China is in a state of metamorphosis. Mao is gone. Western goods and ideas are flooding the marketplace. Consumerism reigns, and nowhere is change more evident than in the cities. Gone are the narrow-laned communities of low-lying residences. Gone are the traditional social networks that drew people together. Now towering skyscrapers dominate the landscape, and millions of displaced residents have been relocated from inner city to its outer ring. It's an environment that breeds alienation and encourages creativity. You can see evidence of both in "Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China," now at the Seattle Art Museum.
You see it in the work of Zhang Dali, who captures this urban transformation in a series of photographs of condemned Beijing buildings. He spray-paints huge heads on walls that are about to be demolished and then chisels through the outline, exposing the broken spaces behind. His empty heads reveal bits of the old amid the detritus of the new. His images are "between past and future," providing a startling insight into China's transformation.
As its title suggests, this exhibit's 60 artists explore emerging modernity, Chinese style. It's not great-grandmother's carved jade pieces or the government-sponsored propagandistic films of the last generation. What you see at SAM is an artistic representation of contemporary society undergoing change ... a postmodern cultural revolution taking place at breakneck speed.
The society and the individuals within it are reinventing themselves, and the artists are documenting the process. They explore the contemporary legacy of China's past. They're studying the transformation of the urban landscape and examining its effect on the human psyche. They're documenting the quest for individual identity in this social upheaval, and often they use the human body as a medium of expression.
The combination of all of these explorations is sometimes humorous, sometimes grotesque, usually compelling. Through their art, these artists cum social commentators have revealed an unfamiliar China and exposed us to its awesome creative energy.
Enormous diversity is evident in these works. There's a wall of Post-It body parts that defies you to give the bits and pieces form. Along a walkway of backlit floor panels, swimmers peer up with contorted faces pressed to the glass you're stepping on. My favorite piece is a 31-foot-long, digitally altered photograph that transposes a famous 1,000-year-old scroll into a 21st-century artform. At five places within it, the artist has positioned himself as an observer of the scene.
He's not the only artist who inserts himself into his work. A number of them are performers as well as photographers, and many of the works document their performances. The first thing you pass on your way to the exhibit is a life-size pair of backlit images of a man lying on the ground of Tiananmen Square. It's Song Dong on a frigid winter's day breathing onto the pavement until a thin layer of ice forms beneath his mouth. He spent 40 minutes performing and recording this effort to breathe new life into a bloodied ground. But, as is human existence, his effort was transitory.
Another performance artist/photographer is Ma Luiming, whose dramatic persona is an androgynous, longhaired fellow who looks something like Michael Jackson. We see him nude in a series of still photographs and a video walking along the Great Wall of China ... old China in all its solidity surmounted by the fragile and ephemeral presence of modern man.
In addition to the photographs, there are more than 30 videos divided among four alcoves and programmed in continuous loops. But beware. You'll get just a random sampling unless you commit to spending half a day moving from one alcove to another. It's a surfeit of riches.
In New York and Chicago, where the exhibit was mounted before it came to Seattle, it was divided between two venues. In those instances it made sense to delineate four different thematic areas so that each venue could have a segment on self and a segment on the outside world. Here in Seattle, where the whole show is in one venue, those distinctions don't add much insight for the viewer, especially since there's so much overlap in topic.
With 1.3 billion people, China has one-sixth of the world's population. Its transformation will have an impact around the globe. For those who are curious about brave new worlds, you'll find some insights here.
"Between Past and Future..." was curated by Christopher Phillips of the International Center of Photography in New York and Wu Hung of the University of Chicago. Seattle is one of only four venues in the United States that will exhibit the show. For that we thank Lisa Corrin, who curates contemporary art at SAM and whose involvement with it spans the globe. Her expertise and SAM's particular interest in Asian art have provided museum-goers in Seattle with a roster of shows that few other communities have been lucky enough to experience.[[In-content Ad]]
