Physical to Metaphysical: Cui Xiuwen's Buddhist Formalism

Cui Xiuwen, Angel no. 3, 2006, photograph, image courtesy the artist

The artist whose video work prompted a notorious lawsuit, whose photomedia works explored the forbidden territory of sexuality and repressed memories of a different China, has reinvented herself as an abstract painter. Her show at Klein Sun Gallery in New York reveals the extent of this transformation.

Last December I met Cui Xiuwen in her Beijing studio for a long conversation about the dramatic shifts in her practice. At the risk of being accused of shameless self-promotion (OK, I plead guilty) she is one of the artists who features in my book about contemporary women artists in China. When I saw the images from her New York show this month, I replayed the tape of that interview, listening once more to the artist talk about her artistic metamorphosis, punctuated by the noise of barking dogs in the lane outside - an inevitable aural accompaniment in any visit to a Beijing studio.

The writer with Cui Xiuwen in Beijing, December 2014

I had particularly wanted to meet Cui, often described as one of very few feminist artists in China, because of her evocative photographic images of young girls in the forbidding surrounds of the Forbidden City - red walls, red scarves and a disturbing atmosphere of claustrophobic sexuality. I was even more intrigued when I realised that an early video work, 'Lady's Room', shot in the toilets of a swanky Beijing karaoke bar, where the 'hostesses' are not just selling their company and their singing, had caused the first lawsuit involving contemporary art in China. For details, you will have to read my book!

Cui Xiuwen, 'One Day in 2004', photograph, image courtesy the artist

From early notoriety as a painter of male nudes and fairly graphic depictions of sexuality (nudity is still, even now, somewhat taboo in China) to experimental video and photomedia works, Cui Xiuwen has charted the autobiographical territory familiar to many artists of her generation. Struggling to forge an identity in a country convulsed by change, trying to marry her experience of the collectivist past with the aspirational, individualist present, Cui like others turned to childhood memory for her image-making. Her crowds of sleepwalking girls in works such as 'Angel' represent a country that had been asleep, oblivious to repression and enforced conformity. Now, however, Cui has turned to a cool, minimalist abstraction - a visual language of line and shape that echoes the post-painterly formalism of the sixties and early seventies. She describes this transition as emerging from a renewed interest in Buddhism.

Cui Xiuwen, 'Awakening the Flesh', installation view, image courtesy Klein Sun Gallery

In recent years, she has become more interested in the spiritual, the ineffable; seeking ways to represent her experience of reading Buddhist texts. She has moved from the physical, to the psychological, to the spiritual and she uses the metaphor of climbing a staircase to describe this process. In doing so, she has found an abstract language that connects her with an interesting aspect of the Chinese artworld zeitgeist: a rediscovery of the possibilities of formal abstraction is an emerging trend there, just as it is internationally. Overwhelmingly, Chinese painting is figurative, with art schools training thousands of students every year to paint in the traditions of French and Soviet realism. Chinese-trained artists can paint like pretty much no-one else in the world today, and abstraction has not been a significant element in the contemporary art that emerged in the last 30 years. There are exceptions, of course, including Shanghai painters such as Ding Yi, or the young rising star, Li Shurui, who uses an airbrush to create almost psychedelic explosions of light and colour. There is a new interest in modernist and postmodernist abstraction, and many discussions of its possibilities in new media and sculpture, as well as in painting. Agnes Martin, Gerhard Richter, and even Barnett Newman are names that have emerged in my conversations with Chinese artists.

But there is another aspect to this new zeitgeist, or 'shidai jingshen'. In Beijing last December almost every conversation seemed to turn (unprompted by me) to Buddhism. Friends at dinner mused about the spiritual malaise they feel has infected Chinese society. Zhang Xiaotao told me his dearest hope for China was for a Buddhist renaissance. Feminist performance artist He Chengyao, returned from a year in a Tibetan monastery, spoke of her new practice creating abstract, meditative works on paper. Even the 'bad boys' of Beijing's East Village Artists' community have changed. The artists who shocked the artworld with their raw, masochistic performance works in the 1990s, featuring acts of self mutilation and abnegation, have turned to a newly reflective practice. Zhang Huan's 'Sydney Buddha' made of ash from the prayers burned in temples, and Yang Zhichao's beautiful 'Chinese Bible' installation at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation in Sydney both reflect elements of this transformation.

