Tag Archives: Ullens

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Ladies and Gentlemen, I’d say we have a theme here….

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That’s right, the bang-em up, smash-em up, blow-em up beauties are pervasive. Not a scientific observation, of course, but I believe I’ve seen enough now to say that something tankful is afoot (aground) in China right now. To begin with, this image:

 

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Ullens Art Centre in 798 district and aforementioned article by Evan Osnos (see my previous post), I now realize also with write-up in Economist.  And in my own encounter at 798 the other day, I encountered this sculpture:

Video version is necessary because somehow the barking dog added to the overall menace of the experience.

Following, and not but four hours after I met the dog and its guardian Tank-Child, which is to say as I was settling in to the Hainan Airlines flight back from Beijing to Seattle, I found the following image in the inflight magazine:

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That is Hong Kong artist Amy Cheung’s “Toy Tank,” a life-size death machine made….of wood.

Not much needed to ‘unpack’ these images. China’s militarism is palpable, at least seems so to me when talking even casually with strangers, friends and family alike. Artists respond to such militarism creatively, but in so doing more or less mark the contours of its prevalence. The will to war is evident in ways very unlike those of the United States (not to mention any other country similarly set in its way). Americans go to war, destroy things and people alike in the name of (insert name), and then we do all we can to imagine its not happening. China meanwhile imagines the war to come, ever more splendidly with each iteration. These two positions, I hope, are not actually the collision course they sometimes appear to be.

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Back from China， ON－OFF

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Just back from a few weeks in China where I was well protected from the dangerous platforms such as WordPress and the like. Just checking back in now with Facebook and other friends, and taking note of Evan Osnos recent piece in the New Yorker. Osnos, arguably one of the most persuasive talking heads in the Klayman documentary about Ai Weiwei, is also increasingly one of the most credible voices about contemporary China on a wide array of subjects. Particularly pleased, then, that he’s paying attention to contemporary art.

The context for Osnos’ piece is the new opening at the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art. The exhibition (curated by Bao Dong 鲍栋 and Song Dong 孙冬冬) is a major event in its own right, with 50 commissioned works by 50 artists or artists groups, members all born after the end of the Cultural Revolution. As to the Apple performance discussed in Osnos’ piece, it seems to me a continuation of pervious work done by contemporary Chinese artists, but a continuation of a subject that needs to be continued. I have in mind a couple of pieces by Ai Weiwei, but principally the Tate  sunflower seeds that follows a similar thread, although it does so much more obliquely.  Ai is commenting on labor in China, with hands so cheap he could commission the creation of virtually countless hand-crafted porcelain seeds. (Tate purchased only 8 million of them–there were more). Of course, Ai’s piece is about much more than mere labor, with a very wide metaphorical scope  encompassing China as symbol, but the implications of  contemporary art object as concrete commodity are there.  In this case, though, Li Liao 李燎 goes for broke, exhibiting the mechanics of contemporary global capitalism in China from source to destination. He does so by actually getting a job at FOXCON and making the iPads, etc. himself, then exhibiting them in a place where most of the consumers of art are carrying such devices in their pockets anyway.  As Osnos describes:

I watched two young men separately linger over it for very different reasons: one was a hip Chinese gallerygoer in chunky glasses and a camel-hair coat, taking it all in; the other was a gallery security guard in a borrowed suit and white gloves. He was studying the details of the contract.

This is performance art at its best, and the type that China will need more of to keep the scene fresh in the years to come. As that develops, I for one hope Evan will keep reporting what transpires.