a coffee with zxerokool in Singapore

Zxerokool 'fake comic book cover' advertising the exhibition at Art Labor, Shanghai
(image reproduced with permission of the artist)

Yesterday I met young Singaporean artist/designer/fantasy futurist Jonathan Leong, aka ‘Zxerokool’ to talk about his work and about the life of young emerging artists in Singapore, a city which has been trying to position itself as an international contemporary arts hub, with mixed results.

Leong in Singapore, September 2011, photograph: Luise Guest, reproduced with permission of the artist

Our conversation ranged from his work as a designer and art director, much known for his ability to bring Gen Y street cred and a strong distinct visual style to projects for brands such as New Balance, Feiyue, Tiger Beer, Nike and MTV; brands aiming to target younger consumers and swim in that desirable pool of social-media-savvy, international 'life-style' corporate identities. Self-described as ‘an intergalactic ninja and practitioner of visual kungfu, art and creative mayhem’, Jonathan tells me he is now able to see a synergy between his independent art practice and his commercial work as a designer/creative consultant. At 28 years old looking almost absurdly young (and making me feel oh, so very old) he talks enthusiastically about his digital media, graphic design, and sculptural projects, and especially about his first solo show next year in New York at the very, very groovy Reed Space on the Lower East Side, entitled 'When the World Ends, and Other Strange Tales'. This year he has shown with Martin Kemble’s Art Labor Gallery in Shanghai, as well as in a group show at Chan Hampe @ Tanjong Pagar here in Singapore. As we talk I can't help but imagine Jonathan as a young boy, immersed in the world of video games and sci-fi fantasy, in a computer-generated world of his own design.

Over coffee he tells me that coming as he does from a highly pragmatic Chinese family, romantic archetypes of the artist starving for his art would cut no ice at all, and that claims of ‘tension’ between the two aspects of his creative identity would be a luxury he cannot afford. In fact, he says, “I believe that art and commerce can coexist, sometimes very effectively. Everything is cross-over now”. Singapore is a city where cutting-edge design, architecture and marketing are everywhere visible and highly influential, so this new kind of artist identity is appropriate to this place, and this time. His artistic hero is, no prizes for guessing, the original cool inhabitant of that cross-over and unashamedly commercial realm, Andy Warhol. In the exhibition ‘100 friends’, Singaporean artists were invited to draw the artist who most influenced them, and Jonathan had no hesitation in selecting the ubiquitous Andy as his subject. In this show, 100 A4 framed artworks by 100 artists were priced at S$199 on a cash and carry basis with 100% of the proceeds going  to the TRANSMISSION: PROJECT, an annual experimental ‘incubatory platform’ for young artists and designers to come together in an artistic exchange and mentoring process.

The Master of Pop by Zxerokool (image reproduced with permission of the artist)

Leong identifies the significant Singaporean Phunk Design Studio as a major influence on his work (and, I would guess, on his artistic identity). They have been described as propagating a visual signature that blends and recontextualises influences as diverse as traditional Chinese art, craft, philosophy and culture, Hong Kong wuxia, Japanese manga and otaku subcultures, together with Western popular culture, art, and design movements. Highly influential in the Asian design world, they aim to challenge conventions of the separation of artist and designer by deliberately and playfully blurring the boundaries.

Jonathan Leong, Fake Comic Book Cover, image reproduced with permission of the artist

As a young artist, one of the first generation to experience the transition from slow to fast broadband internet access, and to seamlessly transition between all the various forms of social media, Leong describes the way that people now ‘curate’ their own identities. This suggests once more that previous ideas of the fixed role of ‘the artist’ are somewhat outmoded, and notions of the true artist being somehow sullied by a dalliance with commerce now appear so quaintly 20^th century that they might belong in the Madison Avenue offices of Mad Men. He says his work is inspired by science fiction, architecture, contemporary visual culture and ‘the moments in between dreams and reality.’ In exploring themes of urban utopia and fantasy he has created his popular and highly engaging series of ‘fake comic book covers’. Currently a little obsessed with the resurgence of zombies in popular culture; he is also planning to design some ‘info-graphix’ parodies for his show in New York next year, which will include a zombie-proof house. Why? Because, he tells me, the current popular culture zombie obsession indicates a deeper unease, a feeling that everyone is looking for a safe place. Of course the irony is, “One is never really safe in a time of chaos”.


