| “Image-Nation: Works by a New Generation of Chinese Artists” is an exhibition reflecting the interests of a younger group of artists that no longer takes as their subject the political content that widely characterized the work of their predecessors of the 80s and early 90s. Political art has, at times recently, become a parody of itself and no longer holds the significance or impact that work from the 80s and early 90s did. Collectors are becoming more discerning and less easily swayed by images of pandas, Mao or the color red. Seasoned auction-goers are becoming more selective when it comes to political art post-1997. |  |
Image Nation – Magnus Renfrew
“Image-Nation: Works by a New Generation of Chinese Artists” is an exhibition reflecting the interests of a younger group of artists that no longer takes as their subject the political content that widely characterized the work of their predecessors of the 80s and early 90s. Political art has, at times recently, become a parody of itself and no longer holds the significance or impact that work from the 80s and early 90s did. Collectors are becoming more discerning and less easily swayed by images of pandas, Mao or the color red. Seasoned auction-goers are becoming more selective when it comes to political art post-1997. The artists in the present exhibition were too young to directly feel the impact of Tiananmen Square, and are rather affected by new commercial and cultural openness, rapid urbanization, the transformation of cities, incessant bombardments of consumer culture and the influence of mass media. “Image Nation” takes as its starting point three different categories: cars, cartoons and daily life and, through each of these subjects, the artists provide the viewer with an independent insight into life in China today.
Cars
With their associations with speed, glamour and danger, the car is rapidly becoming the ultimate consumer status symbol in China. It is estimated that the number of cars in the country will rise to 140 million by 2020, according to reports in the state media. As a result of more cars on the roads than ever before, traffic congestion and pollution have become an everyday occurrence in major cities in China. It comes as no surprise that cars have become a topic of interest for artists. Their impact can be felt in many aspects of modern life, evoking aspirations, frustration and nostalgia in equal measure, and their proliferation has become a potent symbol of the pace of change—an experience that is universal.
Zhao Guanghui’s cars are biomorphic mutations that look like they have emerged from the primordial stew and have crept onto land for the first time. They are curious creatures, familiar yet alien, and it remains unclear whether they are a malevolent or benign force.
The Chao brothers present a different take on the automobile. Rather than focusing on the glamour or the set of aspirations that the modern luxury car inspires, they take as their subject decrepit old trucks, the “work-horses” that have helped to build China. Their treatment of the subject suggests an esteem and affection for these machines that reflects the contrasts that characterize China today: urban versus rural, affluence versus poverty, traditional versus ultra-modern. The models have an element of preservation about them. They seem like historical representations or archaeological models in a museum reconstruction, and remind us that with the speed and scale of change in China, recent history is ancient history.
Liang Binbin’s deluxe depiction of a crashed sports car shows the influence of Warhol and his “Saturday Disasters” series. With the constant barrage of car chases and crashes in films and on television, the car crash is glamorized to such a degree that it becomes a source of fascination. In Liang Binbin’s presentation in highly finished fiberglass, it becomes a consumer item in its own right as the danger of speed is integral to its glamour.
Chen Yun’s playful image Caterpillar Car depicts the imaginary evolution of caterpillars transforming into cars whilst the caterpillars’ natural habitat of the bamboo branch becomes the road on which these vehicles drive. Whereas caterpillars have climbed the evolutionary ladder here, humans have gone down it, and the individuality of the figures is subdued by the repetition of the insect-like depictions of the drivers and their passengers. Although it has elements of humor, the work also has darker undertones. The modern environment turns from bamboo forests into a concrete jungle, and the caterpillar metamorphoses not into a liberated butterfly but into a machine harnessed by man.
Like an entomologist collecting insect specimens, Chen Yunquan collects cars through photographing them and presents large format digital prints of the collated images. As if viewing a display in a natural history museum, one can examine the similarities and differences between the different models and makes. When standing back and viewing the enormous prints, it becomes somewhat overwhelming and difficult to make sense of the thousands of images presented. The experience echoes city life with an urban environment that is so populous and the cars so numerous that any attempt to take it all in leaves your head spinning. As the viewer’s eyes begin to disengage from all that detail, he or she might also notice three insects crawling over the surface of the image, making him or her question whether he or she is hallucinating, and reinforcing the idea of a pace of development that is beyond human control.
