Shanghai to Xiang Gang

Ah Hong Kong! Toilets flush, traffic lights are obeyed, nobody is spitting in the street right next to me, and whilst it can seem chaotic and frenetic there is still a sense of order and stability. As Fuschsia Dunlop so memorably said, Hong Kong is like a decompression chamber after being in mainland China. It is strange to hear Cantonese, with its long "maaaaaa" and "laaaaa" sounds at the ends of sentences, after the more clipped  tones of Mandarin. And just when I was getting a little bit better at communicating!

When I arrived today I was struck anew by the contrasts. Glitzy storefronts with mildewed apartments stacked above. Beautiful mountains rising out of the sea like a literati painting juxtaposed with enormous slender tower blocks and  outlet malls. In Kowloon two men with a sign reading "Keep away from Falun Gong Evil Cult" lounged against the wall of the Gucci shop next to a poster advertising cosmetic surgery and a woman handing out foot massage leaflets. Mainland Chinese queued in long noisy lines to get into Prada, Chanel and Burberry on one side of Canton Road whilst on the other side Hong Kong citizens queued patiently at bus stops, waiting for buses to far suburbs.

Louise Hawson of '52 suburbs' fame has some great photographs of Hong Kong housing estates - check them out here: http://52suburbs.com/suburb/hong-kong/

On Sunday I will go out to Fo Tan to see the artist Lam Tung-pang in his studio in that previously industrial neighbourhood. Now all the industry is pretty much over the border. And so are many of the workers who can commute to Shenzhen or Donguan and be paid in RMB.

Reflecting on my past two weeks in Beijing and Shanghai - I have learned so much and been so privileged to be welcomed into studios and galleries with great warmth and kindness. Ordinary people from taxi drivers to hotel staff to shop assistants have generally been helpful and friendly - maybe it's my grey hair!

Three things I love about China:

1. The sense that anything is possible, no matter how ambitious, and can be achieved very fast. Quite possibly by tomorrow if you like (although it may very well fall apart soon after that)
2. The way that elderly people are treated with devotion, respect and care
3. The openness and generosity of ordinary people. I cannot imagine that I would be welcomed into artists' homes and studios in the same way anywhere else - certainly not in Australia

Three things I don't love about China:

1. Spitting loudly and revoltingly in the street 
2. Food safety fears - every day the newspapers contain stories about adulterated milk, or prosecutions of farmers for adding chemicals to the feed of pigs or chickens
3. Air quality - it is appalling

Three silly moments from a week in Shanghai:

1. Channel flicking from one CCTV station to another, I came across 'China You've Got Talent', featuring a competitor who said he was a 28 year old worker from Shandong Province. He was dressed inexplicably as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, and he performed by juggling eggs with his mouth, shooting them up to the ceiling and catching them again to the wild applause of the audience and the apparent approval of the judges. Chinese TV has a zillion variations on music and MTV style shows, mostly featuring very pretty boys with improbable hair-dos and girls whose role appears to be to giggle on cue. And incredibly soppy romantic love songs with videos starring girls who swoon and are rescued by young men who look extremely gay.
2. Yesterday in M50 I walked into an upmarket art gallery and found three very glamorous young gallery assistants all dancing 'gangnam style' to THAT track. They collapsed into helpless and embarrassed giggles when they realised I was there.
3. Walking in Fuxin Park I came across senior citizens playing a game that resembled bowls, or maybe bocce. It was all very serious - they had uniform team aprons in different colours and a referee with a microphone headset, but they seemed to be having great fun. Much confusion ensued when I asked them what the game was called and about 6 people all tried to explain the rules to me -all in Chinese and all talking at once. Little did they know that I don't understand the rules of ANY sport, much less something that is played only in China!

Three friends watching the ball game at Fuxin park

And three favourite artworks - although there are so many it is almost impossible to narrow it down

1. Cui Guotai, a painter I had not come across before - I loved his raw expressionist works of military hardware and industrial installations fallen into decay. Like a eulogy for the Socialist Utopia.

Cui Guotai

2. Liu Zhuoquan's new work is very exciting - a development from his 'neihua' inside painted bottles as seen in White Rabbit and the Biennale of Sydney, he is now working with lights and developing larger installations. These birds are painted on the inside of the lamps which are intended to evoke those on Chang'An Avenue in Beijing, leading to Tiananmen Square. The black birds are birds of ill omen, a dangerous portent. And a coded political meaning as in so much of this artist's work. The references are very subtle, but they are very deliberate and intentional.