In a city such as Singapore, with its increasingly 'futurist utopian' skyline dominated by what some see as the sinister submarine-like shape of the top of the Marina Bay Sands towers, this savvy combination of commerce with an individual art practice reflects the mercantile history of the Chinese and Peranakan inhabitants as well as its position in the global marketplace. Chaos abounds, as even the most casual glance at the Straits Times will tell you, but there is always room for a little tongue-in-cheek zombie-proofing, and a playful approach to the serious business of art.

Beyond the Frame at the White Rabbit

Entry to Artists' Studios, Weihai Lu, Shanghai

I have been wanting to write about the new exhibition at the White Rabbit Gallery 'Beyond the Frame', since I have now seen it three times, once with my Year 12 students, who were completely engaged, awe-struck and thoroughly convinced, finally, that my passionate enthusiasm for Chinese contemporary art is not so mad and eccentric after all.

There is so much to think about in this show, which has a very different mood from previous exhibitions. It presents some entirely new works as well as some which have been shown in previous exhibitions, which look very different in their new context, juxtaposed with other works. The mood is certainly darker and in some ways less exuberant, although who could fail to be amused, intrigued and enthralled by Liu Di's 'Animal Regulation Series'? Comically fat-bottomed giant creatures (a frog, a hare, a panda, a deer) are trapped within the courtyards of Beijing apartment blocks under construction (or, possibly, this being Beijing, demolition) in order to make a comment on the conflict between nature and 'civilisation', a particularly pressing issue in China. On my three visits to the gallery so far, people gathered, laughing,  in front of another very engaging work, Chen Hangfeng's 'Invasive Species: Vegetables' with its noisy electronic dialogue between the plants growing in one of Shanghai's illicit community vegetable gardens. 'Eggplant' is like a big, dumb, bully character, whilst 'Bok Choi' is more conciliatory. Their talk is raunchy and sexual, or maybe, these being vegetables, 'earthy' might be a better description. 'Heh heh', says Water Spinach, 'I already left my seeds in the earth!' Surprisingly, perhaps, this tongue- in-cheek video work is about civil disobedience.

Maybe my photographs from a local market in Shanghai show produce grown in one of these illegal, but often just-barely-tolerated community gardens, where people attempt to exert some control over both prices and over food safety!

I was reminded of the Shanghai Government's fruitless attempts to force people to stop hanging their washing out all over the streets, on telegraph poles and from every apartment building, and on racks put out onto the footpaths and alleyways. They attempted without success to convince the locals that visitors to the Shanghai  Expo did not want to walk through forests of hanging underwear, quilts and blankets. But people stubbornly ignored all government directives and kept on hanging out their washing. I found this a truly iconic aspect of the city and enjoyed walking through local neighbourhoods filled with drying flowered quilts and padded jackets!

Washing hanging in Shanghai street

Savana with hanging quilts

 I met  the artist Chen Hangfeng in his probably-about-to-be-torn-down studio in Weihai Lu in Shanghai in April this year, when he had just returned from a residency in Japan. His work refers specifically to his local Shanghai context and the pressing social and political issues in a city of great and growing wealth. However he is also fascinated by the Chinese tradition of the scholar and the literati, and much of his work uses ancient folk traditions such as papercutting, with a satirical twist whereby the patterns reveal themselves to be  the signs of global branding: Nike, Adidas, McDonalds et al, such as in his 'Logomania' series. These works indicate an interesting shift towards greater subtlety and more layered meanings in contemporary Chinese art compared to the more obvious 'political pop' works of earlier artists such as Wang Guangyi.

As I discovered in conversation with Hangfeng over cups of flower tea in his studio, a consistent thread running through his practice is the use of found and discarded materials. Not as a self-conscious art reference to Duchamp, dada or Arte Povera, but as a very deliberate statement about over consumption, materialism, greed and the culture of desire that we all live in, and are implicated in, both Western and non-Western alike. I ask him whether he would define his work as political, and his reply is an emphatic 'Yes'. Recently he has been revisiting the art of calligraphy and has studied the traditional manual of the 'Mustard Seed Garden'. His work, 'Wind from West' is a response to this ancient and scholarly form, transformed with his choice of materials - plastic shopping bags. His intention with this work was to create a metaphor for the fact that the essence of Chinese tradition is still there but is now hard to find, or is now viewed only in very superficial ways in this 'new China', something also seen in his 'vegetable soap opera' now showing at White Rabbit.

