Smash Palace at the White Rabbit

A new show opening at White Rabbit Gallery is always exciting - and 'Smash Palace' is no exception.

It's a very, very different mood than that of their previous exhibition - quite dark and disturbing in part, with a sensibility that echoes a prevailing view among many Chinese artists that the world is so absurd, and politics so preposterous, that surrealism is the only sane response.

Here is the start of my review, published this week in 'The Art Life'

Made-In, 'Under Heaven' image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit

Smash (verb): shatter - break - crush - crash - dash - demolish - crack
Smash (noun): crash - clash - collision

Intrigued by the title for this new show of contemporary Chinese art at the White Rabbit Gallery, I wondered at first what curatorial narrative could possibly connect such diverse works. From artists working with oil paint applied with a cake decorator’s nozzle, to drawings made with biro, to collections of miniaturised possessions, to mechanised French railway tickets, to sculptures made with a 3D laser printer the works illustrate the diversity and in many cases the technical virtuosity and conceptual complexity of contemporary art in the People’s Republic and Taiwan.

Zong  Ning, 'Slum', 2008 Inkjet Print, image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit

Bai Yiluo, Recycling, image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit

Seen together they tell a story of today’s China which ironically echoes Mao Zedong’s exhortation to “Smash the Four Olds” – customs, culture, habits and ideas. The “smashing” taking place today relates to the dramatic and fast-paced change being wrought by global capital and modernisation. This has resulted in mega-cities housing upwards of 20 million citizens; the social upheaval, barely contained and controlled, of the largest migration in history of workers from rural villages to the factory towns of southern China; and the transformative possibilities of communications technology as people begin to demand greater freedoms. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle in this last instance – a news story this week reported Chinese netizens’ responses to a People’s Dailystory listing the names of the 2987 ‘representatives’ attending the National People’s Congress. Howls of fury, savage mockery, cynicism and disenchantment erupted on Sina Weibo, the Chinese micro-blogging site which now has twice as many users as Twitter. Most of the comments were variations on “Who the hell are these people and how did they come out of nowhere to represent me?” Others wondered how long it would take for corruption scandals to unseat them, while @?? tweeted, “I refuse to be represented. In this information age, I speak for myself.” This prevailing sense of unease and anxiety at the dark side of the increasing wealth and power of China is expressed by many of the artists in this exhibition.

Wang Guofeng, Ideality No 3, digital photograph, image courtesy the artist and White Rabbit

On the ground floor Bai Yiluo’s 2008 ‘Recycling’, an enormous fibreglass human heart tied onto the back of a tricycle of the kind used to transport materials and recycled paper in Chinese cities, suggests the ways that our human needs for love and kindness are disposable in the rush to acquire material wealth. There are also suggestions of the deeply contentious and disturbing trade in human organs in China. Juxtaposed with a panoramic photograph by Jin Feng, ‘Appeals Without Words’, depicting a row of ‘petitioners’ – rural villagers bringing petitions about corruption and land seizures to the attention of provincial officials – the two works represent some of the problems endemic to a nation undergoing seismic systemic change. The petitioners in this staged photograph are painted gold because they will wait so long to be heard that they may as well be statues, and their petitions are blank sheets of paper because no-one will ever listen to their pleas for justice. The corruption of venal local officialdom is legendary, and was ever thus. “The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away,” in the words of the ancient proverb. Jin Feng powerfully draws our attention to the disparities of power and wealth in China, where mega-rich ‘red princes’ race their Maseratis and Porsches in Beijing and Shanghai whilst migrant workers sleep in makeshift tent homes beneath the freeways they are constructing. Similarly, Jin Shi’s ‘Mini-Home’, seen recently at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in the 18th Biennale of Sydney, makes visible the unseen lives of poor urban migrants, living in the cracks of the cities – alleyways, demolition zones, underneath bridges and beside freeways. The artist represents the contrast between the poverty of their reality and their aspirations by miniaturising the chaotic and cluttered temporary dwelling and all the random objects it contains. These lives are literally ‘made small’ by the inequalities of wealth and power that have emerged following the demise of the ‘iron rice bowl’ system.

If you want to read the rest of my review, click HERE

"Tai Hao Le!" or "What's so Good About Contemporary Chinese Art?"