Cartoons
The exhibition presents many artists among the first generation brought up on a staple diet of cartoons and animation imported from Japan and the West. They have assimilated elements of both into their work. As well as coming to symbolize modernity, cartoon aesthetics enable a free-flow of the imagination, not tied down to specifics of time and place and without the grounding constraints of reality. It provides a vehicle for escapism, pastiche, commentary on consumer society and heroic myth and nostalgia and a gentle mask for serious statement.
Chen Yun’s digitally produced imagery shows the influence of computer animation. In her work Imaginary Reality, she creates her own world as a means of escapism, much as her artistic predecessors did in their ink and brush landscape paintings of previous centuries. In the imagination, and in Chen Yun’s work, the usual laws of nature do not apply and jellyfish and lovesick cows live side-by-side, floating in the air. The seductive colours and idealised landscape are set off-balance by ambiguous images and characters. As with many fantasies, Chen Yun’s work walks the narrow path between dream and nightmare.
Yin Yanhua’s work Study Hard uses a meticulously enlarged stamp of his fingerprint as the body of his figure. With other works in the series, he then paints arms and legs and puts them in different poses and guises suggesting different identities. Yin Yanhua has said that it is very difficult for young people to understand how they fit into society in contemporary China. Deciding on a career can be difficult. Whereas in the past, these decisions were made for individuals, the increased freedom in choosing one’s career combined with a real shortage of graduate jobs causes great anxiety. According to media reports, 5 million graduates will be looking for work upon graduation this year alone. In ‘River Crossing’, Yin Yanhua presents the fingerprint character as an isolated figure on a lonely journey. The snow-filled setting is somewhat surreal with a lightbulb hanging down from a bough, combining a traditional landscape with the visual treatment of animation. The fingerprint is perhaps a literal as well as symbolic identity and conveys a sense of the artist’s own feelings of isolation. Although the works adopt a cartoon aesthetic, their intention is more than whimsical.
Xia Hang has developed a character that his friends have named A Lu. A Lu is a recurring subject in Xia’s work, which develops different guises for the character in much the same way as a merchandised toy derived from a popular animation or cartoon, although often on a much larger scale. The present work is designed to be interactive with an array of complex and detachable elements. Through developing a merchandised toy devoid of a popular animated origin, and with a name given to the work by its audience and not its creator, he reveals something of the way that the structures associated with such merchandise operate (Baudrillard fans would call this a “simulacrum”).
He Jia’s work revels in this mixing of motifs from cartoons and their use in advertising. Reflecting the influence of Jeff Koons’s paintings such as the ‘Easyfun Ethereal’ series, and with perhaps a nod to Kenny Scharf, they again present all the fun of the fair without any discernable underlying message. Like Xia Hang’s work, they reflect the fact that in modern Chinese consumer culture, presentation and branding is everything.
Ren Zhe takes as his subject the ancient warriors of China. They become idealised figures from mythology; heroes whose physiques are exaggerated and which reflect the influence of hero imagery from modern cartoons. He further blends the ancient and the contemporary by casting these modern interpretations in bronze, the most traditional of Chinese media.
Wang Mian is too young to remember the television series “Monkey” which was exported to the West and which popularised the classic Chinese novel “Journey to the West” in the late 70s and early 80s. The book is a cornerstone of Chinese literary culture and is etched on the popular consciousness. His treatment of this subject is highly personal and reflects his own interpretation of the novel, and his sometimes-controversial view of the characters. They are developed from the artist’s imagination, merging the traditional conventional representations with a futuristic and fantasy aesthetic, derived from animation. The characters take a literal journey to the west, hopping over the New York skyline, a juxtaposition that perhaps again alludes to the contemporary transformation of China and the struggle to retain traditions and a national cultural identity in the modern world.
Daily Life
Understandably with such a rapid pace of change there are many aspects of daily life that provide inspiration and subject matter for today’s young artists. The mass urbanisation, and the contrasts between the glamour of consumerism and daily reality provide fertile ground for examination. In other ways, the subversion of scale and the scrutiny of the often overlooked can make us view the world in a new light.
