| The title of this exhibit organized by the British Council and the Capital Museum should be, “Cultural Détente in an Age of Delicate Official Cross Cultural Exchange.” To be fair, the show’s organizers were caught between a rock and a hard place—offending official sensibility would have resulted in no show at all, so the result is an oddly tame exhibit of these typically provocative artists’ work, at least by Western standards. The subject of “Aftershock” is a focus on the controversial social and cultural changes during the late 80s and 90s explored by the YBA’s or Young British Artists, yet none of the controversial works that scandalized the art world are on view. Instead, other more “respectable” works by the 12 selected artists are shown. |  |
Aftershock – Ellen Pearlman
The title of this exhibit organized by the British Council and the Capital Museum should be, “Cultural Détente in an Age of Delicate Official Cross Cultural Exchange.” To be fair, the show’s organizers were caught between a rock and a hard place—offending official sensibility would have resulted in no show at all, so the result is an oddly tame exhibit of these typically provocative artists’ work, at least by Western standards. The subject of “Aftershock” is a focus on the controversial social and cultural changes during the late 80s and 90s explored by the YBA’s or Young British Artists, yet none of the controversial works that scandalized the art world are on view. Instead, other more “respectable” works by the 12 selected artists are shown.
“From the outset, we thought it was important to work with someone who understood the context of the contemporary art scene here,” Richard Riley of the British Council said. The three curators: Pi Li and Colin Chinnery from Beijing and Guo Xiaoyan from Guanzhou, all highly cognizant of the Chinese, British and international art scenes, were invited to London. They felt it was important to put on a show of artists of this generation that came to prominence in the UK during the 90s because of these artists’ influence on the contemporary art scene in China. The selected artists’, known well by the Chinese artistic community, had never shown in the mainland before.
“Do you think they [the curators] were worried about any provocative material being filtered out?” I asked Riley.
“They understand the context here and what can be shown in a public museum. They advised what was appropriate. It is the same all over the world. No matter where you are showing, such as an Islamic country, you have to have the same sensitivity.”
While there are black and white etchings by the Chapman Brothers as well as their sculpture of the physicist Steven Hawkings sitting in his wheelchair with a laptop and on top of mountain, their mannequins of children with sex organs in odd and disturbing locations are nowhere to be found. Similarly, Tracy Emin’s work is represented by an appliqué armchair and a very properly made bed rather than her wildly controversial, mussed-up dirty underwear and condom-strewn mattress or her tent with tacked epithets inside its walls regarding all the men she has slept with. Douglas Gordon has very touching photos of his infant daughter sucking her toes and a black and white video of a man with some kind of disability falling down, both in forward and reverse motion. Mark Quinn’s bust of his face made entirely from his frozen blood and displayed in a specially designed refrigerated glass case is nowhere, however. Rabble rouser Damien Hirst’s work, is the most dampened down of all. There are two round, pink and blue circles, some paintings with butterflies and a simple glass-enclosed, ersatz office with a steel table, chair, cigarettes, lighter and ashtray installation, titled The Acquired Inability to Escape, instead of his dead cow, sliced diagonally into a number of sections, preserved in formaldehyde and hermitically sealed inside of a glass frame. Sex, death, sleepwalking and a sense of dissolution, all recurrent themes in the work of these artists, are muted and shrink-wrapped to make this exhibit more user friendly
