Alone and Together

Image: Crouching Spider, 2003. Courtesy of the Easton Foundation. Christopher Burke, copyright Louise Bourgeois Trust. Licensed by VaGa, NY

 

Faurschou Foundation 

Until March 24

Pain and love, self-entrapment, tenderness and vulnerability are the poetic and reverberating threads that tie together the tapestry of the late Louise Bourgeois’s work. The tension, the oscillating energy of opposites that pervades her weighty, beautiful pieces, is impossible to ignore. Sharp and soft textures sit side-by-side, and the sexual is depicted to reflect the pleasures of the flesh, its burdens and its pains.

Alone and Together has been curated by the artist’s long-time assistant Jerry Gorovoy. The title refers to Bourgeois’s own fear of abandonment and loneliness, so the selection is a species of biography; her work is, almost without exception, intensely personal.

‘In and out’ (1995), like many of the works here, incorporates a form that became a motif as its presence came to be found in more and more of her works. This time, the waxy, sinuous female figure, her back and lower body arched towards the ceiling as if in a convulsion of pain or orgasm, is encased in a metal cage. The association between pain and sex has not gone unvisited by artists through the generations, but there is nothing clichéd about this rendition.

There is a strange and tender beauty to the piece: the intermingled tracery of old and broken glass windows outside the cell; the shiny, round mirror globes positioned around the body. But there is also a sense of violence – the armless and headless figure, easy to miss at first, is surrounded by the mirrors, which let you view it from every angle. her mottled, brown-beige form is set on a dirty old corduroy mattress, trapped and vulnerable. outside one corner of the cell is a rubber-like, abstract pink sculpture, radiating warmth and otherness as it appears to caress the cage-like structure.

In a long cabinet are some of Bourgeois’s small, cloth pieces: figures of women becoming flowers or in various stages of pregnancy. She began making sculptures from soft materials when she lived with her three small children, so as to avoid excessive noise. ‘The arrival’ (2007) continues this practice. here an armless hessian doll giving birth is mirrored by the smaller head of her baby as it is born. The figure is then cut off, or perhaps protected, by a glass dome –-the kind that is used to cover stuffed, dead animals.

As a child, Bourgeois was severely distressed by the experience of watching her father pursue an open affair with her English teacher. In her writings she referred to her hate for him, and this pain never stopped haunting her. ‘Crouching Spider’ (2003) is from the Maman series of spider figures, the biggest of which is more than 30 feet high. The series is a tribute to Bourgeois’s mother, who was a weaver. Sharp legs and the facelessness of this spider, which is a little bigger than a man, suggest violence, but a spider is also protective of its silken home and can rebuild it, something her mother did as she endured her humiliation.

It is a rare privilege to see this stunningly intellectual, emotional and expressive artist’s work in China; a body of work that needs no stepping back from, but which draws you entirely into Bourgeois’s sensual, topsy-turvy world. Clare Pennington

Originally posted in Time Out Beijing

No Fruit at the Root

Beijing Commune

Until January 28

No Fruit at the Root is set out as a maze that moves between dark and light spaces, and through three works that focus the viewer’s gaze so intensely on texture and surface detail that the subjects and sculptures themselves are effaced. The effect is not so much disorientating as displacing.

‘Initially, my interests in reflecting on the differences, appearances and unanimities between surface and essence came about from the split personalities inside myself and some of the people around me,’ says artist Hu Xiaoyuan of the wood-and-silk sculptures she has been creating in recent years. The pieces, also titled ‘No Fruit at the Root’, are placed carefully across the floor – geometric shapes in silent conversation with each other. Each discarded block, pillar and joist is partly whitewashed; the surface is then shrouded by taut silk, upon which thin traces of black ink have been laid, mimicking the texture of the wood grain underneath.

The two video works that accompany this are also about the translucency of surface. In ‘See’, the original subject is almost imperceptible – an undulating, white, liquid-like shape, moving across a creamier white background. ‘Drown Dust’, the three-channel video on display in a darkened room, looks closely at corals, the warp and weft in the edge of a fabric and a board that, in close up, is spiked with splinters and rough edges. all of these works are vestiges of wider experiences – other films shot by the artist; objects found in the city or in her studio – but the sense of fleeting impressions is one that can leave viewers pleasantly spooked. The jarring and even limited nature of the works does not diminish the overall sense of otherness, of deposits, left by this intriguing exhibition. Clare Pennington

Originally posted in Time Out Beijing

Ready for collection

For the devoted collector, developing an art collection can be the journey of a lifetime. But it is journey that must begin somewhere, and you certainly don’t have to be a multi-millionaire or an art expert to get on board. In fact, with a surfeit of galleries in the city and an art world that has cooled since the white-hot days of 2011, there is no better time or place to start nosing around chinese art than Beijing today.

