Jin Shan, "I Am 27 Years Old" / 1918 art space, Shanghai, China
William Hempel
Jin Shan’s exhibition at the 1918 Art Space is called " I Am 27 Years Old." Jin Shan was 27 when he completed the series, and there is one picture for every year of his life. The work is about China and Chinese people, but it is also about people in general, and the way they think. A series of 28 C-prints are presented, 90×60 cms in size. Each image was found and selected by the artist from the YuYuan Book Market in Shanghai’s Old Town. The original images are anonymous, and each image depicts a significant image from recent Chinese history. Jin then adds his own image to the photos, manipulating the information. He describes each picture as an "imagined childhood memory."
The original photographs are black and white, while Jin’s superimposed image is in color, bringing to the surface ideas about context and contradiction in public and private space. The images are not really "beautiful." The C-prints themselves, while well printed, show little concern to integrate different collage elements.
In the piece 2003: why not chose me?, Jin uses humor and speaks for a generation of young Chinese kids who will aspire to become astronauts after China’s recent space mission. The picture combines elements of spacemen, spacecraft, a view of earth from space, and the artist sitting and pouting, complete with leather jacket and goggles.
Most of the pictures come off as goofy, almost juvenile, until the idea comes fully into focus. Jin uses current methods of appropriation and sampling to comment on history, media, sociology and art itself. This combination of humor, high-concept and minimal craft, although not new, does, in this case, feel exciting, alive and refreshing, a rarity in new Chinese art.
The pictures serve as a reevaluation of history. By selecting and choosing these particular images and events, Jin reinforces their importance. Images from events that are engrained in the mind of Chinese people old enough to remember them. Subjects include, among others, the Three Gorges Dam, public executions, space flight, financial crises, boomtowns, and poverty alleviation programs. At the same time, he trivializes the events with humor and by using them as a background on which to show a self-portrait, as if to say, "My experience was more important than this experience."
Jin’s addition to these images is ultimately one of comic relief. Jin never takes himself seriously in these imagined childhood memories. He uses himself as an object of humor and ridicule, thus alleviating otherwise grim and dry subjects. He shows himself in costumes, dressed up like a girl, and in overly dramatic poses. Take, for example, the picture I pout more than you do, in which a crowd reacts to the news of the Asian financial crisis of the 90s. The people look horrified, in pain, shocked as they watch the events unfold. Jin places his picture in the crowd, making exaggerated faces.
The most attractive element of the pictures is the concept. Jin believes that Chinese peoples’ lives are dominated and influenced by the public sphere. This is the main theme of the work. He wants to talk about what he calls "the collective historical memory" and "reappropriating the public space." By that, it must be taken that he is talking about the mental public space in the information age. Jin’s work follows the ideas that personal memory contains the "collective memory," which records our shared ideas and experiences, both primal and learned. This space can be distorted and manipulated.
The choice of manipulated photography seems quite appropriate for this kind of message, both natural and clever. Manipulated photography is one of the main tools used to distort the memory as related to the senses, both intentional and otherwise. Photography and collage let this artist skip the debate over the westernization of Chinese art mediums (think of the sudden switch to oils.) The photograph is used in many fields by different countries and cultures. The camera has been globalized and has been an instrument of globalization since its incarnation.
