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.

As an artist is it possible to hold your subjects apart from their ideology, to present their close-at-hand concerns, to present the people around you and their lives as they take place outside of larger systems? Chinese artist Zheng Yunhan works with subjects embedded in the cult of ideology, working to avoid being caught up by it in his presentations.

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The dilemma I have in launching this piece of writing into the public is that I am coming with an inherent bias towards Yunhan’s work – I am his dealer after all, so perhaps you need to take that into account when you read it. However, I believe this piece is not trying to boost his works without good cause, I really believe that if there wasn’t something interesting about Yunhan’s work, something with which I could grapple in words, to try to understand (and which I thought was worthwhile trying to understand), then I don’t think I would bother putting the effort into writing 5000 words about him. Of course, you could just say “well, it’s my job to promote my artists,” but I hope that my genuine interest and enthusiasm for his work (and, yes, the issues I have with it) come through in this piece.

Right now, the text is being hosted by Li Zhenhua’s research platform Laboratory Art Beijing and I’d like to thank them for supporting of my work in this way. I’m also in the process of editing the piece down into a more pithy 1,500 words which I’ll post to this blog in due course.

Link to text.

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.