Step 1: Do your research

You won’t find your dream artwork without some effort, so make a point of visiting galleries around the city. as well as seeing what’s on display, you can find out what artists they represent (their websites often say this too), and ask their staff for recommendations for other galleries to visit. Do remember that, generally, only galleries sell original artworks; art centres, such as the UCCA, (for the most part) do not; similarly, museums and foundations do not cater to collectors. and be aware that galleries sell more than the work on display; an extra selection of works by artists they represent may very well be kept hidden away in a locked room, to show to interested buyers on request.

The advice of Urs Meile (pictured, above), the founder of Caochangdi’s Galerie Urs Meile and one of a long line of art professionals, is to take your time and ask a lot of questions. ‘There should first be a little bit of time for exploring,’ he says. ‘It is important that you listen to your own feelings and ideas, and that you do a kind of pre-selection for yourself of works that meet your personal taste. Then it is very important that you go to the gallery and talk. People, especially beginners, are very afraid to talk, because they think that if they talk, maybe a gallery director will expect a certain knowledge about art.’ This, he insists, is not the case.

Indeed, gallerists generally agree that it is a gallery’s job to give clear, thorough information about an artist and his or her work to potential buyers, and that enquirers can ask as many questions as they like. This puts galleries in contrast with auction houses, where less information is provided and snappy decisions are a must. and you should never feel under pressure to buy a work just for asking about it, adds Meile. ‘If I was to sell a work every time I spoke to someone about the works, then I would be unbelievably rich,’ he laughs.

Step 2: Ask the right questions
Once you’ve found an artist you like – and the gallery that represents him or her – Pékin Fine arts director Meg Maggio (pictured, below) says there are certain things to look for: ‘[collectors] are curious about where the artist has participated in exhibitions, who has collected his work and why he has a certain relationship with a certain gallery.’ and, she warns, if you only want to decorate your house, then ‘don’t spend a lot of money’.

She continues: ‘a good collector might not care about the market price of a piece, but they always care about the artistic merit of a piece. For something to be identified as an artwork [rather than decoration], it has to have a lot of recognition, whether it’s from museums, curators, critics or auction houses. It has to have third-party, objective, expert recognition.’

Step 3: Budget
Perhaps the most obvious challenge for many collectors is money. Many of us worry about how to budget when it comes to acquiring original art, especially as prices at respected galleries can be astonishingly steep. however, Maggio insists that, if you look hard enough, it is possible to hunt out original works starting from 1,000-6,000RMB: ‘You can find some really interesting things to buy, like drawings or little sculptures.

‘Look for something that isn’t mass-produced, because then you start to get into [the area of] decorations. You need to make sure the works are single productions, and that they are shown in the right galleries. If it’s photography, you should also be looking for a low edition number, and ask how many formats the work will appear in.’ Too many, she says, could damage the value of the work.

Despite this, both Maggio and Meile agree that it’s a mistake to buy art with the intention of making money; it can be a very risky business, and it’s not easy to understand or appreciate the factors by which an artwork’s monetary value may be judged in the future.

Step 4: Delivery
Once you take the plunge there are other expenses to consider. Framing can be costly, but dodging a pricier framer recommended by the gallery for a cheaper, self-sourced one can result in a damaged work of art, whether by clumsy craftsmanship or poor materials that fail to protect the piece against Beijing’s dust and glaring sunlight.

Another issue to consider is that shipping the work abroad is never included in the price. The gallery should be able to recommend a specialist art shipper, and can often help you with the customs forms. It can then take up to a month for an artwork to arrive – including a few weeks to get your application cleared by Chinese customs.


Step 5: After-care
On the bright side, if the gallery is delivering a work to your home in Beijing, it will probably even help you hang it, and, should you want to take it abroad later, a good gallery will continue to give you advice. ‘We consider it an ongoing relationship with the client,’ says Maggio. ‘We hope it’s the start of encouraging the client to build a collection, so there is this whole service that accompanies the purchase of a work.’

Enquire whether the work is insured while it remains in the gallery or is being transported to you, and ask for a certificate of authenticity. ‘We’ll typically give a certificate of authenticity, signed by myself as the gallery representative and by the artist,’ says Maggio, who adds that gallerists should keep up with the provenance of the work they sell. ‘our relationship with the works should be ongoing and dynamic,’ she says, explaining that good gallerists will stay in touch with clients to give them any further advice needed on the work they have acquired – including current estimates on its value, which are necessary for collectors so that they can update their insurers.

A final word
Though there is no shortage of issues to consider when buying art, it is absolutely worth making the leap now, while the art market is moving a little slower says Meile. ‘collectors and art lovers now have the time to think about it because they are no longer afraid that if they don’t say “yes” it will be gone tomorrow.’ and he has one final word of advice for buyers: ‘never buy something just because a gallerist says you have to make a quick decision or it will be gone. Don’t worry if it will be gone. There will be other things.’  Clare Pennington

Originally published in Time Out Beijing

Facing Walls, Opening Windows

Galleria Continua - A web of connected circles climbs up the vast wall at the back of the gallery, each playfully uneven circle enclosing a pure block of colour in its thick, black paint. A few remain unfilled, to be gradually coloured in as the exhibition goes on. Two warm orange lights emit from two of the circular enclosures.

