Tony Cragg comes to CAFA, China

Tony Cragg's exhibition opened today at the China Central Academy of Fine Art (CAFA) in Beijing with a talk about his life and practice. The Liverpudlian sculptor quit his studies in Chemistry and his work at a "smelly" laboratory (he worked at the Natural Rubber Producers Research Association) to begin his studies at the Gloucester College of Art in 1970.  When the drawings he was making in his spare time became more important to him than his work in the lab, he decided it was time to go decamp from his chosen career.

Speaking on the subjects of the sciences, human developments and other man-made products, Cragg dwelt on our need as a species to create cheap, low standard houses, objects,  materials and so on for mass-consumption. "Every city is the same,"  he said, as he described the grey streets, grey lamp posts and grey buildings of our cityscapes. Art, on the other hand, is for Cragg "free from utilitarian motives...something useless and exciting."  He might have added that Beijing is a particular case. On this day, the smog in Beijing has been so terrible that I would rather be inhaling second-hand smoke, but he was obviously too polite to do so.

 Going on to speak about the relationship between science and art (and he says that he cannot understand why people do not find out more about the way man made things around them function - in comparison to something like a tree, these things are "simple"), the artist said, "we should never forget that it is artists who went to the moon first... who went to the bottom of the ocean first." Making art, as an imperative for the development of science is a great "responsibility" to Cragg.

Cragg also spoke of the use of a broader range of materials in sculpture following the innovations of Marcel Duchamp at the beginning of the twentieth century. Now in his sixties, he came into the art scene at a time when conceptual art was coming into vogue with force. Yet, materials are everything to Cragg, and as such he would never describe himself as a conceptualist; someone he would say just sits on the sofa and thinks of one or two related ideas for a work that can be put together just so.  Creating pieces of sculpture is for Cragg akin to writing: "[it] means you discover new words or new thoughts" as you are working.  Material is in this sculptor's mind, ultimately complicated and sublime, with even our emotions being a kind of material in his mind. "This turns me into a radical materialist, if you like." Clare Pennington

Lee Kit: Not an Easy Thing

At Arrow Factory until March 25

Wander down Jianchang Hutong and you might pass this tiny exhibition – and the ’80s pop emanating from its display window – without ever knowing it was there. But it’s worth knowing about. Behind dusty, sliding French doors stands Lee Kit’s installation, a cheap grey chair and beaten-up cabinet table with a cassette player on top, the speakers spilling onto the floor. Behind is a dark black-blue curtain, shutting off what could be a living space. A smiling picture of Cai Qin, the Taiwanese singer whose ’80s success lived longest in both Hong Kong and mainland China, is stuck inconspicuously on the wall. It is her music that wafts out into the street and the lyrics to her song, ‘Just Like Your Tenderness’, which give the exhibition its title.

 

Kit is no stranger to incorporating second-hand objects, having used his studio in Hong Kong as an installation space for years. But he is better known for the pattern-painted, and often colourful, swathes of material used for household objects such as table cloths; ‘Not an Easy Thing’, by contrast, is sparse, recalling the artist’s first visit to Beijing – a cold environment characterised by a simple lifestyle.

 

The song goes, ‘I cannot stop remembering; remembering you and remembering the past’. A few bandages are eerily scattered on the cabinet and chair, a single red bottle on the floor; suggestions of a darker history here. It might be the front of a shop, although it speaks to us more of an ordinary living situation. In the ’80s, private spaces were often curtained off from view within communal rooms. Both shop owners and the average family might have shared miniscule front-room space where they could socialise and greet others in the community. Yet you cannot enter this space from the street. It remains strangely unreachable and empty of people, as if such memories have been pushed into the background. We cannot go in and open the drawers or touch the unused bandages, emblems of a wounded society. A poignant exhibition – if you can find it. Clare Pennington

Originally posted in Time Out Beijing

Chen Qingqing

Remove the mask of the present, and underneath lies the deep, personal well of our memories. Chen Qingqing keeps hers in boxes. ‘It’s like on a computer, where you have different folders for different things,’ she explains in her tidy Songzhuang home studio, surrounded by decades of work. ‘I put my memories in different containers. Sometimes I even take them out and later shift them around.’ Chen has a deep – and sometimes dark – well from which to draw.

 

Chen is best known for her silhouette-like recreations of Qing and Ming Dynasty clothing, which are woven out of dried flowers and grasses, then mounted on to flat surfaces. Her upcoming retrospective at the Today Art Museum, however, will focus on the installations she has worked on for the past 20 years.

 

Born in 1953, Chen didn’t begin to practise art until the ’90s. ‘The Story of Women’ (1998), a small, wooden four-part cabinet containing red ‘lotus feet’ slippers, pages from an ancient medical manual and dried leaves, twigs and stones, encapsulated how intertwined her art and experiences have always been. Recollecting her training as a barefoot doctor after the Cultural Revolution, she recalls an old lady with bound feet: ‘She was in so much pain that she had us cut all her toes off. They were cutting into the bottom of her shortened feet. I’ll never forget that operation.’

 

If there is one thing she misses about her childhood, it’s the role that women played. In her experience, they really were, in the famous words of Mao Zedong, ‘Holding up half the sky’; she remembers her mother working every day except Sundays. A self-taught artist, who made her way without the training and connections of art school, Chen has forged her own path – something she feels not enough modern women do. ‘Chinese society has regressed,’ Chen opines. ‘Women today will go to university, but their dream is to marry a man with a fat wallet and never work again after that.’

 

That unique path led her from a white collar job in Vienna to 798, back in the days when it was just a factory district and far from the commercial art hub it is today. She remembers the abandoned buildings, empty but for a few artists and the truck drivers who took advantage of a space ‘not even the government wanted’. It was only later that the crowds began to appear.

 

‘People thought that modern art was just for fun,’ she recalls. ‘You could use whatever you had to hand to make it, bits of rubbish and so on.’ Despite her desire for it to be more prominent in Chinese society, the simplistic and commercial way in which contemporary art was approached by much of its new audience stirred strong disagreement in Chen. Consequently, she began to make more elaborate and bizarre works coloured by a vicious sense of humour: in one piece, dolls’ heads were attached to the bodies of lizards, then lined up against the inside of a glass tank; in another, the skeletal forms of dinosaurs are depicted having sex with animals and humans. ‘People can be Jurassic,’ she explains.

 

But these earlier efforts, in which the bodies of plastic babies and girls are broken up into disturbing scenarios (in one, a tree breaks through the flailing form of a girl, both penetrating her and pinning her to the ground), also refer to her wider experiences. ‘I’ve gained things, lost things and gained things again so many times… gone through so many extremely different experiences, that it is as if my life is like that – broken up into parts.’

And it's not just misunderstandings of our histories and cultures that abound. In ‘Dialogue – My Coffin’ (2000), two busts face each other across opposite ends of a translucent coffin, made from grass and flowers over a branch frame. It is intended as an expression of hope, a wish that people can better learn to communicate with each other – and yet the coffin itself admits that ‘the possibility of this ever happening, even in our deepest relationships, has its limits’.

 

There are many things, she thinks, that her parents did not communicate to each other before they died. Imagining herself as a restless ghost, perhaps finding another male ghost seeking companionship, Chen has done battle with her own – and others people’s – interpretation of history, searching for the kind of freedom she has yet to find, either here, in Europe or anywhere else she has travelled in the world. Clare Pennington

Originally posted in Time Out Beijing