The current Chinese contemporary art bubble must surely be at bursting point when I go to my local cafe on a Saturday morning and pick up a freebie real estate magazine (of the pretentious 'lifestyle' variety) only to find an article about the current show here at the National Portrait Gallery, 'Go Figure: Contemporary Chinese Portraiture from the Sigg Collection'. Some pretty banal text, and mostly pictures of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's 'Old People's Home', a work which has certainly captured the popular imagination, but it nonetheless indicates something of the genuine excitement that people feel when they encounter some of the work that has been produced in China in recent years. 

 

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Old People's Home, 2007, mixed media installation. Courtesy M+ Sigg Collection,
Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and National Portrait Gallery.

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Old People's Home, 2007, (detail) mixed media installation. Courtesy M+ Sigg Collection, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and National Portrait Gallery.

Often I suspect this reaction is one of awe at the sheer technical wizardry of the artists, and the audacity and scale of their ambition. There is also a recognition of some of the challenges faced by artists in the PRC, although these are often understood in very simple ways. The parents of my students often catch this excitement, visiting the White Rabbit Gallery with their daughters and then telling me how much they loved it. While this sometimes makes me feel as if I am proselytising - and I probably am, as I can't help sharing my enthusiasm with anyone who will listen - I am always so delighted when I can see such a heartfelt and appreciative response to contemporary artworks. Sadly this is not the general response to exhibitions at the MCA! 

Perhaps it is partly a function of the way people respond when they can sense that artworks in a gallery have been chosen based on the personal tastes and enthusiasm of the buyer - in White Rabbit's case, Judith Nielson and her astute judgements. People have something of the same reaction when they go to Hobart and visit MONA, repository of David Walsh's appetite for the Grand Guignol end of the artworld. 

In the case of the Sigg Collection, of course, one is aware that it represents a grand narrative of Chinese art in the post-Mao period, with the collector consciously and carefully telling the story of what he observed as China changed. And so much recent Chinese work in particular seems to transcend national boundaries and speak directly of human experience in this part of the 21st century, with all the anxiety and uncertainty that entails.

Next year, the wonderful 'Waste Not' installation by Song Dong, previously shown at MOMA, will be here in Sydney for the Sydney Festival at Carriageworks for the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. That is a major coup! See the link here: 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art

Song Dong, 'Waste Not' installation view 2005/2009/2012, Museum of Modern Art New York, courtesy the artist, Tokyo Gallery and BTAP

A 'double take' and some cognitive dissonance...

Old and new China, Shanghai, April 2011, photograph Luise Guest

So as usual I am attempting to immerse myself in all things Chinese and all things contemporary Chinese art. This sometimes leads to some strange cognitive dissonance. This week I am reading three books at once and jumping backwards and forwards from one to the other. The first is Jonathan Fenby's 'Tiger Head Snake Tail: China Today, How it Got There and Where It is Heading'. As you might guess from the title, this book delivers rather less than it promises. Despite being genuinely interesting, many chapters are essentially a series of lists and factoids in search of a narrative which could make sense of them. There are some great quotable bits and pieces though, like the story of the 6 year old child on a TV quiz show who was asked what she wanted to be when she grew up. 'An official', she said. 'What kind of official?' 'A corrupt official', she said. The book certainly paints a fascinating picture of a nation on fast forward with all the excitement and the inevitable problems that entails. The second is Tani E. Barlow's 'The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism' which I am earnestly and optimistically dipping into and then  putting down with a sense of exhaustion. The third is a book that surely must have been written just for me: A crime novel in an affectionate homage to the hard-boiled private eye genre, with a female protagonist (an American born Chinese) set in New York, with a plot centering around the Chinese contemporary art market. For me this already ticks all the boxes. And S J Rozan can really write. I totally love Lydia Chin!

And of course meanwhile I am neglecting to do my Chinese homework - I should be learning how to discuss the weather in Chinese for my class on Thursday but the 'tianqi yubao' (weather forecast) is so far failing to fascinate. And I make such tiny baby steps towards some kind of minimal level of competence that it is just depressing. Especially when I hear westerners speaking fluent Chinese and think 'But how did you GET there?!'

Meanwhile I have just got home from an absorbing and illuminating conversation held by the Power Institute at the University of Sydney, between Chinese curator Pi Li and Sydney art academic Thomas Berghuisen. Pi Li is here for 'Go Figure!', the big Contemporary Chinese Portraiture show opening at the  Sherman Foundation and the National Portrait Gallery later this week. He is in transition between Boers-Li Gallery and the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and his new role at M+,  the new Museum of Visual Culture housing Uli Sigg's collection in the West Kowloon Cultural precinct in Hong Kong.

