Young Shanghai aritsts
meditate on modernity, but manage only mediocrity
by Lisa Movius
Eastlink Gallery’s most recent exhibition, "Facing
Shanghai’s Modernity," was billed rather grandiosely as "an
examination of Shanghai’s modern identity." The
exhibition is remarkable in that it features seven young,
unknown, mostly student artists, all from Shanghai and born
between 1971 and 1979. The works themselves, however,
were nothing spectacular: If this is Young Shanghai’s
identity, than we’ve got a serious crisis on our hands.
The concept of
identity was explored little in the exhibition, not very far
beyond a basic old things/modern styles contrast that failed
to make much of an impression. Leading the vanguard of the
"old things" contributors were Shen Ye’s interesting
installments, not-so-subtly titled "Tradition 1" and
"Tradition 2". For the first, the 21-year-old Shen took
two small blue and white porcelain vases and clad them in
traditional blue-calico men and women’s doll outfits.
"Tradition 2" consisted of some thirty worn out pairs of
shoes, mostly peasant sandals, neatly laid out in a large
wooden tray.
Shen Ye’s subtle ingenuity contrasted to the exhibition’s
other installments, the farcically bad works of Lu Xuming.
"Doubt—Who is it?" featured a cracked window pane hastily
splashed with too-bright red paint and with a few cigarette
butts and wads of paper scattered about the base. It
reminded me of nothing so much as the discarded projects
residing in my high school art teacher’s storeroom.
Also contributing to the "Old Shanghai" perspective was Qi
Xiaochun, whose works harked back to the cigarette ad posters
that dominate modern perceptions and misperceptions of Old
Shanghai. Most interesting is "Article", an oil on wood
of sixteen panels each depicting a sultry model or "singsong"
in Qipao and permanent wave. While his images are not
fantastically well-painted, the concept is unusual enough to
make us hope Qi will continue to explore it.
The rest of the
works featured the sparklingly modern. Jiang Liping’s bright,
bright, bright impressionist oil paintings of rooms in almost
blinding pinks and yellows suggests he could launch a
profitable career as spokes-artist for Ikea. Ignore the
two horrendous two-tone neon green and pink paintings of what
appear to be giant ovaries, and he can be considered a very
promising young artist. Jiang’s "I’d Like to go to the
Bund", of a woman with her face turned up and a Biore pore
strip on her nose, resembles in subject and style the works of
Sang Wei, another of the exhibition’s artists. Sang’s
realistic yet grotesque portraits provide a powerful parody of
humanity at its ugliest mediocrity. If he’s this
disillusioned at 22, imagine what his art will be like in a
few decades.
Finishing off
the pack were Gao Ming, Song Tao, and Liu Yanfeng. Gao
recently exhibited at last month’s "Out of Desire" show, and
was the least impressive of that group show. His sloppy,
haphazard canvases in neutral tones suggest a child’s picture
book, only less pretty, less interesting, and more
X-rated. Liu Yanfeng’s gray blobs and Song Tao’s
elaborate doodles on graph paper from what must have been a
boring semester round out the very so-so exhibition. If
"Facing Shanghai’s Modernity" is an indication, the city’s
next generation of artists will be as much a mixed bag of
quality and mediocrity as their predecessors.
"Facing Shanghai’s Modernity" continues until March 8 at
Eastlink Gallery, 70 Fuxing Xi Lu, (021) 6437-1255.