Cui Xiuwen, 'Reincarnation No.10, acrylic on canvas, 2014, image courtesy the artist

Works from Cui Xiuwen's 2014 abstract series are currently also showing at the 'Si Shang' Art Museum in Beijing, in  'Breaking the Image', an exhibition intended (somewhat didactically) to provoke discussion about how contemporary artists in China respond to international art discourses. Since the beginning of this century, access to global contemporary art is immediately available on the internet (albeit in virtual form) and many artists are also able to travel for residencies and study overseas. This has led to a revitalisation of previously marginalised forms such as abstract painting. Curator Libin Lu says, rather plaintively, "Many more artists have quietly explored this issue, looking for new possible forms of self-contained artistic language. Due to limiting factors as well as objective reasons from artists, this exhibition exhibits only a fraction of works by artists working within this vein." He hopes it is a continuing trend, and worries about the co-option of abstraction by the market since its emergence as a style in 2006: "But within less than ten years, we are grieved to discover that the majority of abstract art has become “decorative painting” or simply a “conceptual painting tool"

Cui Xiuwen arrived at her own spare visual language via a transitional series of photographs shot in bleak, snowy landscapes around her birthplace of Harbin, from which all the vivid colour of her early works has been removed, in a deliberate reference to the disciplined marks of  'Shan Shui' ink painting. The next phase was a move to pure abstraction. Cui Xiuwen speaks passionately of her desire to transcend the everyday, and to express profound truths in installations of painting that provide immersive experiences for the viewer. Despite the anxiety of the Si Shang curator she could not be accused of 'decorative painting'.

Cui Xiuwen, 'Reincarnation No.15, Varnished Aluminium and Acrylic on Canvas, 2014,
 image courtesy Klein Sun Gallery  

© Cui Xiuwen

So what do we see in Cui Xiuwen's new exhibition, 'Awakening of the Flesh' in New York? The title is provocatively paradoxical - any fleshly concerns here are so pared back as to be unrecognisable. All the elements of her typical iconography - the schoolgirls, iconic Chinese architecture, dolls and landscapes - have been stripped away. There is almost no colour. These new works, often created with aluminium and acrylic on canvas, are minimalist surfaces featuring repeated forms and lines. Cui is finding new ways to convey ideas about mysticism, meditation and a higher plane of consciousness. The works are severe, yet tranquil, and in paintings such as 'IU no. 4' there seem to be echoes of Malevich and the Russian Suprematists. Metallic, slightly brittle, they are the antithesis of her earlier lyrical, narrative photographic works.

Cui Xiuwen, 'IU No.3, Acrylic on Canvas, 2014, image courtesy Klein Sun Gallery  © Cui Xiuwen

Lit in the darkened space of the Chelsea gallery, they appear to glow. Is there more than surface beauty? 'Reincarnation No 9' suggests that the artist has one foot firmly on the ground, and although she may be operating in the rarefied plane of  'wu wei' she is still interested in responding to worldly concerns. Unlike the calm horizontal layers appearing in other works, this painting's variegated vertical bands remind us forcefully of a bar code. Intentional or not, it suggests the inevitable tensions and slippages between the desired state of elevated spiritual awakening, and the forceful imperatives of the flesh, especially those manifested in commerce and consumerist desire.

A full account of Cui Xiuwen's practice appears in 'Half the Sky: Conversations with Contemporary Women Artists in China', to be published by Piper Press in October.

