30.10.2008
Never mind the Saatchis
Mike Belbin reviews 'The revolution continues: New art from China' Saatchi Gallery, 10am-6pm, until January 18, free (guide book �1.50)
It’s only modern art - just more of the same. That has been one response to the contents of the recently opened Saatchi Gallery.
Since the advertising executive and art collector, Charles Saatchi, lost his exhibition space at London’s County Hall, the art world has been waiting to check out his next prime site. This most prominent patron of British art - Hirst’s animals, Emin’s bed, the Chapmans’ model holocausts - is exhibiting again in an old army building, the Duke of York’s HQ off the King’s Road, Chelsea. No pickled sharks or toy Waffen-SS here though: this is art new from China, most from the 21st century.
However, are these works so new or do they only remind us of the usual international - ie, western - style of gallery product, with elements of pop-pastiche or detritus, often sensationalist, but ultimately detached? “[Such] art’s purpose,” comments Julian Stallabrass in Art Incorporated (Oxford 2004), “is to assure its educated viewers that despite the corruption of democracy, the manipulations of the media, the pollution of the mental environment by endless and strident commercial propaganda, they are still themselves, undamaged and free.”
The exhibition is on four floors, with stairs and lifts between. The building has been totally refurbished - white walls, a lot of glass and walkways, all obviously fresh to the Duke of York. Only occasionally could you pass through a door or look through a plate window and think of an officers mess or ‘square bashing’.
The artists on show are all young and from the People’s Republic of China. There are photos of them on one floor, like rows of snapshots on a democracy wall.
The work is primarily figurative, or at least non-abstract. Many, especially Zhang Xiaogang’s portraits, remind me of what used to be called in the 70s humanist art, and what conceptualists might call cartoon illustration. There is some suggestion of traditional subjects, but given a twist: Zheng Guogu’s ‘Waterfall’, a hill of petrified, dripping ice, as well as rural landscapes like the peasant field of Zhang Huan painted in ash. There is also a giant dog turd, skeletons of imaginary creatures, and a performance artist lying with his tongue flat on the floor. With the latter work, I had to check the guide that it was not the artist himself.
The prone form of Cang Xin is not the only facsimile in the show: faked bodies feature on every floor. In the top room, naked figures hang upside down from the ceiling in ‘Chinese offspring’ by Zhang Dali. This is apparently a reference to migrating workers. On each figure’s bared back there are tattoos issuing each with an edition number, as if alluding to both gallery practice and identity card registration.
Surprisingly effective are works referring to the recent past, such as the Cultural Revolution. ‘Materialist’s art’ by Wang Guangyi is an agitprop poster-like painting of worker-soldier figures in bold black, yellow and red with a cascade of numbers printed over them - sets of digits that could be prices, pin codes or stock idents. Are Red Guard stereotypes then any flatter than the reduction of everything to commodity quantification? Mao himself features: photo-like monochromes by Shi Xinning of the chairman with the queen mother or sitting at McCarthy’s table during the Un-American Activities hearings. The celebrated face also turns up on a tub of Quaker Oats.
Much of this has reminded reviewers of contemporary western art, of Gormley’s statues, toy Nazis, icons mocked, celebrities ironised, quotes from other media, the facsimile, hyper-realist heads of Ron Mueck. It is also clearly reflective of Saatchi’s taste, his interest in pop-allusion, shock, physicality and decay.
Yet something else comes through. If this art is post-Cultural Revolution, it is also post the capitalist ‘revolution’.
Fang Lijun’s painting, like the parody of a church ceiling, shows pink cherub dolls disappearing up into a whirlwind; Zang Fanzhi etches in oils a gloomy riverbank of dying grass entitled ‘This land is so rich in beauty’. Zhang Xiaogang’s ‘My dream: little general’ is a shimmering darkish portrait of a young boy in a military tunic with his little genitals beneath. This and the ash paintings and frozen waterfalls and commodity price posters speak to me of a land that may be rich, but where the vulnerable, including the landscape, are being sacrificed to a whirlwind of change from above.
The last room, gallery 13, the basement, is taken up by a single work. Sun Yuan and Peng Yu give us ‘Old person’s home’. A large group of hyper-realist figures career around the gallery floor in motorised wheelchairs. They are bent and white-bearded and dressed in suits and uniforms: many recognisable as famous political personalities. Is that Castro, Arafat, archbishop Makarios, an oil sheik? What, no Reagan or Thatcher? No Alistair Darling? You can stand among them, inspecting their hyper-realist features and waiting to see what happens when their chairs bump into each other. When they do, they simply (by computer programme?) touch and move away.
Are these stand-ins for the current PRC leadership (who are not so geriatric any more) or representations of those old world nations that go-ahead China has gone beyond? We stand there, many of us young and well dressed, and feel superior too. Or maybe these facsimiles are also bearing the brunt of the formative forces in the world - second-country leaders redundant and put away like dementia patients.
Is there a theme here?
Those pictures of Mao at home in the McCarthy hearings may not be a spoof on the past - a juvenile tongue out at ‘official communism’ - so much as a symbol of convergence. In these works, there may be a sense of what all of us could be in for: a flat future where capital and state parties like the CCP work together to keep us in line, whether on the way to construction site, service till or sponsored website.
This is new art all right, straight from present history. If they suggest copies of western art, they are also observations from Chinese artists who have learnt that many expectations of freedom and security in a post-Mao, neo-capitalist China have not been fulfilled.
Much of what is on show in New art from China can indeed be fitted, if you like, into the currently acceptable frame of modern art; yet there is some kind of protest here, a sensation of dissent, however feeble, at the world the mandarins of state and corporation are impressing on us. It may be mournful, and suggest impotence, but it is not dead, not deadened.
It’s only modern art, but I like it - that is, feel it.