Cameroon artist Pascale Marthine Tayou’s ‘L’arbre a palabres’ has a worldless, neater scattering of colour than in his other pieces, and in this context the loosely patterned, interconnected nature of this exhibit suggests, on the surface at least, a fun, easy-going work of art.

In fact, many of the creations in this group exhibition appear to have a light-hearted tone to them, although several of the participating artists are known for bringing social commentary into their art. Perhaps it is the combination of bright colours, the sense of humour evident in many of the pieces, or the bright, airy gallery itself, but, overall, the works by this array of artists – including Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Kendell Geers and Michelangelo Pistoletto – have an immediacy that is refreshing to the eye.

The Albanian artist Sislej Xhafa’s shiny yin yang symbol, made from black, white and silver telephones, is not, however, without irony, as its title ‘This Call May be Recorded for Quality Purposes’ makes evident.

Meanwhile, Nedko Solakov’s ‘Some Nice Things to Enjoy While You Are Not Making a Living’ invites the audience to offer ideas on how best to torture a lawyer, boss, tax collector and other such vilified members of society. The artist’s own light-hearted ideas are hung on sheets alongside three panels in primary colours, as inspiration for viewers to vent their primal emotions and frustrations.

This exhibition is full of simple pleasures, such as Daniel Buren’s ‘Untitled’ – a series of mirrors reflecting five blocks of colour painted on the wall opposite. Elsewhere, Pistoletto asks ‘Is this God? Yes it is!’, with an ‘e’ in Italian that looks as if it has devil horns. Playful in its style, while still asking bigger social questions, this show gives you a good reason to while away an afternoon. Clare Pennington

Originally posted in Time Out Beijing

Until the End of the World

Tang Contemporary - Until the End of the World is a dedication to the medium of film in Chinese art, and includes works from five mainland artists known for working in this format. The exhibition focuses on the older generation of heavyweights – Zhang Peili, Wang Gongxin and Lin Yilin – while also including work from younger artists Liu Chuang and Chen Zhou.

Perhaps the most interesting work is ‘Q&A and Q&A’ (2011) by Zhang Peili, who is widely acknowledged to have produced the first piece of video art in mainland China with ‘30 x 30’ (1988). The installation occupies a temporary room, fitted with three pairs of screens protruding from three corners of the room. The middle pair features a policeman on one screen, with a suspect who is undergoing interrogation on the opposite screen. The other two pairs of screens show the words the two men are exchanging (one pair in English, the other in Chinese).

But words are often played out of time, sounds are distorted or, in the case of the suspect, omitted entirely. The only speaker is situated in the fourth corner so that image, text and sound are separated and re-layered.Zhang took this video from a real-life interrogation. The elements of what really happened, in a scenario where the purported aim is to discover the truth about a crime, are warped. Although ‘Q&A and Q&A’ raises more ethical and philosophical questions than many of Zhang’s other works, his focus remains questioning truth and reality by playing with our senses.

Since Zhang is often considered as the father of Chinese video art, it is apt that his pieces are set alongside works from ensuing generations of video artists. Taken in order, Wang Gongxin, a pioneer of video art in the mid-1990s, follows. On entering the exhibition space, one is confronted by his five visually arresting, hanging screens. Each closes in on a face, smeared with brightly coloured foam. As time passes, the coloured bubbles of artificially bright blue, green, yellow, red and purple peter out to reveal the individual beneath. Each colour’s purpose is to suggest a mood for the subject, but their face only truly appears once this mask has receded.

The aesthetic focus of this piece conflicts sharply with the adjacent works of Lin Yilin, whose ‘Scandal’ (2010) documents a public performance, in which the artist never actually appears. Liu Chuang, meanwhile, takes video display into a sculptural dimension, exhibiting two screens in two facing symmetrical boxes that emit blue light towards each other. The works of these artists come together as pieces that consider the nature of video art itself, as well as reflecting the individual voice of each artist. By contrast, Chen Zhou’s output, shown separately upstairs, is preoccupied by personal identity. His video documents the artist Wei Honglei rifling through old photographs and talking about how, as a boy, he liked Jeff Koons.

This show is a meaningful and considered presentation of video art in China, presenting the cohesion and divergence between these five artists in a pleasurable format that avoids the wearisomely simple curatorial format that so many video ‘surveys’ suffer from. Clare Pennington

Originally posted in Time Out Beijing

Turning the lens on China: Martin Parr

Say what you like about Martin Parr – and many people do; his work is consistently polarising – but you can’t help but be drawn to his photos. Often laced with humour, his uncompromising images tackle high, low and popular culture; commercialism; human behaviour and the role of photography itself.

