半 边 天 : Half the Beijing Sky Part 2

Ming City Wall Park, Beijing

 Blue sky continues, the air is fresh(ish), and trees are in green leaf everywhere you look. Three reasons to be cheerful in Beijing. Only the apocalyptic traffic today could put a dampener on my mood, the day after the big book launch and "Half the Sky" exhibition opening at Red Gate Gallery. The exhibition is causing a bit of a buzz around town, I hear, and I am hoping there will be at least a few people turn up for my talk tomorrow evening at the Beijing Bookworm. It seems that "Half the Sky" has hit some kind of zeitgeist - people are definitely interested, and warmly enthusiastic.

Half the Sky opens at Red Gate Gallery

How interesting that shows of women artists are in the news again, with Hauser and Wirth in LA re-writing the history of abstract sculpture in America in ‘Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947 – 2016. Despite the apparent success of individual women - in that case Louise Bourgeois, or Lee Bontecou; in the Chinese context Cao Fei or Lin Tianmiao - they are still an absence in the larger narrative. The debate about the rightness or wrongness of all-women shows continues, and I must admit I had secret worries about whether it was a good strategy. But in the end, writing the book was a curatorial process, and an exhibition was a logical move.

Dong Yuan, Grandmother's Cabinet, installation view

When I began writing "Half the Sky" there were many anxious moments when I thought I must be mad. I continued to succumb to moments of doubt and despair throughout the process: was it a kind of hubris that made me think that I could - or should - write a book about artists in another culture, another language? But I really was determined to tell the story of this particular group of artists, representative in so many ways of the extraordinary phenomenon that is contemporary Chinese art.

Installing Gao Rong's "Sitting in a Chair and Thinking About My Future" - an armchair covered in embroidered mould, and lamp with knitted light rays

Installing Li Tingting works

Tao Aimin and Ma Yanling with Tao's "In an Instant" installation

In conversation with Lin Jingjing before the opening begins

  Visitors examining Dong Yuan's "Grandmother's Cabinet"

Tao Aimin, "In an Instant"

Brian Wallace, Red Gate director, with Xiao Lu and Guo Chen

With Dong Yuan

Gao Rong signs a copy of the book

Looking at Cui Xiuwen's "Existential Emptiness"

With Lin Jingjing

Brian Wallace introduces the Australian Ambassador at the opening

Australian Ambassador Jan Adams and a line-up of Chinese artists: 

L to R Zhou Hongbin, Cui Xiuwen, Li Tingting, Xie Qi, Jan Adams, Ma Yanling, myself, Bu Hua, Tony Scott, Bingyi, Xiao Lu, Lin Jingjing, Han Yajuan, Gao Ping. Not pictured: Gao Rong, Tao Aimin, Dong Yuan and Huang Yajuan

Half the Beijing Sky

Bu Hua, Beijing Babe Loves Freedom, Giclee Print, 60cm diameter, courtesy White Rabbit Collection

Back in Beijing after six months, I am listening to a cacophany of shouting and car horns on Chunxiu Lu outside my window. The horn, otherwise known as the Chinese brake pedal, is a form of catharsis for drivers going nowhere on the choked Beijing roads. It's been a tough few days, but finally I've got my Beijing mojo back and I'm loving it again. Spring makes grey Beijing beautiful, and softens its harsh contours.

After disastrously losing my cell phone in a mad race to the gate to board my Beijing-bound flight in Hong Kong last Wednesday, thrown into a state of panic at being cut off from the world, I was then further horrified to discover that my previously reliable means of clambering over the Great Firewall of Chinese internet censorship was no longer working. No Facebook! No Gmail! No Twitter! And with no phone, there could be no Wechat or text messages to and from friends and family. Horrible! It's been an enforced "digital detox" and I don't recommend it, despite my growing anxiety about my own dependence on social media and the pressure we now feel to be a constant online presence.

So imagine my surprise tonight to find this blog working just fine - it's never been accessible in China before without a VPN. The censorship here is nothing if not unpredictable - it keeps us on our toes and is a source of constant frustration, a game of cat and mouse between the censors and the providers of VPN services. A game you can't win, a bit like Bu Hua's Beijing Babe taking shots at fighter jets with her slingshot. Or this, my favourite Beijing translated signage:

In China there is always, always suddenness. I should be used to it by now.