Pi Li gave a history from his own personal recollections of the development of contemporary art from the early 1980s in China, with all the many transformations and developments along the way. One of the fascinating things he commented on was the profound influence of the Sensation Exhibition and the yBa artists such as Hirst and Emin on a new generation of Chinese artists seeking another path following the commodification of the 90s wave of Cynical Realist and Political Pop painters. He identified Qiu Zhijie, Zhang Huan and Yang Zhenzhong among those who saw the use of ephemeral artforms, and rotting or impermanent materials as a way to reignite the avant garde. There was also some very interesting discussion of the impact of the returning diaspora of artists. When I met Yang Zhenzhong at his studio in Shanghai last year he was re-editing his iconic work 'I Will Die' into an 8 hour version for a European exhibition. He was the very model of the contemporary Chinese artist - essentially a global brand. But with an interesting and hugely significant body of work.

Yang Zhenzhong in his Shanghai Studio, April 2011, photograph Luise Guest
 (the artist  trying to give directions to my taxi driver on his way to pick me up from the studio - quite a challenge!)

Last Friday night saw the opening of the new White Rabbit exhibition 'Double Take'. It is clever and thought provoking and a wonderful chance to revisit some familiar works, such as paintings by Liang Yuanwei, painted 'neihua' bottles by Liu Zhuoquan, and even some of Ai Weiwei's sunflower seeds. I have written at greater length inhttp://theartlife.com.au/ and you can read more about my responses to the show here: Double Take at White Rabbit

A favourite work from the show? Gao Rong's fabulous simulacra of her Beijing basement apartment entrance, entirely fabricated from fabric and embroidery.

Gao Rong, Level 1/2, Unit 8, Building 5, Hua Jiadi, North Village (2010) fabric, thread, sponge, metal, image reproduced courtesy of the artist and White Rabbit Gallery.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Luxury Logico Artist Collective, Solar, 2011, lights, sound, computer
Image reproduced courtesy of White Rabbit Gallery

I loved the new show at White Rabbit Gallery, 'Down the Rabbit Hole', which I have now seen three times. In particular, one work which has stayed with me is Wu Daxin's 'Ashley's Heart', one of his series of sculptures made of bronze tubes connected to a fridge compressor so that they freeze anew over the course of each day. There is something so lyrical and fragile about the tracery of bronze forms casting shadows on the wall like the bare branches of a winter tree, with the drip, drip of the melting ice pooling on the floor below.

The works by the Taiwanese Luxury Logico Artist Collective were also quite wonderful, and it is interesting to speculate about the very different sensibility that informs the works from Taiwan in the collection. Less of the pervasive sense of vertigo and anxiety resulting from the dramatic pace of change in Mainland China, I suspect.

Luxury Logico Artist Collective, Solar, 2011, lights, sound, computer
Image reproduced courtesy of White Rabbit Gallery 

I have written more extensively about this  show in The Art Life

My next post will be from Beijing in less than a fortnight. Tai hao le!

Sugar and Spice Sichuan Style: 'China's Decade' at Ray Hughes Gallery

Wan Yang, Game No 2: Fortuitous Encounters in the Forest, 2006, acrylic on canvas, 100 x 150 cm, image reproduced with the permission of Ray Hughes Gallery

Ray Hughes, that somewhat Rabelaisian, larger than life fixture of the Sydney artworld, first travelled to China in 1998. Since then he has been a regular visitor to the studios and galleries of Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and, most recently, Chongqing, that vast city of 38 million people on the Yangtze River in Sichuan Province. It is now well known that it was at an exhibition at Ray Hughes Gallery that Judith Nielson, the founder with her husband Kerr of the White Rabbit Gallery http://www.whiterabbitcollection.org and its significant collection, first encountered contemporary Chinese art. While she has since developed her own networks of artists and advisors, it is due to her chance encounter with artist Wang Zhiyuan and the energy and excitement of Chinese art at Hughes’ Surry Hills Gallery that a new and vital force was unleashed onto the Sydney cultural scene.