Shen Shaomin: Handle with Care

Shen Shaomin, "Handle with Care No. 29," 2014, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches (91.5 x 91.5 cm)
Image Courtesy the artist and Klein Sun Gallery

What kind of artist makes a legally binding agreement to ensure that after his demise his own skeleton becomes an artwork?  Who plans to have his teeth engraved with sentences in English and Chinese as an interactive performance work? Who has previously created works using animal bones and bone-meal, and rocket fragments from China’s space program? Yes, it’s the audacious Shen Shaomin. Part theatrical showman/magician; part Duchampian iconoclast; part sardonic social commentator; creator of disturbingly beautiful installations, Shen is best known for his impossible Jurassic-like creatures made of real and fake bones. Having seen his tortured, chained bonsai installations at the 2010 Sydney Biennale; his monstrous bone creations in a number of exhibitions including ‘Serve the People’ at the White Rabbit Gallery and an eerie installation of apparently living, breathing, hairless creatures lying on mounds of salt in a major exhibition of his work at Sydney’s 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art , I had long wanted to interview this artist. After a frustrating series of emails and aborted encounters, we finally met at his Qiaozi Town studios outside Beijing almost a year ago. While we spoke, behind the artist, and the two film-makers who were disconcertingly circling us, recording our conversation for a documentary, his young assistants were working on a series of drawings and paintings inspired by the erotic bondage photographs of Japanese photographer Araki - but with a twist: the women are escaping their chains and ropes. What he didn't tell me about was another series of paintings, shown last month at Klein Sun Gallery in Manhattan's Chelsea gallery district, that subvert the familiar tropes of mid-century Pop Art. More of Shen Shaomin in a minute...

Shen Shaomin, April 2014, photograph Luise Guest

Its been a while between posts. Working at breakneck speed to get my book finished, managing a full-time teaching load and organising a family wedding are responsible for my lengthy absence from this blog. That, and an absence of especially interesting exhibitions to prod me into writing.  So - apart from my obsessive focus on the forthcoming book (October!) - what have I seen that might inspire me to open a blank new  page and begin to write?

The offerings in Sydney's commercial galleries over this summer just past have been a little lacklustre. Other than Zhang Huan's impressive and moving Buddha of ash, and the chaotic and anarchic visit of those Duchampian jokers, The Yangjiang Group, there hasn't been a lot to get excited about. The new exhibition at White Rabbit, 'State of Play', is provocative and interesting - quite a different curatorial "take" on works from Judith Neilson's collection, with a dark interpretation of the notion of play. Memorable works include MadeIn Company's leather and chain, bondage and discipline, spiky Gothic cathedral, Zhang Dali's beautifully ethereal cyanotype, and Yang Yongliang's giant cigarette, which is suspended from the ceiling (in fact, from a hole cut into the floor above), ashing layers and layers of multi-storey towers, referencing what Yang sees as the destruction of the unique character of his home city of Shanghai, and his sadness at the way that globalisation and modernity have made everyplace the same place.

The big blockbuster show over the Sydney summer was 'Pop to Popism' at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, by all accounts a financial success of a somewhat limited kind. I must confess I enjoyed it immensely: it reminded me forcibly of the excitement of being seventeen and discovering Warhol, Hockney, Jim Dine, Nike de Saint Phalle and Marisol. I went to Europe at eighteen and thought I had arrived in heaven in the Pompidou, in a room with George Segal and Ed Kienholz. The artworks, not the artists. Apart from nostalgically visiting my long-lost girlhood, though, I liked the connections established between the original Pop artists and the latter day inheritors of Pop. But where, I wondered, were the Chinese Political Pop painters? This seemed a most bizarre exclusion from what was otherwise a very comprehensive show. Much too important to simply ignore without explanation, their absence left a weird hole in the narrative.

When Robert Rauschenberg showed in Beijing in 1985 (a triumph of American soft diplomacy) it was one of those ground-breaking exhibitions that changes the course of art history. He met with the avant-garde artists of the day, in  a series of rather frustrating conversations characterised by misunderstanding and mutual incomprehension, but the effect on Beijing's nascent contemporary art scene was explosive. In combination with the opening-up of China to Western ideas, and the influences of Duchamp, Warhol and Beuys, this exhibition is the influential experience that almost every Chinese artist of that generation refers to. Rauschenberg, Johns, Warhol and the cool ironic stance of American Pop was perfectly suited to artists emerging from the traumas of the Cultural Revolution. Artists such as Fang Lijun, Zhang Xioagang and the much-copied Yue Minjun, among others, developed two influential movements, Political Pop and Cynical Realism, perfect expressions of the zeitgeist ("Shidai Jinsheng" in Chinese.) After his years in New York's East Village, even Ai Weiwei wanted to be "yige Beijing de Andy Warhol."

