As I sit poised to re-visit the southern, tranquil neighbor of Shanghai for yet another blow out art exhibition I think about my last trip not so long ago in the frigid depths of winter when the Lunar New Year’s plans were upset by massive (by Southern China standards) snowfalls. Thousands of stranded, mostly migrant workers whose only break from the back breaking tasks that occupy the rest of their year finally comes to fruition. But this year snow falls cut down train lines and left lots of these modest proletariat folk stranded on both sides of my trip. Shanghai’s UFO shaped South Railway Station was packed to the brim with instant noodled-out, comatose pedestrians. They filled every nook and cranny – sometimes stacked on top of each other and their belongings… They all seemed surprisingly patient. And when I took the hi-speed line 200kms south to Hangzhou, the army had erected tents (without heat or floors) so that the runoff riffraff from the insides of the station didn’t have to brave the pissy weather while they waited for their trains to come in- up to 2-3days for some.
Anyway I went to see Zhang Peili, the appointed father of Chinese video art and dean of the New Media Department at the China Art Academy, to see if we could work out one convoluted and ultimately flawed book deal. I’m not sure who appointed him “father” but somehow the title seems appropriate- and he seems fatherly, though still very active as a video artist - most recently with a show at Jack Tilton Gallery in NY for which Holland Cotter (friend of anything Chinese) wrote a funny little ditty about in the Times. [It might’ve been while working at Jack Tilton for a brief stint in '98-99 that I first collaborated with Peili- curating his exhibition FLY for which no one really paid attention except the good folks at MoMA who ended up collecting their first Chinese artwork- Zhang’s many channeled EATING piece –directly from the artist for which J.Tilton is still pissed off]
Peili picked me up and we went for tea. As we pulled up onto the sidewalk- people park on the sidewalk sometimes- I thought our positioning created an obstacle for any pedestrian to pass– Peili assured me that if the parking attendant didn’t say anything – it’d be fine. Anyway- we had a few too many cups of extra strong, locally grown Dragon Well tea and between cellphone interruptions we tried to work out some kind of deal and catch up on each other’s lives. Afterwards we exited to discover Zhang’s car has been ticketed! Zhang bewildered and pissed walks over to accost the unsuspecting attendant – what the F**? You saw us park here and you didn’t say anything – and now I’ve got t his 500yuan ticket! Do you have your head up your ass? I’m a regular customer here for Christ’s sake! The driver claims he doesn’t know anything about the car or ticket. Zhang Rages on about the attendant’s incompetence and threatens to talk to the management about his job.
Anyway
Even fathers of video art get parking tickets.
Then we went to see his exhibition at a local galley where an interactive video piece wasn’t really working so well so we had some espressos –doubling an already phat caffeine fix . One piece that was working, and that was also in Zhang’s NY show was a very small monitor which played, what seemed, a porno film but when the viewer approached the film turned off frustrating the viewers desire and expectations. Very smart and somehow reminiscent of the parking ticket earlier.
Afterwards Zhang drops me off in front of the Academy and I am relayed to Sun Xun, one of China’s young artistic heroes who belongs to, for lack of a better name, the 80’s generation- those born into a China already in full swing of economic reform and opening up - way after the dreaded Cultural revolution where Starbucks, KFC and bootlegged Hollywood were already quickly healing and homogenizing the wounds of yesteryear.
Sun makes charcoal animations of men in top hats that pontificate while big insects buzz around and the sound of impending doom makes the soundtrack. For lack of a better referent I’d say he’s China’s William Kentridge BUT us westerners are always looking for some sort of hole to put these “others” into, always looking for the derivative, the link back to our shores- like we invented everything and anything that occurred and everyone else are producing cheap ripoffs. Sun Xun’s adopted his aesthetic from many varied and globally available referents and complies them into these dark animations that describe dystopic societies of both and neither yesterday and tomorrow. I’m supposed to write his catalog essay for the HAMMER museum in LA and have only dystopia and poor Willy Kentridge to begin with. When I mentioned William, Sun said William’s process is one that documents the drawing and erasing while he produces new slates for each motion- adding up to a helluva lot of drawings that can be sold in groups – see his last show at Shangart’s D Space. But Sun Xun isn’t about the market- he’s rather about the system and he has quite an efficient one in he likes of his workshop. A sleuth of 20 or so workers produce his short abstract animations. He also has one of those old-school three barreled video projectors (like the ones we used in ’99 at Jack Tiltons for Zhang’s exhibition) and only buys imported, mostly German, items. He believes that if you don’t push hard people don’t work hard. He likes Nietzsche and Nietzsche likes him. More on all of this and hanging in Hangzhou later.
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