Red Gate Gallery, Beijing

Here in Beijing to launch my book, "Half the Sky: Conversations with Women Artists in China" with an exhibition of works by 16 of the 32 artists at Red Gate Gallery, I have been so frustrated by not being able to upload and share photographs of the installation process and the opening itself. Today, with blue skies and sunshine - never to be taken for granted in Beijing - a big crowd arrived and climbed the stairs to the city wall and the old watchtower that houses Red Gate Gallery. The newly arrived Australian ambassador, Jan Adams, launched the book, and it was wonderful to see  the artists again.

Miraculously now the car horns have died down and drivers have stopped leaning out of their windows to shout at each other. No - I spoke too soon! But nevertheless, exhaustion has overtaken me.

Photographs and more Beijing stories soon.

Art superstars and Postmodern Literati: It's Spring in Beijing

Here is my second of four articles resulting from my April in Beijing, published today on www.theculturetrip.com

It’s spring in Beijing. Despite the smog (apocalyptic) and the traffic (makes Manhattan look bucolic) and the general grittiness of a place which is in a continual process of flux and reinvention, this city is inherently beguiling and seductive. In addition to willow and flowering cherry trees, the weight of imperial and revolutionary history, and the ever-surprising inventiveness and enterprise of its inhabitants, there is, of course, the art. This is a city of art superstars and art mavericks, of postmodern literati and of traditionalists, of hyper-inflated prices (and egos) and of sheer hard work in thousands and thousands of studios. From Songzhuang to Feijiacun, from Beigao to Qiaozi Town, in studios ranging from the large and palatial to the humble, artists are working. Artists from all over China and, indeed all over the world, flock to Beijing. Why? Perhaps this question is best answered by an account of some exhibitions I have seen in the last two weeks of April.

Xu Zhen, Installation View, Photo by Eric Powell | Image Courtesy UCCA

Chinese contemporary art (‘Zhongguo Dangdai Yishu’) is like nothing else on the planet. For sheer bravura spectacle, artistic bravery, and innovation it is hard to beat. The unique historical accident which resulted in artists encountering every phase of Western Modernism and Postmodernism all at once, during the 1980s reform era, provided them with the freedom to invent, reinvent and transform historical conventions unburdened by reference points which western artists take for granted. They are often iconoclasts, as well as inheritors of a valued and treasured tradition. This apparent paradox plays out in surprising ways.

Installation view of Xu Zhen, Photo by Eric Powell | Image courtesy of UCCA

At Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, the mid-career retrospective of Xu Zhen (though perhaps we should call him ‘the artist formerly known as Xu Zhen’ as he now operates as a corporation, ‘MadeIn Company’) is sheer spectacle. An extraordinary diversity of installations, performances and objects across multiple platforms and media makes for a very powerful experience, sadly not always the case in the contemporary art museum. The exhibition as a whole, and individual works within it, pack quite a punch. Surprise, delight, awe at the artist’s sheer inventiveness is the initial audience response, followed by a growing awareness of Xu’s thoughtful representation of some of the big issues of our times. The Duchampian wit and irreverent Pop sensibility is underpinned by the artist’s critical gaze on both Chinese society and the international art world.

Described by curator Philip Tinari as the key figure of the Shanghai art scene, Xu is a significant influence for Chinese artists born since 1980. The UCCA show includes more than 50 installation pieces, 10 videos, 40 painting and collage works and several performances (including slipper clad grandmothers who followed audiences around the gallery) and spans his oeuvre from the late 1990s.

Xu Zhen, Installation View, Photo by Eric Powell | Image Courtesy of UCCA

One enters the museum to encounter a monumental sculpture in which the heads of Ancient Greek gods and goddesses have been replaced by inverted Buddhist statuary. In Xu’s hands this literal overlapping of East and West, the continuing concern of so many Chinese artists, becomes parodic. A multi-coloured Goddess Guanyin presides over the ‘ShanghArt Supermarket’, a replica of a convenience store, staffed by cashiers at the cash registers, in which the contents of every package have been removed – and are for sale. This is the literal embodiment of consumerist emptiness. In an interview with Ocula the artist said ‘We consider that exhibitions nowadays are a product, and that art is being sold…’ You wander through rooms containing museum vitrines showing the cross-cultural connections of bodily gestures, or witty replica oil paintings complete with carefully rendered camera flash. Courbet’s notorious La Source with camera flash obscuring – of course – the very source of the painting’s controversy cleverly skewers the phenomenon of art tourism whereby people experience artworks only through the lens of their camera. Images like these may be found in many vernacular Chinese photographs of the 1990s as citizens took up the opportunity for travel outside China.