Shen Shaomin, Summit (Castro), 2010,  silica gel and mechanical breathing system,image courtesy the artist 

So my smooth-as-silk segue here is to a show that I wish I had seen, but haven't. Shen Shaomin  presented a new series of paintings at Klein Sun Gallery in New York last month. A change of direction in his work, and one which this prolific artist didn't even hint at when I interviewed him last April, the works challenge the notion of artistic originality and the ways in which audiences usually encounter works in art galleries. The exhibition is called 'Handle with Care' - highlighting the temporality, instability and fragility of what we define as "art". Twenty oil paintings depict archetypal Pop Art paintings wrapped in translucent plastic bubble wrap - we can see they are by Warhol, and recognise the famous soup cans, and iconic figures such as Mao, John Lennon and Monroe, but we are frustrated by seeing them through wrapping, as if they have just been delivered to the gallery.

Shen Shaomin, Handle with Care #10,2014, oil on canvas, 35 x 23 1/4 inches (89 x 59 cm)
image courtesy of the artist and Klein Sun Gallery

The gallery says, "Shen Shaomin probes the nature of artistic creation through the appropriation of Warhol’s pieces which occupy important territory in the historical discourse concerning individuality and authenticity. Leaning against the wall of the gallery, furnished with veneers that deliver a deceptive effect, paintings from the Handle with Care series represent a pre-installation state, a transitional condition of artwork. The unconventional “hanging” method of this group also breaks the boundaries between painting and sculpture. The setting subverts the traditional manner in which one interacts with artworks inside a museum or gallery, further issuing a subtle statement of institutional critique."

Shen Shaomin, "Handle with Care No. 19," 2014, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches (91.5 x 91.5 cm)
image courtesy the artist and Klein Sun Gallery

As with much of his earlier work, Shen Shaomin challenges us to think about the distinction between the real and the ideal; the real and the fake. His earlier works of hybrid creatures made of real animal bones and bone meal, his tortured bonsai plants chained in their ceramic pots, and most particularly the work previously shown at the same New York gallery, 'I heard the voice of God' all reveal an artist who is dealing with the big issues. That installation, made from the nose cone of a rocket from the Chinese space program which had fallen to earth ("You can buy anything in China!" Shen told me) engraved with text from the Book of Revelations - in Braille - suggests a darkly pessimistic view of the world. At first you might be inclined to dismiss these new works as a clever, but slightly facile art joke. You would be wrong to do so. An artist with a team of assistants to fabricate his works, Shen is asking us to consider whether contemporary art is any more than another branded luxury good, and whether the art market is different to any other market.

Shen Shaomin, "Handle with Care No. 15," 2014, oil on canvas, 35 x 23 1/4 inches (89 x 59 cm)

Image Courtesy the Artist and Klein Sun Gallery

Like Wang Luyan, Ai Weiwei, Guan Wei and Wang Gongxin, all of whom spent years living outside China, Shen’s work today emerges from his own particular generational experience. In the early 1980s there were no commercial galleries and no art market. Artists met in each other’s homes to discuss ideas and to make experimental work with limited resources. There was much excitement and a growing awareness of western contemporary art practices including performance and installation art. I asked Shen what unites the artists of his generation - what makes them different from younger artists: “The difference for my generation of artists is they are idealistic, but for young artists they are more commercial. In our time there was no market for our art so we never even thought about making money. Now it is very different. For the young artists, even just after graduation, or from their graduation exhibition, they can sell their work and make lots of money. Then they just keep doing the same kind of work.” He thought for a minute, then laughed and said, “But maybe they are smarter than our generation.”

The twenty paintings in 'Handle with Care', wrapped in their trompe l'oeil bubble wrap, are presented leaning against the wall as if propped there before or after the install of the show, subverting our expectations of the seamless experience of viewing art hung at eye level in the white cube of the gallery. He alludes to the fact that artworks are just another commodity, globally traded, and shipped around the world. Yes, packed in bubble wrap.

