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Curated by Zhu Qi, one of China’s premier critic/curators, the multimedia “Beyond Empire” exhibition at Arario Beijing promises to be a holistic highpoint in 2006, with over 30 prominent and emerging Chinese artists. The show revolves around questions of the changing nature of the "New China" as cities are torn down and rebuilt almost overnight and social identities are thrown into flux, the nouveau riche strut their vice in public like ostentatious peacocks and urban youth, in a move so vacant, hit the streets in search of anything that can arouse them from boredom and emptiness. No one wants to talk about idealism, spiritual things or the fate of the soul. |
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Beyond Experience: The New China – Luna Fenichel
Curated by Zhu Qi, one of China’s premier critic/curators, the multimedia “Beyond Empire” exhibition at Arario Beijing promises to be a holistic highpoint in 2006, with over 30 prominent and emerging Chinese artists. The show revolves around questions of the changing nature of the "New China" as cities are torn down and rebuilt almost overnight and social identities are thrown into flux, the nouveau riche strut their vice in public like ostentatious peacocks and urban youth, in a move so vacant, hit the streets in search of anything that can arouse them from boredom and emptiness. No one wants to talk about idealism, spiritual things or the fate of the soul. It is “money, honey,” that makes the world go round—material disgust or unadulterated lust alike. A few of the highlights from the exhibition approach these questions from a variety of directions.
Chen Qingqing’s installation, The Big Happy Camp, captures the multivalent themes of this exhibition in a microcosm. Her work appears colorful and lively on the surface, but sobering insights lurk beneath her whimsical surfaces. In her characteristic expressive language, Qingqing spins symbolic constellations of imagery—a dinosaur hunches down over a fiberglass phallus sprouting purple feathers as if in devious consultation, dismembered arms of plastic dollies reach, grasping from a computer keyboard on which there are no letters, hybrid creatures try to worm their way into the labyrinth of pipes threading their way through the cabinet and a pig steers the cannon of his tank in search of action.
Among the numerous works on canvas, painting by promising newcomer Li Jikai, whose images of a disaffected child, involving scenes of going to the bathroom, vomiting and self-mutilation, are rendered endearing, even cute.
The gifted Guanzhou prodigy Cao Fei—whose Cosplayers captivates with the contrast between the role-playing fantasy identities of young Chinese "costume players" and their everyday roles in family life—shows her recent work, a performance captured on video. Chronicles of the Pearl River Delta’s Alternative Heroes is a cabaret-style take on the unsung, and perhaps unwashed, local heroes of hardscrabble everyday life who’ve fallen through the cracks in the New China, and, hence, have resorted to making their own "alternative order" of things.
Photography highlights include new works by aesthetic master Hong Lei, who uses his characteristic appropriation of classical forms to render contemporary subjects, such as the Three Gorges Dam, which has caused as much massive displacement and disruption of human lives as it has earned national glory for its engineering prowess.
A trio of works from Han Bing’s “Everyday Precious” series bring the paradoxes of China’s modernization into sharp relief. In this trio of photographs, he uses bricks as an instrument of subtle social criticism. Bricks, which were everyday symbols of modernity in the 80s, now signify backwardness to urban society in China. In the cities since the late 90s, brick structures have been razed en mass to make way for glass, steel and concrete high-rises, yet, ironically, most of rural China has just begun to scrape together the resources to move from gray brick homes of mud, straw and stone into red brick houses that they often built by hand. In Superfluous Remnants of An Already Backward Modernity: Everyday Precious, No. 2, the rural migrant workers who spent the frigid winter in Beijing demolishing brick buildings—without gloves or warm coats and, eventually, without pay—so their families back home could afford to build with bricks—the refuse of urban development—know this irony all too well.
The opening ceremony of the exhibition features Love in the Age of Big Construction III, a multimedia performance installation by Han Bing, investigating the human costs of China’s frantic rush toward urban modernity. Male migrant workers, in their hardhats and underwear, curl in sleep around heaps of bricks. A young woman (does the eternal feminine strike yet again?) clad in a diaphanous nightgown does the same. Everyone seems to be dreaming the same halcyon dreams; those of home, material comforts, a space of one’s own, a glorious future and a mighty, wealthy nation. Dreams that are also mostly out of reach since the gap between rich and poor expands with a vengeance. A swarm of iridescent bubbles undulate as they ride the currents of the air, only to shimmer and burst. The artist, who can best be described as pan-gendered (not sexless and androgynous, but hyper-trans-sexy in a way that exudes a heady mix of gender trouble), "sleeps with," strokes, kisses and caresses the massive steel clawed arm of a backhoe—a machine of modern construction and demolition—on a bed made of concrete and steel girders that create the semblance of the bare frame of a house. In the background flicker video images of construction, destruction and human toil from the artist’s video Age of Big Construction. Playing upon the interplay of opposites, he uses the warm softness of his flesh to seduce and tame the hardness of cold, man-made steel, and life-affirming Eros to ameliorate the impersonal violence of China’s modernization.
