artdaily.com, September 7, 2005
The Vancouver Art Gallery Presents Wang Du: Parade

[image] Wang Du,.Défilé, 2000. View of the installation, Wang Du Parade #1, La Criée, Rennes (2004). polyester resin and acrylic paint. Individual sculpture height variable 100-180 cm; Pedestal 200 x 300 x 1200 cm. Collection FNAC (Fond National d’Art Contemporain). Courtesy Galerie Laurent Godin, Paris. Photo: Wang Du Studio.

VANCOUVER, BC.-The Vancouver Art Gallery is the first venue outside Europe for the exhibition, Wang Du: Parade, part of its summer series. This showcase of sculptural works by Wang Du will be the first presentation in Canada and the first outside of Europe. Wang Du is first and foremost a sculptor; he uses traditional sculpting and casting techniques to produce elaborate three-dimensional figures and forms. However, his subject matter is anything but conventional.

Wang Du was born in China in 1950 and as an art student he participated in a number of prodemocracy protests. In 1989 he was arrested and jailed. After his release he immigrated to Paris in June 1990 where he has lived and worked since. His primary subject of the past fifteen years has been the popular media and the images they produce (primarily magazines and newspapers, but also television and the Internet) and especially focusing on Chinese media and images. In each work he reproduces the original two-dimensional image but now in three-dimensional form, often utilizing the extreme foreshortening and cropping that are a part of media representation. In doing so, Wang Du creates a new kind of “reality,” so that our experience of those images is no longer one of unmediated consumption, but rather an intense encounter with a physical object.

Given the mass-media origins of Wang Du's subject matter, it is not surprising that the work addresses a variety of topical subjects including politics, the military, celebrity, ecology and sexuality. This exhibition consists of three major installations. Défilé (Parade) consists of thirteen monumental sculptures mounted on a single plinth. The images, all from Chinese media, depict the military as "politico-spiritual" force and its media representation as a powerful ideological tool. Tapis Volant (Flying Carpet) is a monumental flying carpet depicting the cover of Time magazine on February 10, 2003, which featured an image of the space shuttle Columbia disintegrating as it entered earth's atmosphere. Finally, Enter! is a work commissioned for this exhibition in which four identical monumental figures stand before a gigantic wall mural. The figure itself (taken from a pornographic website) is seen to be extracted from that site and returned to the three-dimensional world, but revealed to be no more “real” than its source.

Wang Du’s work has been widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions since the mid-1990s, most notably as part of Ho Hanru's Cities on the Move exhibitions, the Venice Biennale and the Inside Out Chinese Art exhibition organized by the Asia Society and SFMOMA. Wang Du: Parade, exhibition and publication, is organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery in collaboration with La Criée, Rennes; les Abattoirs, Toulouse; Le Rectangle, Lyon and Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Presentation of the exhibition is supported by l’Association française d’action artistique (AFAA / French Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and the Consulate General of France in Vancouver. The exhibition is one of four exhibitions on display this summer in the Body Slam suite, an international convergence of recent contemporary work focusing on the human form. Comprising works by artists from Austria, France, the UK and Vancouver, Body Slam explores the human condition through the mediums of sculpture, photography and video. Body Slam is being presented in juxtaposition with an exhibition of historical works by the legendary sculptor Rodin, providing visitors with a unique opportunity to explore the human body in all its many dimensions.

http://www.artdaily.com/section/news/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=14849

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The Observer, September 4, 2005
Snap dragons

Once used purely for propaganda, photography has exploded in China in the last decade. Experimental artists have gained international success by playing with ideas of truth and fiction, the old and the new, vanishing traditions and modern urban alienation. As a major exhibition opens at the V&A, Gaby Wood finds out what makes them click

Ten years ago, art consultant Karen Smith threw a New Year's Eve party in a nightclub in Beijing. She invited all the people who had been her friends for years, painters, sculptors, performance artists, photographers. She noticed that the room quite naturally split in two: the traditional artists were on one side, the experimental artists on the other. Some of the latter were members of a community known as the East Village, and they were anything but off-duty.