Smaller versions of Play, the architectural construction of black leather, ropes and bondage items now in the collection of Sydney’s White Rabbit Gallery, reveals another aspect of the work of Xu and his art corporation. These works, and the upside down be-feathered tribal people hanging, bound, in contorted poses from the ceiling above us, are deeply sinister and to some extent defy interpretation. Their sheer physical presence is enormously powerful. They suggest the ways in which religion and tribal identities are merely another brand in today’s world.

To read the rest of this article, click HERE

Six Exhibitions in Beijing

The first of my articles based on my most recent trip to China has been published today on Daily Serving. I found, amidst some awful and pedestrian shows in the 798 art district -which is really suffering from a push to make the entire space over to the sale of products and "design" (mostly tacky in the extreme) - some wonderful exhibitions. Indeed on my first visit an exhibition by an artist I have met several times, Ma Yanling, was an unexpected delight. Later, Xu Zhen at Ullens and Xiao Yu at Pace were thrilling in the way that one always hopes for, but is so rare an experience. At Redgate and at several of the Caochangdi galleries, interesting shows abounded. Here are some of my impressions:

Beijing is exhausting, exhilarating, infuriating, appalling, and wonderful, all at the same time. The energy of the city, undefeated by its weight of imperial and revolutionary history, or by the dead hand of contemporary politics and power struggles, is encapsulated in the lively diversity of its art scene. In the late 1990s and the early years of this century, Chinese artists were rock stars, earning big money fast. Chinese and international galleries opened large and palatial premises. Every property developer wanted a museum, and artists posed for fashion shoots in Chinese Vogue. Today things are not quite so upbeat, but there is still a palpable sense of optimism about China itself, and about the role of art and artists in this fast-mutating society.

Xie Qi. So Green (Mao on 50 Yuan), 2012; oil on canvas; 200 x 180 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and Pekin Fine Arts.

Recent exhibitions in Beijing reveal how Chinese contemporary art combines a mastery of technique (learned in the rigid academic tradition of the powerhouse art academies such as the Central Academy of Fine Arts) with a willingness to innovate. Artists who came of age in the ’80s and ’90s discovered western Modernism and post-Modernism all at once, resulting in an art devoid of the overwhelming layer of theory that infects much contemporary art in the West.

Li Shurui, Beijing, 2014. Photo: Luise Guest.

Li Shurui at White Space Beijing continues to paint in her characteristically psychedelic manner, using an airbrush to create monumental three-dimensional canvases. The blurred, softened edges of her forms make us question our perception of reality. Li was startled when someone told her she was making “Optical” art like Bridget Riley, as she had never heard of this style. Her training at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts provided her with almost no awareness of  Modernist or contemporary art, which paradoxically allowed her the freedom to invent a visual language entirely her own. She is interested in the color spectrum and in creating paintings that provide an experience so physically immersive that it becomes emotive as well as perceptual. The shimmering uncertainties of her large paintings pierce the illusion that we inhabit a rational world. The sculptural pieces in this show blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture. They lie on the ground like shards broken from an extraterrestrial machine, their matte-gray knife-blade surfaces punctuated by sky-blue edges.

Li Shurui. Lights No.95, 2009; acrylic on canvas, 210 x 210 cm. Courtesy of Li Shurui.

Painting continues to be a vital force in Chinese contemporary art. It was the Political Pop and Cynical Realist painters, after all, who burst onto the international art scene like flamethrowers in the mid-1990s and continue to be influential today.

To read the rest of this article, click HERE 

北京日记: Nothing and Everything - Three Days in Beijing

Here is a list of all the things that I could have bought from carts, trucks, three-wheeled bicycles or directly from the pavement as I walked home today:

• underpants with slogans in gold lame embroidered on the bum
• pineapples carved into beautiful sculptured shapes - in one instance by a very small boy wielding a very sharp knife
• socks
• balloons
• strange white cakes from a woman who only seems to have a small boxful each day - is it her hobby? How on earth can she make a living?
• American tights and "spanx" shapewear laid out straight onto the dust, spit (and worse) of the road
• Sausages and pancakes cooked on a griddle on a three-wheeled cart
• jewellery and textiles - supposedly Tibetan, but quite possibly from a factory in the Pearl River Delta
• interesting notebooks from a man who sells them from the back of a cart
• mysteriously, a small selection of frilly pink and white hats, again laid on the filthy ground

Needless to say, many of these people vanish quickly into the shadows when the police appear. You can walk down a road filled with these vendors, go and buy a coffee and when you emerge they are all gone. Later at night, you see carts with all their pineapples covered with a blanket, under the overpass of the Third Ring Road, just waiting.

