So I've been out of touch
Not touching so much
because other, more serious, professional writing endeavors have kept me from letting loose here. BUT some of those potential publishers have dragged their heels and timeliness has got left in the dust. So below a short review of REFRESH, a group show of emerging (love the term- you can emerge till 35 years old and then you're a has been-emerging artist or a successful artist- or by that time the day job has taken over along with the mortgage and nursery school fees and art just seems like a silly waste of time. Me, I'm still clunking along, post-emerging at 36 with a group show here or there and wasting my time on this here blog.
Here's REFRESH slightly refreshed so it has some minor differences with the soon-to-be published version on artforum.com which isn't as interesting as bookforum.com but will bring you your daily dose of art chatter (which is what art is all about anyway -chatter). Below more chatter:
In the art world’s unrelenting pursuit of the continually new, REFRESH, a group exhibition at ZenDai MoMA, waves its youthful hand for attention. This show of thirty-five artists, most of who were born during the 1980’s, presents an eclectic range of mediums and mall-rat sensibilities in a museum, oddly enough, situated in a mall. These artists are of China’s first generation to experience an entirely Economic-Reform era life, complete with its material privileges and freedoms that previous generations could never have dreamed of. Subsequently much of the work embodies concerns less akin to their socio-politically infatuated predecessors and more attuned to a burgeoning global culture. Suitably, consumerism and its discontents greet the viewer in the lobby. A table case by Sha Weichen displays an array of home electronic equipment - cell phones, digital camcorders, laptops all meticulously constructed out of black tape. Light-boxes show a bright mountain of small toys, apparently self-portraits of the artist, Fan Mingzhu, buried underneath. A bay of blowing fans make a pun on the company's Great Wall name. from The show’s centerpiece, a humorous cross between sculpture and painting by Guo Hongwei, is a square of actual lawn littered with Coke cans, condom wrappers and banana peels which were made from multiple layers of acrylic paint. Many other examples of post painting dot the show. TV noise appears on a flat screen monitor next to a painting of the same subject. Along the expanse of another wall wasshisname (I'll check this later) painfully has rendered his signature marbleizing technique over which sits yet another flat screen monitor that shows the artist painting his colossal studio wall with the same little squiggly interlacing lines. It was a project that apparently took an entire month.
There are several photographers who show misguided youth in various stages of undress, intoxication and reflection ala Wolfgang Tillmans reminding us that this image obsessed generation is also one that is entirely sibling-less. However the results of China’s one-child family experiment are most successfully transmitted here via video. In a piece dedicated to her parents, Ma Qiusha recites the story of her life with a razor blade in her mouth. In Zu Weimin’s inscrutable video, execution style killings unfold in a gritty industrial wasteland to the reggae version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind”. Another video shows a rifle-scope focusing in on and falling pedestrian traffic, a nod to the pervasive influence of gaming on China’s youth. The curatorial aim of the show is to “refresh”, to make anew the hitherto categorically confined name game of historians. Despite much derivation and a desperate need for a final edit, the show presents young artists with a lot of promising territory to explore.
REFRESH: Emerging Chinese Artists
September 23 – November 08, 2007
Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art
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