art reviews
Butterfly Dream
At MoCA Shanghai >>
By Guido Mologni
Taewon Jang
Gana Art New York >>
By Mary Hrbacek
La Wang Tao, Liu Xun, Mei Yi
Renaissance Shanghai Yuyuan >>
By Vivi Ying He
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Butterfly Dream
At MOCA Shanghai
By Guido Mologni
Among the significant art institutions to emerge during last couple of years in Shanghai, MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) was founded three years ago in the picturesque People’s Park by the Samuel Kung Foundation as “the first non-profit, independently-operated contemporary art institution in Shanghai”, with the endorsement of the Municipal Government. The past twenty or so exhibitions held at the museum have provided a platform for new contemporary Chinese artworks and hve fostered a dialogue between artists at home and abroad. With art museums and art spaces flourishing in Shanghai, aparently undetered by the economic melt down in the West, MOCA helps to cultivativate Shanghai’s fledging art scene, nourishing a public appinite for contemporary art through a mix of thoughtfully curated exhibitions, lectures, films and art performances.
The idea for the most recent show, Butterfly Dream, curated by Victoria Lu, Pan Qing, Liu Chunfeng, and Diana Freundl came from the work of Zhuang Zi, a famous philosopher living during the Warring States Period. Zhuang Zi dreamt that he had become a butterfly. After waking up, he couldn’t tell if he had dreamt of the butterfly or f it was the butterfly that dreamt of him. An identity confusion arises, bringing great uncertainties between oneself and the outside world. In reverse, all these uncertainties contribute to one certain motif – transformation – that matches vividly the intricate status-quo of contemporary Chinese art.
During the past three decades, Chinese artists have devoted themselves to exploring new characteristics of this unprecedented era, redefining the tradition. Meanwhile, mainstream western contemporary art ideologies flooded into China, playing an important role amidst their Chinese counterparts. This exhibition collects artworks from artists living or working in China with a wide variety of genres. It suggests the rapid economic growth and sharp transition of Chinese social structures.
In this work we see a boy lying in the wooden box and gigantic skeleton in a huge monochromic background in the painting, Mam-Moth, by Li Jikai, together with objects such as aircraft, rabits and toy bricks, daydreaming and self-consciousness. Our attention falls on the boy’s meditation and a sense of distance in face of the outside world. Though the easier social conditions foster an egocentric attitude among young artists, Li Jikai doesn’t indulge himself in the release of nervous emotions when confronting reality. A deep introspection about self-existence give a sense of the freehand brushwork considered as the quintessence of traditional painting. Adressing the decline of traditional ink and wash painting, Wang pays homage to this Chinese tradition in a contemporary way, extending its definition by pushing the limitations of technique.
In a similiar vein Li Chen’s sculpture Clear Soul explores the spirit of Buddhism and Daoism. A corpulent, pudgy shape and casual gesture makes this image temporal, standing out from traditional Buddhist sculptures. The perfect rounded line frames the Buddha in an ethereal way. And the uppermost dark Buddha is more earthly than the one beneath covered with the silver patina. As the Buddha is secularized in Li’s work, we still can find a sense of serenity through the mildly smiling face and the stillness radiated from that, spiritually bringing people a feeling of happiness, forgiveness, and doing so with a sense of humor.
By scribbling in pencil, scanning into computer, then projecting onto canvas, the drawing bird was created by Ye Yongqing in a graffiti-looking way. But what is the metaphor of this bird? It could be the symbol of elegance with the ethereal gesture. It could be cynical and scorning with scribbling lines. What hides behind the fastidious working on the canvas? Ye succeeds in a transformation from complexity to simplicity on forms and from early expressionistic Pop work to a secretive language on subjects. The literary, poetic emotion and abstract minimalism are mixed to express an individual feeling about the ideological mainstream in an attempt to transcend the limitations of west and east, of present and past.