And here are some of my questions about daily life in this city:

• Why is it that everything sort of works but nothing quite works? Every tap in China is apparently not quite connected to its sink so they are always wobbly and appear about to break entirely. Beijing plumbing is not designed to take toilet paper so you cannot actually flush it down the toilet without risking something truly appalling in the way of a sewer catastrophe. Electric lights are flaky. The heating in Beijing goes on on a certain date each year and off on another, never mind the weather. I am walking around my apartment wearing multiple sweaters and several pairs of socks. 
• The light in my pitch dark apartment block hallway goes on automatically only after I have finally - by a Braille method of feeling my way along the wall, then feeling all around the door, and eventually finding the lock - somehow blindly managed to insert the key. At that moment, hey presto, the light goes on. WHY?

Whether one is charmed or annoyed by these things depends on what kind of day you are having. And today I was noticing the beauty of the willow trees and the blossoms, and less aware of the dust, noise, polluted air, spitting and smoking that surrounds me every time I venture out.

Beijing continues to delight, intrigue, amuse and infuriate in equal measures. Today, in the end, delight won out as I came home from interviewing the absolutely extroardinary artist Bingyi, in her studio in a converted Yuan Dynasty temple, in the hutongs right near the Drum and Bell Towers. Two hours hearing about Bingyi's ambitious projects - for example the 160 metre long ink painting to be exhibited in Essen, Germany and then (maybe) buried in a mineshaft - quite restored my equilibrium after a few days of being a bit defeated by big bad Beijing. Bingyi's work is part 'shui mo' scholarly ink painting, part performance art, part land art and part installation. She has been described as a postmodern literati painter, a description she quite likes. She paints, writes calligraphy, writes poems and libretti for opera, composes music, designs and makes incredible costumes and plans ambitious projects and exhibitions which take place across the world. Do you ever sleep? I ask her. "Not much," she says, "I am always working!" An artist with a global practice, yet absolutely grounded in Chinese history and tradition - her Yale PhD thesis, after all, immersed her in a study of the Han Dynasty for seven years - she has reinvented ink painting for a new age.

Bingyi writes calligraphy in her studio, photograph Luise Guest

Bingyi, ink on Chinese paper, photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artist

Bingyi, Cascade, installation and performance, image courtesy the artist

Yesterday I was thrilled to meet a true legend of the Beijing artworld, Meg Maggio of Pekin Fine Arts, who deftly skewered many of the preconceptions that I and other westerners may have about Chinese art, the artworld and the market. I enjoyed her direct and down-to-earth attitude and the opportunity to hear at first hand some of her stories - and I like to question my own assumptions, testing for traces of chinoiserie and romanticism that we are all a little prone to. The exhibition currently showing, of work by Xie Qi in her first solo show with the gallery, is wonderful, and I will be looking forward to meeting and interviewing this artist. From Pekin Fine Arts at Caochangdi, in its beautiful Ai Weiwei designed courtyard, I spent an hour travelling across the city in apocalyptic traffic jams to Redgate Gallery in the Ming Dynasty watchtower and an exhibition by painter Zhang Yajie. I particularly loved his tough, expressive paintings of electric sockets, sinks and taps, perhaps partly due to my own Beijing plumbing adventures.

Zhang Yajie at Redgate Gallery, images courtesy the artist and Redgate Gallery

The previous day I had been absolutely bowled over by two exhibitions in 798. The first, Xu Zhen (Madein Company) at the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art - well, at the moment I have no words. I shall have to think of some, given that I plan to write about the show, but I am still absorbing it as spectacle. 

The Goddess of Mercy at the entry to Xu Zhen's Art Supermarket, filled with bags and packs of - nothing

The entrance to the Xu Zhen exhbition at Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art Beijing

Inside the "ShanghArt Art Supermarket at Ullens

The second, entirely different, Xiao Yu's "Earth" at Pace Beijing. Literally that. A vast space filled with earth, the smell of rich loam and the earthiness of the farmyard. During the installation it had been ploughed by farmers with cattle, but only the earth remains. Nothing and everything. And all I can think, at the end of three days such as these is, "How incredibly lucky am I, to be here, in this place, at this particular moment in history."

Xiao Yu, "Earth" at Pace Beijing

Art in Review, 2013: The Good, the Bad and the.....

 It's the end of 2013, another year over and a time to look back. Every writer of every description is doing their end of year roundups (aka "quick, make a list, rather than actually write something of substance") and "who am I to disagree?" to quote Annie Lennox and the Eurythmics. And that's always appropriate. Returned from a Chinese winter, exposing my startlingly white skin to the Australian sun and walking along the beach, instead of more practical and useful tasks I have been deciding on my top ten gallery experiences of the past year. I could have been thinking about New Year's resolutions such as, oh, I don't know, losing 10 kilos, going to the gym more often (or, in actual fact, ever), doing intensive Chinese homework every single week, being kinder and less impatient, being less of a workaholic. But instead, I decided to write a list of the aforesaid gallery moments of wonder and awe. And here they are:

1. Song Dong, Waste Not, at Carriageworks, Sydney, January 2013. This was magical and moving, a testament to family, to memory, a profoundly human elegy to the artist's mother and to times past.

Song Dong, Waste Not, photographs Luise Guest

When I wrote about this installation, which I had always wanted to see, I found it hard to express my own feelings of sadness that linked me directly with my own very complex relationship with my mother. Here is the start of my review for 'The Art Life'.

The Ancestral Temple: memory and mourning in the work of Song Dong

Ten thousand objects collected by the artist Song Dong’s mother Zhao Xiangyuan, over the course of her adult life, are arranged in neat rows and grids on the ground at Carriageworks. During the Cultural Revolution, a period of extreme uncertainty and privation, she began hoarding – drying out and keeping even her allocated bars of soap for fear of future soap shortages. Continuing right through to her last years, Zhao saved everything, in a process called “wu jin qi yong”, translated as “waste not”. This is the latest incarnation of Chinese artist Song Dong’s extraordinary installation, itself entitled ‘Waste Not’.

Song Dong: Waste Not (detail, installation view) Photograph by: Jane Hobson Courtesy Barbican Art Gallery.

Entering the vast space one first sees a row of old chairs, and beyond them the reconstructed frame of Zhao’s traditional timber home. Radiating from the skeleton of the house, the possessions it once contained are laid out on the floor: among them 4 TVs, 3 record player turntables, numerous clocks and watches, broken toys, lamps, old umbrellas, plastic buckets and tin washing tubs, rows of shoes, coat hangers, threadbare face washers, stacked quilts and blankets, polystyrene food containers, empty plastic bottles and their lids, and hundreds of plastic bags folded into neat triangles. They are unbearably poignant in their sheer ordinariness. To read the rest of my review in The Art Life, click on this link: theartlife.com.au/2013/the-ancestral-temple-memory-and-mourning-in-the-work-of-song-dong/

2. Liu Zhuoquan, Chang'An Avenue, at Sydney Contemporary, August 2013

Liu Zhuoquan. Chang'An Avenue (detail) image courtesy the artist and China Art Projects

I have loved the 'neihua', or 'inside bottle painting' installations of this artist from my first encounter with him at his Beijing studio early in 2011. A major installation at the MCA for the 18th Biennale of Sydney in 2012 gave Sydney audiences a sense of his ambition and range. His recent work, shown here for the first time at the Niagara Galleries booth at the inaugural Sydney Contemporary Art Fair, is an indication of the way his practice is continuing to develop.

Here is the catalogue essay that I wrote for this work, which I just wish an Australian museum had the foresight to acquire: http://www.chinaartprojects.com/liu-zhuoquan-essay/

3. 'Serve the People', curated by Edmund Capon at White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney, August 2013

Each show at the White Rabbit Gallery of Contemporary Chinese art presents us with intriguing new works as well as old favourites in new juxtapositions. Edmund Capon, retired (liberated?)  from his role as Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, curated this show and it was excellent. Even the gallery spaces themselves looked different and the works were selected and arranged to elucidate his narrative, which related very strongly to his own memories of China during the Cultural Revolution. And why read John McDonald's review if you can read mine?

