‘‘New Networks: Contemporary Chinese Art’’
Dunedin Public Art Gallery
A lifesize deflated leather tank, a long photographic tableau of staged vignettes, text lifted from paperback romances scrawled on the wall, a pile of handmade porcelain sunflower seeds, exquisite porcelain vessels, paintings, a mockreplica supermarket; these are some of the artworks included in ‘‘New Networks: Contemporary Chinese Art’’. ‘‘New Networks’’ is a diverse exhibition of contemporary art from mainland China that covers a 40year period from the 1970s to the present day. The exhibition is not, however, a historical survey, but a selection of artworks sourced from public and private art institutions in Australasia. In some respects, therefore, curators Lucy Hammond and Lauren Gutsell have made their selection of artworks from a series of prior selections, which is itself an interesting curatorial premise. As with most largescale curated exhibitions, it is always interesting to consider why these particular works (and not others) were chosen. Undoubtedly the curatorial intention was to showcase the range of contemporary art practices Chinese artists are pursuing in the decades following the Cultural Revolution. Chinese art is ‘‘hot’’ and China’s contemporary art market (and the audience for Chinese art internationally) is thriving, as even a cursory flick through the pages of
Art Forum reveals.
‘‘New Networks’’ can be situated amid the hype surrounding contemporary Chinese art, and therefore in the interconnected forces of capitalism, neoliberal globalised trade and China’s rapid industrialisation that generated the very conditions for the commodification of Chinese art. Many of the artworks in ‘‘New Networks’’ comment on or critique the impact of China’s rapid transition to global superpower. Yang Fudong’s photographic work The Coloured Sky: New Women II (2014) captures a sense of the new wealth and opulence accessible to China’s entrepreneurial elite. A young woman in a short blue jumpsuit faces the viewer somewhat tentatively as an exoticlooking snake with yellow markings coils around her neck. One reading of Fudong’s work suggests
that new opportunities and wealth (for women in this instance) do not necessarily release women from societal strictures. In a similar vein, Xu Zhen’s ShangART
Supermarket (Australia), with its empty bottles and boxes of foodstuffs, signals, as art reviewer James Dignan noted in his January 17 review of Zhen’s work, the vacuity of consumer excesses.
Of course, each rise of entrepreneurial individuals depends on the labour of multitudes. Ai Weiwei’s wellknown work
Sunflower Seeds (2010) and Xe Xiangyu’s Tank Project (20112013) embody the inequities of labour in the very making of each work. Weiwei outsourced the making of one hundred million porcelain sunflower seeds (only a fraction exhibited here) to 1600 potters, while Xiangyu’s leather tank was made by 35 leather workers. Xiangyu’s tank is perhaps the most political work, as it recalls the showdown between ‘‘Tank Man’’ and a military tank in the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.