Mathieu Borysevicz on Chinese art in the U.S., circa late 2007

2008.01.01

Yan Lei, Landing, 2007, oil on canvas, 300 by 300 cm

Miami heated up the art world’s winter blues last month with a whopping twenty-four art fairs, plus countless independent exhibitions, performances and parties. While there was a curiously modest amount of Chinese art activity in the midst of all this, the work that did get shown was surprisingly critical. Shanghart’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach was one of the show’s most memorable, with Xu Zhen recreating a Shanghai convenience store in its space. Meanwhile in the Art Positions section of the fair, both Cao Fei’s dabbling in Second Life real estate at Vitamin Space and Liu Wei’s installation based on worker fatalities at Universal Studios created some buzz. Back north in New York, buried beneath the new New Museum opening, Paul McCarthy’s sweet Chocolate Santas with butt plugs, and the usual end of the season fare, one could find several more manifestations of Chinese art.

A portrait of Jeff Koons in a Chelsea window beckoned to viewers of Yan Lei’s solo debut at Robert Miller Gallery. Inside, a cycle of paintings depicting 1950s flight attendants and jetliners—painted by number and embellished with gaudy sunray streaks—were meant as an ironic critique of Chinese artists’ rise in the international contemporary art jet set. But it was the trio of mural-size Color Wheel works in the rear of the gallery that made the show a hit. These hypnotic, pastel-colored spirals seemed to recede and protrude at the same time, enveloping the viewer in their gyration and harking back to less obvious Western precedents like Keneth Noland and the long lost school of Op Art.

Wang Yaqiang, The Perfect Design of Air Conditioner, 2004, oil, acrylic and pencil on canvas, 59 by 51 in.

Elsewhere on the Chinese contemporary radar, things weren’t as interesting. China Square mounted Revolution, a group show, mainly of painting, chock full of propaganda imagery, pink faces and Tian’anmen Squares. The one stand out piece also happened to be the oldest: Ping-Pong Mao, a table with the silhouette of Chaiman Mao cut out on both sides by New York-based Zhang Hongtu is a classic (circa 1995) ‘cult of Mao’ deconstruction by someone who actually experienced the leader’s torrid legacy first hand.

Down the street, Korea’s Arario Gallery inaugurated its Manhattan outpost by flaunting a heavyweight stable of Chinese artists. Wang Du, Liu Jianhua, Zhou Tiehai and others each showed impressive works whose individual poignancy seemed to recede in the grouping of the show as a whole. Across the street, Stux Gallery followed up its Chinese Relativity Part One exhibition with its equally arbitrary Chinese Relativity Part Two. In what appeared to be a secondary market sale, and maybe even an auction raid, Yang Shaobin, Fang Lijun, Wei Dong and some of the other usual suspects showed us what we already knew about Chinese art. A painting by the relatively young and under known Wang Yaqiang was the only fresh surprise. Elsewhere painterly painters, Zhu Wei, Chen Ke and Li Jikai made handsome New York debuts at Thomas Erben Gallery.

Zhang Hongtu, Ping Pong Mao, 1995, ping pong table and paddles.

As the ‘random China group show syndrome’, laden with clichés and outdated modes, seemed to dominate Chelsea this fall, the spring is due to bring a few solo shows—Zhang Huan at Pace Wildenstein, Xu Zhen at James Cohan, and of course Cai Guo-Qiang’s Guggenheim retrospective—that will hopefully reflect the better of what is really going on in this dynamic scene.

— 文/ Mathieu Borysevicz