Jin Feng, History of China's Modernisation, Volumes I and II, 2011, rubber, marble, ricepaper installation, image courtesy White Rabbit Gallery

Shen Shaomin, Laboratory - Three-Headed, Six-Armed Superhuman, 2005, bone, bone meal, glass, glue, dimensions variable, image courtesy White Rabbit Gallery

Chen Wenling, Happy Life - Family, bronze with vehicle duco, 2005, (with Gonkar Gyatso Buddha at rear), image courtesy White Rabbit Gallery

Here is the start of my review for The Art Life:

Serve The People

Wang Zhiyuan ‘Object of Desire’, 2008, fibreglass, lights, sound, 363 x 355 x 70 cm image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit Gallery

In Mao Zedong’s famous exhortation to the Red Army at the 1942 Yenan Forum on Art and Literature, he emphasised the close relationship between art and revolution, stressing that art must ‘serve the masses’. He probably wasn’t envisaging a gigantic pair of gaudy pink knickers made of fibreglass and car duco; a three-headed conjoined baby skeleton in a scientific bell jar; vegetables growing in an illicit Shanghai garden engaged in a sexually explicit conversation courtesy of Chen Hangfeng’s video installation; or a baby stroller customised with spikes on the wheels, symbolising the fierce struggle for success that characterises parenthood in today’s China. Imagine the bewilderment of Mao and his revolutionary comrades in an encounter with these works and others in the new exhibition at White Rabbit Gallery. ‘Serve the People’ has been curated by former director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Edmund Capon, from Judith Neilson’s impressive collection of contemporary Chinese art.

The notion of how art might “serve the people” has an entirely different resonance in today’s China. Artists born before Mao’s death in 1976 cannot help but look back and attempt to reconcile their life experience with the strangeness of the present day. The dislocations of social transformation, globalisation, demolition and urbanisation which have swept away the revolutionary past, ushering in a world filled with uncertainty, have rendered many of the tropes of the first 1990s wave of contemporary Chinese art passé. A new visual language is emerging, with which artists can respond to the strangeness of their contemporary world, in which enormous disparities of wealth, education and personal freedom are creating new schisms in the social fabric. It is in reflecting this 21st century world back to audiences, both within China and in the West, that artists ‘serve the people’ today. If you want to read on, click on this link: http://theartlife.com.au/2013/serve-the-people/

4. Shoufay Derz, Owen Leong and Cyrus Tang, Phantom Limb, UTS Gallery, September 2013

Shoufay Derz, On the other hand (detail), concept image for sculpture, 2013. Natural Indigo, blown borosilicate glass fountain pens, gold plated nibs, sandblasted black granite, black Chinese ink. Image source http://www.cofa.unsw.edu.au/events/archive/935

Three really interesting artists in an exhibition which explored "disembodiment and the attempt to bridge a physical or metaphysical divide."

In the interests of what politicians like to call 'full disclosure' I have to declare that Shoufay Derz is a friend and colleague, however that does not alter the fact that I consider her unequivocally one of the most interesting artists working in Sydney right now. Her commitment to a deeply philosophical practice based on her research and investigation of religion, philosophy, art and cultural history and the embodiment of materiality is impressive. She followed this exhibition with a show at Artereal Gallery (link here: http://arterealgalleryblog.blogspot.com/2013/11/luise-guest-on-shoufay-derz.html) and is currently completing a residency in Taipei. I look forward to seeing what she will do next.

Shoufay Derz, I Am Death, Destroyer of Worlds, image courtesy the artist

5. Yin Xiuzhen, 'Nowhere to Land' at Pace Beijing, October 2013

Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen at their Beijing studio, November 2013, photograph Luise Guest

Yin Xiuzhen, Portable Cities, Biennale of Sydney 2003, image courtesy the artist

I have loved her work since I saw the whimsical 'suitcase cities' at the Biennale of Sydney many years ago (seen again this year at the Moscow Biennale.) This exhibition was a revelation - her use of old discarded clothing is powerfully evocative and I particularly loved the moody, atmospheric paintings of Beijing streetscenes on cement road barriers. She combines whimsy and wit with a passionate and intelligent focus on issues and ideas. After I saw the exhibition, on my first visit to 798, I was determined to find a way to meet the artist. It took until the end of my residency, in the very last week, before we managed to arrange a time, and it was a highlight of my time in China. I just hope to have the opportunity at some point to see the wonderfully witty 'Collective Subconscious', shown at MOMA in 2010.

