Tino Sehgal is a pretty big deal. And undoubtedly, 2013 has been his best year yet. In June, he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale – for an artist, this is comparable to an Oscar or an Olympic gold medal. Earlier in the spring, he was one of four artists shortlisted for Tate Britain’s prestigious Turner Prize. At 37 years old, he’s amassed an impressive resume of institutions where he’s exhibited, including a solo show in New York’s Guggenheim Museum in which the main spiral of the building’s interior was emptied out for one of his tightly choreographed “constructed situations.” You know where else he’s been exhibited?

The Ullens Center of Contemporary Art in 798 Art District, Beijing. That’s where his current exhibition, which opened on September 27, will remain until November 17.

UCCA is understandably thrilled to provide space for Sehgal’s “largest and most comprehensive” exhibition in Asia thus far. Whether or not you know (or care) what the Golden Lion is, this is not an exhibition to be missed.

Seghal’s work is categorized by many as performance art, self-described as “constructed situations” in which “interpreters” interact with each other, the environment, and the gallery-goers. If you’re not sure what that means, don’t let it intimidate you; your engagement with Seghal’s work will not involve decoding a text full of art terminology on a gallery wall. Experiencing his constructed situations requires only that you look, listen, and respond in whatever way you choose.

Performance art is nothing new, but there are several reasons why Sehgal’s way of working is noteworthy. Because performance is ephemeral, most artists incorporate documentation into their processes in one way or another. The mediated version becomes the primary delivery method of many performance works. Sehgal, on the other hand, completely rejects documentation. It should be noted that he studied dance and worked as a choreographer before beginning his art career. Photos and video are not permitted in his exhibitions, and there is never an exhibition catalogue. If you Google image search “Tino Sehgal,” you’ll find plenty of pictures of him, but none of his artworks. (I actually recommend doing this if you’re interested in seeing a goofy picture of him with his Golden Lion award.) (Ed’s note: here.)

In 2008, New York’s Museum of Modern Art famously purchased one of Sehgal’s earlier and best-known works, Kiss, for a five-figure amount — all without written or photographic documentation. Sale agreements with Sehgal are entirely oral and strictly dictated by the artist. The gall of a young artist demanding this from buyers like the MOMA was sensational and no doubt contributed to interest in Sehgal’s work. (Kiss involves two interpreters who kiss and touch, recalling historically significant works of art employing kissing couples as subjects — Rodin, Klimt, and Brancusi, among others.)

Prior to seeing the UCCA exhibition, I’d only seen one work by the artist, This is Propaganda, at the New Museum in New York City. In that one, an interpreter sang, “This is propaganda. You know… you know.” It was followed by a spoken signature, “Tino Sehgal,” and the year. This repeated every time a new person walked into the gallery. I thought it was hilarious and brilliant. The lyrics and delivery, very particularly directed by Sehgal and staff, was somehow perfectly on point. The repetition, routine, and combination of singing and talking lent it a religiosity. This is Propaganda was part of a large group show, but post-museum conversation that day tellingly centered on that work.

The pieces at UCCA are far more complex and elaborately choreographed than Kiss or This is Propaganda. The bulk of the currently used gallery space is devoted to Sehgal’s This Progress, which is the same work that took place in the Guggenheim in 2010. At the opening reception last Thursday, I found myself standing in a line outside the gallery, not knowing why. Sehgal was reportedly unhappy about the queue, but I understood why it was necessary, as there are precise timing requirements for this piece. Moving through the work involves talking about progress, first with a child, and then a sequence of interpreters of increasing age. I was aware of our leisurely but purposeful pace along the designated path through the gallery as one interpreter handed me off to the next.

The conversations were relaxed and enjoyable. The piece is choreographed but not scripted, and the interpreters’ engagement feels genuine. My final conversation included a little bit of Peking opera sung by an elderly woman who has been an enthusiast for years. Admittedly, the UCCA can’t provide nearly as thrilling a space as the iconic spiral of the Guggenheim, but located in the capital city of a rapidly changing country, it’s an interesting venue for other reasons. All of the interpreters in this piece are Chinese, and their ascending ages offer an opportunity to consider the vast generation gaps that exist here amid a state of constant transformation.

