Financial Times (London, England), September 26, 2005
Snapshot of a nation in furious transition PHOTOGRAPHY: The V&A's show of modern Chinese photography is thrilling overall - but some individual works disappoint
By FRANCIS HODGSON

The supernova explosion that is contemporary China is familiar even to those who have never been there and have no direct connection. Biggest, fastest . . . the superlatives are mainly positive. China, after all, has finally bought in to the ideology of the west, and bought in to it in a very big way. In China every kind of group thinking is being knocked aside by the purest kind of individual drive. The speed of change is dizzying. The spread of the private car, of domestic refrig-eration, of mobile telephony has outpaced in a few years what in Europe often took a generation. It is not just political institutions that are creaking as a result. The family, the village, even such abstractions as courtesy - all have come under terrible strain. The rates of internal migration (which signals psychological as much as geographical displacement) are monstrous. In all of this it is natural that groups of artists, only recently unmuzzled, are beginning to explore the ferment around them.

Between Past and Future, at London's Victoria and Albert Museum, is an exhibition of some of the contemporary work emerging from the whirlpool. Since China is still essentially so unfamiliar, the initial impression is of strangeness. The artists' very names are unfamiliar. The soundtracks of videos seem strange. There is also a clear sense of the fierce energy that seems the norm in China at the moment. It is a thoroughly exciting show. Simply to be exposed to such a chaos of new things is a heady experience. Originally put together by American institutions working in tandem, the UK showing is disappointingly abridged. But it is still an impressive demonstration of curatorship. Only after spending some time in the exhibition does a measure of doubt creep in.

Few of the artists represented are working in any Chinese tradition. Several are identified as having spent periods abroad, often for their own safety, and they share a wolfish greed for the more sugary and easily digestible tit-bits of western art. A bit of Warhol, a splash of Duchamp, anallusion to Jeff Wall or Andreas Gursky, an environmental piece here and a bit of graffiti there. Like kids in a sweet shop, many of these artists seem unable to believe their luck. And they are not too bothered about the solid substance of what they do. To be taken seriously, even to make a good living, is a new and powerful sensation, and too many of these artists seem to want no more. The plain fact is that a great deal of the art here is not very good.

When the issues confronting an artist are huge, it takes an extraordinary intellectual effort to find a manageable way to communicate to the audience. Here, too many responses are egocentric, solipsistic. This show has lots of works in which the artists, overwhelmed perhaps by the outside world, turn their eyes upon themselves. When that works it's powerfully moving and the body can carry a huge metaphorical weight. Zhang Huan's "Family Tree" is a grid of nine self-portraits. His expression is neutral but his face is covered in black-ink calligraphic characters representing a variety of cultural references. By the last row his face is disappearing, the characters blended into an impenetrable soup until nothing shows through the shiny blackness. The individual has been overwhelmed by culture. The silent characters jostling each other over his features become an evocation of the cacophonous crowding of ideas and lives that is modern China. The risk of getting such self-scrutiny wrong, though, is the risk of looking terribly vain, and there are plenty of examples of that in this show.

Several pieces are adaptations of famous Chinese art-works. Hong Hao's "Spring Festival on the River No. 2" col-lages modern figures on to a copy of a well-known scroll. Wang Qingsong, one of the stars of the show, does something similar in "Night revels of Lao Li", revisiting a Tang dynasty painting to tell a modern fable of censorship. And Wang's "Past, Present and Future" is a tour de force, a triptych in parody of Socialist Realist sculpture that manages to be at once affectionate to a disappearing style and scathing about it.

Like many of the artists here, Wang sees the destruction of so much of the fabric of Chinese life as a terrible price to pay for progress. It is also noticeable that even in these historical works the artists can rarely resist putting themselves in the picture. Miao Xiaochun has made a recurring figure of himself in classical clothing as a bystander in scenes of con-temporary documentary. In "Opera, 2003", he contemplates the crowd at the zoo watching the monkeys. The monkeys are unselfconsciously alive (one is drinking Pepsi) while the crowd is more gurning, more apelike.

There is a large variety of tone and mood here. That's not so surprising, given that all the participants are looking for ways to confront changes of such vast reach. More surprising is that the range of artistic styles is much more limited. Here are few straight portraits, landscapes or still lives. It's as though the twin headlines "Conceptual Art" and "Performance Art" have offered a liberation of such intensity that everything else has had to wait. That would be a pity if one were looking for finished art of the highest standard. But if one wants to see the sheer drive and vigour of one fraction of the new work coming out of China, this is a splendid place to start.