In general, the artworks in this exhibition represent an interesting phenomenon. First, the connection of the medium and the form is no longer in an absolute, unified state. Traditional material, such as rice paper, ink and wash could be employed merely as a medium to tell a conceptual story from the west. Likewise, by editing and collaging oil painting, digital images and other materials such as wood, steel and found newspaper, the non-traditional ink and wash pieces challenge our old perceptions and suggest a familiar atmosphere of traditional art. A combination of material and form brings ethnic, regional and spatio-temporal identity into an ambiguous state. And the mixing of cultures makes any attempt to decipher boundaries between east and west, modern and traditional pointless; what makes these artists recognizable is their unique life experience and individual thinking. Whether seen as a retrospection concerning the past, or a glimpse into the future, the work that artists make and indeed the artists themselves become an embodiment of the times. M
Ed. Note:
MOCA Shanghai is located at People's Park, 231 Nanjing West Road, Shanghai, 200003. Telephone +86.21.6327.9900. info@mocashanghai.org. www.mocashanghai.org
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Taewon Jang
Gana Art New York
By Mary Hrbacek
Taewon Jang has a talent for accentuating rich vibrant color within dark natural settings. His photographs combine images of man-made structures with the vastness of the sky that surrounds the earth’s plains and hills. Most of the buildings that attract his attention are factories, which seen at night, evoke an eerie otherworldly aura. His sense of color is unique; it is rare to see pea-green and emerald green enhance one another. A solitary murky bulldozer against the background of dark green hills adds impact to the photograph.
In some of these images, mist plays the background role as the subject that envelops a dewy green foreground. Photographed at night, blurred human figures, crouching or standing on mudflats at low tide, accentuate the indestructible continuity that exists between man and his natural surroundings. Paradoxically, the night illumination produces a theatrical sense of overwhelming beauty that encompasses the ugliness that can be so glaring in daylight; nature overwhelms the man-made with respect to visual appearances. Light and color saturate and transform ugly buildings whose details and contours are softened and obscured by the darkness.
There really is no separation between the man-made and the nature-made in these pictures. Contrasting light and darkness brings out the drama of an ordinary factory situated in a valley with a backdrop of blackened hills. Tiny points of rose-colored lights establish a rhythm across a pale blue sky and sweeping landscape. Whether the factories comprise monolithic towers or structures that are spread out and diffused by distance, Jang’s sophisticated photographs accentuate the repetitions of dark forms and the mysterious anonymity of the settings. He doesn’t seem to care what the factory produces, or why the bulldozer is left with its shovel stretched upward, backlit against the evening sky. It is all one in these powerful evocative, 50 x 70 inch digital C-prints and conventional photographs. The scenes are photographed after midnight, using moonlight as a natural illumination; a fact that highlights the unusual variety of color found in the night skies, lending natural and man-made forms a unified visual appearance. M
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Wang Tao, Liu Xun, Mei Yi
Renaissance Shanghai Yuyuan
By Vivi Ying He
Dubbed The Image of Individuals, this three-artist show is the second in a series of art exhibitions co-hosted by the Renaissance Shanghai Yuyuan Hotel, Renaissance Art World and Shanghai Sheng Ling Gallery. The artists, Wang Tao, Liu Xun and Mei Yi, were born between the end of 1950’s and the beginning of 1960’s. Their work, in some regrds, reflects the attitudes of a generation that changed everything we know about Chinese culture today.
Wang Tao employs materials in his paintings that give historical evidence of stories which straddle both traditional and modern forms. Liu Xun explores the essence of painting, dealing with color fabric issues that present unique techical challenges. In his recently-completed “Tibet” Series, Mei Yi presents a kind of spiritual prayer that shows a reverence for the western classical aesthetics and traditional Chinese aesthetics. A common element in these paintings is a tendency to strive for escape from reality and a return to a spiritual home.
The Renaissance Shanghai Yuyuan Hotel is housed in a contemporary structure towering over the city’s Old Town, which bears the hallmarks of Shanghai’s storied past. The hotel began co-hosting art exhibitions as a way to offer its patrons a definitive aesthetic experience in the areas of fine arts, design, music and culture. M
Ed. Note:
The Renaissance Shanghai Yuyuan Hotel on Henan South Road is located in the Huangpu district of Puxi in Shanghai. Please contact the hotel directly for a full calandar of arts exhibition program.
