselves and reach out to an audience that to a large extent cannot be predetermined to bias the effect. Both Breath and The Neon God become a way for the artist to re-imagine the relationship of communication between the worker and their clients.

Pi Li, in his text for the show, describes “Overstep” as, for example, a move from “closed” to “open” narration: “from uniform to paradoxical.” This small show demonstrates the positive and negative consequences of such a move, and is a welcome demonstration of how a critical curatorial structure can productively work with it’s chosen set of works to leave room for questions and create something that takes them beyond themselves for the audience.

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published 1 August, 2011 on ArtSlant.

…What exactly are we looking for when we roam as tourists around museums?…

A few game tourists glanced vainly in guidebooks or hopefully at wall labels, as if learning that one or another of these sculptures came from Papua New Guinea or Hawaii or the Archipelago of Santa Cruz, or that a work was three centuries old or maybe four might help them see what was, plain as day, just before them.…

“…plain as day…”? Sorry, surely this is the problem, it’s never plain as day. Visitors need some context to understand the works, or maybe that’s what they should expect from a museum. That’s the “job” of the museum: to provide a place to see works in some kind of context. Kimmelman seems to be suggesting that the visitor should just take what’s “just before them” at face value, which I suppose they could, but it seems that is not providing enough to hold the tourists interest, hence creating the premiss for Kimmelman’s article.

Visiting museums has always been about self-improvement.…

<sighs> I think it would be more accurate to say museums have always been about someone’s idea of improving other people. The Louvre (the subject of this article) being a case in point. When it was opened up to the masses after the French revolution, the displays were adjusted from being the private collection of the king, to being specifically designed to demonstrate and inculcate an idea of France’s place in the world in “the people.”

Cameras replaced sketching by the last century; convenience trumped engagement, the viewfinder afforded emotional distance and many people no longer felt the same urgency to look.…

…the canon of art that provided guideposts to tell people where to go and what to look at was gradually dismantled. A core of shared values yielded to an equality among visual materials. This was good and necessary, up to a point. Millions of images came to compete for our attention. Liberated by a proliferation, Western culture was also set adrift in an ocean of passing stimulation, with no anchors to secure it.

This wistful nostalgia for an overarching ideology to guide our thinking, is a bit sickly. The “liberation” he speaks of will inevitably lead to new ideologies, perhaps ones better suited to the material and the proliferation, in the same way that it will lead to new ways of seeing and presenting art – new museums even. The tourists’ inattention in the Louvre is symptomatic of this change in viewing patterns and its sensible for the museum to try and identify how to address these new patterns.

Slow looking, like slow cooking, may yet become the new radical chic.

That, I think, is wishful thinking. Just because this is how it was in the past, and what museums have been created to cater for, does not mean it will be so in the future, or that museums will be suited to our viewing habits in the future. Our viewing habits adapt, and institutions will be created to serve those habits. Museums which work by “slow-viewing” will still have a place, and will go in and out of vogue as times and tastes change, the definition of “slow-viewing” will also change to meet these new requirements.

Kimmelman, Michael (2009), At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay to Focus, NYTimes.com, 3 August 2009.

Laoban Soundsystem 1.0 Holiday Mixing Event at CPU:798

Friday, December 12, 8 PM – 12 Midnight, Free and Open to the Public

We invite all to come out to the launch of version 1.0 of the Laoban Soundsystem for a special Holiday Mixing Event at CPU:798. This is a new type of media event where all are welcome to join, bring media, laptops, video players, cameras, and other recording devices. The goal is to mix media, explore what artists, DJs, musicians, designers, and architects are working on RIGHT NOW — successes, failures, and rough edges are welcome at Laoban events! The ultimate plan is for consumers to be producers by both mixing media, and by tagging any recordings they have with “laoban” when posting onto twitter.com, flickr.com, or other places.

His works stem from an investigation of his home town of Jixi, a mining town in NE China. Jixi Research Project, ongoing since 2004, is a documentary-like archive of visual and spoken records of the lives of the people living in this town dominated by mining and the consequences of this industry on their lives and landscape. This piece is presented as a 4-channel projection with interactivity, emphasising the audiences participation in the story telling process.

For Sunflower Project, Zheng commissioned his family and friends to plant a large field of sunflowers in the hills surrounding the town of Jixi. The resulting artwork is an ultra-high resolution composite photograph of this field. On the one side in the distance is Jixi and on the other a memorial marking a mass grave of locals killed by the Japanese Army during the occupation of China during the Second World War. The sunflowers act as physical link between the living and the dead, a route of remembrance, reflecting during their short lives the remains of life and death all around them.

The show is called “Frivolous” and is a set of installation by our artist Zu Jing. Zu Jing hails from Beijing and although she’s been working for a few years now on the series which we are presenting, this is the first showing of them in a gallery. She’s a very talented artist for whom we have high hopes! I’ve written a short introduction to the show on the website and will do a longer text over the next week.

So do join us next Saturday!

Dust is Dust installation (2008) by Wang Yuyang

I just posted some pictures of the gallery to flickr. Unfortunately, it’s a very small space and the installation uses reduced lighting, and these two factors show up the shortcomings of my camera, but the pictures give a flavour of what we have here.

I was thinking about the show the other day, and why I like it so much. I usually profess to prefer more socially committed work, or work which has some sort interaction for the viewer or direct effect, and this would appear not to have such if you looked at it superficially. However, through talking to the artist (via interpreter, obviously) and thinking about his work’s methods, I’ve come to appreciate the meaning and significance of these works more and more, and how these actually have as much effect in their way as the kind of work I usually go for.

The pursuit of truth is a very strong and emotive subject, and one which is probably common to all of us in some shape or form. Closely allied with truth would be understanding, one step towards truth. The means we take in the pursuit of truth and understanding vary massively – this show and some of the artist’s other pieces investigate the place science and technology take in the formation of ‘truths’ through the facilitation of understanding. Their relationship is scrutinised by the artist and in the pieces is opened up to analysis in itself by the viewer, potentially clarifying the constructions in play.

A corollary of this activity would be that the artist’s very actions are just adding a further layer of complexity to the process. Analysis could go on forever, but at some point we stop, take stock and report on what it is that we have found. Written into that report is the awareness that this is very much a provisional state. This is an artificial, man-made point and one which is as much a construction as any in the subject matter.

Artificial Moon (2007) by Wang Yuyang

The hands of Abbas Kiarostami

The Iranian film-maker, Abbas Kiarostami, signing posters at his show at the Beijing Art Museum of Imperial City, which closes on the 28 February 2008.

Got to a meeting early today, so spent the time before it started taking some shots round Cambridge (it was a nice sunny day). It was one of those nice experiences, in that when I took a look at the pics when I got home I noticed many aspects to them that I hadn’t seen when I was taking the photos. I really liked the way Garage 1, Garage 2 and Garage 4 came out after being cropped drastically – very abstracted, the colours came through really well. Garage 3 was a bit of an anomaly, but I left it in regardless.

Also the rather unreal building in the background of this shot. And this shot is just a beautiful take on a fairly common subject (at least it is in Cambridge) – the fan of punts really makes the composition. Oh, and this one with the beautiful blue of the window – I like the fact that it’s off in one corner, not the main subject, but adds so much to the overall feeling of the pic. That’s what I think, anyway.