'Between Past and Future' is at the V&A, London until 15 January. Tel 020 7942 2000

***************************

The Times (London), September 20, 2005
As the old Chinese proverb goes...
Joanna Pitman

... think before you exhibit 'cutting edge' photography at the V&A, says Joanna Pitman

Walking into the new exhibition of contemporary photography and video from China at the V&A is a bit like walking into the centre of a brand new Chinese city thrown up on the spot. It feels just like Shenzen, for example, which is located just over the border from Hong Kong in a Special Economic Zone. Development, growth and the emergence of individual prosperity here have been so rapid that no one can keep track of the size of the population, whose average age is just 28. Fashion is fast-moving and everywhere there are videos and images, noises and messages clamouring for at-tention.

The design of this new show reproduces these sensations with vivid and exhilarating success (but mercifully without the smells and filth). Red and orange walls rise up in a seeming jumble of facades, tall and narrow and bathed in neon light. Videos flash images; strange noises and messages assail you from all directions. The installation and hang of this show is magnificent. It is a shame that the contents don't come anywhere near the same standard.

Typical of the kind of work on display is the diptych by Song Dong, a 39-year old Chinese photographer from Bei-jing. On New Year's Eve 1996, seven years after the Tiananmen Square massacre, he lay down after dark in the square and took a series of stills of himself breathing on the pavement. He stayed there motionless for 40 minutes, watched with intermittent interest by some soldiers. He was trying to make his breath turn to ice on the cement surface. The next day he did the same thing lying on the frozen surface of Houhai Lake, where his breathing made no mark on the ice. The work, he says, was about challenging monolithic authority. It showed that in Tiananmen Square his efforts, no matter how small, were effective and meaningful.

More self-indulgent stuff follows. Yin Xiuzhen (who happens to be married to Song Dong) is a 41-year-old pho-tographer also from Beijing. In 1998 she stuck ten portraits of herself, some from childhood, some more recent, inside ten pairs of cloth shoes (pictured). Yin Xiuzhen believes that shoes carry their owner's experiences, memories and traces of time. She sees them as boats, carrying a person's identity for miles.

But perhaps the most painfully adolescent piece of work is by Ma Liuming, a 36-year-old from Huangshi. In 1998 he came up with the idea of walking stark naked along the Great Wall of China. Not only was he naked, but he was also wearing lipstick and eye-shadow and letting his long hair flow freely in the air like a girl's. As a performance, the com-bination of androgynous sexuality and nakedness on the symbolic wall was provocative in the extreme. But he was al-lowed to walk until his feet bled, being photographed all the way. Perhaps the authorities considered the event too childish to bother with.

Experimental photographers are often intensely concerned with their own bodies, and it seems that Chinese ex-perimental photographers are particularly so. This is partly explained by the history of oppression through which they have lived. The individual comes across with such pleading in these photographs because for so long the individual has been crushed in China by brutally enforced programmes of collectivisation.

Only in the past few years have the powers of the previously all-embracing institutions of family and Communist Party been eroded. The global consumer culture has arrived, recognising only individual satisfactions. Only now are restrictions on independent photographers being lifted. No longer are they subject to the dictates of party officials. No longer is the supply of cameras and other photographic equipment restricted.

This exhibition has already been shown in New York, Chicago and Seattle. After London it goes on to Berlin. Many of these photographers have already exhibited abroad and have their own dealers in China. A new class of hugely rich entrepreneurs is seeking to validate their new status by buying art. Some are buying back historic Chinese works sold abroad in earlier centuries, but many are also investing in cutting-edge Chinese art. And what could be more cutting edge than contemporary photography and video?

The dealers representing these artists stand to gain from this vast exhibition, which lends international credibility to the artists and makes their work much more valuable. But the question nobody seems to have asked is this: is the work any good? Much of it looks to me like the kind of work churned out all over the developed world by self-obsessed second-year art students. Would we be paying it any attention if it was being made by Germans or Australians? I sense a whiff of the emperor's new clothes about this show.

Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China is at the V&A, SW7 (020-7942 2000), until Jan 15.

