Shanghai in Art-ion
I went to Shanghai on the occasion of ‘The Last Two Decades Revisited’, which was the public lecture and discussion programme for the exhibition ‘Double Infinity’. The show that engaged Asian and European artists to create works in response to a selection of art works from the collection of the Van Abbemuseum was a joint effort between the Van Abbemuseum and Arthub Asia that took place from April 29 to May 23 at the Dutch Culture Centre in Shanghai, as a satellite event to Holland’s participation in the World Expo 2010. To activate a collection, archival materials and past memories through commissioning new works and initiating conversations surrounding their collection is very much in line with Van Abbemuseum’s past and present programmes such as Plug In and Play Van Abbe, the latter of which is currently running in the museum for 18 months. The two-day public programme on May 15th and 16th brought together Chinese and international artists, critics, theoreticians and art historians to question the given accounts of Chinese art history. This was a timely and necessary discussion in light of the current phenomenon of staging exhibitions with a historical claim in Beijing and Shanghai. The beginning of May just saw the opening of Reshaping History in Beijing, a rather extensive survey of Chinese art produced in the last decade comprising over a thousand pieces of works by more than 200 contemporary Chinese artists. The show triggered a great deal of controversy as it turned out to be an occasion that clearly favored quantity over quality, power play over respect for art, tacky sensation over thoughtful treatment of ideas.
Despite their grandiose ambitions, most of these attempts at establishing historic accounts ended up repeating the same simplified chronology that has been overexposed rather than carefully examined. On April 18, Minsheng Art Museum was officially opened with a 30-year survey of Chinese paintings from 1979 to 2009. Minsheng Art Museum is the latest addition to the roster of private art museums mushrooming in Shanghai in the past few years. Most of these museums are supported by private enterprises from property developers to private banks and they constitute a unique part of the institutional scene in the city. Shanghai artist Zhou Tiehai, vice director of the Minsheng Art Museum and curator of the exhibition walked us through the nearly 100 paintings by more than 80 artists that are on view until July 18th. Apart from the usual suspects, a few of the names are no longer familiar today but were relevant to the art scene of the former decades. The show wasn’t organized strictly chronologically but evolved organically taking into accounts of the manifold associations among the works in terms of their conceptual, stylistic, aesthetic, and mostly relational relevance and legacy. It was overall a tasteful selection yet as a statement for 30 years of Chinese contemporary art as it aspired to be, such a personal, intuitive and loosely constructed narrative left ample room for in-depth research and theoretical discussions.
Just a few days before my visit, Biljana Ciric, a Serbian curator based in Shanghai, launched her Chinese language publication ‘History in Making: Shanghai 1979–2009’ on May 11 in Art House in Shanghai. The publication was an archive of interviews with artists and documents collected from her research for an exhibition of the same title that was opened last September. Along with this exhibition, the publication revealed many lesser known but important facts, practices, and thinking in the current circulation of knowledge about the art history in Shanghai.
Rock Bund Art Museum is another new venue in town for contemporary art that opened on May 7th with Cai Guo-Qiang’s solo exhibition: ‘Peasant Da Vincis’. The museum is housed in the handsome Royal Asiatic Society building, a site of historic heritage completed in 1932 and formally a museum that collected natural specimens and cultural artifacts, with a recently renovated interior. In a recent interview with Hi Art, a Chinese art monthly magazine, Cai has said that he’s done with those government-level commissions of choreographing firework displays for the Olympics or the 60th National Day Celebration of China and is now turning his attention to the common people.
This inaugural exhibition of the Rock Bund Art Museum claimed to celebrate and showcase the creativity of Chinese farmers and presented a number of makeshift mechanical inventions by peasants discovered by Cai Guo-Qiang from all over the country, among them, airplanes, helicopters, flying saucers, submarines, racing cars and robots. The peasant inventors had impressed Cai with their unbound imagination and dedication to carry on their dreams sometimes at the risk of their own livelihood and even lives. One of them died at a test fly of his homemade plane. While these inventions with rather unassuming appearances bear inspiring stories of these individuals who have invested their interest, time, energy, dreams and often scarce resources into these creations, it remained questionable to me whether these projects and aspirations really belonged there in the museum but more importantly how genuine was Cai’s glorification of these common people and how convincing was his emphasis on the power of peasants, who are among the most underprivileged and vulnerable of our society. Although I am not against appropriation strategies and ‘relational’ approaches in which other practitioners – be they ‘hobby’ or ‘professional’ – are incorporated into the artist’s work, I especially question Cai’s motivation to temporarily lift these peasants from their own lives and grant them such a possibility for their creations to be seen in the context of the art museum for the sake of his own practice. We will probably never know what would happen to these farmers and their lives after this small adventure and detour. Cai has positioned himself as a discoverer, collector and owner of these inventions and thus the dreams of these farmers. He had the means, privilege and authority as an artist to place them in a museum and turn the display of these machines into an art project of his own. Cai also organized a series of lectures and conferences organized in association with the exhibition to address and recognize the imagination and creative power of Chinese farmers. There were also large banners and graffiti writings on the surrounding walls outside the museum with sentences such as ‘What Matters Isn’t Whether It Could Take Off’ and ‘Peasants-Making a better city, a better life’, echoing the theme of the 2010 World Expo: ‘Better City, Better Life’.
Back to the city where most peasant workers whose hard labor have been responsible for all the constructions and radical transformations of Chinese cities since the 1990s, had been kept out of sight for the duration of the World Expo, one wonders whether an exhibition like Cai’s has made Chinese peasants seem more present or less in control of where they can be.
