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

Freedom Factories

Like most forbidden fruit in China, these renegade exhibitions turned out to be readily accessible and irresistible. Two of them were mounted by the indefatigable Gu Zhenqing, who, in addition to organizing a group survey as part of the 2002 Pingyao photo festival, put on multiple alternative shows during the Shanghai Biennale in both 2000 and 2002 [see A.i.A., July '01 and Sept. '03]. This time, his endeavors--in widely separated venues--were sponsored by the Today Art Gallery, which is backed by a private real-estate development firm. (It is not unusual for commercial outfits in China to promote an "art center" as an amenity calculated to attract high-end clients to new business of residential spaces. Once the buildings are filled, the art programs tend to evaporate.) The theme of the two-part survey was, poignantly, the derealization induced by contemporary media overload.

"Secondhand Reality: Pre-Reality," showcasing 14 artists at Pingod Space, home to the Apple apartment-complex sales office, included a huge billboard photo that is both a sexy ad for the company--featuring the Chinese phrase "I want ... I want" scrawled in lipstick red over a shot of short-skirted legs propped up in a swank living room--and an element in photographer Chen Lingyang's ongoing semi-autobiographical "She" series. Myriad fluorescent tubes hanging vertically from the ceiling create a shower-of light effect as part of Yung Ho Chang and Wang Hui's sleek architectural conversion of the former brewery. Tang Hui presented several gray-toned paintings of his fantasy blob-shaped megalopolis enclosures. Wang Mai's phallic, person-size wooden construct Rising and Falling Tower (2003) is composed of a stela, carved with TV-show scenes, that can be slipped inside a pagodalike casing. Two stiff-backed security guards, wearing soldiers' uniforms at Gu Zhenqing's request, gave a creepily militaristic air to the viewing experience.

Further evidencing his flair for showmanship, Gu Zhenqing enlivened the Pingod Space with San Yuan and Peng Yu's huge digital photo of two pit bulls at each other's throats, then announced that a live face-off between fighting dogs would take place at the opening of the complementary Today Art Gallery exhibition "Secondhand Reality: Post-Reality," housed in a spiffy new office building on Wenhuiyuan Road. There, while waiting for the bout, attendees enjoyed wine and canapes as they took in the more sedate works on view. Standouts included Gu Dexin's cacophonous pile of tiny portable radios bearing BMW logos; Lu Hao's 1/5-scale models of the doorways of four major international museums (MOMA, Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou and Beijing's National Museum); several massage chairs stripped down to their bizarre-looking inner mechanisms by Yang Zhenzhong; and works from Wang Xingwei's comic painting series in which he inserts his own likeness into famous art-historical scenes (Courbet's workmen, for example, do their stone-breaking on his stomach). The most impressive work in the 15-person show was Yin Xiuzhen's Weapons (2003), consisting of long knife-tipped poles, their horizontally suspended shafts wrapped with bright fabric and yarn. These components, punctuated by disks that give them a form reminiscent of knights' lances, allude to the TV signal towers that have contributed so directly to the recent mass-marketing penetration of Chinese society.