*************************

The Observer, September 18, 2005

Review: PHOTOGRAPHY: Long march to freedom: A compelling exhibition by Chinese artists reflects the aesthetic awakening of the Nineties
ROSE JENNINGS

BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE V&A, London SW7, until 15 January

THE WOMAN is strikingly beautiful. By my reckoning, she must be strikingly uncomfortable, too, perched as she is on a bollard in the middle of a churned-up wasteland, like some bizarre, mobile-toting seabird. But this is Shenzhen, one of the fastest growing cities on the south coast of China, where the average age of the inhabitants - workers in the new service industries, predominantly - is just 28. This is Kids Town , as recorded by an artist, Yang Yong, who is herself barely 30. Backache isn't an option.

Between Past and Future is the first major survey of Chinese photography and video from the past decade. It covers 1994 to 2003, a period that has seen an extraordinary mobilisation of energies in China. Though it's probably not going to be the definitive exhibition on the subject - there's too much interest in Chinese art for that - it deserves to stand as one of the most important shows of the moment.

While such figures as Yang Fudong and Wang Qingsong have reached a wide international audience, there's little understanding of the context from which they emerged. While Western ignorance played a part here, it isn't all our fault. As curator Christopher Phillips says, academics have barely started collating Chinese and non-Chinese material, let alone constructed an overarching, Schamaesque narrative. The books haven't yet been written. The fascinating question is whether our categories will take the strain when they are.

The exhibition is divided into four thematic sections. 'History and Memory' is self-evident, as is 'People and Place'. 'Performing the Self' isn't, and is probably best left until last, after what I described in my notebook as the 'toilet and incarceration bit'.

This last section, actually called 'Reimagining the Body', is weird, but rather wonderful. It focuses on the activities of a body of artists whose performances 'are characterised by masochism and gender reversal'. Artists here include Ma Liuming and his feminised alter ego, Fen-Ma Liuming, both of whom were prompted (not least by contact with Gilbert and George) to walk naked along the Great Wall; Rong Rong, who photographed a seminal performance by Zhang Huang, in which Huang incarcerated himself in a filthy lavatory; and Zhu Ming, who created a performance in which he nearly suffocated himself inside a huge balloon.

Silly Zhu, you think, wrong Rong, until you read the catalogue essays and grasp just how accurately these metaphors reflect the constraints that, even in the mid-Nineties, were imposed on anyone of a remotely dissenting bent.

These performances aren't about individuals being imprisoned within bodies, or inner selves longing to float free; they are a reaction to a real reckoning of certain categories of people as intrinsically abject.

Many of these artists upset the authorities. We're reminded of this particularly in the work of Song Dong, who conducted a performance that involved him breathing on the frozen stones of Tiananmen Square, as if to breathe life back into the bodies of the people who died there.

'People and Place' records changes in the urban environment. As the area of Chinese life we hear most about, this is rather less fascinating than the section on 'History and Memory'.

One extraordinary work here is a series of images by Liu Zheng, who photographs waxworks, socialist-realist revolutionary monuments, traditional clay sculptures and other realist forms. One photograph shows a sculpture called The Punishment of the Wife Who Misbehaved, while another shows a waxwork depicting the Nanjing massacre of 1937-38. How can someone construct a healthy identity, he seems to be asking, brought up on such a gruesome aesthetic? While the tableaux Liu Zheng photographs reflect an almost bottomless cruelty, they are often also compellingly dynamic; the still of actors on the set of a propaganda film about the war against the Japanese made me curious to see the movie.

Not all the works in this exhibition are quite so demanding. There's a lovely little video about gender by Yang Zhenzhong, where a cock and a hen engage in a grain-pecking match. I also liked Weng Fen's re-edits of old propaganda movies and a haunting video by Yang Fudong that draws on Thirties Shanghai movie-making conventions.

Where does Chinese photography and video slot into the existing canon? Few of these artists seem originally to have picked up their cameras with a view to making a career 'in' photography or video. It was simply expedient to use these media at the time. These artists don't neglect form, but they are not controlled by it.

Chinese artists in the Nineties may well have gone crazy for the Western predecessors (Stieglitz, Sherman) whose images suddenly became available to them. But in the end, they found that their own culture provided quite enough ma-terial.

************************

The Independent, September 15, 2005
ENTER THE DRAGON: CHINESE ART AT V&A
Louis Jury Arts Correspondent

For decades, Chinese photographers lived in a twilight of legitimacy, their work permitted only if it served the in-terests of the Communist state.