This Variation is the other Sehgal work at UCCA. The original venue for it was Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany in 2012, and it was one of two exhibitions that scored Sehgal his Turner Prize nomination. In this work, interpreters move and dance around a dark room. The interpreters sing, dance, talk, hum, and clap in a way that feels semi-coordinated, then transition without warning via undetectable cues. At one point in this piece, the interpreters sang the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations.

Like This is Propaganda, This Variation has a religious quality. But the delivery is communal and ritualistic rather than preachy. The experience reminded me of being in a sweat lodge, in part because the low-ceilinged room was uncomfortably hot. It was also reminiscent of my experiences attending religious services where everyone but me seemed to know what to do and when. If the interpreters are clapping, should I clap too? What I find glorious here, though, is that this is art and you can do whatever you want.

When you first walk in, you can’t see, and it’s unclear how many people are in the room or where the walls are. A friend wisely advised me to leave my glass of wine outside. The first steps are tentative and may involve walking into people. Then, as eyes adjust, each person finds a place where he or she feels comfortable. Some people immediately lit their way with cell phones, others sat quietly on the floor. One woman applauded before leaving, while some who knew each other awkwardly clumped together and whispered. This Variation has a physical resonance that’s immersive in a totally different way from the verbally driven This Progress. In this way, the two works complement each other beautifully.

Also at the UCCA, concurrent with the Tino Sehgal exhibition, are sculptures by Wang Keping, a Beijing artist from the group called “the Stars,” who formed the vanguard of contemporary Chinese art beginning in the late 1970s. The gallery devoted to his very consistent wooden sculptures has a lot of work in it, maybe too much. Unfortunately, problems with shipping prevented the arrival of some very large works meant for display in another, higher-ceilinged exhibition space. Customs issues have also delayed the work for Taryn Simon’s exhibition, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII, the result of four years of exhaustive global research of bloodlines. Hopefully when you visit the UCCA (and you should), Simon’s work will be installed, as it promises to be very worth checking out.

Lauren McCarty is a teaching artist from Philadelphia currently living in Tianjin. She can be reached at laur768@gmail.com.

By The Good Doctor

The Caochangdi branch of Beijing Design Week is an eclectic mess. The posters have the wrong dates. Designers didn’t finish their work on time, so you’ll find empty spaces in the place of installations. Volunteers might sell you a button or a program that’s supposed to be free. You’ll wonder what some exhibits, such as a mishmash of geolocation balloons and a physical “chat room” called “The Real Network,” have to do with design.

Mix it all together, and you have a wonderful template for the best and worst of Beijing. A combination of overseas and local designers have come together to create something that, if it isn’t exactly cohesive, at least is interesting. If you are at all fascinated by architecture, design, or urban planning, or just want to interact with creative types eager to pontificate on their work, it’s well worth checking out.

Highlights include:

• Carl De Smet’s Memories of the Future, a demonstration of shape memory polyurethane that posits a future where our furniture will come in handheld containers and expand to full size with the application of heat.
• Nicole Condon used adhesives to capture particles in Beijing’s atmosphere, and then took microscopic photos of the results. You’ll be scared to see what the Particle City looks like when scaled up a thousand times.
• And Chinese Shanzhai, one of the most immersive installations, is a multinational brand posing as an art project posing as a multinational brand… posing as a biennial. Even when you see it in person, it still doesn’t make sense — but it makes for tremendous eye candy. Just follow the red carpet from the main entrance.

And, of course, dinosaurs, which is always fine in my book.

Beijing Design Week at Caochangdi is happening now through Thursday Saturday, October 6. 

The Good Doctor is a writer in Beijing. Check out his website, The Chaos Factory, and follow him on Twitter @doctorentropy2.

HQJ-05 (Photographer: Huang Qingjun)

By RFH

Saturday saw the launch of “Art, Design, Culture: The History of Penguin by Design,” first exhibited at London’s V&A. It recounts the history of the paperback (or Penguin’s at least), which was conceived by Allen Lane in the 1930s as a way to popularize books and learning. Books had previously been seen as somewhat of a luxury item (a subject forming part of the dilemma in Orwell’s classic 1946 essay, “Books vs Cigarettes?”), and the perception then was that this was entirely just-so. Lane took the book out of the drawing room and into the railway carriages, pubs and bedsits of the country’s burgeoning middle class.