I went to Shanghai on the occasion of ‘The Last Two Decades Revisited’, which was the public lecture and discussion programme for the exhibition ‘Double Infinity’. The show that engaged Asian and European artists to create works in response to a selection of art works from the collection of the Van Abbemuseum was a joint effort between the Van Abbemuseum and Arthub Asia that took place from April 29 to May 23 at the Dutch Culture Centre in Shanghai, as a satellite event to Holland’s participation in the World Expo 2010. To activate a collection, archival materials and past memories through commissioning new works and initiating conversations surrounding their collection is very much in line with Van Abbemuseum’s past and present programmes such as Plug In and Play Van Abbe, the latter of which is currently running in the museum for 18 months. The two-day public programme on May 15th and 16th brought together Chinese and international artists, critics, theoreticians and art historians to question the given accounts of Chinese art history. This was a timely and necessary discussion in light of the current phenomenon of staging exhibitions with a historical claim in Beijing and Shanghai. The beginning of May just saw the opening of Reshaping History in Beijing, a rather extensive survey of Chinese art produced in the last decade comprising over a thousand pieces of works by more than 200 contemporary Chinese artists. The show triggered a great deal of controversy as it turned out to be an occasion that clearly favored quantity over quality, power play over respect for art, tacky sensation over thoughtful treatment of ideas.
Despite their grandiose ambitions, most of these attempts at establishing historic accounts ended up repeating the same simplified chronology that has been overexposed rather than carefully examined. On April 18, Minsheng Art Museum was officially opened with a 30-year survey of Chinese paintings from 1979 to 2009. Minsheng Art Museum is the latest addition to the roster of private art museums mushrooming in Shanghai in the past few years. Most of these museums are supported by private enterprises from property developers to private banks and they constitute a unique part of the institutional scene in the city. Shanghai artist Zhou Tiehai, vice director of the Minsheng Art Museum and curator of the exhibition walked us through the nearly 100 paintings by more than 80 artists that are on view until July 18th. Apart from the usual suspects, a few of the names are no longer familiar today but were relevant to the art scene of the former decades. The show wasn’t organized strictly chronologically but evolved organically taking into accounts of the manifold associations among the works in terms of their conceptual, stylistic, aesthetic, and mostly relational relevance and legacy. It was overall a tasteful selection yet as a statement for 30 years of Chinese contemporary art as it aspired to be, such a personal, intuitive and loosely constructed narrative left ample room for in-depth research and theoretical discussions.
Just a few days before my visit, Biljana Ciric, a Serbian curator based in Shanghai, launched her Chinese language publication ‘History in Making: Shanghai 1979–2009’ on May 11 in Art House in Shanghai. The publication was an archive of interviews with artists and documents collected from her research for an exhibition of the same title that was opened last September. Along with this exhibition, the publication revealed many lesser known but important facts, practices, and thinking in the current circulation of knowledge about the art history in Shanghai.
Rock Bund Art Museum is another new venue in town for contemporary art that opened on May 7th with Cai Guo-Qiang’s solo exhibition: ‘Peasant Da Vincis’. The museum is housed in the handsome Royal Asiatic Society building, a site of historic heritage completed in 1932 and formally a museum that collected natural specimens and cultural artifacts, with a recently renovated interior. In a recent interview with Hi Art, a Chinese art monthly magazine, Cai has said that he’s done with those government-level commissions of choreographing firework displays for the Olympics or the 60th National Day Celebration of China and is now turning his attention to the common people.
This inaugural exhibition of the Rock Bund Art Museum claimed to celebrate and showcase the creativity of Chinese farmers and presented a number of makeshift mechanical inventions by peasants discovered by Cai Guo-Qiang from all over the country, among them, airplanes, helicopters, flying saucers, submarines, racing cars and robots. The peasant inventors had impressed Cai with their unbound imagination and dedication to carry on their dreams sometimes at the risk of their own livelihood and even lives. One of them died at a test fly of his homemade plane. While these inventions with rather unassuming appearances bear inspiring stories of these individuals who have invested their interest, time, energy, dreams and often scarce resources into these creations, it remained questionable to me whether these projects and aspirations really belonged there in the museum but more importantly how genuine was Cai’s glorification of these common people and how convincing was his emphasis on the power of peasants, who are among the most underprivileged and vulnerable of our society. Although I am not against appropriation strategies and ‘relational’ approaches in which other practitioners – be they ‘hobby’ or ‘professional’ – are incorporated into the artist’s work, I especially question Cai’s motivation to temporarily lift these peasants from their own lives and grant them such a possibility for their creations to be seen in the context of the art museum for the sake of his own practice. We will probably never know what would happen to these farmers and their lives after this small adventure and detour. Cai has positioned himself as a discoverer, collector and owner of these inventions and thus the dreams of these farmers. He had the means, privilege and authority as an artist to place them in a museum and turn the display of these machines into an art project of his own. Cai also organized a series of lectures and conferences organized in association with the exhibition to address and recognize the imagination and creative power of Chinese farmers. There were also large banners and graffiti writings on the surrounding walls outside the museum with sentences such as ‘What Matters Isn’t Whether It Could Take Off’ and ‘Peasants-Making a better city, a better life’, echoing the theme of the 2010 World Expo: ‘Better City, Better Life’.
Back to the city where most peasant workers whose hard labor have been responsible for all the constructions and radical transformations of Chinese cities since the 1990s, had been kept out of sight for the duration of the World Expo, one wonders whether an exhibition like Cai’s has made Chinese peasants seem more present or less in control of where they can be.