Clampdowns on artistic freedom were random but frequent. Only in recent years have some artists emerged to in-ternational acclaim, snapped up by dealers, fted in shows that have shown China to be a thriving and vibrant artistic nation. And now Britain is to get its first glimpse of the work. Today, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London unveils the first major survey of Chinese photography and video from the past decade.

The exhibition, Between Past and Future, features 60 works by 40 artists including its brightest stars " even if the names of Wang Qingsong, Hong Hao, Qui Zhijie, Sheng Qi and Liu Zheng may not be household ones in the UK.

Some works update themes from traditional Chinese art, such as Wang Qingsong's 31ft photographic reinterpretation of a famous 10th-century scroll painting about a disillusioned government official. Others, such as Zhang Dali's scenes of Beijing's massive urban transformation, explore the country's turbulent recent history.

Many clearly reveal the forced element of secrecy that was a feature of working conditions for so long, notably in performance art, presented quickly and once only to avoid official intervention, but captured on film or in photographs.

Kate Best, the V&A's curator, said the show featured 'very tough, slightly masochistic work'. She added: 'They definitely tested the boundaries of what was possible. There was a point when artists were having to find ways to cir-cumvent state censorship. Only very recently have exhibitions [in China] stopped being cancelled unexpectedly.'

Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China runs from today until 15 January.

*******************************

The Guardian (London), September 13, 2005
G2: Culture: What are you looking at?: The V&A's new show demonstrates that Chinese art has been growing as quickly as the country's economy. But can we ever be sure how to interpret it?
By Adrian Searle

Grubby but unbowed, the mud-spattered army on the plinth makes its long march up the slope of history. Faces are implacable and determined, and victory is certain - if only the living sculptures who make up this re-creation of a bom-bastic social-realist sculpture can stay still. They are watched by a wounded bystander, his hand on his heart, gazing up at them on their plinth. This is Past, Present, Future, a living tableau emulating the sculptures that stand in front of Chairman Mao's memorial in Tiananmen Square, staged for the camera by Wang Qingsong.

While the army struggles, a crowd of silver-clad workers makes its own great leap forward. These are watched by a man with a dog. In the final part of this tongue-in-cheek monument to lost idealism and bad art, we see the future. It is golden, but just as unsmiling. Amid the lanterns hoisted aloft and the baskets of plenty, the man who has been watching the previous two scenes unfold (played by the artist himself) is now centre-stage, sitting on a bike and raising two saucepan-lid cymbals, as though to announce destiny's arrival.

Past, Present, Future is one of two works by Wang in Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China, which opens at London's V&A this Thursday. It is as difficult to know what to make of recent Chinese art as it is to know how to view the transformation of China itself. We are living, says Wang, in times that lack ideals. Or rather, ideals have been replaced by aspirations for power and money. So provocative are Wang's exemplary, textually rich photo-tableaux that one was recently banished - not by the Chinese authorities, but by the local council in last year's Hereford photography festival, on account of its scenes of nudity.

Yesterday it was announced that Disneyworld is opening in Hong Kong. So fast are China's cities growing, new street maps are produced in Shanghai every two months. On the teetering walls of demolished buildings in Beijing, Zhang Dali draws huge graffiti of a cartoon face, which he then has the wreckers carefully chip out, leaving the face-shaped hole to frame views on to old quarters and ancient corners. "The fortress of reinforced concrete that has been erected amid the stink of money and red slogans has impaired the vision of good people and sedated the nerves of those who were once awake," he says. In one of Yang Yong's images of young people, out and about on the neon-lit streets and in city un-derpasses, a fashionable young woman stands precariously amid the flattened muck of another building site, leaning forward to light a Camel.

Yang arranges her photographs in scatters and arrays of larger and smaller images, their self-consciously casual placement - as well as the compositions themselves - sometimes reminding me of Wolfgang Tillmans. The vernacu lar may be familiar, but China, we keep having to remind ourseves, is not. If these scenes could be taking place anywhere, so the hidden video camera of Cui Xiuwen, aimed at the communal mirror in the women's loos of a Beijing escort bar, shows us a sleazy nocturnal world whose ubiquity is as depressing as it is commonplace: the girls talking into their mobiles, counting out the banknotes and stashing them down their bras. This video, called Ladies, was recently shown at Tate Modern.

