The academy strikes back: last fall, as official taste reigned at major international surveys in Beijing and Pingyao, avant-garde artists responded with spunky alternative shows

Art in America, June-July, 2004 by Richard Vine

Longing and fantasy predominate in Zhong Biao's acrylic Art Life (2002-03), a painting that would be perfectly at home in any Chelsea gallery. Rendered in a flat, bright style, the triptych suggests that a Caucasian boy's dreams, and thus the work's entire picture-world, correspond to a fictitious group-sex Web site called www.eden.com. One of the few other paintings of interest to a contemporary-minded viewer was Zhou Cangjiang's Complementary, April 2000 (2000), a yellow Twomblyesque abstraction.

More academic is Chen Yungang's statue Lao-tzu, a Chinese Thinker (2003), with the ripples of the black fiberglass sage's beard continuing into his robe and out across the floor. Li Xiuqin's Chatling (2003), in contrast, is a conversation grouping of nontraditional openwork bamboo furniture. The lifesize fiberglass caricatures of Chinese social types by Liang Shuo, like the tall cut-metal flowers with human heads by Ren Rong, are so broadly comic yet so unrelentingly earnest that one wonders if their creation--to say nothing of their inclusion in an international biennial--was some sort of coy esthetic joke.

No such tongue-in-cheek possibility could redeem the vast majority of international works at the Art Museum of China Millennium Monument. Installed in several curving galleries of the futuristic ovoid building, they ranged from the harmlessly pleasant--like American artist Colette Hosmer's valleyball-size earthen spheres--to the wretchedly silly, such as News from a War (1999), a smooth, armless plaster family group reacting in horror to a television set on their dining table, by Denmark's Bjoern Noergaard. In this mix, two full-length grisaille portraits of slacker youths by Tom Birkner (U.S.)--which might well have gone unnoticed in other shows--came off as fresh, honest and direct.

Many established names, including a laundry list of late '80s art stars, had been promised (if that is the right word) in advance publicity for the Biennale. Very few were actually represented. Most venerable was Sam Francis, with four paintings from 1966-86. Arman showed recent paintings of sliced-up guitars and cellos, along with a similarly deconstructed life-size Discus Thrower (2002) in bronze. Several mottled, bright-color figure studies were offered by Sandro Chia. Enzo Cucchi had a round drawing mounted like a road sign on a metal red in front of Mimmo Paladino's triptych Laboratory (2000), consisting of drawing fragments affixed to heavy paper torn in three vaguely profilelike shapes and set in screened shadowboxes.

Though commendably catholic in its reach (artists from places like Mongolia, Syria, Lebanon, Serbia, Lithuania, Congo, Iran, Vietnam and even Monaco were given space), the Beijing Biennale as a whole was, curatorially, neither more nor less than an exercise in official taste--in other words, kitsch. It was predicated on the condescending assumption, articulated at several event functions, that the general public will eagerly embrace such "healthy" work in preference to the social provocations and rude smut of the misguided few. Indeed, the dubiously populist and "international" spirit of the event was perhaps best conveyed at the opening-day press conference, conducted entirely in Chinese with no translation. Ten top administrators, sitting presidium-fashion at a long table facing the audience, took turns praising the inoffensive--even uplifting--tenor of the work selected for the Biennale, and vividly deprecating the "perverse" and "elitist" independent shows one might happen to see around town.