Wang Zi takes photographs of everyday scenes and city life, sometimes humorous, such as the photograph of the gentleman taking exercise at the outdoor gym; a sight which can be seen in many of the cities in China and which look somewhat incongruously to Western eyes like adult playgrounds. In another photograph, we see the dramatic juxtaposition of a fruit shop immediately neighbouring a building site, where run-down lane houses are being demolished to make way for new high-rise buildings. Such a dramatic juxtaposition reminds the viewer of the human impact of such developments and the resilience of everyday people able to eek out an existence like a seedling that improbably flourishes on the most inhospitable of cliff-faces.
Yin Yanhua’s painting, Pink Sofa, takes the domestic interior as its subject and transforms it into a sensual place. The artist creates a calm and serene environment with an almost womb-like security. The sofa becomes emblematic of a modern-day haven, a source of comfort, and a chance to have one’s own personal space.
Guo Peng appropriates photographs from postcards and magazines or images from television; photographing them with a traditional camera and black and white film. He alters these images by scoring the surface with curved lines and hand-tinting them with different coloured inks to create an abstract surface pattern. The effect is odd to the eyes of the ‘Photoshop’ generation, and the hands-on involvement in developing, altering and intervening in these photographs by the artist is highly personal and expressive.
Whereas He Jia revels in popular culture and Chen Yun escapes the day to day through her imagination, He Jiandan focuses on the mundane realities of everyday life. He chooses subjects that are not heroic and far from glamorous, depicting a box of rubbish or a static toilet. The subdued tones and choice of subject convey a sense of pathos, isolation and resignation – a far cry from the upbeat nature of consumer imagery.
Click On Pu’er by Zhang Hua shows the merging of modern and traditional China. A nation once known for its tea is now equally known for its high-tech manufacturing industry. The personal computer created from this most expensive and sought after of teas makes it a doubly desirable consumer object.
With Chair 4, Xue Tao is reacting in his own way to the bombardment of information that young Chinese people face everyday. His technique is to use tightly twisted sheets of newspaper, which are woven through a wire mesh to form functional and non-functional objects. In conversation he has mentioned that he likes the fact that each of his works contains a huge amount of information. In a sense, it is a three-dimensional archive. If you were to unravel the contents of Xue Tao’s chair in 100 years time, you would get an interesting insight into what life was like in China today.
The work of Jiao Xingtao takes everyday items, such as a plastic carrier bag, and elevates them to works of art through reproducing them on an oversized scale in fiberglass or bronze – using a pop aesthetic under the influence of American Pop artists such as Claes Oldenburg. His Mao wrapped in a ‘Doublemint’ chewing gum wrapper can perhaps be seen as something of a comment on the influence of Western consumer tastes in the East. With the heated state of the auction market for Chinese contemporary art, Mao Zedong repackaged as a Western exported brand has something of an irony about it – and one that would not be lost on a number of Chinese artists.
With a similar strategy, Liu Danhua’s oversized ‘Pins’ invade our space and this play with scale makes the viewing experience a little unbalancing. These everyday, functional items are transformed into beautiful sculptural objects and when installed in a gallery space, make a surprising impact. They are at once seductive and dangerous, and their familiarity is part of their allure.
Liu Lifen and Zhao Guanghui’s nest dwellings are presented as newly discovered natural phenomena. The designed interior of these living spaces is at odds with the materials used. The human nest dwelling as a natural phenomenon in the natural environment is an alien concept. This reaction reflects how detached humans have become from their natural environment. We are now more used to human dwellings in a human context where our surroundings are developed and nature is pushed out of our lives. The mock reporting of the discovery of these nests as intriguing and mysterious objects mirrors our own response, and heightens this sense of our isolation from nature.
Yang Bo’s work uses the everyday experience of video games to provide a platform to let his imagination run riot. Here he creates battles where soldiers shoot octopi and tanks chase skeletons around the Forbidden City in a Pac-Man-like grid. Using the motif of the video game, the artist blurs the distinction between real and imagined violence, and brings interesting power dynamics into play: are we doing the controlling or are we the subjects being controlled?
The aim of the exhibition is to show that although the main collecting base for young Chinese artists for the short term remains in the West, artists are no longer merely pandering (no pun intended) to a Western preconception of China or cynically producing ‘political pop’ for the export market (although this clearly persists). There are artists who are exploring their own cultural identity, engaging with popular culture, reflecting the contemporary experience of daily life in China, and concerning themselves with issues and influences that directly affect them – an engagement which brings about an art with an independence of outlook and one which will in time bring them a domestic as well as international audience.