Cloaks of Invisibility: Liu Bolin in New York

I have just returned from two weeks in New York, where somehow I still managed to be immersed in all things Chinese, from the Liu Bolin exhibition at Klein Sun Gallery, to the very beautiful exhibition of Chinese albums at the Metropolitan Museum, to Prune Nourry's 'Terracotta Daughters' showing in the new downtown China Institute and a fabulous and fascinating show entitled 'Mao's Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution' at the older uptown China Institute. More of these in a later post. Meanwhile, here is my review of the Liu Bolin show, published this week on 'The Art Life'.

Cloaks of Invisibility: Liu Bolin in New York

Invisibility, erasure, disappearance, camouflage. This is the preferred territory of Chinese artist Liu Bolin (Liu Bolin at Klein Sun Gallery for more images of his work), whose ambiguous works make us question the “real” world, revealing it to be a mere painted illusion.

Best known for his ‘Hiding in the City’ series, in which he literally paints himself into various backgrounds, in cityscapes as diverse as Beijing, New York, London and Paris, Liu Bolin is sometimes called “The Invisible Man”. He is a master of a complex trompe l’oeil technique which allows him to examine the paradoxes and slippages of the contemporary world. Wearing a specially designed suit, the artist is painted by a team of assistants, in a painstaking and sometimes physically challenging ordeal, to merge almost seamlessly with his background. A disappearing trick; the artist as conjurer. No mere pop culture gimmickry, Liu Bolin’s process of erasure examines issues of contemporary culture and social justice, never more so than in his most recent exhibition in New York, at Klein Sun Gallery, ‘A Colorful World?’ In the lyrics of pop diva Cece Winans, “It’s a colorful world, it’s a beautiful world that we live in/ It’s a colorful world…” Well, perhaps, but Liu Bolin is interested in what happens when saccharine sentiments are juxtaposed with contemporary realities.

Liu Bolin ‘In Junk Food No.5, 2014. Acrylic on copper 36x36x26cm. Courtesy Klein Sun Gallery, NY. © Liu Bolin

Here we see works from the ongoing ‘Hiding in the City’ series, and new works created for the show. Liu also involved New Yorkers - 100 volunteers - who spent many excruciating hours being painted by the artist and his assistants for a new ‘Target’ series. Camouflaged into backgrounds of new $100 bills and a traditional Chinese ink painting, they were required to hold poses inspired by Renaissance paintings. The artist questions the ways in which people are made the passive recipients of consumerism, and the victims of political forces beyond their control. Underlying ‘Hiding in the City’, too, is the omnipresent smog and haze of pollution in Chinese cities, which Liu sees as rendering their inhabitants partially invisible, both literally and metaphorically.

Liu Bolin Head Portrait’ 2012. Courtesy Klein Sun Gallery, NY. © Liu Bolin

The first works in this series, created in Beijing, in Tiananmen Square or in the rubble of his studio, overtly reference to the need for artists to “camouflage” themselves in order to avoid the unwelcome attentions of the authorities. Ideas about appearance and disappearance inform all his work. Artists in China, including Liu himself, engage in a delicate game of cat and mouse, due to the unpredictable and sometimes apparently random nature of political censorship. Liu began this series after his studio in a Beijing artist village was forcibly demolished, creating photographic documentation of his performances.  He represented hidden stories of Chinese history, and more recent inversions and varnishings of the truth. Blurring the boundaries between performance, painting and photography, the stillness which is such a striking feature of these images creates a silent protest. Later works in which he has painted himself into scenes of supermarket shelves displaying packaged food or plastic bottles of soft drink refer to issues of food safety and corruption in China.

More recently, Liu’s concerns have become global in their scope. A key image from this show is a life-size standing sculpture, cast from the artist’s own body and covered with brightly coloured food packaging logos. The figure assumes the submissive pose required by airport security in the full body scanner. The posture is one of surrender, capitulation. What is more symbolic of the contemporary world (and the international world of the contemporary artist, in particular) than the airport, that liminal zone of ever more authoritarian surveillance juxtaposed with ever more shiny shopping opportunities? What pose could be more appropriate for the current moment? Klein Sun assistant director, Willem Molesworth, pointed out to me that the pose is also the bitterly ironic “Don’t shoot” stance of black youth protesting in Ferguson, a viral internet phenomenon and a new cultural trope which instantly traversed the globe. In subsequent weeks it was to be echoed by the Occupy Central demonstrators facing police teargas in Hong Kong.