Once uniform in their orange (fiction), blue (Pelican; non-fiction) and green (crime) jackets, as the brand proliferated, so did the design and, by the 1960s, the jacket as we imagine it now – an image which speaks as much to the intended consumer as the content – was being firmly shaped. It’s worth dropping by for the huge range of talent – covers by David Pearson, Frank Gehry, Coralie Bickford‐Smith, Jillian Tamaki, and Yayoi Kusama are all on display – Penguin wielded from the 1930s until now, as well as creepy, quasi-academic paperbacks from the 1930s with such titles as The Jewish Question and Germany: What Next?

What makes “Art, Design, Culture” particularly interesting for Chinese (the exhibition also visits Hangzhou) is the parlous state of book design in China today – walk into any major outlet to see a depressingly homogenous display of covers large on characters, small on personality. But lest we get smug, this exhibition is by no means an accurate reflection of the state of book design in the UK, where Penguin is based. Most bestsellers are made through supermarkets, paid-for 3-for-2-style promotions in chains like Waterstone’s, Amazon placements, and through avowedly middle-of-the-road arbiters like the Richard and Judy Book Club. If your book doesn’t look like The Shadow of the Labyrinth Island’s Da Vinci Code, appeal to reading groups looking for the next Captain Corelli, or catch the eye of the senior buyer at Tesco’s, you can quite honestly fuck off, close down your official Twitter account and stop wasting the marketing department’s precious time.

Few (if any) of the covers at the Penguin exhibition would cut it with the sales teams at any of the Big Four. No, they’d want to “see it in yellow,” demand the lettering be more like The Time Traveler’s Wife and eventually throw the whole thing out and replace it with the cheeks and chin of a reassuringly unidentifiable female visage. The exhibition is at the Temple Hotel, which is right in the courtyard of TRB Temple Beijing; make time to see this if you’re planning to eat at TRB in the next two weeks or simply make a date to eat at Temple (it’s great!) – and don’t, for Christ’s sakes, mention e-books.

Of other interest to readers, though, is the small retrospective the restaurant is holding by photographer Huang Qingjun of his “Belongings” series, which you may have already seen online. Huang takes shots of whole families outside their homes with all their belongings heaped around. Some look proud of their swag, others quite terrified. As the blurb says: “these shots belie two decades of double-digit growth to show the bitter, hardscrabble existence suffered by most ordinary Chinese.” No question: look for the drying, bloodied goat carcasses that form the centerpiece of the Tibetan nomad household, or the house-proud couple with two dogs, TV, sewing machine and spotless set of furniture outside their yurt in the plains (top picture).

Huang, who was at the opening, reflects (in the publicity material) that the experience has taught him that “the things we require to satisfy our daily existence are few, while the things we desire are many.” Others might draw different conclusions. The notions of importance we choose to invest in material goods should be of particular resonance with the dispossessed existences of expatriates or travelers, many of whom relinquish or renew their worldly goods with each destination.

Penguin Design

When: September 2-13, noon – 9 pm daily except Thursdays (noon – 10 pm)
Address: The Temple Hotel, 23 Songzhusi, Shatan Bei Jie, Dongcheng District, Beijing 100009

Huang Qingjun: “Belongings”

When: September 2 – October 2
Address: Southern Barbarian, 107 Baochao Hutong, Gulou Dong Dajie, Dongcheng District, Beijing 100600
Contact: southern.barbarian@yahoo.com.cn

As to be expected from the invariably weird National Art Museum of China, the exhibition design for “Pneuma, Enlightenment, Harmonious: Sculpture Exhibition of Zhao Chengmin” was really freakin’ weird. First there were the dingy maroon walls — apart from the feeling of being in a ’70s smoking lounge, they wouldn’t be so bad except that everything in the exhibition was made out of reflective metal. Kind of changes the experience. What would be an immaculate, radiant sheen turns into a dumpy glimmer. It’s not an inspiring feeling. While boring, white walls are the standard for museums to avoid distractions like this.