Ma Liuming, famous for wearing make-up and walking naked along the Great Wall of China, was being trailed by a French TV crew. Zhang Huan, whose forte was masochism - eating worms, attracting flies in a public toilet, strapping himself to a ceiling and bleeding on to a mattress - set up a cooker and started to fry his own hair. At some point, a cake arrived. Cang Xin, who licks things for a living - pavements, objects, walls - clearly decided the cake was not to be eaten. He picked it up and threw it across the room at the painters, whereupon a fight broke out. Chinese icing is made mainly of grease, and very soon all the artists were sliding around in an oil slick. The party was broken up, and grit brought in for the dancefloor.

This year, Smith sent out another invitation, with a photograph from that night, assuming that after 10 years they could all laugh about it. They couldn't. In that time, the experimental artists had become internationally successful and wildly wealthy; the rest had been left behind.

In the past decade, photography has been responsible for the largest number of artistic works in any single medium in China. Its acceptance and rise has an intriguing history. During the years of the Cultural Revolution (1966 to 1976), photography was largely propagandist and therefore, arguably, a form of fiction. An underground push towards unsuppressed truth during the second half of the Seventies led to a strong documentary photography movement. Only after these two layers had been established could what became known as experimental photography arise; once contained within Chinese institutions, photography became a tool used by self-determined artistic communities.

The story of the East Village is central to this history. Formed in 1993 on the Eastern outskirts of Beijing by various artists who moved there from the provinces, the East Village was an assemblage of extremely poor housing that mainly existed as shelter for migrant workers. The artistic community only lasted until 1994, when Ma Liuming was arrested for cooking naked in a courtyard - 'He was only boiling potatoes!' cries Xing Danwen, who photographed the event. But in that time, the community - which included the performance artists Ma Liuming, Zhang Huan, Cang Xin, Zhu Ming, and the photographers Xing Danwen and Rong Rong - produced enough work to lay the foundations for the following 10 years.

It also produced a curious aesthetic difficulty. When the photographers documented the performers, whose work was it? As recently as 1998, the New York exhibition of contemporary Chinese art, Inside Out, credited the photographic records of performance works by Ma Liuming and Zhang Huan to the performer, not the photographer. In Between Past and Future, the new show of Chinese photography and video at the V&A, some of the same images are listed as artworks by the photographer.

'I got very confused,' Xing Danwen says of this tussle. 'I had to go to an expensive copyright lawyer in New York. She said: "These are your photographs, they are your copyright." I still wondered if they were my own artwork - in a way it's not, but they are my photographs.' She resolved the issue by publishing a book entitled A Personal Diary of Chinese Avant-Garde Art in the 1990s. In a similar vein, Rong Rong's limited-edition hardback is called Rong Rong's East Village.

At the time those pictures were taken, performance art had far greater currency than photography. But since then, as China's economy has been transformed, photography, which is so much more saleable, has flourished. As the distinguished photojournalist Liu Shing points out, critical and commercial success now amount to the same thing. The market so far has been almost entirely in the West; all work is priced in dollars, and commerce has become the standard by which art in China is judged.

This means that old-guard photojournalists have been excluded from the success with which younger artist-photographers have met. The latter now have works in the world's leading museums and art collections. But because the photojournalists worked for the Chinese government, their negatives belong to the state. Recognition is all about the market, and they own nothing they can sell.

Lin Tianmiao and Wang Gongxin live in a beautiful courtyard house in a rural suburb of Beijing. They moved back here in the late Nineties, after spending the previous decade in New York, and were shocked to be unable to find their way around the city. Though he was brought up here, Wang had to go into a shop in a part of Beijing he thought he knew well to buy a map. He says that even now, if he doesn't go into the centre for two months, the next time he goes he gets lost. 'Things change so fast,' he says. 'The night we finished installing my last show we had dinner in a noodle bar nearby, and the next night, after the opening, the noodle bar was gone.'