He first made a name for himself documenting life in northern England in the early 1970s, using black-and-white film as his medium of choice. But it was in the 1980s, when he pioneered the use of amateur, colour film for his ‘in-your-face’ snaps that he truly shot to fame. While other artistic photographers stayed locked to more traditional, colourless films, he straddled the line between artist and photojournalist. 

The images from this period – of overweight beachgoers, cramming their mouths with chips and squeezing in among fellow sunbathers at New Brighton – remain among his most recognisable. His intimate portraits of these unsuspecting subjects are rarely flattering; sometimes he even seems aggressive, exposing them to a certain degree of vulnerability. 

Even in 1994, when Parr was admitted to Magnum, the world’s most prestigious photo agency, there was heated debate about his photography. Magnum’s legendary French co-founder, Henri Cartier-Bresson, was among those who took exception to his work. After years of debate, Parr was finally voted into Magnum by its members, receiving just one vote more than the minimum three-quarter majority he needed. 

The celebrated photographer is most often associated with his visions of the cloudy shores of the British Isles, but the majority of his commissioned work today is shot abroad. 

Parr first began taking photographs in the PRC in the mid-’80s, while he was in Beijing to exhibit works at the Geological Museum of China. He has returned to the country over the decades to capture people in parks, at beaches (one of his favourite subjects), car shows and wedding shoots. ‘Photography is particularly important in weddings in China, which I find fascinating,’ he says. 

He found this unique national obsession so fascinating, in fact, that he created an ongoing series of portraits of himself shot by Chinese wedding photographers, some of which he compiled into a book, Chinese Wedding Album (2010). ‘I was taken to a pretty professional studio in Beijing and had a series of photos taken of myself by several different photographers – they do that so that each photo is different for you. The props, clothes, they provide all that,’ he explains, discussing one of these ‘self-portraits’. 

Of his own China pictures, Parr says shooting here is no more difficult than in any country, and, if there is any particular appeal, it is the sheer number and variety of China’s people. His subjects here ‘mostly don’t bat an eyelid’ at the notion of being photographed, he says. ‘I mean people in China take photos of everything anyway. They are not the only culture to do so. The Japanese are even worse, but you can be even more invisible when a culture is so used to cameras.’

 'China. Shanghai. 1997'

‘In the ’90s in China, most people didn’t even have a mobile phone, so [this photo] did capture a moment. I take so many photos every day, and only a few of them are good enough. These photos, you get them because that is what is there – and it was at a time when China was opening up, so you see a time of intense change.’

 'Hong Kong. Horse Racing. Sha Tin. 2001'

‘Horse racing is very popular in Hong Kong. I studied how people got caught up in their emotions over the races – betting and so on brings out a lot of emotions in people.’

'China. Qinhuangdao. Beidaihe. 2010'

‘In China, people have photos taken weeks before their actual marriage, and they are taken pretty seriously. [In this shot, the groom] was jumping up and down – there was no wind or anything.’

 'China. Qinghuangdao. Beidaihe. 2010.'

‘Beaches have attracted me for a long time. [Why did I shoot] the crowds on the beaches? It’s simple, there are lots of people there, all crowded together, and people are my subject.’

Clare Pennington

Originally posted in Time Out Beijing 

Yung Ho Chang interview

Beijing-born Yung Ho Chang is one of China’s best-known modernist architects. But far from being proud of the shiny new skyscrapers that glitter over his home town, Yung Ho Chang would prefer to tear them all down – yes, really. ‘I think we should rebuild the whole thing,’ he confirms, from the offices of his company, Atelier Feichang Jianzhu (‘Amazing Architecture’), in the leafy grounds of the Summer Palace. ‘[The old design of the city] was totally unique and we have the maps of Old Beijing from the Qing Dynasty, with details down to the individual buildings.’

When Chang returned to China in 1993, after 15 years as a US academic, the city still resembled the Qing Dynasty layout of 1644 to 1912: narrow hutongs criss-crossed neighbourhoods of one-storey siheyuan (courtyard houses). Over the next two decades, he would see most of these remaining hutongs – 88 percent of them, according to Unesco – bulldozed to make way for multi-rises.

Being unable to prevent this destruction didn’t dampen Chang’s spirit: today he continues the fight against the march towards vertical modernity, one building at a time. When asked to design King’s Joy restaurant, at the eastern entrance of Wudaoying Hutong, he chose to keep the spirit of the alley, but to, as he says, ‘reorganise’ it. Traditional materials – wood, clay tiles and bricks – were used, but in fresh ways: wooden screens patterned with holes take the place of heavy brick walls, and light pours in from large windows above the main dining area, through which siheyuan roofs are visible.

