An Interior Scene at the Guangzhou Triennial
Pauline Doutreluingne
Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru curated the second Guangzhou Triennial. The concept was conceived with the intentions to break away from the conventional form of a Triennial by not limiting it to a flat presentation that lasts a few months, with the fair’s opening acting as the peak of the event. The title of this event is "Beyond: An Extraordinary Space of Experimentation for Modernization." They created an interdisciplinary art laboratory spread over two years (2004-2006), called Delta Lab, or D-LAB, referring to the geographical area of the Pearl River delta, a zone covering Guangzhou, Macau and Hong Kong. By organizing workshops on a regular basis and inviting international and national cultural players, they offered a captivating platform bridging art, architecture, urban study and cultural activism in order to investigate the potential of contemporary art in a specific context.
The actual presentation of the Triennial started on November 18th, 2005, featuring music performances, conferences and performances such as those by intriguing artist Wu Ershan.
Wu Ershan is a multimedia artist, originally from Huhehaote, the capital of Inner Mongolia. At the end of the 80s, he moved to Beijing to study oil painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. After he explored the plastic arts, his interest changed towards moving images, so he engaged directing at the Beijing Film Academy.
Wu Ershan told me in an interview that one of the main reasons why he has been using installations and performance as his mediums of late, is the lack of reliable projection equipment in China. You can quickly set up a video exhibition, but frequently the money to rent good projectors is simply unavailable. At large exhibitions such as biennials and triennials, this problem doesn’t occur. If you can’t use a good projector, then the visual impact the video artist aims to realize in his work can simply not be attained. The language of video art is, after all, not an easy one and requires a suitable setting and technical support of quite a high standard in order to get the message across.
The first of his works I had the chance to see was a large installation called The New Land, which was on display in the entrance hall of the Shanghai Art Museum at the 2004 Shanghai Biennial. Its orchestration of multimedia, performance and installation created a fantastic vision of the new continents.
For the second Guangzhou Triennial, Wu once again created an extremely captivating mixture of performance and installation. The title of this work is Interior Scene and is comprised of a concrete room with very simple furniture such as an iron bed and a night lamp. The room is cut across by another bright red coloured space. The space radiates a pleasant environment; in it you can successively see an old man lying asleep, a scuba diver swimming or a few charming ladies in red bathing suits having a rest. The bright red color of the space reminds me of the interior of one of the numerous karaoke bars in this country.
Wu is interested in people, how people behave in contemporary society and how they did in traditional society. As an artist he does not consider it his task to analyse or criticize the political world and the socio-economic currents. He generally finds it disillusioning if artists try to achieve such a goal because artists are not economists, sociologists or politicians and they generally know too little about such matters, says Wu Ershan.
At the Triennial, there were a lot of art works that brought the social problems of contemporary China into scope, like immigrant workers and prostitutes in the giant cities. Wu got a bit disappointed by these works–they are images that you get to see constantly at nearly every exhibition in China, they almost seem to be done by one single artist and sure, these problems are real, but we can’t change this situation by showing them time after time.