Despite the immediate pop-culture appeal of his work,Chen Hangfeng is intending to make a serious point about the working conditions and wages of those who make the common everyday objects 'made in China' available so cheaply to consumers in the west, and about the way China is perceived as a source of cheap labour and a market for raw material. Most particularly this is seen in 'You Can Get Them', a video work in which he becomes a comical version of the multi-armed Goddess of Mercy, or Bodhisattva, Guan Yin but in each of the hands (Chen and friends providing the arms) is an item from the supermarket, an assortment of plastic objects ranging from toy guns to fly swatters and coathangers, "made in China'. Here is a link to see this work:
http://vimeo.com/5713339

Chen Hangfeng in his studio, photographed by Luise Guest and reproduced with the permission of the artist

Other memorable works in 'Beyond the Frame' include the harrowing photographic documentation of life in Myanmar Prison Camps by Lu Nan, and the profoundly melancholy and touching 'Mental Patients' by Lu Zhengyuan, who spent two weeks in a Beijing psychiatric hospital taking care of a friend. These grey, staring, life size characters distil the despair of the long term inmates. They reminded me irresistably of Chang Chien-Chi's photographic installation 'The Chain', which I saw in Singapore 3 years ago, which records the misery of patients at the Long Fa Tang Temple (both sanctuary and prison) in Taiwan, where patients are chained in pairs as a kind of 'therapy'.

My two favourite works, however, touch more lightly upon aspects of human experience, both universal and particular. 'Calm' by the 'Madein' collective appears at first to be a room sized pile of rubble, roughly rectangular in shape, perhaps detritus from a building site or demolition zone. Only after standing quite close and looking for a while does one see that it appears to be very, very gently rising and falling, undulating from one end to another, or 'breathing'. Unexpected and slightly unsettling, this work suggests that what we expect to see is not always what we do see, and the world is filled with inexplicable beauty for those who take the trouble to look more closely. Finally my all time favourite, 'Exuviate 2: Where have all the children gone?', Jin Nu's 2005 installation of ghostly apparitions - 20 tiny starched organza children's dresses, turning gently in the slightest shift of air current, swaying and moving as if sighing or crying in an elegy of mourning for lost childhoods. The artist denies any connection with the one child policy and the countless little girls who were never born. This may be a good demonstration, though, of the fact that the meaning of an artwork does not lie in the hands of the artist alone, but is ours to ponder and interpret. Discarded clothing, especially children's clothing, is filled with so many multiple meanings of loss and mourning, even if it is the sadness of the child grown away from the security and safety of the family, or the mother regretting the quick passage of time and the loss of her children to the adult world.

Beyond the Frame? More than the works by 'stars' such as Ai Weiwei, these works made me think beyond my comfortable Australian 'frame' of reference.

Jin Nu, Exuviate 2: Where Have All the Children Gone? 2005 starched silk

'Leviathanation' on a Friday afternoon...

One of my students told me today that art on Friday afternoon was the highlight of her week - and I don't even think she was being sarcastic! There are many times when for a teacher the thought of Year 8 on a Friday afternoon might result in a certain sinking of the heart - even perhaps a desire to run away fast in the opposite direction - but with this class, and our focus on contemporary art, they are so keen to share ideas and get involved that quite the opposite is true and the lesson was a bit of a highlight of my week too.

Here is their 'take' on Huang Yong Ping's wonderful 'Leviathanation' shown in Tang Galleries in Beijing last April. They had  looked at it without any background information last lesson, and then read two brief reviews today:

"The fish is like the engine of a bullet train, pulling the people of China behind it."
"The fish is a monstrous 'Leviathan' (they all got the Jonah and the Whale reference after I suggested they think biblically) and represents Chairman Mao as a powerful ruler"
"All the little taxidermied animals represent less powerful people who attach themselves to those who have power"
"Fish in China represent good fortune and prosperity so this is China becoming more wealthy and powerful, moving into the future"

I found their thought processes fascinating, as were their attempts to put these thoughts into interesting descriptive and analytical language, which we wrote up immediately on the interactive whiteboard, with lots of collaboration and instant critique and feedback.

As so often happens, I found my own ideas about the work were challenged and extended by their interpretations and insights - what a great way to earn a living!

Huang Yong Ping, Leviathanation, 2011, Tang Galleries Beijing