Inapropriate interventions
Carol Lu
Lui Ding, Samples From The Transition, 2005.
The reception of Chinese contemporary art abroad is not unlike that of Chinese food in most foreign countries. It is exotic, tasty, inexpensive, an increasingly fashionable. When exported, the inexhaustible diversity of Chinese food dwindles down to certain foolproof items likes sweet and sour pork, chicken nuggets with chestnuts, fried rice, and to the more sophisticated taste, dim sum. Likewise, contemporary Chinese artworks with strong ideological and social connotation are the mainstay of growing export orders.
Since its onset in late 1970s, Chinese avant-garde art had grown up by resisting a will external to itself: the barrier and repression of the official system. The presence of an overbearing parent– a government that viewed contemporary art as subversive and went about shutting down shows and censoring artists’ work– had driven the rebellious kid to seek compassion and tolerance outside the family. Chinese contemporary art found its sympathizers and sponsors among foreign diplomats in China, Western journalists, curators, museum directors, and collectors, who consider the avant-garde artists and their political, critical and cynical work as the key to understanding the political situation and social climate the world’s fastest rising power. From the early 1990s, the overseas art market and opportunities to exhibit abroad have helped shape the development of contemporary art in China.
Back home, the "wall" has subsequently crumbled since 2000. Besides a dozen commercial galleries, contemporary art is now shown in state-owned museums, and at all sorts of biennials and triennials. China even has pavilion at the Venice biennial. In no time, contemporary Chinese art has become the shop front of China. The parent is no longer ashamed of its rebellious child. Riding on this prevalent optimism, Chinese contemporary art finds itself without an enemy, an external force, or a closed door to work against, for the first time. The new-found confidence and freedom then pose a further challenge: What now?
"Incest," the exhibition running from May 7 to July 4 at Platform China in Beijing, isn’t an immediate answer to this question. But the show does suggest the beginning of a new soul-searching" about the internal demons within the art system: the artist’s proper role, sovereignty, and power, the permanent and classic nature of artwork, and the hit and miss mentality of China’s under-developed contemporary art scene.
The title, "Incest," teasingly expresses the idea behind this exhibition: that each of the nine participating artists must be engaged in altering his/her fellow artists’ work one week into the exhibition. The challenge is for the artist to give up the security of knowing his or her own medium, subject matters, materials and to intervene in–violate, even– someone else’s work. The nature of "Incest," the first exhibition conceptualized, staged and participated in by members of the Beijing-based group Complete Art Experience Project (CAEP), echoes the objective of this independent artist group: "To practice and explore the site-specific, integrative, penetrative, and versatile nature of art through active interdisciplinary exchange and interaction as well as a dynamic program of collective and individual projects."
All the works have been conceived and created specifically almost obsessively in relation to the particular architecture that houses the show, Wang Wei, for example, makes four gigantic pillars that are slightly short of the height of the space and wrapped in soft fluffy fabrics. The subtraction of height and the textile both work to negate the architectural function as well as the symbolic nature of a pillar.
Liu Ding’s 7.5-meter wall is sweet-coated by a layer of translucent angelic pink paint that appears inviting and innocent, but turns out to be sinister and spine-chilling. The barbed-wire on top of the wall has something to with this repulsion too: it cruelly draws the viewer back to reality from the temporary reverie induced by the breathtaking lightness of the pink.
Fast backward to 1990: another artist, Wang Peng built a wall, entirely blocking the way into the art museum where he was about to have his show. It was a gesture symptomatic of the indestructible border between avant-garde and the governmental system, a sentiment prevailing in the art world back then. Liu Ding’s wall in comparison is open-ended in both a physical and mental sense, and reveals a new outlook in the art scene today. Like this exhibition itself, it represents a dynamic and indefinite discussion.
The artists here have produced their work with the knowledge that it won’t stay intact more than one week. An artist might add, subtract, or even wage a war against another, or one might make friends. Some try to incorporate other work into their own by unifying them with a symbol, be it a color, or a mark. After all the alterations made by the others, how much of your own signature can still be seen on your own work? It is exactly this seemingly chaotic and unpredictable manner of mutual engagement that makes this show spontaneous, experimental, and truly intriguing.