Chang’s most famous reimagining of the hutong home is Split House, one villa in a collection designed by different Asian architects, which together form Commune by the Great Wall, a luxury resort in the Beijing foothills. Like a traditional siheyuan, it has three sides: two are buildings which sit almost at right angles to each other, linked by a glass corridor; the third side is ‘the slope of the hill’, says Chang, adding, ‘I realised I couldn’t just transplant the urban courtyard house from the city to the mountains.’

It’s not surprising that Chang seems so determined to show the world that the hutongs aren’t dead, given his happy childhood spent in them. ‘When I was growing up, the city could be described in three layers,’ he recalls. ‘If you were on Wangfujing Street, there were lots of neon lights and people, and once you got into the hutongs the whole thing started to calm down. Then once you got into the courtyard, you were in nature; the piece of sky above you, the ground, and the seasons.’

His attachment to nature is particularly evident in Split House. Large, darkened windows reflect the surrounding trees and sky, and a natural stream runs around the house. The walls are made from rammed earth, a building material that has recently become more popular in Germany, and in US states such as Arizona. But, as Chang points out, ‘very few architects are interested in it here’, where steel and concrete are now the norm.

 ‘Buildings have lifespans, and when they are in the mountains, I don’t think they should leave a load of rubbish and debris,’ says Chang. ‘We realised that using earth and wood could achieve that. [When the building is no longer used] the wood rots and the earth goes back to earth.’ Split House’s eco-credentials may be unique. But what it has in common with the King’s Joy restaurant and the rest of Chang’s designs is what the architect terms ‘porousness’. By this he means that buildings should work in conjunction with their surrounding environments, not against them. As an example of the kind of thing his loathes, Chang points to the ‘gated communities’ that preoccupy most developers in China. ‘[They] tend to be isolated, tear up the city and, more often than not, do not contribute to urban life,’ he grimaces.

And it’s not just buildings that he wants to open up. Chang has visions for whole cities. ‘New cities in China are built with these unbelievably big blocks, and they are surrounded by roads. They aren’t streets because they are for cars; they are not for people to walk along,’ he complains. Instead, Chang is trying to promote ‘micro-urbanism’: the idea that architects should design developments which combine residential, shopping and eating options into one small, walkable area. It’s a concept that plays off both hutong-style small communities and the modern need for more car-free eco cities.

To this end, Chang is currently drawing up plans for a set of buildings outside Shanghai, which will measure just 40 metres along each edge – ‘the smallest blocks in China,’ he claims – and will be infinitely more easy to walk around than the average blocks in Chinese cities, which are between 400 and 600 metres squared, according to Chang.

In Beijing, too, he has created a microcosm of how his city of the future might look with the offices he constructed for Yong You, a major Chinese software company (pictured above). ‘They work very long hours, so we thought we should design the office as something they could consider as their homes,’ says Chang. The whole complex, finished in 2007, weaves indoor and outdoor spaces together, with walkways and balconies connecting a series of semi-detached buildings with different-sized courtyards in between. ‘Now even if the weather is lousy, they go out for just a bit – so we made the connection between a healthier lifestyle and the courtyard,’ Chang says, adding, ‘I want to make Beijing more liveable than the spread-out city that we see here.’

Chang’s dream of a Beijing restored to its Qing Dynasty form might seem a little far-fetched. But, when you consider the dramatic transformation Beijing has gone through in the last two decades, perhaps the idea that it could all be torn down and rebuilt again isn’t so fantastical after all. Clare Pennington

Originally posted in Time Out Beijing

He Xiangyu solo exhibition

In 2009, when he was still only in his mid-twenties, He Xiangyu shot to fame with ‘Cola Project’, for which he took thousands of litres of Coca-Cola and reduced them down to a coal-like, brittle substance. These dried-out clumps of Coke were then piled up in the Wall Art Museum in Beijing to resemble a bare, sloping mountain, reminiscent of an environmentally and culturally degraded landscape, ruined by mass consumption.

Predictably, the sugary global brand then humourlessly intervened and the work was taken down, but it has appeared at various locations around the world since – with materials documenting the number of plastic bottles emptied, and processes used to create the work. Since then, He’s ambitious and politically engaged works have continued to win him recognition for their thoughtfulness, simple beauty and combination of art-history references and social commentary.

He’s latest pieces are now on show at White Space in Caochangdi, and while their scale is somewhat smaller than that of ‘Cola Project’, their cleverly expressed and daring statements are no less challenging. The self-titled exhibition includes a miniature piece called ‘My Fantasy’ (2012) – a self-sculpture of the artist, dressed-up to look like a deceased (Communist) state leader, laid out in a glass cabinet. Wearing a Mao suit and shrouded in a red blanket, this direct reference to the Great Helmsman’s own mausoleum is nothing if not bold. The figure itself, made from silicon, fibreglass and real hair, is also startlingly lifelike. It’s also reminiscent of his infamous ‘Death of Marat’, a sculpture of a dead Ai Weiwei that caused concerned calls to the emergency services in 2011 when it was placed in the window of a German gallery. In ‘My Fantasy’, He reappropriates an image usually reserved for publicly dominant figures. What is more, it is an image of death – one that both puts the individual to rest and immortalises them anew in distorted ways.