As was Yang Fudong's beautiful, elegiac film Liu Lan, set on a misty, reed-fringed lake in a China that feels as distant as another century. The local and the global blur, but does this mean that art, like a McDonald's hamburger, is becoming the same everywhere? All art comes from somewhere, however much artists cruise the world's biennales and art fairs. We might believe that recent Chinese art, using the same media and the same display strategies as art elsewhere, has become just as commodified, just as consumable, just as modish as everywhere else. But we don't always know what exactly we are looking at; allusions are inevitably lost.

The excellent catalogue to the V&A show goes a long way in addressing these issues, and providing us with a useful history. Chicago-based art historian Wu Hong's essay on the development of art photography in China is fascinating. His use of such tantalising terms as "traditional melancholy" and "cynical realism" stopped me in my tracks.

But all this takes a lot of unpacking. We may think that cultural globalisation leads to homogenisation, but there is also misunderstanding everywhere, played out on the borders and faultlines of difference. Between Past and Future, which began as a larger show in Chicago, is extremely rewarding, but frustrating for reasons that go beyond the difficulties of the works. The exhibition's thematic, four-part structure - with sections devoted to "History and Memory", "Performing the Self", "Re-imagining the Body" and "People and Place" - has been crammed into a single exhibition space at the V&A. And its range, from intimate black-and-white photographs to brash, bold, large-scale works using the most up-to-date imaging technologies, is a bumpy ride. There are some things here that are just silly. But then silly is also fashionable.

The same art theories and the same art catalogues are pored over wherever one goes. Wu reminds us that art theory and Jacques Derrida, catalogues of Andy Warhol or Cindy Sherman, introductions to postmodernism and to conceptual photography, have been increasingly available in China since the "information explosion" of the 1980s. Chinese art may sometimes appear gauche and belated, but the best artists have other, deeper reasons to look towards the contemporary art of the west than merely to appropriate its manners and styles.

We get a better sense of this from those works whose engagement is personal, rather than from those that poke fun at the authoritarian aesthetics of social realism, or whose subject matter is wilfully arcane and symbolic. Hai Bo pairs studio photo-portraits of young people, taken during the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, with portraits of the same people today. They have aged. Some chairs are empty, people are missing. Explanations here are unnecessary. Hai's documentary approach is all the more affecting for the severity of its understatement.

The underlying theme of the show is the plight and place of the individual in relation to society and the world. This is about as universal a theme as art ever has. It is everywhere here: in Rong Rong's photographs of the grimly masochistic, bloody and cloacal performances of Zhang Huan, who once slathered his body in honey and fish oil, and stood, covered in flies, in an unimaginably filthy public toilet; and in the beautiful performances of Song Dong. One New Year's Eve, Song lay face down in Tiananmen Square, his breath fogging the slabs with a thin rime of ice. If he stayed there long enough, I thought to myself, Song would have been able to see his own reflection there, like a frozen Narcissus, unless the cold or the soldiers constantly patrolling the square got to him first.

This performance risked more than frostbite, and one remembers how cautious artists in China have to be. Fen-Ma Liuming, the feminine alter ego of performance artist Ma Liuming, naked and shoeless, applies his lipstick and walks the Great Wall of China until his feet bleed. Sometimes he's a distant dot on the wall, then he's framed precarious in a broken arch, then he's striding to the sound of wind in the leaves. This may seem innocuous enough, but such performances once landed Ma in detention for two months.

It is a mild winter day at the provincial zoo. Spectators crowd around a sunken enclosure, where a pack of monkeys are doing the things that monkeys do on the rockery. There's a flash of red on the climbing frame, a discarded plastic bag that one of the monkeys has adopted as a plaything. What a rich image this is, filled with air and light, activity and detail. Eventually we discover, among the smiling crowds watching the monkeys, a man who looks more lost than most. Like some ancient philosopher or wandering sage, he wears a cloak and topknot that mark him out as someone from another era. In fact, he's a mannequin, whose face is modelled on the artist himself, Miao Xiaochun. Miao refers to this character, who reappears throughout his work, as "him". He is a historical witness, but one confounded by the present and lost amid it.

 

 

__________________

with kind regards,

Matthias Arnold
(Art-Eastasia list)

http://www.chinaresource.org
http://www.fluktor.de

__________________________________________

An archive of this list as well as an subscribe/unsubscribe facility is
available at:
http://listserv.uni-heidelberg.de/archives/art-eastasia.html
For postings earlier than 2005-02-23 please go to:
http://www.fluktor.de/study/office/newsletter.htm