Globeandmail, December 12, 2005
Wall to wall Chinese art
The contemporary works in this Albright-Knox show are full of big ideas
expressed in a bold visual language. They leap across cultural
boundaries and capture our senses, writes SARAH MILROY
By SARAH MILROY

BUFFALO, NEW YORK -- One of the phenomena on the museum circuit over the
past decade or so has been the mega-exhibition of contemporary Chinese
art. These shows, in their various ways, have attempted to map a terra
incognita for Western audiences intrigued by the cultural landscape of
China, a meeting ground of socialist utopianism run aground in
disillusionment and first-wave rampant capitalism, a place where Pop Art
meets ancient calligraphy, and where the debates on postmodernism and
modernism are argued in fresh minted supercities with the glittering
insubstantiality of Disney destination resorts. Many of these shows,
however, have straggled across their themes, their uneven quality giving
the impression of a net flung wide across a vast sea of information,
harvesting treasures and dross in equal measure.

Such is not the case in the vivid and tightly edited exhibition
currently on show at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo (organized
in concert with University at Buffalo): The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary
Chinese Art. The exhibition, and accompanying catalogue, present a
concise history of art-making in China over the past 20 years, focusing
(whether intentionally or not) on the bigger-name artists who have
received some measure of attention in the West.

Curator Gao Minglu, a visiting UB art-history professor, has organized
the exhibition around the idea of the wall (the Great Wall as the
metaphor for the boundary between past and present, east and west, male
and female, public and private -- the list goes on), but the theme that
emerges for the viewer is something else: the throng. What does it mean
to be part of a nation of 1.3 billion people?

What happens to the perception of the individual in such a state? Does
such profusion produce a sense of liberation (in anonymity) or
alienation? And what kind of bold possibilities are opened up by the
presence of such a collectivity? Many of the artists in the show seem to
respond to these questions, offering a window onto a consciousness that
is almost unthinkable in our own sparsely populated nation state.

Wenda Gu's 100,000 Kilometers installation is as good a place as any to
start, as this is where the exhibition itself kicks off -- a large room
filled with a display of bricks made from compressed human hair gathered
from around the world. These are arranged to simulate a section of the
Great Wall in its current tumbled-down state of semi-neglect. Around the
perimeter of the room, the artist has hung gauzy, semi-transparent
banners also made from hair.

Here, architecture is suggested through the medium of the body,
suggesting the human capital involved in such massive projects, from the
Great Wall to the Three Gorges Dam project of today. A lot of humanity
is compressed into those dark, rectangular tablets, with hair serving
here as a symbol of human power, desire and agency. What flows freely
from the body is pressed into service and utility.

Wang Jin's photographs titled 100 per cent also set one to thinking
about the bodily effort of nation building. In this sequence of works
from 1999, his human subjects are positioned propping up architecture --
a roof, a stairwell, a bridge -- often standing on one another's
shoulders with arms extended upward to bear the load. Are they
supporting these structures or are they oppressed by them? Wang's images
suggest the pride of the Chinese people in their burgeoning country's
exponential growth, at the same time as he taps into the anxieties that
come with such growth, and the human toll it extracts from its citizens.

Xu Bing's enormous installation Ghosts Pounding the Wall (1990-91) arose
from collective effort, like the Great Wall that it memorializes. With a
group of assistants, Xu took a section of the Wall in suburban Beijing
and, over a 24-day period, created a giant rubbing on rice paper --
recording both the path beneath your feet and a portion of the Wall's
interior side walls and turrets.

The central section is anchored by a huge pile of dirt (a burial mound
memorializing the workers and soldiers of the past), which then soars
upward from the ground, traversing the space of the gallery dramatically
upward as if the material Wall itself is left behind and the pure idea
of it takes flight. Flanking this on either side, the rubbings taken of
the inside of the wall are mounted upright and facing inward, allowing
the viewer a sense of the scale of the structure, and what it might feel
to travel along it.

