I met Liu Jianhua about 3 years ago when I was visiting Beijing from NYC. Feng Boyi had just curated a mammoth show at the 798 space that will soon become Ullens foundation.
See below for the hitherto unpublished review I wrote on the exhibition. Zhuang Hui was in the show as was about 30 other Chinese and international artists including Liu Jianhua. At the opening night or maybe it was the day after, a bunch of us including Zhuang Hui, Shi Jinsong (both with their shirts off and rubbing their sweaty bellies- always appetizing) and Bai Yiluo (who with jinsong are now making an exhibition all about trees- very nice trees), plus Zhuang Hui's ever expanding posse of Lanzhou arrivals and some asshole / B-rate artist who got stupidly drunk and decided to take out his unearthed discontent on the guy sitting next to him, which happened to be me, got together for dinner. That night Liu Jianhua, through much kicking and screaming escorted the silly, sweaty fool away. I didn't instigate the affair but by being a laowai - foreigner I was an easy target and he needed a target. Anyway Liu Jianhua reared his cool, calm head on more than one of these types of occasions since I've known him and now that I'm living in his town he's becoming a close friend. He's one of the nicest guys you can meet (nice like he brings his wife and kid along to art events and dinners-which is quite unusual in this testosterone filled, individualistic art world) and he makes some interesting work as well. Liu Jianhua works primarily in ceramics. He's known for the qipao girls which are easy targets for flaming feminists but he doesn't mean it like that. LJH is much older than he looks and has seen a lot of state administered sexual repression throughout his growing up and these sexy things served up on platters are an expression of this. He's also making installation works - one of which was shown at the last Shanghai Biennial. The piece exhibited there was comprised of 10,000 USD worth of plastic little gadgets and toys from the manufacturing town of Yiwu that spilled out of a container truck- A testimony to both the monster production arms of the Chang Jiang River Delta and the world's insatiable appetite for disposable little plastic things.
He's also casting household appliances in white ceramic, altering their size and then installing them in different configurations. He recently came back from Arario Gallery in Seoul (a very powerful Korean gallery with 3 venues in Beijing's Jiu Chang) where he showed ceramic boxing gloves with the names of warring countries names engraved on it among other things.
We visited him at his studio recently and he gave us a signed little flower piece.
Thank you LJH
“Convergence” 798 Dayaolu Workshop/Platform/European Contemporary China
Beijing, China
More is more in China today. There’s more money, traffic, choices and more exhibitions with more artists. In the blitz of satellite shows shadowing the notoriously avoidable Beijing Biennial “Convergence” stands out as the most quantitatively ambitious. Feng Boyi, the chief of three curators that pulled together this international, forty-person show calls the current situation in China “a beautiful chaos”. “Convergence” in every shape and form addresses, as well as mimics, this chaos.
Spanning three sites on the eastern outskirts of Beijing this exhibition brings together artists from different countries, generations and practices to forge a wider sense of community through their shared concerns about modernization. At the same time, the curator speculates, this widened sense of community is inevitably affecting a narrower sense of cultural difference. In “Convergence” the idea is not so much a homogenization of cultures but a juncture between artists of different backgrounds, which in itself is noteworthy for China. Only a few years ago it was not only difficult for Chinese artists to exhibit in China but unheard of for foreign artists to work and show in China. Times have changed. Now Beijing plays host to artists from all over the world who seek excitement and cheap studio space. While “Convergence” provides a meeting ground for some of these artists, the scope of the exhibition is so large that curatorial coherency is lost to diversity. Wim Delvoye for instance, who is now farming pigs for his famous tattoo series on the outskirts of Beijing, shows some of his livestock next to Sze Tsung Leong’s epic images of construction sites, a pairing which reflects, albeit inadvertently, China’s beautiful chaos.
The show’s main exhibition space, 798 Dayaolu Workshop, in itself an astounding edifice, is a perfect vessel for this or any other chaos. Spanning an unimpeded 4700m2, the defunct factory space was incidentally the product of Sino/German/Russian cooperation during the height of Socialism. Responding to the specificity of this manufacturing site Heike Baranowsky’s two channel video piece “Death Breath/Tomb Womb/Evil Live” shows close up views of hands toiling endlessly with a mechanical device. Zhuang Hui’s “Cannulation Building” a reconstructed life-size model of his dormitory hallway where he spent years as a factory worker sentimentalizes a time less complicated. The passageway is dimly lit, and all the Spartan props are rendered in baked clay. It is a moment frozen in time. Outside a neon sign reads “Looking at all the cruel things of the past now seem so gentle.” Sitting opposite this structure is “Tunnel” a kinetic installation by Xu Zhongmin that demonstrates the mindless conformity and mechanized condition of modern man. Three diagonally intersecting metal tubes repeatedly convey lines of walking figures from nowhere to nowhere and back again, creating an entrancing web of no escape.
Disenchantment with modernization as it takes form in urban expansion is reiterated in several artists’ works. In Liu Jianhua’s photographs of Shanghai’s Pudong economic zone these one-liner works show the city’s glossy skyline, all built within the last 10 years, behind stacks of poker chips. “Netropolis, The Invisible City”, a video projection by German artist, Michael Najjar, more poetically conveys the process of urbanization by repeatedly dissolving wide views of different cityscapes onto one another without ever resolving to one single image, while Xing Danwen’s Urban Fiction Series animates the drama of social desire in China by situating the artist herself, playing various roles, in maquettes used for real estate promotion.
While different thematic threads intertwine in this vast exhibition the idea of international convergence is humorously deconstructed in Ai Weiwei’s “Change”. Here the artist renders the global market defunct by exchanging 100US dollars into foreign currencies and back again until there is nothing left to exchange. But it is the video “The Butterfly Effect” by Waseem Khan in which a sleeping figure is unaffected by a swarm of surrounding butterflies that brings us back to the illusory theory of a beautiful chaos that globalization has fostered in China and beyond.
No comments:
Post a Comment