In another work, grains of rice, sealed under wax in glass bottles, are painted with the names of global state leaders – including China (though only deceased ones). Their names are mixed in one jar, to decay more slowly than the world around.

A more eye-catching piece on show is ‘Sorry’ (2011): a stainless-steel door coated in a sunny yellow lacquer and placed against the wall, as if it were leading to a space beyond. But its handle is a burning-hot bulb, and there really is no passage into another place, or a ‘brighter future’, as the glowing light seems to suggest.

The audacity with which the artist tackles his subjects, while maintaining a certain simple, yet grand, visual identity, makes this exhibition a welcome one. It doesn’t quite match up to ‘Cola Project’ or his ‘Man on the Chairs’ (2011), where trained dancers were asked to manoeuver across roughly-cut wooden chairs that still resembled trunks of timber. However, each smaller piece functions as an entity in itself, and the combination gives us a picture of the artist as both a cynic and a hopeful youth, who does not shy away from controversial subject.  Clare Pennington

Originally published in Time Out Beijing

Che Photographer

Within a decade of the shutter’s snap, ‘Guerrillero Heroíco’, Alberto Korda’s iconic 1960 photograph of 31-year-old Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, had become an incendiary symbol for would-be revolutionaries everywhere. Versions of Korda’s image – stoic, strong, visionary – gazed over riots in Milan in 1967, and in Paris the following year. Fellow photographer Giorgio Mondolfo, who took part in the Milan protests that were sparked by news of Che’s CIA-sponsored execution, recalled: ‘It was the picture that had drawn us – many for the first time – to gather in the streets, crying, “Che lives!”’

In the decades since, the image – and the trichromatic, cropped, poster-ised version later created by Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick – has spread to posters, bags and T-shirts the world over. In doing so, it has been bled of almost all political meaning, turning Guevara’s face into a generic symbol of rebellious cool; most of those who proudly wear their Che T-shirts probably have very little knowledge about the actual man behind the image.

But the travelling exhibition Che Photographer, currently at the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, aims to reverse the ‘damage’ done by this single image with a whole slew of other photos, taken by the Argentinean-born medical doctor-turned-guerrilla fighter himself. The exhibition’s 230-plus works date from 1950 to 1966 and were taken all over the world, particularly Latin America – although, notably, no images of the revolutionary’s visit to China or his meeting with Chairman Mao have been included. This despite the fact that Che’s speeches and modes of thought have been more closely likened to Maoist Communism than the Soviet politicians his Cuban government were allied with in the ’60s.

‘We want it to be about the art, not the politics,’ explains Camilo Guevara, his son, who has travelled to Beijing to help with the show. But in many ways Che’s political and artistic role are difficult to separate entirely. Camilo talks of Che’s time as a photojournalist, documenting the Second Pan American Games in 1955, but this was the same year that Che first met Fidel Castro. And while many photos from this era include stunningly composed stills of athletes in action, Fidel and Che’s other political comrades also appear in the exhibition. But, says the show’s curator, Jillian Schultz, they appear merely as subjects, nothing else: ‘We all know of Che as this historical figure, but this exhibition is very tangentially related to that role, and reveals him as an artist, a photo aficionado.’

As those who’ve read his Motorcycle Diaries will tell you, Che became committed to the cause of a socialist revolution after travelling the length of South America, during which time he made ample notes on the poverty and repression he saw around him. For many of his supporters and family, it was his connection to people that informed his vision as a politician, fighter, writer and photographer. ‘The exhibition is about how he saw people,’ says Camilo. ‘He saw something in people – he was fascinated by them – and you can see this in his portraits.’

One of five Guevara children (there may be six – accounts differ as to whether Che also fathered another child out of wedlock), Camilo has travelled with the exhibition through Latin America and Europe. For he and his siblings, it is important to counter the commercialised image of their father with one that is more respectful and understanding of Che and his historical place. But there are also brief glimpses of the Guevara family unit, too. One shot has the young Camilo, a toddler, sitting amongst his family. ‘But,’ says Camilo, ‘we did not want to include too many of these images. ’

‘For me, the photographs have a very personal significance,’ he continues, his blonde, wispy ponytail and heftier figure at first sight bearing little resemblance to his father’s slimmer frame.

‘I couldn’t be with him as much as I wanted, being young when he died, and he was away a lot...but my mother, she has told us many stories about him, and she remembers that he wanted to leave these photos as a record for his family.