Then, hanging on those walls were giant pictures of the artist and his studio megaplex near Badaling. I don’t think it’s necessary that we see both the night and day views of Zhao’s swimming pool. If Mark Rothko, curmudgeonly Ab Ex painter who spent the first three decades of his career playing jump rope with the poverty line, saw Zhao’s private library or nautical-themed reception room, his head would explode.

But onto the artwork: actually, not bad. If you’ve never been to the National Art Museum of China, you perhaps don’t understand how shocking the experience can be. NAMoC typically specializes in neo-realist paintings of swarthy, wizened minority men and pale, remarkably Han-looking minority women with perfect skin gaily frolicking and dancing in traditional festivities. Zhao’s work, however — supposedly his first solo exhibition in 35 years (where did the mansion come from, exactly?) — are massive constructions, such as our friend Turbo Pony up there. They are made of industrial items, nuts and bolts, wire rope, metal coils, tubes and plates welded together with varying degrees of finish. There are around 50 pieces spanning two decades.

There’s something very gleeful in their construction, a sense of joy evident from the artist that is very infectious. The horse and warrior sculptures make me wish for handheld versions so I can play with them while making sound effects with my mouth. There’s something to be said for that, and not just that I’m a man-child who could be the subject of a Lana Del Rey song.

The smaller, less grandiloquent works complement these well. Whereas the big pieces are all bombast and emotion, the small pieces are contemplative. The chinoiserie shifts from fawning over politics and history to philosophy and nature. Some of them are even quite spiritual, and in an abstract way that avoids the pratfalls of being too literal.

The style isn’t completely original, as you’ll soon see, but most of the pieces have flashes of technical inspiration that sustain your attention. Take the above piece, “A Group of Clouds Trample the Snow and Gallop Towards the Sky” (sounds much, much better in Chinese). Zhao abstracts the horses’ features to give them a sense of solidity and strength while simultaneously dissolving that structure in the center by breaking it down into attenuated strips and sinews. It evokes power alongside the intricate, fragile and unfathomably complex biological motor for that power. And it does this in a way that’s uplifting. These, too, are ultimately works of Triumph.

And that’s where it starts to get a bit uncomfortable. It’s pretty much cut-and-copy Futurism, the stuff of early-20th-century Italian artists who fetishized war and industrialization, rendering the power of nature in the language of steel, etc. There’s a reason that Zhao’s horses’ feet are shaped like gun barrels. Sure, thematically you have to substitute the course of Chinese politico-military-philosophical history for Italian nationalism during the Industrial Revolution, but there’s an uncanny amount of overlap.

This hunch came to me even before I read Zhao’s preface to the exhibition, subtitled, “My Dream of a Strong Nation.” He extols, at length, his desire to see China rise up and triumph over America through the power of her art and aesthetic principles, something about qi and enlightenment and harmony that are incomprehensible to the Western mind.

Note to Chinese aestheticians (and dieticians, and doctors, and anyone inclined to hold such theories as legitimate counterpoint to the West): qi has not and cannot be shown to exist in any empirical way. It is not a thing. Remember when Mao advocated smashing superstitions? This is what he was talking about. It’s no coincidence the Wikipedia page on qi refers you to the page “Force (Star Wars).”

Mercifully, little to none of the exhibition has to do with qi, or harmony, or any of Zhao’s vague batshit themes. It is about Chinese history. Or, more accurately, a myth of Chinese glory and military triumph and spiritual attainment that gives nationalists the hardest of hard-ons. This is where the artworks start to lose a bit of their charm. The magnificence and affective power of some of the works are speaking a very different language to the intended audience, to which I, sadly, do not belong. This is an exhibition meant to inspire not reflection but feelings of a patriotic community, a sense of duty to a cultural lineage. It’s no wonder reviews of the exhibition all laud Zhao’s “sincere nationalism.” It just goes to show you art can be technically and aesthetically solid but have a rotten ethical core.

“Pneuma, Enlightenment, Harmonious: Sculpture Exhibition of Zhao Chengmin” will be on display at the National Art Museum of China until April 24. Go and feel the Pneuma.