The modernisation that began in Beijing during the Nineties and continues apace has made many of its inhabitants feel alienated from their city. So much so that the urban condition is one of the central subjects in contemporary art. Xing Danwen's latest work, Urban Fictions, is a series of photographs of maquettes from estate agents' offices, into which she has inserted digital images of herself in noir-like set-ups. They are single-shot thrillers set in environments that are, as she puts it, 'a reality too'. The maquettes are imaginary places, but unlike the models of a set designer, they will eventually refer to real buildings. The work is about the future of the city, and also about memory-related feelings about what makes a home. Every time she went to one of the estates agents, Xing would wonder if she could live in the imagined buildings. As it happened, she could: she has just moved into a brand-new triplex in a vast, ultra-modern compound.

After the events of Tiananmen Square in 1989, Zhang Dali moved to Italy. He returned to Beijing six years later, and was shocked by all the buildings he saw being torn down every day. Inspired by the graffiti art he had seen in Bologna, he began to spray his 'tag' - a black line drawing of his profile - on walls that were due to be demolished. Between 1995 and 1998, under cover of night, he sprayed more than 2,000 images of himself across the city. Sometimes, he would ask construction workers to knock out the image, so that his head formed a hole through which the old and new layers of Beijing's architecture could be seen at once.

If Zhang Dali is preoccupied with nostalgia and aggression (he writes 'AK-47' next to some of his heads, because, he says, 'the Russians' legacy to us was violence'), Yin Xiuzhen, a very different artist, portrays the human experience in the midst of the hard blast of demolition. She collects discarded clothing, because she is touched by objects that have once been next to human skin. One of her pieces is a box in which baby clothes have been encased in concrete. Another is a city of clothes - sweaters wrapped around wire frames, with lights shining out of tiny, window-shaped holes.

Yin Xiuzhen lives with her husband, the artist Song Dong, in a traditional hutong house in the centre of Beijing. They live in constant fear that their home will be torn down, and have now devised a new plan for its protection. They will turn their house into a train station, so that it becomes a permanent art installation. Old courtyard houses must be preserved, they believe, not merely for architectural reasons, but for social ones. High-rises lead to further alienation and, as Song Dong puts it, 'I am infatuated with a slowly vanishing type of relationships between people.'

As a form of meditation, Song Dong writes in water on stone every night before he goes to bed, making the diary of his day a letter to invisibility. He writes but does not record; the process is like an expression of memory itself.

Wang Qingsong, the star of China's contemporary art scene, has engaged with vanishing traditions in another way. His vast and spectacular work, Night Revels of Lao Li, is a 31-ft photomural based on one of China's most famous paintings - a 10th-century scroll called Night Revels of Han Xizai. In five gaudily staged and digitally stitched scenes, he replaces the original scroll's government-official-turned-night-owl with the real editor of an art magazine who was sacked for championing experimental work.

Hong Hao's beautiful Spring Festival on the River No 2 is based, similarly, on a 12th-century scroll by Zhang Zeduan. Using the original monochrome scroll - which tells the story of an emperor's journey through the city - as a base, Hong has photographed people in the streets of modern Beijing, cut them out and pasted them on to the original, so that old and new China meet over a 5m stretch.

Qiu Zhijie, a calligrapher, artist and professor of 'free art' at the China Academy of Art, melds the Chinese tradition of calligraphy and the European tradition of photography in haunting night photographs. Keeping the shutter open, he draws a Chinese character very quickly in the air with a torch, writing in light, in night, and recording for posterity a word which barely existed.

When I asked Song Dong if he thought of his work as political, he said quite emphatically that it was not. Clearly, though, it has suffered from being thought so. His first show, which invited people to write on a blackboard and included members of the public reading books full of blank pages, was shut down by the government, on the mysterious grounds that so much paper was a fire risk.