Installation view: Yin Xiuzhen. Collective Subconscious. 2007. Minibus, stainless steel, used clothes, stools, music. Collection of the artist. © 2009 Yin Xiuzhen. Photo: Jason Mandella.

When I met Yin, with her husband Song Dong, at their studio out near the Great Wall, she told me that her intention with these painted works was to reflect on China's appalling and worsening air pollution. She fears for her daughter, and sometimes feels hopeless and despairing. She said, "They (these paintings) may look beautiful and misty, but in fact they are poisonous." The visit was not without drama. Mr Zhang, my driver, nearly had a heart attack when he saw the complicated directions in their text message, which took up 3 or 4 screens and went along the lines of: "After you leave the expressway, drive past a group of dead trees, then when you see a factory with a red gate, take the next road on the left over a small bridge. Drive for a while. You will see a blue sign on a fence. Turn right at the next village....etc." We got lost many times, asking directions from farmers, factory workers, and women riding bicycles along the dusty road. The drive from central Beijing took nearly two hours and the drive back, in traffic that caused the usually placid and unflappable Mr Zhang to swear continuously and viciously, took three. As we left,and Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen were waving us goodbye from their gate, he asked dubiously, "Tamen youming ma?" (Are they famous?) I said, "Dui ah, tamen shi zhende hen, hen, feichang youming yishujia!" Which is bad grammar but gets the emphatic point across.

Pace Gallery exhibition page: http://www.pacegallery.com/beijing/exhibitions/12588/yin-xiuzhen

Yin Xiuzhen, Traffic Barrier, Chang'An, from solo show 'Nowhere to Land' at Pace Beijing, image source: ocula.com

6. Qiu Zhijie 'Satire' at Galleria Continua, 798, Beijing, November 2013

Weird and slightly incomprehensible, but oddly fascinating as this artist always is. When I went to his talk at the MCA last year and he presented his concepts for the Shanghai Biennale, I left the lecture theatre thinking that either I am very, very stupid ( always a possibility) or else that Qiu Zhijie is a very charming but alien being from a far far galaxy. His exhibition confirmed for me that while he may not actually be an extraterrestrial, he certainly doesn't think like other people.

Galleria Continua web site: http://www.galleriacontinua.com/english/mostra.html?id_mostra=259

Qiu Zhijie, 'Satire' at Galleria Continua, Beijing, installation views, photographs Luise Guest

7. Yinka Shonibare at Pearl Lam Hong Kong in December 2013
To tell the truth, the major Yinka Shonibare show at the MCA in Sydney some years ago left me a little cold - I thought the messages about postcolonialism were obvious and a bit trite. The new show at Pearl Lam was different - multiple meanings and some witty and satirical views about Hong Kong's obsession with wealth and status as well as the fabulous characteristic use of textile patterns.

8. Do Ho Suh at Lehmann Maupin Hong Kong, December 2013
What can I say? His work is profound, beautiful and spellbinding, even in the context of this extremely swanky gallery where I had trouble attracting attention to ask for a catalogue because they were very busy doing a high pressure sales pitch to a glamorous, designer-clad, Chinese buyer.

9. No Country: Contemporary Art for South and South East Asia, Asia Society Hong Kong, December 2013
This was unexpectedly fantastic. One of the best curated exhibitions I saw in 2013, in fact. Curated by June Yap under the auspices of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative , the exhibition included some artists whose work I know (Shilpa Gupta) and others who were new to me. My favourite was Bangladeshi Tayeba Begum's 'Love Bed' - a little bit Mona Hatoum, a little bit Lin Tianmiao, a little bit Ed Kienholz but without being merely derivative. And absolutely chilling.

Love Bed, 2012. Stainless steel, 31 1/4 × 72 3/4 × 87 inches (79.4 × 184.8 × 221 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Guggenheim UBS MAP Purchase Fund, 2012, 2012.153. © Tayeba Begum Lipi. Installation view: No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, February 22–May 22, 2013. Photo: Kristopher McKay

The catalogue provided insight without empty 'artspeak'. 

