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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Essay on Zheng Yunhan – short version

As promised in my previous post about artist Zheng Yunhan, I have edited down the essay to a more manageable size. This version obviously is much more condensed and shifts the focus a bit. From the intro:

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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Essay on artist Zheng Yunhan

I am please to say I was able to complete my essay on the artist Zheng Yunhan, whom we represent, ending up with an extended piece which goes through each of his works, tries to put them into context and provide some sort of critical commentary on them. My piece was informed by the work I’ve done with Yunhan over the past few years and the conversations I’ve had with him over that time. I’m very sad that we were never able to put on a show of his work in our old space, but there will always be other opportunities, particularly for the most recent project To Walk.

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.

Notes on the artist Zheng Yunhan

Zheng’s work deals with the relationship between the Chinese people and their landscapes, it’s idealised nature as a site for forming, as man-perfected/adjusted material, a symbolic residue or site of potential for human activity.

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.