Something of a maverick, Hughes’ determination to run his own race in the sometimes pretentiously self-conscious Sydney artworld is what makes him such an interesting character.  He is interested in “the next generation, the next ‘new thing’ “, he tells me when I visit the gallery to see the group show ‘China’s Decade’ together with a show of new work by the painter Li Jun. A curious title for the show, given that many works date from the late 90s, but there is no denying the accuracy of the statement in today’s global context. Hughes was expansive and animated, describing his visits to Sichuan (and the hot pots eaten in the mountains with the artists, teachers and art students, of course!) and the way that the artists he admires there are focused on moving art beyond the limited scope of the ‘Political Pop’ movement of the late ‘90s, re-examining their own pre-revolutionary Chinese history. They are developing a new visual syntax which incorporates Western influences with a confidently global, international outlook.  Their references to Chinese art and craft traditions are sometimes subtle and veiled, sometimes overt.

Luo Brothers, 'Welcome Welcome!', fibreglass and paint.
Image reproduced courtesy of Ray Hughes Gallery

This is not to say, however, that the brash wit of Political Pop is altogether absent. The work of the Luo Brothers, who have been shown in Sydney by Ray Hughes since his first forays into Chinese art, is typical of the style. As well as the highly recognisable icons of consumer desire – such as the gaudy fat ‘good fortune’ fibreglass babies reclining smugly on cans of Pepsi that we see in this show – there is also a series of pencil and charcoal drawings. The three works in ‘The 100 Family Names Primer’ series represent a baby, a young female in Red Army uniform, and an old worker, all with their jackets covered in Mao buttons and backed by revolutionary flags. The title is presumably a reference to the ‘Old Hundred Names’, the ordinary working people of China who propped up the revolution and are now propping up the country’s growing wealth and industrial might in the factories of the Pearl River Delta. Other works by Feng Zheng-jie and Qi Zhilong which date from the late 90s and early 2000s work the familiar seam of Red Army ballet dancers and Maoist imagery with engaging verve and confidence. There are those in China, such as the Canadian Martin Kemble of the respected Shanghai ‘Art Labor’ Gallery http://www.artlaborgallery.com/ who see the continuing popularity of this style in the west as a kind of ‘Chinoiserie’ or orientalism, which Chinese artists are pragmatic enough to happily profit from. There is no doubt some truth in this. However, despite the fact that younger artists (and many of the older generation as well) have moved away from this somewhat obsessive gnawing at the bone of the Cultural Revolution, these works still exert a fascination in their relentless exposure of the contradictions of this ‘new’ China as it moves towards global dominance.

Hang Bo’s series of photographs, ‘No. 6 They’, ‘Middle School’ and ‘No.  5 They’ exemplify a very different approach to the business of ‘being Chinese’ and making sense of history. His method is to take ‘found’ images, poignant group photos of young Pioneers, soldiers or work unit comrades from the time of the Cultural Revolution, and then re-photograph the same (living) subjects in the same arrangements. Quietly arresting and very moving, ‘No. 5 They’ contains a number of empty chairs, and one inevitably begins to speculate as to the reasons for the absences.

Of most interest to me were other more idiosyncratic works such as Wang Yuping’s oddly tentative ‘Untitled’, a mixed media work on paper.  A faceless figure, sketchily and loosely rendered, tenderly holds a small black bird on its hand. Reminiscent of ink drawings by Joy Hester such as ‘Girl with Hen’ or the ‘Lovers’ series, in which faces are partially or totally obliterated, the work can be read on many levels and suggests the vulnerability of both the natural world and of human connections. Ji Dachun’s large canvases, in which mundane objects such as electric light bulbs and shoes appear to float against a light coloured ground, are also strangely compelling, making subtle references to Western modernist conventions of abstraction, colour field painting and expressionism. There is a Zen sensibility though, of weightlessness and quiet meditation, which makes these works repay a second look, and then a third.

Wang Yuping, Untitled, 1998, mixed media on paper, 102 x 69 cm,
 image reproduced with the permission of Ray Hughes Gallery

The highly respected senior painter Liu Xiaodong, who will be remembered by Sydney audiences for his monumental  paintings of migrant workers building the Three Gorges Dam shown at a Sydney Biennale some years ago, is represented here with a work from 2002, ‘Unknown Pleasures’. A solitary figure, seen from the rear, smokes a cigarette, quietly observing a street scene. Large, ornate, brightly coloured floral wreaths are arranged along a bicycle lane in front of the kind of new commercial buildings which look ramshackle and decrepit in China before construction has even finished. There is a melancholy air about this figure observing the ‘new’ China.  Liu was apparently inspired to develop his particular expressive style after he was given a postcard of a work by Lucien Freud. When you look at the way he paints flesh, especially in those earlier paintings of migrant workers at the dam site eating lunch in their underpants, or young girls lying on seedy bare mattresses, this makes perfect sense. There is a sense of melancholy and a hint of menace lurking behind the seductive and luscious painterly surface.