‘He didn’t prioritise his photography, of course. But he was an artist, a writer and a thinker. He should be remembered as such, too.’ While Camilo speaks of the photographs as intimate mementos and artistic works that should be shared with the world, he also refers to his father throughout the interview as ‘El Che’, as opposed to the more familiar ‘Papi’ his family usually use. ‘In public, I want to retain a certain distance, and a certain respect for the man.’

The photographs also include plenty of self-portraits, taken with a timer. One colour image from the late 1950s – most are black and white – shows him as a dark shadow in his iconic black beret, the edges blurred as he raises a cigar to his mouth, an electric fan whizzing behind him. The soft yellow light of curtained windows, also reflected in a mirror, give the scene a serene atmosphere. ‘His work became more abstract, with an eye for composition,’ opines Schultz of this period.

Artist, politician, journalist, activist, father: though it may not be comprehensive, the 16 years of photography featured in Che Photographer reveal a lot more going on behind that iconic face than poster-buying students could possibly expect. Whether the hundreds of photos in this travelling exhibition can possibly outweigh the single shot Korda took, however, remains to be seen. Clare Pennington

Photos from The Che Guevara Studies Institute 
Originally posted in Time Out Beijing

Industrial action: Xie Molin

Xie Molin's solo exhibition is at Beijing Commune Sat 1-October 13.

The dusty roads and piles of trash that choke the north-eastern suburb of Heiqiao are unlikely to feature on any postcards. And yet here you’ll find a quietly cooking hotbed of creativity. This community of artists is where Xie Molin, one of Beijing’s up-and-coming talents, has spent the last two years creating his own brand of abstract, minimalist-inspired paintings.

Xie is in his early thirties, but his earnest-yet-quiet mannerisms make him seem younger. He cuts a slight figure and, as he talks, his eyes are wide under their furrowed, messy brows. He has been preparing for his upcoming exhibition at Beijing Commune; a series of carefully crafted paintings limited to a palette of black, white and yellow.

The artist has attracted attention for his abstract canvases, not least because he has discarded that most traditional of painter’s tools, the brush. ‘People have been saying for quite a while that painting is dead. It no longer excites people’s interest, because they think the possibilities in the medium are limited,’ Xie says, leaning forward.

Instead of a brush, he uses computers and self-built industrial-style machinery. At the back of the studio is a large contraption that he designed with a professional engineer to create his paintings. A table-like surface is straddled by a pronged machine, connected to an old desk top by a series of wires. It looks like a mad scientist’s loom as it begins weaving its pre-programmed patterns into heavy-quilted paint. 

When we visit, Xie’s busy creating a large piece of pure lemon-yellow; there’s a loud revving as the steel rods move across the surface, delicately scraping a thick layer of the freshest paint. Sometimes they dip up and down, as the machine carves lines into the wet gloop. The last attempt at this very work lies slumped against the wall, to be discarded. ‘Too rough, too many bubbles,’ he says, running his hands over it. ‘I’d like it to be perfect.’

Xie hopes to break new ground with his technique, which has demanded extreme patience and plenty of experimentation. Some observers say that he already has. ‘Normally the brush is operated by painters to express their vision. Using different tools brings new possibilities to painting,’ Xie explains. But it’s not just about updating the tool, it’s also about using it to create technically proficient, original and arresting art. ‘The final word in my work, for me, is still in the aesthetic feeling.’

‘The traditional way of painting by hand is very difficult to be excellent at nowadays, and it feels forced anyway,’ he says. ‘I can paint well by developing in the digital world we live in. I still hope that people will be drawn in by the work. A good artist should always want people to stay in front of his paintings.’

Abstraction in art, of course, is nothing new, and neither is resorting to methods that leave the brush behind. US artists such as Ad Reinhardt made abstract pieces back in the ’40s. The legendary Jackson Pollock reinvented his relationship with the canvas by hovering above it, dripping and dolloping paint from the air. In fact, early last year, Pace Beijing showcased one of Xie’s works alongside those of Mark Rothko and Donald Judd, the founding fathers of American abstract expressionism and minimalism, seeking a visual connection between the works.

Xie’s paintings possess, thanks to the machine he built last year, a certain aesthetic of their own. Shadows play over the patterned grooves that texture their surfaces, sliding under your eyes as you move before them. Using subtly shifting gradients of colour adds to the effect of industrial perfection and detail, though the mechanical nature of the work is not so obvious to the naked eye. Works that look like they could be screen-savers in photographs come to life in the flesh.

‘I like minimalism,’ says Xie, as he discusses the inspirations for his work, citing late US artist Fred Sandbank as a favourite. ‘I feel that it is closer to art itself. Its possibilities are not easily described in words.’

But while Sandbank’s works, which consisted of multi-coloured strings stretched across galleries, or wooden blocks with lines carved into them, were intended to be experienced purely on an aesthetic level, Xie’s are also consciously about wider society. ‘I would call the yellow here “the Confident Yellow”, because as an identity and a skin colour [in China], “yellow” has not been confident in the last 100 years.’

