After Exoticism - review of art festival, Shanghai, China

Art in America, July, 2001 by Richard Vine

Longtime observers made it clear that such works, and such often well-connected artists, are the "refined" standard against which more vigorous contemporary practice is pitted. (This judgment, of course, carries its own cultural bias. Few Biennale visitors, from either hemisphere, chose to visit the city's venues for exquisite ink paintings in the traditional vein.) To most Western eyes, fresher vision and livelier attack are found in recent oil-on-canvas works like Duan Zhengqu's view of a man hoisting a giant carp and Liu Xiaodong's mordant Eating (2000), in which six decidedly nonbuff men in swimwear confront the viewer across a seaside table loaded with crabs. (An affinity could be seen with the big dreamscape heads and juicy brushwork of Thailand's Chatchai Puipia.) Meanwhile, Fang Lijun's gray woodcut banners of grimacing, bare-skulled "hippies" upped the emotional ante on Holland resident Marlene Dumas's large face-and-body watercolors, which they faintly resembled.

But Chinese viewers were most deeply fascinated by Shi Chong's hyper-realistic canvas Stage (1997), a smooth-surfaced image of a blindfolded female nude covered with white paste and small tied-on toys and gadgets. "Photographically" slicker than the Hubei Province artist's other Jenny Saville-like torso close-ups, the work was perpetually scrutinized at nose-to-canvas distance by amazed local visitors.

Chinese Pop and "gaudy art," both considered passe in China now due to their too-fervent embrace by the West, were entirely absent, with much wall space given instead to the huge blocky abstractions of Wang Huaiqing and Lee U Fan (Korea)--works that jibed well with the semigeometric paintings of Australia's Emily Kame Kngwarreye and France's Bernard Frize.

Sculpture ran a similarly wide gamut from Liang Shuo's fiberglass "Urban Peasants," wistful Keane-like figures done life-size in rough, realistic detail, to the slyly ironic works of Sui Jianguo, whose "heroic" plaster casts depict Western sculptural classics--the Discus Thrower, Michelangelo's Dying Slave--clothed in Maoist garb. About midway between the ridiculously earnest and the satirically sublime are the painted wood figures of Funakoshi Katsura (Japan), the fiberglass-and-canvas "Flying Angels" of Indonesia's Heri Dono, the brightly cartoonish wood "spirits" (with accompanying paintings) of Georges Lilanga Di Nyama (Tanzania) and the seemingly inescapable tabletop architectural fantasies of global biennial stalwart Bodys Isek Kingelez (Republic of Congo).

As is usual these days, installation work consumed greedy amounts of space at the Biennale. Most notably, Huang Yong Ping (the show's top prizewinner, listed as an emissary of France) filled half of one large gallery with his massive Bank of Sand or Sand of Bank (2000), a roughly 11-foot-high sand-castle version of a 19th-century bank structure on the Bund, Shanghai's famous riverside lineup of government buildings and international trade manses. Two entire rooms were devoted to a reinstallation of Taiwanese artist Huang Buqing's 1999 Venice Biennale piece, Wild Feast, which incorporates 14 tables bearing various seeds and pods, canvas-covered walls to which burrs are adhered to form images of trees and the artist's parents, and a small artificial pool evoking the fishing village of his youth. Meanwhile, Zhang Yonghu modified the walls and ceiling of a large gallery with thin wood panels, nonfunctional stairs and suspended minimalist boxes. Japanese architect Tadao Ando showcased his partially underground Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum project (1987-2000) on four video monitors and a long wall-strip of drawings and photographs. Chen Yanyin presented Difference in a Sudden Moment, composed of dozens of red roses lying on a table, each attached to a suspended IV bag. Canadian Ken Lum lined a segment of a corridor with two-way mirrors, behind which viewers entering from the other side could spy upon fellow visitors. South Korea's Lee Bul, also a Venice '99 veteran, offered another karaoke experience--not an isolation booth this time but a room with a screen featuring a through-the-windshield video that simulates zooming down urban expressways at night with rock music blasting.