Best of 2008: Angie Baecker

2008.12.18

1. Ai Weiwei's 1980s New York photographic archive
Ai Weiwei lived for twelve seminal years in the United States, leaving in his wake a prolific stream of photographs trained upon zeitgeists both internal and external, Chinese and American. When he left New York in 1993, he was deep in the East Village scene. References to those expatriated years have been constant since his return to China, building the shape and authority of his voice. But Ai's documentation of that time has not entered the public realm until now. Beijing's Three Shadows Photography Art Center has undertaken the organization, preservation, and partial publication of this incredible archive, with an exhibition to go on view in the new year. The archive offers a precious window onto the times, Ai's presence, and their combined significance.

2. Wu Shanzhuan, But Still Red, Red Humour International (Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou)
Wu Shanzhuan is the practical joker of his generation: anyone who can discuss the performance in which Wu masturbated into a cucumber without a sense of humor is guilty of desiccating art. The mainland-produced retrospective was a step in the right direction—a decently curated show dedicated to a deserving artist. Here's to hoping there are more where that came from.

3. Wang Gongxin, Synchronization, ("Christian Dior and Chinese Artists," Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing)
Deep in the hallways of one of the more swollen of exhibitions to be staged in Beijing this year, a video projection shows runway models sashaying forward in fabulous Dior designs. A parallel projection faces off with it, fat and forward street models strutting in crude fabrications of the originals. The schadenfreude is sustaining: chub and flab don fashion drag to devastating effect, deflating the pretension of skin and bones— and under the auspices of its worst offenders, no less! Synchronization is a cheeky crystallization of the emperor's new clothes syndrome that seems to have defined the year in art: all this pomp and fuss, but what about substance?

4. '85 New Wave Archive series (Edited by Fei Dawei, volumes 1 and 2 published by Ullens Center for Contemporary Art)
Pages upon pages of scans of handwritten notes, sketches, photos, and mementos from the 1980s by Fei Dawei and the cluster of shining expatriated art stars that surrounded him, this series of documents from the '85 New Wave archives is field upon field of raw bounty for future researchers. The next four titles in the series are suspended for the time being, but once more, here's to hoping more good content will find a way to get out.

5. White at D-22 (November 16, 2008)
Zhang "Jeffray" Shouwang and Cosmic Shenggy only get to play together a few times a year: he's the frontman for the earnest Carsick Cars, posterband for Beijing's rising underground music scene, and she's in London studying sound engineering and philosophy. But on the rare occasion when they do get to perform together, you just need to be there. White exemplifies their experimental label, and accordingly, material at each performance varies wildly. This November 16 performance at D-22 was, to use Shenggy's own descriptor, an exercise in "cosmic industrial": magical, heavy, soaring, and probing. This is music with its eyes full of stars, bass that soaks in through your pores, a moment that can only be communicated live.

6. Liang Yuanwei, BLDG 115, RM 1904 (Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing)
Against the backdrop of a Chinese art world that is rapidly and oftentimes inelegantly commercializing, Liang Yuanwei's solo show at Boers-Li Gallery was a steady, measured gesture. Her heavily textured oil paintings explored the decorative and fine arts traditions of the medium with a lingering and understated grace, a slow-cooked approach that is quiet and lasting.

7. Video works of Li Yongbin
Li Yongbin's works weren't exhibited this year, but I had the chance to watch his entire output in the course of other research. Long, slow, and devastating, Li makes video art that seems to straddle performance and abstraction. These are serious and rewarding pieces that deserve to come to more light.

8. "House of Oracles: A Huang Yong Ping Retrospective" (Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing)
The show came from Minneapolis and North Adams by way of Vancouver, but it was a happy presence in Beijing. Have we blown our shot for another traveling exhibition of a similar standard?

9. Lawrence Weiner, lecture at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (January 11, 2008)
In town for an installation at UCCA, Weiner's talk to an audience full of eager minds at the Central Academy of Fine Arts opened a window onto a rigorous and provocative system of thought that gave many much to chew on for a long time afterward.

10. New Pants, closing performance at the Modern Sky Festival (October 2, 2008)
China doesn't give the right stage even to its most seasoned successes: at their November launch party at Yugong Yishan, the New Pants were cramped by the venue, their luster lacking for want of size and scale. It's clear that these are personalities that need space to fill and expand, and after twelve years of making music, it's going to be a challenge for Beijing's music boxes to sustain their careers and their interest. New Pants' closing performance at the Modern Sky Festival in October offered song after anthemic song, each building on the emotional swell of the last, until the band closed with "This is Our Generation," and the audience believed every word when Peng Lei started it by saying, "After all these years, it still comes down to this one song."

Angie Baecker is a book editor and critic based in Beijing.

— 文/ Angie Baecker