"For the artist, the nation’s political state forms the backdrop to another critical political concern: the gendered violence that was rife during both partitions. Her works reflect on both the double bind of the personal and the political, expressing and accentuating a sense of unease through a public form of gendered expression that also speaks to challenges faced by the artist and her contemporaries. In Bizarre and Beautiful (2011), exhibited at the inaugural Bangladesh Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, she transformed mock stainless-steel razor blades into the fabric of a feminine undergarment. Attractive yet threatening, the article is converted into a hard, gritty form, possessing the qualities of armor or a shield.

Razor blades return in Love Bed (2012), in which the shared space of domesticity, affection, and bliss glints with both threat and invitation. The blade here represents not merely the violence implied by its sharp edge, but also the object’s function as a basic tool to aid in childbirth in the absence of other medical support, a circumstance that the artist recalls from childhood. Printed on the blades is the Bengali name Balaka, a well-known Bangladeshi brand. Coming from a large family, the artist associates the strength of steel with the tenacity of the women who surrounded her as she grew up, individuals who defied the odds to keep their families and communities together. Yet these works resist interpretation according to simple binary opposition along historical, religious, social, or gendered lines. As much as the skeins of razors draped across the bed frame warn against our approach, they also, paradoxically, join together into a productive space for connection and dialogue."

Zhou Hongbin, image courtesy the artist and China Art Projects

10. Two exhibitions at the CAP Project Space in Sheung Wan, Hong Kong which neatly bookended my 3 months in China - the first, 'Aquarium' by Chinese photomedia artist Zhou Hongbin (definitely someone to watch) and the second, a show of new artists from Sri Lanka, 'Serendipity Revealed'. This last contained the extraordinary images of Anoli Perera.

Anoli Perera, 'Protest', black and white photograph

I also enjoyed 'I Am Your Agency', Jing Yuan Huang's November solo show at Force Gallery in 798, and 'I Love Shanghai', a group show at Art Labor Gallery which included works by Lu Xinjian, the ubiquitous Island6 (Liu Dao) collective - are they actually literally everywhere? - Emma Fordham (she's an art teacher - yay!) and a stunning photograph of the transformation and loss of old Shanghai, by Greg Girard.

Image source for Emma Fordham and Greg Girard: http://www.artlaborgallery.com/pages/artists/gourp_i%20love%20shanghai.html#

I also loved the concept behind Redgate Gallery's November show, which paired printmakers with significant Chinese poets. 'River on Paper' included some of the printmakers that I had met earlier in the month at the Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts, and it was a delight to discover some of the poems as well.

River on Paper - Dialogue between Poetry and Prints

Lies, Poet: Zhai Yongming, Artist: Kou Jianghui, 2013, Lithograph, 56 x 38 cm, part of the River on PaperPortfolio, 2013, Boxed, 61 x 42 cm, image Redgate Gallery http://www.redgategallery.com/Exhibitions%201991%20-%202013/River_on_Paper/index.html

Earlier in the year I really loved Tianli Zu's work at 4A Centre for Contemporary Art in the group show 'In Possible Worlds'. And who could forget John Kaldor's '13 Rooms' - not all fabulous but the re-creation of the Marina Abramovic piece was extraordinary as was Xu Zhen's 'Blink of an Eye'.

Xu Zhen, 'In the Blink of an Eye', image source: www.smh.com

I won't be negative and focus on the disappointments. But they included, most especially, the Hugo Boss Asian Art Awards at the Rockbund Museum Shanghai - this left me completely cold and utterly disengaged. So disappointing, as the show there last December which included Huang Yong Ping was one of my 2012 highlights. I was left unexcited by much of the Asia Pacific Triennial early in the year as well - unexpected as every previous show has been fantastic. I suspect that sourcing so many artists from Micronesia and Central Asia and pretty much ignoring China may have been one of the factors that left me less than impressed there. Not that I am biased or anything. And to even the balance, the new Fang Lijun show in 798 was very, very dull. I don't think he should bother returning to Jingdezhen to do any more slumped, fallen, collapsed ceramic pieces, frankly.

What am I looking forward to? Cai Guo-qiang at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art next week - watch this space!  Christian Boltanski at Carriageworks in January. And Beijing Silvermine at 4A Centre for Contemporary Art - intriguing!

What were your highlight exhibitions this year?

Happy New Year! 新年快乐！Xinnian Kuai Le! 
May 2014 (the year of the horse) be filled with interesting art, and fascinating conversation.