'None of these artists has ever done anything to directly provoke the government,' says Karen Smith, who has been translating. 'To say they are political is to suggest that they have. In English, it's possible to have a looser meaning of the word "political", in the sense of "politically correct". In Chinese it's not.'

Qiu Zhijie, however, is happy to say that his work is political. 'Maybe not straightforwardly political,' he adds, 'but if you're searching for new possibilities, it's a new ideology. Every ideology tries to tell you that this life is the only one: you can only drink this way, eat this way, feel this way. You cannot have another truth.' So art, 'is dangerous for the people who try to keep order and control the system'.

For many of these artists, their first trip abroad was momentous. But even those who have spent extended periods outside China have mostly returned. Of this generation, only Zhang Huan, who lives in New York, is notable for his absence. Qiu Zhijie says he wouldn't move to another country. 'There are always limits,' he says. 'If I moved to New York or London those limits would be different, but they would still be limits.' In any case, he adds, 'limits also give people chances'.

We walk out into the artists' complex where we have met for coffee. Called 798, it is a former munitions factory built in 1958 by the Russians and shut down years ago (no one knows what happened to the munitions). Since then, it has been turned into artists' studios, two galleries, a bookshop and a cafe. In the last three years, rents have tripled. Along one wall is a gigantic slogan: 'Mao is the red sun in our hearts.' The colour is fading.

'When I was growing up, all the photographs in the newspapers were fake, or inspired by a false reality,' suggests Wang Qingsong. If he believed then that reportage was fiction, he now thinks of his work as documentary, because however elaborate the set-up and however kitsch the manner, it depicts what is going on in China now. The same might be said of Zhang Dali's latest work, in which he makes full-body casts of migrant workers and hangs them upside down from the ceiling, and of Hong Hao's new life-sized digital images of money - dozens of international currencies scanned and added up, in the works' titles, to a single meaningless sum.

In this respect, you could say that these Chinese artists preceded Andreas Gursky and Jeff Wall and other purveyors of high-art tricks - not in terms of age or international recognition, but because they were raised with ideas about realism and artificiality, and have drama in their blood. And because they have made all these ideas, and many more besides, entirely their own.

Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen

Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen have been married for 16 years. Song used to be a painter and is now a performance artist; Yin makes installations. The modest amount of work they have done together has been assembled in a hand-made book under the name Chopsticks, since one cannot exist without the other.

In January 1996, Song Dong lay face down in Tiananmen Square in memory of those who had died there seven years earlier. He proceeded to breathe on to the pavement for 40 minutes, until there was a thin mound of ice beneath his nose. With his transient human effort in the middle of a vast state monolith, he had breathed life back into the square - a tangible, transparent thing which, by the next morning, had disappeared.

His wife, Yin Xiuzhen, accompanied him; she photographed the event, which took place at night, and since video recording is not allowed there, she recorded his breathing as audio.

Yin's own work - which might be likened to that of Cornelia Parker or Christian Boltanski, is among the most thoughtful in contemporary Chinese art. One of her most beautiful pieces is a self-portrait in shoes. Afraid that old traditions might die, she went to the countryside to learn how to make traditional Chinese slippers. She made 10 pairs - one for each month of gestation - and on to each insole she pasted a tinted photograph of herself at an important moment of her life.

Hong Hao

One of the wittiest artists of his generation, and a leading proponent of Chinese pop art, Hong once pulled a prank on the entire Chinese art world. By 1997, Chinese artists had been in all major international shows, except Documenta in Germany. Hong sent letters to artists saying the organisers were to visit their studios. It was some time before anyone realised it was a joke; when they did, everyone was furious.

In recent years, Hong has made the beautiful digital collage, Spring Festival on the River No 2, based on a classical Chinese scroll, and a wonderful series of fictional maps, in which he has substituted China for the States and made oceans out of continents. His most recent work is life-sized images of objects in his studio, the often revolting detritus of life turned into compulsively pretty patterns.

