‘Globalizing’ China seen in SFMOMA exhibit
Provocative exhibit depicts how artists reacted to Tiananmen Square and changing world
“This is not a show of Chinese art,” explained one of the curators of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s sprawling exhibit that fills its seventh floor. Instead, the 100-plus works are meant to display a “shared history of globalization” through the eyes of Chinese artists, some of them working as far away from China as Paris, New York and Oakland.
Stepping out of the elevator into the exhibit, visitors are confronted by a mashup of constructions, video displays, sounds and light effects that suggests a vivid, upto-the-minute show. But it’s not quite that. The works are confined to the period between the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989 and the Olympics in 2008 in Beijing.
“Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World” is the expansive title of the exhibit, which originated at New York’s
Guggenheim Museum in 2017 and will be on view at SFMOMA through Feb. 24. It includes works by 60 artists and artist groups living in China and abroad.
Alexandra Munroe, the Guggenheim curator who organized the exhibit, says it grew from an “urgent intellectual need” to expand museums’ offerings beyond a Eurocentric perspective. Of course New York’s Metropolitan Museum, as well as SFMOMA and San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, often focus on recent and contemporary Chinese art.
The exhibit contends that the Chinese artists represented, like those from other regions, were caught up in globalization in the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st.
“There was a radical rupture of contemporary art,” said Gary Garrels, SFMOMA’s senior curator of painting and sculpture.
“Theater of the World,” as the exhibit is subtitled, does feel like a contemporary performance with its raw edges and
stimulating atmosphere. It also draws on conceptual art techniques familiar from earlier years.
Much of it is art with an impact. Ai Weiwei, the best-known Chinese artist/activist, is represented by a Han dynasty urn inscribed with a Coca-Cola logo and by three photos of himself dropping another 2,000-year-old Han dynasty urn to the ground, breaking it into pieces.
Less “visual” but more stunning is an Ai installation that first appears to be a simple grid pattern on adjoining gallery walls. On closer inspection, it reveals “Names of the Student Earthquake Victims Found by the Citizens’ Investigation,” listing 5,386 students’ deaths, possibly caused in part by shoddy school construction.
There are paintings here, too. Zhang Peili’s big “‘X?’ Series No. 2” depicts a limp pair of surgical gloves; the exhibit catalog informs us that Zhang was one of 300,000 affected by a hepatitis outbreak in Shanghai and Hangzhou in the 1980s.
Displayed at the beginning of the exhibit is a Western perspective: Time magazine’s cover from June 12, 1989, with the headline “Massacre in Beijing” and a photo of demonstrators and victims in Tiananmen Square.
Nearby is Wang Xingwei’s painting “New Beijing.” Also based on a news photo, it depicts young people rushing the injured away from the demonstration for treatment, but the human victims have been replaced on a makeshift gurney by penguins.
Zhang offers a more subtle approach to the massacre. In a video, he records an anchorwoman from staterun television reading a list of Mandarin dictionary words related to water. She was persuaded to collaborate on Zhang’s piece by a ruse. Her nonsense reading underscores that when she reported on the Tiananmen crisis on actual news broadcasts, she left out any mention of government violence against demonstrators.
The exhibit’s introductory wall text points out that the artists “sought to think beyond China’s political fray and simple EastWest dogmas.” For example, Oakland-based Hung Liu’s painting “Avant-Garde” is based on a photograph of herself during the Cultural Revolution. Photos and videos show artist Song Dong “Stamping the Water” to leave a trace in a flowing river. Xu Tan’s “Made in China” assembles a room full of products including a sofa, a computer keyboard and a jigsaw puzzle with an illustration of the “Mona Lisa.”
The show’s biggest impact is provided by Chen Zhen, who was “inspired,” if that is the word, by a visit to Shanghai in the 1990s. He was stunned by promotions to sell more cars in an already crowded city. The result is an 85-foot-long dragon, made primarily of rubber inner tubes from bicycles, with the dragon’s belly encrusted with tiny cars.
Chen’s dragon, called “Precipitous Parturition,” floats above SFMOMA’s ground-level lobby just inside the entrance from noisy, traffic-clogged Third Street. It’s the perfect perch to welcome visitors — or guard against intruders — from the contemporary city.