The contemporary built environment also figures in the exhibition. Xing
Danwen's suite of large-scale photographs titled Urban Fiction (2004-5)
reflect the fate of the individual body within the great machine that is
the city, the heroic collective building project of today. In these
works, tiny human beings are digitally situated within fantasy towers
and urbanscapes that are clearly artificial. (The artist uses the
miniature models built by real-estate developers to presell properties.)
Into these immaculate scenarios, so reminiscent of the instant cities
springing up all over China to accommodate population growth and the
rural-to-city exodus, Xing inserts the messy stuff of life: a runaway
bride with her groom in pursuit across an apartment plaza, a car
collision in a freeway beneath some condo towers, two lovers in torrid
embrace in an apartment courtyard -- all of them dwarfed by their
sterile surroundings. In the same gallery, the curator also presents
Wang Jinsong's photographs titled A Hundred Chai -- To Be Demolished,
large-scale images that document the traditional calligraphic sign now
prevalent on many of the crumbling brick walls of Chinese cities, a mark
that indicates that a structure is to be destroyed to make way for new
construction.

Some artists in the show take pains to underscore their own private
experience in the midst of collectivity. Yu Hong's installation Memory
Dress (2005), consists of 40 white-cotton garment bags painted on one
side with images from her own life (taken from family snapshots) and, on
the reverse, with images from the same year taken from the news media,
depicting the unfolding drama of political life of China and the wider
world. Thus, we discover the 1971 family photo of the artist as a child
holding her new baby sister, coupled, on the back, with an image of
Chairman Mao in Cambodia, or the flaming towers of the World Trade
Center paired with the image of the artist at her high-school reunion.
Poignantly, Yu's own small, sensitively rendered life is made to hold
its own against the narratives of world events.

Such moments of studied subjectivity are rare in the show, though.
Instead, the group action appears again and again as a trope, as in
Zheng Lianjie's Big Explosion '93 Series photographs. These works
document a group action in the remote Hebei province of China where, in
addition to a number of other things, the crew directed the gathering of
more than 10,000 fallen bricks from the Great Wall. Rural workers in the
community, like the workers who originally built the Wall, were paid to
replace the old bricks atop the structure, each one tied with crimson
ribbon. The work feels like a symbolic re-enactment of the initial act
of construction, tapping into the capacity in the Chinese people for
large-scale collaboration in pursuit of a shared vision -- whether that
be in the making of an art work, in the ongoing building of the Three
Gorges Dam, or in the massive enterprise that was the Cultural Revolution.

Cai Guo-qiang's gunpowder project from 1993, shown in video form here,
is another example of the art of the massive undertaking. From his
series titled Project for Extraterrestrials, the work is subtitled
Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Meters. The artist's
concept was to extend the Great Wall figuratively out into the remote
Gansu desert through the laying down of a gunpowder trail. Once lit, the
flame speeds off into the night, leaping over boulders and around the
obstacles into the landscape -- a fiery flight punctuated, occasionally,
by small explosions.

Using one of China's most ancient art forms -- fireworks -- Cai brings
the whole question of community smartly up to date. The Wall served as a
system of defence against outsiders, but it also provided a medium for
communication, with messages sent from sentry post to sentry post across
the wild expanse of the kingdom's outer reaches. Cai has been a regular
on the international art circuit for a decade or more (as have many of
the artists in this show), and his popularity in the West is
understandable. It's an art of big ideas, in a bold visual language that
leaps across cultural boundaries like one of his own tinder-dry fuses.
Like many of the artists here, Cai ignites our curiosity to understand more.

The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art continues in Buffalo at the
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, University at Buffalo Art Gallery in the
Center for the Arts (UB's North Campus) and UB Anderson Gallery until
Jan. 29 (716-270-8204).

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__________________

with kind regards,

Matthias Arnold
(Art-Eastasia list)

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

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