Liu Zhuoquan with his new installation, bound for an exhibition in Australia.
Photograph Luise Guest, reproduced with permission of the artist and China Art Projects

3. The new works by Gao Ping - she continues her subtle and delicate ink on paper works of 'tiny things' - rows of tin mechanical toys, sad stuffed animals, tiny people or cars, miniature gardens or pot plants, floating on expanses of Chinese paper. However she has developed strong works in oil on paper and canvas, exploring a palette of subtle greys, fleshy pinks and celadon green, from which murky forms emerge from a misty wash of pigment. They are evocative and very beautiful works.

Gao Ping, untitled, oil on canvas, image reproduced courtesy of the artist and China Art Projects

Gao Ping is an artist who impressed me enormously with her quiet dedication to advancing her practice - unflashy, unpretentious, absolutely sincere and genuine in her determination to keep learning.

Gao Ping Studio View, Photograph Luise Guest

Gao Ping in her studio, photograph Luise Guest reproduced with permission of the artist

Actually I lied - I can't leave it at three. I have to include Dong Yuan and her paintings of her grandmother's house - multiple small canvases making up the entire 4-roomed house as it was in Dalian in the artist's childhood, reconstructed from photographs, memories and interviews with her relatives:

Dong Yuan, Grandmother's House, oil on multiple canvases to make up installation,
 image reproduced courtesy of the artist

And. finally, the truly astonishing work by Huang Yong Ping in the Shanghai Biennale, 'Thousand Hands Kuanyin' - this artist continues to amaze, delight and impress.

Huang Yong Ping, Thousand Hands Kuanyin, Shanghai Biennale

Lost in Caochangdi

Inside Dashanzi Art District, Beijing - relics of the industrial past

This relic of a socialist past is at the back of the 798 Art District, on a narrow road where steam hisses unexpectedly out of strange pipes and from cracks in the path. Hard to believe that the city planners intend to replace all of this with a 'water park' complete with fountains and pools.  In one of the driest cities on the planet, and in a district which is well and truly on the tourist map, for good and ill, this is strange decision making.

I write this at the end of my third day in Beijing. A day as exhausting, exhilarating, frustrating and wonderful as this one has been could only happen in China. I had arranged an interview with a young artist, a meeting at the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre and visits to four galleries, all in Caochangdi, which sounds like a manageable schedule but didn't really take into account the particular difficulties of getting around. Caochangdi (an outlying place, part city, part old town, part ugly suburb) is notoriously difficult to navigate and tends to involve many, many phone calls in Chinese to the various parties asking how the hell to find them. Taxi drivers patiently drive in circles, sometimes stopping in the middle of the road and turning off the engine while the phone calls are made.

With Stanley, my trusty translator, I caught the bus. He assured me he knew where we were going. After leading me up onto a railway track, where we were followed by mangy and quite possibly rabid dogs, I decided the hell with his 'face' and said, 'Oh really, I don't think so - call the gallery now!' Many phone calls ensued, and we walked first one way, still followed by the dogs, then another, down dusty windswept streets. Past an elementary school with military marching music blaring from loudspeakers and little children in blue tracksuits exercising in the yard, past street markets with underpants and running shoes laid out on the trays of rusty old tricycles and vendors selling what appear to be grilled intestines on sticks, past factories, construction sites and military barracks. I wonder, as I do so often in China, why villages in the countryside and many parts of Beijing look as if they have somehow survived the apocalypse.

Eventually, many shouted Chinese phone calls later, it transpired that we had passed the entrance to the street several times in our wanderings.To get to it we had to duck underneath an advertising hoarding and wend our way past an enormous and hideous KTV karaoke parlour set in a kind of wasteland with Egyptian statuary and what looked like a sculpture of the four horsemen of the apocalypse out the front. Quite appropriate. Then suddenly we are in a tiny narrow walled lane and emerge into the series of beautiful galleries designed by Ai Weiwei some years ago, before his current troubles.