Guy Templeton is an art critic in Beijing. |Art Review Archives|

Installation art may be the only type that lets artists actually live up to their outsider, free-spirit, totally bullshit reputation. It’s also more fun for the audience to get to step into/touch/eat the artwork, so they tend to be crowd pleasers and museum favorites.

I’m inclined to give artists more credit for giant installations because A) they’re distinctly unsellable and B) they leave little room for repeat or rehash. If someone tries to do the same thing a second time, he or she will get called out on it. (Unless you’re Damien Hirst — a big fuck-you to him and the Tate Modern, by the way.) In this sense (and only in this sense), installation work can be viewed more as art-for-art’s-sake, even if we acknowledge that this phrase needs to be retired and shot. There is art for expression and entertainment and social change and money. That’s about it.

Bai Yiluo’s “Illuminations” (above) is the product of two years of work in which he “tries to stress the feeling of being observed from afar.” Not to sound snide, but something like that is too easy to dismiss. Why would surrounding a person with lamps rusted to the point of being indistinguishable inspire any feeling? 

I suppose it’s intended to make me feel overwhelmed? There is an immediate claustrophobic perceptual excess, not unlike walking into an antique shop too small for its wares. The moribund lanterns do evoke eyes and vision in a Tower of Sauron kind of way, and serve as a conceptual juxtaposition with the paintings and the fabricated illumination that now defines life on earth. Perhaps I’m jaded or an ass or whatever, but I don’t really think it’s useful for me to stand in awe of the amount of electricity we produce. It’s just not that compelling of an idea. Bai is trying to get the viewer to step out of his limited perspective and contemplate the world on a macro scale. But aside from oohs and aahs, what else does he want us to think about our technological advances? There are a lot of profound and terrifying things to say about how we now live and how little we understand its implications, but Bai doesn’t really say any of them. “Raising awareness” is not an admirable goal in itself, it’s just lazy and self-satisfying. That goes for you KONY people, too.

The paintings themselves are very beautiful, electric macro-nightscapes of that sort of gauzy lapis lazuli blue under shimmering silver dots. If he stuck with just these I think I’d like the exhibition a lot more. Of course, then it’d just be pretty pictures.

Li Zhanyang, by contrast, goes for a more, erm, direct approach:

In case it’s hard to discern, yes, those are long shards of glass dangling between the backpacks. So, a sort of Cask of Amontillado-cum-Pit and the Pendulum situation, except the sociopathic killer is the Chinese education system. Right. The shards are there because the school materials are a METAPHOR, METAPHOR for LOOMING DANGER, sword of Damocles, Chicken Little, etc. The problem with this kind of METAPHOR is that it hits hard but doesn’t try for depth. What you see is what you get.

The man in the background is a nice touch, set in the back corner so that you don’t quite realize he is made of fiberglass until you get closer. He’s genuinely discomfiting. At the time I assumed he was supposed to be the little girl’s father. After some snooping around on Google (what we in the arts call “due diligence”), I found out that it’s actually a self-portrait. Li Zhanyang is also the father of a nine-year-old girl.

Even though I think it’s pretty weak to rely on outside information or a wall text to complete the meaning of a work of art, this detail makes the piece. It’s still a ham-fisted visual metaphor for what isn’t an especially original idea, but in a country where mental health and suicide among kids are both alarming and, for practical purposes, largely ignored, it begs the question whether subtlety or nuance are even important. The self-portrait also shifts the message from “What the hell is wrong with you?” to “What the hell is wrong with us?,” which is always much more effective, rhetorically.

It’s for this reason that I have to give this round to Li. Neither installation is going down in the history books, but at least Li’s has an immediacy to it that sits uncomfortably alongside its aesthetic value. He too doesn’t go much beyond “raising awareness,” but his installation works emotionally instead of conceptually, which is more appropriate. It’s also a far cry from what most Chinese contemporary artists are doing, which is trying at all costs to avoid being pinned to any single meaning. If people understand you, they can dismiss you. Obscurity has a premium. Make no mistake, artists know that it’s in their best interest to keep you confused, which is why Li’s work is far bolder than he’ll get credit for.

The best art is still that which is subtle, profound, and containing complexities drawn out by slow contemplation. Barring that, you might as well get a rise out of your audience.

Li Zhanyang’s “The Nightmare” will be on display at Galerie Urs Meile in Caochangdi until April 29. “Bai Yiluo: New Works” will be on display until April 16 at Pekin Fine Arts in Caochangdi. Also, just go to Caochangdi. The art is way better and you get to feel superior to the all the 798 folks. Dilettantes.

Guy Templeton is an art critic in Beijing. |Art Review Archives|

Monkeys do not have opinions on curatorial ethics.

Today Art Museum, a totally unprecedented factory-cum-gallery space (it’s not unprecedented at all), has done us all the favor of cutting back on the galleries to focus on what art lovers really want: posh restaurants and cafes. I could go on along this vein, but this review really isn’t about Today Art Museum, featuring a front-yard sculpture by the shallowest man in Chinese contemporary art, Yue Minjun. No, I’m here to talk about Conversing with the Moon – He Sen’s Solo Exhibition, a quite decent show that opened on February 11, which I would totally recommend you go see if only it were still there. That’s right, it ended less than two weeks after opening. So yeah, thanks, Today Art Museum.

Let’s talk about the monkey.

That particular simian is He Sen’s “Monkey King on the Peach Tree” from 2007. The Monkey King, Sun Wukong to acquaintances, is the sutra-toting rapscallion from the 16th-century novel Journey to the West by Wu Cheng’En, or, to those who can’t read archaic vernacular Chinese (plebes), from the 1980s live-action television show now in relentless syndication. He Sen’s exhibition included several pieces based on Journey to the West, and while these were mostly an excuse for the artist to show off his traditional brushwork and oil skills, they are still awesome because they involve Journey to the West.

Moving on…

He Sen, "Ma Yuan Conversing with the Moon - Distant" (2011, oil on canvas))

In the above series, He Sen uses oil paint to copy post-Song ink compositions, splitting each canvas into zones of different brushwork styles or tonal fields. The juxtapositions are engaging and playful. They invite semiotic questions of form and meaning and how classic tropes mutate over time, what that says about us and them and whether we can ever really understand what was there in the first place, if there was ever anything there at all. The TV show Journey to the West raised many of the same questions, but in a much subtler way.

He Sen, "Picture Album of Plum Blossoms" (2008, oil on canvas)

Some have made the terribly wrong claim that He Sen is pioneering a contemporary artform with traditional Chinese culture at its core. These people are probably dull Chinese art historians. If anything, He Sen is commenting on how traditional Chinese art symbols fail to resonate with contemporary audiences because they represent a foregone culture that can’t be recreated without getting our grubby little modern-day fingerprints all over it. His creations are also just really pretty. The pink pastels look like cake frosting.

The artist’s earlier works were on the second-floor exhibition hall. I’d guess the curator (rightly) assumed most exhibition-goers wouldn’t care enough to climb a set of stairs. Of these pieces, the press release says ([sic], obviously), “The decadent and sophisticated female figures portrayed were the most fierce and literal expression to confront impact of mainstream cultural trends of the time, especially the anxiety and void in those images projected the artist’s psychological response to that particular context.” I’d call them excuses to paint his squeeze’s barely unexposed vagina.

He Sen, “Dudu" (2006, oil on canvas)

He made dozens of these, and they sell for tens of thousands of dollars apiece. I can actually picture the sleazy Shanxi coal baron who buys and subsequently jerks to this painting. They’re certainly not good for much else.

You could have gone to see “Conversing with the Moon – He Sen’s Solo Exhibition” before it was inexplicable shut down two days early on February 22. You can still watch the greatest TV series known to man though:

Guy Templeton is an art critic in Beijing. |Art Review Archives|

拆 - chai: demolish. Say what you want about Art Bridge's art selection, but its logo is pretty cool. UPDATE: Ah, it's probably "桥" - bridge. I prefer chai.

First, as a token of good faith, I offer this piece of advice to all Chinese galleries: don’t skimp on wine at openings. Free-flowing liquor will ultimately work to your advantage when plying potential customers, especially when you’re going to need to exact mental debilitation on them to sell your wares.

Case in point, the most recent group exhibition hosted by 798’s Art Bridge gallery, in which demure volunteers poured quarter-glasses of garden-variety reds, orange juice and Coca-Cola. Art Bridge, HELLO: you’re hosting an exhibition opening, not a wine tasting. Forget pouring samples, the purpose of wine is not to train a visitor’s palate but to make the shit you’re hawking more palatable.

The exhibition was titled “Changing View: Round Two Nominating Exhibition of Contemporary Ink and Water,” and it is still unclear what the artists were nominated for. I was accompanied by the dauntingly sober Lola B, resident Creamer and recovering art student, who plowed through the paintings doing full-on crits. God bless her, it was like watching Bob Costas commentate tee ball. What do you say about a painting of a puppy lying next to an old phone receiver? Nice stock image? Why yes, puppies are cute? His plaintive and innocent eyes gazing into mine assure me of naïveté and perfect love?

Zheng Qingyu, The Wrong Number :: 郑庆余, 打错的电话 (Ed's note: this is a photo, please pardon the reflection)

Okay, actually I did like the puppy piece, though for no good reason. To everyone’s detriment, the exhibition was not entirely puppy-themed. As is the case with many works of Chinese contemporary art, the draftsmanship was unimpeachable, but they failed to live up thematically. Specifically, this:

Zheng Qingyu, A Rose is a Rose :: 郑庆余，天使的玫瑰也会枯萎 (Chinese title translates as "Even an angel's rose will wilt")

This should not happen in a professional exhibition. Setting aside the Pre-Raphaelite-on-a-bad-day coiffure, what in the world would possess an artist (or adult human, really) to paint this? It’s like a particularly shallow teenage girl’s idea of beauty. I especially like the black rose, which looks like it comes straight out of Evanescence’s Tumblr feed. It’s so cheesy it may legitimately be a postmodern joke, or at least a what-can-I-get-into-a-Chinese-gallery drunken bet between artists. Zheng Qingyu had three pieces in the show, and none of them communicate a damn thing. As a viewer, I felt like I was listening to muffled sounds of the artist in a one-way conversation with himself. Fun fact: in 2009 Zheng was in a group exhibition subtitled “Contemporary art exhibition of new intellectuals” at the China National Museum of Art. I’ll leave that without comment.

But as with most group exhibitions, somehow a couple of artists of talent managed to slip in. Dang Zhen’s “Monochrome Fable – Farewell to My Concubine” (the movie Farewell My Concubine in all its majesty is here on Hulu). depicts a slovenly, pants-less man and an actor in full Peking opera regalia riding sidesaddle on a purple horse. This is, admittedly, something of a dream of mine (I am the horse). It’s nonsensical and disorienting in a good way. It’s challenging.

Dang Zeng, Farewell to My Concubine :: 党震, 灰色寓宫之霸王别姬

Which is probably why I also liked Chen Lin’s meticulously plumed bird paintings, one of which is below. Yes, they felt banal, probably even more so if I knew more Chinese art history, but they at least tried to find meaning somewhere other than fantastically beautiful women and voluptuous nudes. (Quick interlude regarding nudes: it’s vaguely sexist and astounding that this can still fly in the 21st century. It’s also why sometimes even the best technically crafted pieces are just so-so – they mine tired symbols and cheap sentimentality for a sense of significance, when in fact they are lazy and formulaic and not worth my time.)

Chen Lin, in a picture that may or may not be titled "Memories of the Harem No. 1" :: 陈林, 后宫往事之一

The biggest problem with most of the works at Art Bridge’s exhibition is not that they’re trite, but that, sadly, they’re still convincing. They were convincing enough to a handful of artists and academics to get into an exhibition at an established gallery. Artists are well aware that they get away with this crap. It’s a delicate, insular and insecure art world in China, and I think on some level a lot of successful artists and professionals at least vaguely understand that they’re shilling glorified pet rocks.

“Changing View: Round Two Nominating Exhibition of Contemporary Ink and Water” will run at Art Bridge Gallery until February 28. Go see it. Or, you know, don’t.

Guy Templeton is an art critic in Beijing. |Art Review Archives|