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