'Half of the Shadow' by Chen Wei
It was in the late ’90s and early ‘noughties’ that China’s first post-Mao generation of young artists came of age. Unlike its predecessors, this one-child generation has grown up slurping Coca-Cola, reading previously banned literature and, perhaps most importantly, surfing the internet.
On | Off is
the latest of many international exhibitions that have attempted to
survey this young generation of Chinese artists. But the show, which
includes works by artists born between 1975 and 1989, stands apart from
its peers in far-flung international art hubs because it’s happening
right here in China, at Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA).
‘We
thought it was more interesting to focus on newer trends, particularly
artists who have been emerging over the past five years,’ says UCCA
director Phil Tinari of the exhibition, which includes 50 works by 50
artists. ‘By virtue of being in Beijing, we can look at the artists as
artists – it is not as if they appear first and foremost as
[representatives of] a nation. We can just assume a little more
sophistication and a little more familiarity with the history of
contemporary art in China.’
Jiang Pengyi's Everything Illuminates No 9'
The title of this exhibition, On | Off,
refers to the icon that appears when using Astrill, a VPN program that
allows computers to bypass China’s internet firewall. Apart from the
literal reference, the title also invokes what Tinari calls a wider
‘binary-toggling existence’. It refers to the high speed at which China
has changed over the past three decades and the rate of adjustment that
this generation has had to, and continues to, cope with due to the
changing environment. Sun Dongdong, one of the exhibition’s curators,
who was himself born after 1975 and is deeply entrenched in the local
art scene, says: ‘Our generation grew up in a different environment. We
don’t have the same idealism – we are much more pragmatic. For the
oldest among us, we were born at the end of the Cultural Revolution, and
the youngest were born around 1989, another time of great political
significance.’‘
If anything, the art world has
become more complex, more varied and more international than ever
before,’ adds Guo Hongwei, one of the participating artists, considering
the idea of an overarching identity for his contemporaries. And the
variety in both subject and media in these 50 works, a mere picking from
among the young artists working in China today, is impressive. His own
work mostly consists of watercolour pieces that document objects in his
daily life, and natural specimens in the style informed by the past few
centuries of natural history paintings.
Yan
Xing, whose video work ‘Arty, Super Arty’ threads seven scenes inspired
by Hopper’s realist paintings, focuses on his inherited art history as
well as an entirely different set of social issues. ‘While the
generations can appear to be totally different from each other,’ he
says, ‘history has a way of repeating itself and only time will tell how
much meaning those differentiations [between] generations will [have].’
Yang Xinguang's 'Hello'
But
the research undertaken by Song and fellow curator Bao Dong also means
that work by lesser-known artists forms a core part of this exhibition.
For his contribution, Li Liao, a relatively unknown artist, worked for
45 days in a factory run by Foxconn, the motherboard manufacturing
company now infamous for mistreating its staff. ‘Consumption’ (2012), is
made up of his contract, the safety suit he had to wear to work with
his ID tag looped around the collar, his work licence, his leaving
certificate and a documentary he filmed in the factory while he worked
there, played on the iPad he bought with his earnings. Here is another
‘binary’, an extreme between rich and poor, between the urban middle
classes in developed cities and the factory workers that sustain their
economy. While there is a meaningful overarching concept attached to the
exhibition, it is also general enough for it not to control artists’
contributions.
‘These works weren’t made in
response to this theme, it’s more that the theme follows on from the
works,’ explains Tinari. ‘It’s a good theme because it’s a frame through
which to view work that is already being made, as opposed to an
assignment or a guideline defining how to make your work, and so it
became a lens on this generation rather than a way of getting a specific
result from a specific artist.’
And that is
just what this generation is about – diversity, individualism and the
freedom to make art about social issues that no longer appear to
overlap. Despite the economic downturn, the Chinese art world has grown,
and this exhibition is a great indicator of this. Or, as Guo Hongwei so
aptly puts it: ‘This exhibition is more about beginnings than
conclusions.’
On | Off is at the UCCA until April 14.
Clare Pennington
Originally posted in Time Out Beijing