Liu Bolin, Security Check No.2, 2014, 205x95x55cm. Courtesy Klein Sun Gallery, NY. © Liu Bolin

Sculpted clenched fists, ‘Junk food’ No. 3 and No. 5, are copper painted with acrylic, covered in garish Pop Art junk food packaging. An echo of his massive steel fist shown at the Paris Art Fair – monumental, authoritarian, repressive – these smaller versions may be read as inverted symbols of triumph or protest. Liu Bolin was trained as a sculptor, turning to his practice of photographic documentation only after the demolition of his studio. He has been at pains to point out that his work is not a Warholian celebration of glamour and consumerist desire. Rather, he is driven by the rapid transformation of his world – and ours. He examines issues of food safety, environmental destruction, the transformation of China into the world’s factory – and the world’s shopping mall – and the inscribing of global brands onto our bodies and our psyches.

Amongst a number of powerful works in this show the most compelling is ‘Cancer Village.’ This large photograph shows twenty three people, rural villagers from one of China’s notorious “cancer villages”, where industrial pollutants have created unprecedented rates of cancer, even among children. These sites are considered so politically sensitive that they are absolutely off-limits to journalists, artists and film-makers. The villagers (who all willingly volunteered to take part, at considerable personal risk of retribution from local authorities) have been rendered invisible, painted into their toxic fields, and thereby written out of the official story of China’s remarkable economic success. A chemical factory in the background is the source of the 100% increase in the rate of cancer within this rural area. By concealing these people in the contaminated landscape, Liu reveals their plight, and the great cost of China’s rapid industrialisation and wealth.

Liu Bolin, Cancer Village, 2013. Photograph. Courtesy Klein Sun Gallery, NY. © Liu Bolin

Liu Bolin is interested in the ways in which our identity is hostage to the interests of global corporations, transcending all previous notions of nationhood and culture. A series of relief works in which a cast of the artist’s head is layered with magazine mastheads is a literal representation of the post-structuralist notion that we exist as a web of texts. These texts, he suggests, are the brands of media barons.  We are what we consume, and the notion of “truth” becomes infinitely flexible. In ‘Red Door’ the artist disappears into what seems to be a traditional Chinese timber door, studded with brass spheres. A closer look reveals both the hidden figure of Liu and also the padlock and hasp which show the door to be a modern metal imitation. The individual subsumed by the overwhelming conformity of Chinese tradition and the weight of cultural history? Perhaps the subversive suggestion here is that this history and culture are in themselves suspect – faked - much as the famous tourist sites of Beijing such as the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace are repainted every year, in garish colours.

Liu Bolin, Red Door, 2012. Photograph. Courtesy Klein Sun Gallery, NY. © Liu Bolin

‘Hiding in the City: Art No. 1’ camouflages the artist in a Jackson Pollock painting. In actual fact the work in the background is a reproduction. Liu has said that he wanted to pay tribute to the oeuvre of a great master, and yet in the context of his practice we are irresistibly drawn to conclusions about the branding of art and the insatiability of the market. He is also represented “hidden” in a monumental mural of Chairman Mao, in the General Assembly at the United Nations, and in Tiananmen Square, with all its dark connotations. A photograph depicting Liu camouflaged in a wall of meat cleavers references very recent events. After the terrifying attacks carried out in Kunming in March this year, allegedly by Xinjiang separatists, Chinese citizens are now prevented from purchasing these previously ubiquitous utensils, a staple of every kitchen. These works deal with fear. In a world in which terror can appear suddenly amidst the banal environs of the railway station, the shopping mall and the airport, we all experience constant mistrust and a heightened level of anxiety. It’s fertile ground for the artist. The title of his show, complete with its question mark, is darkly ironic.

Liu Bolin, Kitchen Knives, 2012. Photograph. Courtesy Klein Sun Gallery, NY. © Liu Bolin

Liu Bolin: A Colorful World? continues through to November 1 at Klein Sun Gallery, 525 West 22nd Street, Chelsea, New York.

In Sydney, Liu Bolin is represented by McLemoi Gallery. Works from the ‘Hiding in the City’ series can be viewed by appointment between October 24 and December 8.