I was intrigued by Zhou Siwei’s mixture of ‘spice and sugar’ in works such as ‘Infection Bambi ‘ paintings, part of a larger series of ‘cartoon nostalgia’ which includes ‘Infection Mickey’ and ‘Infection Astro Boy’. Drops and splatters of paint create stylised images which are intended, the artist says, to return viewers to the state of their wide-eyed and optimistic youthful selves. Rather unnervingly though, Bambi appears to be decomposing, so the work rather suggests the impossibility of returning to that charmed childhood state, and instead suggests that popular culture is toxic to those who consume it. The artist has said that his work is there to be ‘infected’ with all the various interpretations and ideas that the viewer may bring to contemplating it. Zhou studied at the influential Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing. This city is, Hughes believes, at the centre of innovative art in China. Zhou represents a generation who have little interest in, or direct experience of, the Cultural Revolution that provided so much of the imagery employed by the first wave of contemporary Chinese artists and avidly ‘consumed’ by Western audiences. In this he reminds me of Lu Yang, a young artist I met in Shanghai last year, who told me she has no interest whatsoever in being identified or defined as a Chinese artist. The limitations of national identity become  meaningless in the age of social media. These young artists are forging a new path, challenging the orthodoxies that have grown up in the last 20 years about what Chinese art ‘should’ look like. Sometimes they may seem to an (older) outside observer to be in denial, however there is no doubting their sincerity, or their determination.

As I chatted with Hughes in the gallery, though, my eye was continually drawn away from him (despite his characteristically brightly coloured shirt and tie) to the works by Chang Xugong hanging above him. Dating from the Late 90s, they represent the ‘Gaudy Art’ movement. Born in 1957 in Hebei Province, Chang uses the tradition of silk embroidery to make comment on the nouveau riche in China and their relentless acquisition of consumer goods and branded products. Like the dramatic imagery of heroic workers from Cultural Revolution Propaganda posters, these new aspirational heroes of ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ appear happy to the point of lunacy, which allows just a little doubt to creep into the mind of the viewer. They  are charming rather than malicious, however -  there is affection in the mockery, rather as one might tiredly acknowledge the foibles of a relative one is really quite fond of. Many of his toothy grinning characters carry the latest accessory of urban China – a fluffy white Maltese terrier or Paris Hilton style pooch. Cars, mobile phones and television sets swirl around like the haloes surrounding Renaissance depictions of saints. These saints, though, are more likely to be performing Karaoke than miracles.

Chang Xugong, Untitled, 2000, machine embroidered satin, 100 x 80cm,
image reproduced with the permission of Ray Hughes Gallery

The delicate and beautiful works of Li Jin, http://www.li-jin.com/  an artist from Tianjing, are reminiscent of nothing so much as the drawings of George Grosz or Max Beckmann, albeit with a lighter and more humorous touch. Loose, lyrical ink on paper works depicting rather unprepossessing looking men in front of messy  tables scattered with bottles of baijiu and cut sausage, or engaged in strangely unerotic encounters with plump naked girls, they celebrate the everyday lives of ordinary and unbeautiful people – that is, most of us. Affectionate and gentle, his works present a slightly flabby and imperfect cast of characters, drawn lovingly without attempts to idealise, to beautify, or to apply Vaseline to the lens recording daily existence. In a time when the only images of ordinary flawed human beings we see are the grotesque photographs of ‘Celebs without Make-up’, or the sad and desperate on ‘The Biggest Loser’, this is very refreshing.

The exhibition celebrates Chinese art in all its rich diversity. Yes, there is Mao imagery, and the memory of the Cultural Revolution lives on in the work of many artists – how could it not? Yet there are also artists working in new techniques and with imagery that represents the bizarre and the humdrum, the beautiful and the disturbing, the humorous and also the magical aspects of life in China (and everywhere) today.

Li Jin, Accompanying Object, 2007, ink on paper, 46 x 70 cm, 

image reproduced with the permission of Ray Hughes Gallery

Chang Xugong, Untitled, 2000, machine embroidered satin, 100 x 80cm,
image reproduced with the permission of Ray Hughes Gallery

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