Urs Meile Gallery, Caochangdi, Beijing

Eventually we found our way to Urs Meile and Platform China and saw exhibitions both interesting and not so interesting. Paintings by Shao Fan at Urs Meile revealed an interesting adaptation of highly academic realist painting. At Platform China I saw a show of installation works by Zhou Yilun. The title of the show 'As there is Paradise in Heaven' is apparently taken from an old proverb "Up Above there is paradise, down below there are Suzhou and Hangzhou" the relevance of which I confess entirely eludes me, except for the fact that the artist lives and works in Hangzhou. The exhibition of paintings and installation works is raw and crude and slightly disturbing, drawing inspiration from pornography, political advertising, cartoons and sci-fi. The show struck me as the less than coherent outpourings of a young artist whose practice is yet to mature, but which has the potential to be extremely interesting.

Zhou Yilun, 'Beijing Hao Gan A' (Beijing is very dry)
installation view at Platform China

Shao Fan, Chicken Wing Bone, 2010, oil on canvas

 I met young photographer Chu Haina at Egg Gallery where she is currently showing her work in a group exhibition, and we spoke at length about her practice. She creates blurry, soft and very ambiguous images shot with film and printed digitally. Her work reminded me of early photographs by Niepce or Daguerre, or experiments with alternative processing. She is self taught, and very dedicated, living in a space in Caochangdi tinier than any I have ever seen. Having shown her work in an exhibition of emerging artists at Redgate Gallery, and now at Egg Gallery, she is hoping for a solo show. This seems to be the right time for young photomedia artists in China, with increased interest in its possibilities for making images which reflect contemporary life. Haina takes her camera everywhere she goes and looks for images which will evoke a particular kind of feeling in the viewer. She herself loves an eclectic range of artists, from Diane Arbus to Taiwanese photographer Ruan Yizhong to the Japanese Hiroshi Sugimoto, who was shown at Pace Beijing earlier this year. Her work has an elegiac and subtle quality, especially the larger more abstract prints shown at Redgate.

Chu Haina with her work at Egg Gallery, Beijing.
Photograph Luise Guest, reproduced with permission of the artist

The current state of photomedia in China is an interesting one - at once very exciting and cutting edge yet at the same time often still seen as the poor cousin to painting and sculpture. In a wide ranging chat at Three Shadows with their director of international programs we discussed what it is that characterises current photographic practice here. She told me that there is a resurgence of interest in alternative processing, especially from younger photographers who have perhaps never seen a darkroom in their training, and have never used film. Jurassic technologies are returning in every field it seems! Chinese photographers, working in a medium which is still at the margins of artworld acceptance, can say a lot with very little, layering meanings which skirt the boundaries of what is permitted. And not just in photography: artists in China are adept at developing techniques which reveal much, with a great economy of means.

Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Caochangdi

In this vein, I later discovered a fascinating exhibition at Boers-Li, of works created by Kang Wanhua whilst imprisoned for almost three years during the Cultural Revolution. Tiny works, some the size of postage stamps, made clandestinely on whatever surfaces the artist could find (playing cards, precious scraps of paper) with scratchy oil crayons, they represent scenes from the artist's imagination. Creating expressionistic portraits and Arcadian landscapes became his way to survive. That they were made at all is extraordinary: that they found their way out of the prison is nothing short of miraculous. Boers-Li Gallery is conducting a research project investigating the roots of contemporary art in China. These years of oppression gave way to a frenzied outpouring of creativity, despite tight control and censorship, at a time before the art market existed in China. Some see that time as creativity in its purest form. Before he was sent to prison Kang was an art teacher, but was later assigned to Beijing Shuguang Electrical Machinery Factory as a worker. When I looked at his CV I was moved to see that his imprisonment coincided almost exactly with my own years at art school in the mid 1970s, a time for me of great freedom, excitement and the sense that anything was possible if I wanted it enough. A time also when we were unforgivably ignorant of what was happening to artists in other places in the world.

Works by Kang Wanhua shown at Boers-Li Gallery Beijing

Other interesting work seen today:
An installation created from spent fire crackers by Jiang Zhi:

Jiang Zhi, The Quiet Bodies

A series of portrait heads that turn out on closer inspection to be carved from stacked books:

Variations on the tradition of papercutting, 'Strange Flowers' by Hoyun Shin:

Elegant meditations by Shen Kelun on traditions of Chinese furniture and lacquer ware:

A series of fabulously expressionist paintings by Cui Guotai that are like a lost lament to the heroic workers and heavy industry of the Communist past: