BOLD EXHIBIT
Works by 10 young talents suggest they are first and foremost citizens of the world
Group show ‘We Chat’ reflects what constitutes contemporary Chinese art.
WHAT, exactly, is “contemporary Chinese” art?
This is one of the big questions of an exhibition at Asia Society Texas Center featuring painting, photography, video, sculpture, multi-media installations and conceptual art by 10 “it” Chinese talents younger than 40.
Born after dictator Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, these artists were still children in 1989, when the Tiananmen Square massacre took place. They grew up without siblings under China’s one-child policy but are far less repressed than their elders were. They are fluent in English, more liberal about work and relationships (uninhibited, even) — and way more connected to the rest of the world.
The show’s title —“We Chat: A Dialogue in Contemporary Chinese Art” — is borrowed and tweaked from the name of a popular messaging app, WeChat, that has 600 million users.
Artists can’t escape the influence of their surroundings, but a few in this fiercely independent group seem hell-bent on presenting themselves as global citizens first, Chinese second.
For instance, the fearless new media artist Lu Yang, who is from Shanghai, doesn’t like being labeled Chinese.
“I say that I want to live on the Internet,” she says in the show’s catalog. “People online only care about your work and whether it’s any good … you can abandon your identity, nationality, gender, even your existence as a human being. I rather like this feeling.”
Informed by her explorations of neuroscience, mortality and religion, her animated videos may be the freakiest, most exhilarating things you’ll see this summer. Her “Delusional Mandala” is like an evisceration, a wow-weird music video with genderless bodies that morph into, um, dancing intestines that careen around the screen to a techno beat. It’s breathtaking.
Photographs by Pixy Yijun Liao (a Shanghai native who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.) and videos by Beijing’s Ma Quisha may look like “Chinese art” because the people in them are Chinese, but the situations they convey aren’t specific to any country.
Liao’s “Experimental Relationship” series consists of formal self-portraits with a male partner, in an intimate setting, in which she reverses stereotypical gender roles.
In Quisha’s “Rainbow” video, ice skaters slowly squish a field of tomatoes that splash onto their white tights. In the confessional video “From No. 4 Pingyuanli to No. 4 Tianqiaobeili,” the artist recounts the misery of being forced to go to art classes as a youngster, then gingerly removes a razor blade from her mouth.
Guo Xi explores what it means to be an artist living in China with “There never should have been an artist named Jia Siwen,”
‘We Chat: A Dialogue in Contemporary Chinese Art’
When: 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 10 a.m.6 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays, through July 3 Where: Asia Society Texas Center, 1370 Southmore Tickets: $5; 713-496-9901, asiasociety.org/texas an amusing installation of small drawings, prints and paintings that imagine a fictitious collaborator whose work gets “lost” in transit to the U.S.
All this internally focused work gets millennial artists labeled the “Me Generation” by critics in China. But the current generation is not oblivious to the impacts of globalization and rapid urbanization on their country.
Paintings from Sun Xun’s lush-lined “The Time Vivarium” series employ creatures metaphorically to comment on China’s air pollution and government surveillance: An iconic tiger wears a gas mask; a camera appears as a monster.
Photographer and filmmaker Bo Wang’s “Heteroscapes” series was inspired by something Western — Michel Foucault’s writings on heterotopias — but it opens a window into the surreal transformations taking place in Wang’s hometown of Chongqing, where massive new developments butt up against relics of the past.
Along with Lu Pan, Wang also provides a glimpse of the gargantuan Art Basel Hong Kong fair in the 36-minute video “The Exhibition.” They could have done the same thing at Art Basel Miami or the original Art Basel in Switzerland, but it does convey the commercialization of Chinese art on a global scale.
The “We Chat” show also allows beauty and poetics into the conversation.
Liu Chuang’s “Love Story” installation, an eight-year conceptual project, is appealing humanity. It involves a table full of romance novels the artist collected from a streetside library in Shenzhen. Many of the books had been read by migrant workers who scribbled personal notes in the margins. Chuang translated the notes into English, and he’s filled three walls with them.
One could also get lost in Shi Zhiying’s meditative canvases, which are often inspired by ancient artifacts in Chinese museums and rendered in a monochromatic style influenced by Buddhism, traditional ink painting and German contemporary master Anselm Kiefer. “Dong Ujimqin Qi Stone Iron Mesosiderite” depicts a 195-pound meteorite that landed in China in 1995.
And there’s a lovely surprise in the back room of the Asia Society Texas Center: Jin Shan’s “No Man City” installation features a large white sculpture where futuristic, utopian rooms grow out of a jagged landscape. The structure is an homage to Shan’s father, who made backdrops for Chinese operas. An LED projector casts shadows around the room, so it seems as if a crane is flying by or the sun is rising.
Contemporary Chinese art can, obviously, be a lot of highly engaging things. The edgy stuff fascinates, reflecting the crazy complexities of our era. But to these Western eyes, work such as “No Man City” feels authentic and timeless. That’s the piece I’d still want to be with 100 years from now.