The yellows and blacks in these paintings might seem like tired metaphors for Chinese hair and skin, but they represent something deep for the artist. ‘We grew fearful and unconfident because of losing wars with Westerners,’ he says. ‘The Olympics show this clearly: we want to win lots of gold medals to show that we are able.’ Xie’s experiences working in a Chinese takeaway in Edinburgh and getting to know illegal Chinese aliens there took their toll – he dreams of a China with more to be proud of. Then there is the machine. Industrialised China, with all its complexities, its positives and its downfalls, is rather like the undulating grooves in Xie’s works.

Most of all, though, Xie is seeking a new direction for Chinese artists. ‘I think I take art very seriously,’ he sighs before we leave. But then he’s buoyant again, saying that he’ll continue experimenting – perhaps even completely changing his mode of working in five or ten years. Whatever he does, we suspect it will be worth seeing. Clare Pennington

Originally posted in Time Out Beijing

Hai Bo: No country for old men

Beijing’s contemporary art scene, once a hub for economically struggling but energetically creative artists, has changed. Not that artists in China are no longer creative – they are – but, whereas before they lived in houses with paper windows and no running water, many now attend exclusive private parties and live in comfort. Openings are followed by expensive dinners and champagne-fuelled chin wags, and the art market – its glitz and glamour – is ever present.

Hai Bo’s work, on show now at 798’s Pace Beijing, is an uncomfortable fit for this brave new world. Easygoing and a lover of travel, he’s spent the last 12 years photographing subjects whose lives are a million miles away from the sometimes heady art scene that his work attracts.

The subject of this show is one he has turned to before – the elderly. A generation on the cusp of passing from the face of China, they are wrinkled men who have lived most of their lives working hard under grinding poverty. For a project he undertook four years ago, Bo returned to his native Changchun in Jilin, where, with a traditional film camera, he photographed old family friends going about their daily chores.

He wanted to capture something of a history and a lifestyle he feels people today are already forgetting. Deploring how ‘every city in the country is becoming the same as the next’, Bo often photographs this – in his words – ‘dying’ generation. His subjects are usually poor, and people whose appearance – their clothes and lifestyle – makes them hard to place in time.

Bo worries that rampant consumerism has left people’s lives without meaning or identity. ‘Everyone in China fundamentally feels that they are without a home. Our generation, it’s a drifting generation,’ says the photographer. ‘I think this has a lot to do with the way the economy is developing.’ And so the artist bids viewers to remember a past that is quickly slipping from their lives.

In pursuit of this preoccupation, Bo has returned to portraying old men, and the sense of loneliness and sadness in these recent works is even more inescapable than before. Nine metres in length, ‘Blind Men’ (2011) is a six-panel work whose time and place is, at first glance, difficult to determine. There is no wide landscape – gone are the arid earth and faceless deserts that occupy the backgrounds of many previous works. Instead, a tall grey wall looms behind six men, sitting apart on stools at little tables.

‘I bet you can’t tell where that is,’ he says. I can’t, and he vaguely mentions a city in South China. ‘The important thing is, you wouldn’t know it,’ he says. The men are blind fortune-tellers, who really ‘tell you a load of nothing, but, because they are blind, young people go to them because they think it is a bit of fun.’

Bo’s open and placid features remain serene, even jovial, as he reflects on the sadness he tackles in his work. ‘When I photograph old people, I’m photographing all of us,’ he explains. ‘Very soon, we’ll be just like them; we’ll grow old. There’s no way round it.’

In another new piece, nursing home residents walk in the snow in front of their monotonous, brick-red residence. Taken in Jilin’s cold, dry landscape, the men are going about their daily exercise – their stooped and frail forms silhouetted before the sunset. Death is coming for these frail figures and, if that is not clear enough, the descending sun, about to disappear behind the rectangular, isolated residence, makes for a clear-enough metaphor.

Apart from the gloomy subject matter – there are examples of impinging death and loss in nearly all of his photographs – Bo’s ability to capture light and shadow has added gravitas to his work over the years. ‘For some of these pieces I had to go back to the place at different times of the year, so that I could get just the right light,’ he says, going into the technicalities of various lens options and items that protect his camera from the weather.

As he shows me through his works, I begin to wonder who they are for. Is he targeting a middle-class urban gallery audience, or has he got a broader proportion of the public in mind? But he takes the question figuratively: ‘I want to speak through these photographs to men. Men and women aren’t the same: men want power and money, they have too many desires. I want to tell men that these desires are pointless. Everyone will be old one day and, slowly, they’ll die.’ Then he smiles, the gloom and earnestness that overcame his stoic features, for one tiny moment, entirely gone. ‘I’m trying to say people should relax a little, lead a less cumbersome life – it’s not all that dark. We all die, and people today are so worried, it’ll be gone before they can actually enjoy it.’ Clare Pennington

Originally posted in Time Out Beijing