Wang Qingsong

Born in a small town in 1966, the first year of the Cultural Revolution, Wang became his family's main breadwinner when he was very young. His father was a soldier in central China, and was killed in an accident when Wang was 15. Wang spent seven years working in the mines to support his family before moving to Beijing, where the economy changed so fast that the savings he thought would last five years disappeared in two months.

Now one of the most famous artists in China, Wang became the leader of the 'gaudy' art movement (a contemporary Chinese movement akin to American kitsch) making witty commentaries on Chinese society. He believes what's happened economically in China - big brand names flouncing around on billboards, then being replaced by more fashionable ones - is 'like the march of artists: they're famous for a few minutes, then disappear'. A recent piece, called Competition, is a large tableau of 20 people putting up more than 600 hand-painted posters in the largest film studio in China, famous for Kung Fu movies. 'In the past,' says Wang, 'the streets were hung with posters in fights over political beliefs. Now the struggle is over financial power and business gain. Ads for items are like psoriasis found everywhere on our city streets.'

Zhang Dali

When Zhang came to art school in Beijing from his home in the north of China, the city was still relatively intact. That was 1983, and Zhang's favoured medium was paint on canvas. A decade later, after several years spent living in Italy, Zhang was shocked to discover the changes that were taking place in Beijing. He embarked on a series of graffiti works, entitled Dialogue: Conversation with a City, in which he sprayed his profile on to more than 2,000 buildings that were due to be demolished.

Zhang's latest work is preoccupied with the human consequences of this modernisation: migrant workers are a new class of citizen in Beijing - or new in such numbers. Though the official population of Beijing is 16 million, it has been suggested that if you include the undocumented itinerants, it could be as high as 25m. Most of these people have come to work on building sites. In order to get migrant workers to pose for full-body casts for his series Chinese Offspring - in which the casts are hung upside down from the ceiling to mark the displacement of these children of the new China - Zhang paid them 1,000RMB each (about £70). The fee was equivalent to two months' wages.

Cui Xiuwen

One of the few successful female artists in Beijing, Cui is also one of the youngest. She explains that though the Chinese Constitution says women and men are equal, social custom is another matter: 'Women aren't necessarily encouraged to have creative powers of thought. There aren't many women artists because women are limited by their education.'

Cui's video work is mesmerising and at times brutal. For Ladies Room, she borrowed a camera built into a handbag from a friend who works for the Public Security Bureau. Cui then stood in a club toilet where 'hostesses' change between tricks. The combination of the feminised surveillance and what's seen (the sad, glitzy world of bank notes stuffed into push-up bras) offers a powerful picture of women's lives.

'This scene is a feature of the new capitalism,' says Cui. 'The clothes - in the mid-Nineties women became aware of themselves in a way they hadn't had an opportunity to be in the early Nineties. The hostess industry was born after that.'

Xing Danwen

Xing first used a camera during a demonstration in Tiananmen Square in April 1989, one of the events that led up to the massacre there two months later. She became a photojournalist, travelling all over China and publishing important work on coal miners in the northwest. So it was as a successful reportage photographer that she joined the collection of artists living in Beijing's East Village and documented their work.

In 1998, Xing moved to New York to do a masters at the School of Visual Arts. In that time, she produced her Scroll Series of images. Strips of medium-format film, they are not unlike images taken with a pinhole camera - Xing has intervened in the wind-on mechanism so that the usual frame-divisions are non-existent. She was inspired by cinema (not by traditional Chinese scrolls, she adds, despite the title), and aimed to produced images that could be read rather than merely seen.

On her return to Beijing, she 'saw the great progress but also felt regret for the part of the past that had been lost'. She embarked on her series of Urban Fictions, which deal inventively with the city's future, and on which she continues to work today.

· Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China is at the V&A (0870 906 3883) from 15 September to 15 January

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1560724,00.html

 

 

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Matthias Arnold
(Art-Eastasia list)

http://www.chinaresource.org
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