After Exoticism - review of art festival, Shanghai, China

Art in America, July, 2001 by Richard Vine

But the most absorbing exhibits were the painting, photography and video pieces concentrated on the upper floor. There one could see, for example, Wang Xingwei's oil-on-canvas depiction of a young boy hauling a female corpse out of the brambles and onto a public green, or Yang Qing's photo-and-video record of himself studiously painting characters onto balloons, despite such potential distractions as working in the presence of a nude female model or being immersed to his waist in a river near a waterfall. Photography dominated, however, with works like Jin Feng's self-portrait showing his head and upper torso covered in alternating squares of raw meat and fat. (Meat and--in the case of Gu Dexin--animal brains and innards are another staple, so to speak, of current art practice in China. One of the most talked-about recent events in Shanghai was Wu Gaozhong's emergence from the belly of a cow, into which he had earlier been packed in a swaddling of rose petals for transport to a public park.) More subtle but also disconcerting were Liao Bangming's color headshots of himself in various guises--male prisoner, military officer, businessman; glamour girl or female doctor--that combined Cindy Sherman-style role-playing with earnest gender-bending a la Yasumasa Morimura. Cang Xin, meanwhile, offered a wry twist on August Sander in his photo sequence "My Identity, Tourist Series." In these color prints, the artist stands amid the working environs and wears the clothes of people in highly distinct jobs (garbageman, chef, waitress, etc.), while the actual jobholder stands beside him dressed only in underwear--a mordant play on the perpetual debate between essentialists and social constructionists. Similar in impulse but even more elaborately staged are the photos in which Weng Fen stands rigidly in a Mao suit amid nude Olympic swimmers or next to a woman in traditional garb and a child in schoolgirl uniform (a variation of the gambit made famous in the West by Tseng Kwong Chi [see A.i.A., Mar. '97]). Wang Qingsong, the most stylized photographer in the show, concocts complicated, computer-altered group scenes whose colorfully dressed and heavily made-up characters enact tales of sensual indulgence in a studio environment often rife with Coke bottles and McDonald's logos.

Much more rough-and-tumble was the sprawling show "Fuck Off," organized in an Eastlink Gallery warehouse by Feng Boyi and Ai Weiwei. (The Chinese title reportedly transliterates as "Uncooperative Approach," but the blunter sentiment was deemed preferable in English.) Revered as something of a mage by younger artists, the 43-year-old Ai encapsulated his artistic-curatorial attitude with one set of photos in which he gives the finger in turn to the White House, the Forbidden City and the viewer, and another in which he releases an ancient Chinese vase that smashes to smithereens at his feet. (Since his brother is an antiquities dealer, one can only hope that this vessel was one of the innumerable modern copies in circulation.) Among the 50 participating artists were Wang Chuyu, whose performance consisted of a four-day fast; the diaper-clad Zhu Ming, who floated down the Huangpu River in a plastic bubble; He Yungchang, shown in a color photograph as a bare-torsoed figure suspended from a crane by his ankles over a rushing river which he "cut" with the same knife he later used to knick himself in the arm, thereby mingling his blood with the water; Sun Yuan, creator of Solitary Animal, a glass case containing an animal skeleton and--purportedly--enough poison gas to wipe out the show's entire audience; Yang Zhichao, photographed having grass planted in two incisions on his shoulder; and Chen Hao, Zheng Jishun and Song Tao, seen in a video documenting their stroll through the city with blood leaking from plastic tubes that had been surgically inserted in the veins of their arms. A fun time was had by all, but authorities chose to shut down the show once foreign critics and journalists had departed.