Category: Reviews

ArtSlant: Beyond Shopping Poetic

Developing Phantom group show, curated by Dang Dan (WAZA, Hexie Baroque, Zheng Yunhan, Jiang Zhi)

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.

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ArtSlant: Lady Liberty and a Dragon

Happy New Year: Wang Qingsong solo show

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.

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ArtSlant: Black-out Viewing at Center

The Power of Doubt, curated by Hou Hanru

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.

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ArtSlant: In Deep Water

Xi Sha—South China Sea Project No.1: Xu Qu solo show

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.

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