by Lisa Movius, Shanghai Listings Editor
Last Saturday was a heady day for the arts in Shanghai’s
Gubei district. Two eclectic and mostly unpublicized
exhibitions opened their doors to a very small public: “Out of
Desire,?a three-day exhibition of works by six young and
mostly unknown Shanghai artists at the Liu Haisu Art Center;
and “Capping,?featuring pieces by some 46 mostly well-known
artists from Korea, Japan, and China. Both exhibits were
roughly “contemporary? in flavor, and attendees were mainly
the same group of artists and die-hard connoisseurs who
wandered en masse from one show to the other, but otherwise
the two shows couldn’t have been more different.
The Shanghai art scene would benefit from more exhibitions
like “Out of Desire.?The six featured artists pooled their
limited funds to rent the Liu Haisu gallery for a
weekend. Shanghai exhibitions tend to feature the same
artists and the same works over and over again, and “Out of
Desire?provided a welcome glimpse into the underground.
Yang Fudong’s bright, vibrantly weird paintings draw
attention on every rare occasion they are exhibited.
Shockingly neon colors and amusing yet disconcerting
depictions perhaps result from his day job designing cartoon
animation for computer games. One series, “Evening
Primrose Lover,? details a semi-faceless man touching tongues
and exchanging fugal saliva with a rather cheerful collection
of frogs.
Shi Dehong’s unsettling series “Where is the life??depicts
a number of dead yet apparently very angry babies or
fetuses. Painted in dark blues, purples and grays, Shi’s
pieces impose death, decay and despair on what is normally a
theme of life. Also notable were Chen Zhongxhu’s women’s
faces in varying degree of surrealism and Zhou Zixi’s urban
landscapes in starkly neutral colors on enormous canvases.
“Capping,?in contrast, was a tired exercise in 1970s style
post-modernism. The accompanying booklet, with mentions
of “deconstruction of colonial places?and “ideological
discourses of the body,?was actually more subtle than the
exhibition itself. The pieces leaned towards poorly
executed “object art,?such as one collection of computer disks
glued to pieces of rice paper. The worst piece of the
exhibit, from Shanghai artist Hu Jianping, who wandered around
during the exhibit giving Japanese candies to everyone in
misplaced spirit of internationalism, featured an electric
guitar on a shrine of CD boxes, with a bunch of CDs glued to
the wall behind it.
The show was the Shanghai leg of a prior exhibition in
Korea in May of last year. Despite “Capping’s?ongoing
history, Saturday’s show was thrown together only on Friday,
and the haste was apparent. The Chinese artists were
irritatingly dominated by the ShanghART brat pack that rule
the Shanghai creative roost. While Shi Yong’s “What if all
Chinese were blonde??can always provoke a laugh, it gets a
little stale the fifteenth time you see it. A few pieces
were genuinely unique, such as Noriko Kikuchi’s
black-and-white photographs reprinted on leaves and Masayasu
Suganuma’s copper peelings arranged on the ground, but most
were stale and contrived. The real excitement came not
from the art. After three hours of speeches, all
translated twice and badly and only slightly less interesting
than the opening of a State-Owned Enterprise, the tired crowd
of international artists made quick work of the large stash of
Chivas Regal and Johnny Walker that had been brought in for
their behalf. The place soon descended linguistically
into a drunken Tower of Babel even more bizarre than the day’s
artistic offerings.
 |
 |
| "evening primrose's lover"
by Yang Fudong |
"Where is the life--Can
you blame me for this" by Shi
Dehong |
 |
| "crayz flower on the end
(4)" by Chen Zhongzhu |
