Eli Klein Fine Art Gallery in New York could hardly have picked a more pertinent subject for its latest show of contemporary Chinese photographers. A figurehead for contemporary Chinese art in the West, Eli Klein has dedicated the two-month exhibition "Passing by China: Contemporary Chinese Photography" to several of the dominant and rising talents of the middle kingdom.
The show, held from July 7 to Aug. 24, 2009, is made up of Chinese and Taiwanese works by Hung Tung-Lu, Lian Dongya, Liu Bolin, Liu Zheng, Maleonn, Miao Xiaochun, Pan Yue, Wang Yiqiong, Yu Hang and punk-rock singer Zuoxiao Zuzhou. Each artist contributes to the dialog on how photographs are perceived as translating reality into "true" images and to what degree this assumption shapes the understanding of China and the region.
Over the years, the country's projected image has oscillated dramatically, resulting in an inevitable conflict between past and future identities. This paradox is made yet more recondite by the government's attempt to dictate every aspect of its image. Fragments of people's stories survive the cogs of these gargantuan machinations, telling of individuals caught in the grind of transition.
The powers that be are passing through an especially curious flare of contention over the past months. An anxious 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, held 4 June 1989, was followed by the racially incited riots in Western province Xinjiang, redefining current perceptions over how artists can be creatively industrious without fear of censorship and punishment. Meanwhile, China is making efforts to shift its weight from manufacturing into the colorfully dubbed marketplace of "creative industries" -- sometimes a misleading name.
Unreality is a notion ubiquitous to "Passing by China." 37-year-old Shanghai-born artist Maleonn's abstract What Love Is No.2 sparks the imagination, setting the stage with those romantic connotations imbued in the title, then casting a breathtaking collage of traditionally nostalgic and surrealist elements.
Butterflies converge on a passive ivory bust in florid profusion. Cotton clouds seep from behind a painted backdrop of azure sky, while marbles lie scattered like crystal balls and streaks of glowing fire.
Each of Maleonn's photo series revolve around a central abstract theme, often incorporating a mixture of surrealist humor, nostalgia and aesthetic drama, though the works exhibited at "Passing by China" do less than justice to an accurate introduction of the artist's work.
Ma's tendency to prefer the narrative form of series, and his imposition of strictly choreographed structure over his subject, hark back to the eight years he spent as an art director for commercial films, while his impassioned use of color can be attributed to the eleven years of his life spent training as a painter.
In direct contrast to Ma's approach appears Liu Zheng -- who you can tell just by looking at his black-and-white portraits -- is a man of the people. Liu draws inspiration from his formative years, spent in a mining town in Shanxi Province, and six of those years as a photojournalist for the government mouthpiece Workers' Daily.
Well schooled in propaganda and communist rhetoric, he makes it his business to explore the artist's willing creation of a false reality, and a society wrestling with the contradictions between traditional culture and modernization.
His photograph Two Miners, revealing two men wading through the darkness -- coal-smeared faces contrasting with the pasty white of their torsos -- carries many of the distinctive traits also visible in Three Elderly Entertainers, faces painted, and dressed in floral opera garb, emerging from the consuming blackness of a dubious narrow tunnel.
Influenced by both Diane Arbus and August Sander, the lighting and poses in Liu's square-format photographs appear to penetrate another side of China. In fact, upon questioning, Liu's shots are sometimes revealed to have been staged, to incite both viewer response and meditation. Both Three Elderly Entertainers and Two Miners were taken in 1995 and 1996 respectively, soon after he began focusing on "moments in which archetypal Chinese figures are encountered in contemporary incarnations – often in extreme and unexpected situations."
Rather than aiming at the realism expressed by artists like Liu, Maleonn's work often turns to digital manipulation to achieve a highly personalized dream state. Though the two artists are the most starkly divergent styles in the exhibition, Liu may indeed agree with Ma's description of his self-discovery as an artist as "coming back and forth between the most unreal world and the most real one; like bringing some amazing but fragile things in memories back to the present; like taking some ordinary time of nowadays into a certain atmosphere of the past or the future, seeking the beautiful balance lost in time”.
Though Ma's works have often been chastised for veering from the generic standards of "Chinese Photography," he takes commentary on his original style as a complement.
"When I was in school, my teacher once tore up my paintings in front of public, and quipped that my sense of color was like color-blind. When I started shooting, many photography professors from colleges were quite scornful, and defamed my work. I was proud. Because of their rejection, I will insist on myself."
Artists like the solemnly inspired young Beijinger Liu Bolin, on the other hand, take a more humble approach. His "Camouflage" series is an exploration of the adaptive side of human nature, featuring Chinese citizens painted to blend into their surroundings.
Each subject is covered head to toe in paint, absorbed almost completely by backgrounds such as the Chinese flag, a billboard, and a very tastefully achieved piece in Tiananmen Square, where the subject's face is camouflaged to replace Mao Zedong's famous portrait hanging above the Forbidden City. Hiding in the City No. 66 is set before a roadside war memorial, the solemn lead-grey of the relief art consuming the subject. Most curious is that the city appears to be Western, perhaps England, with text above and below the relief in English.
Taiwanese photographer Hung Tung-Lu, unlike his peers, avoids the direct narrative in a bid to harness the more traditional subjectivity of the art photograph. Instead of telling stories like Maleonn or Liu Zheng, each work's subtleties belie a new flavor of absurdity. Similar to Liu Bolin, Hung likes to leave his work open to interpretation, and could be seen as arguing any number of mutually contradictory points. The lustrous plastic statuette of Japanese anime songstress Lynn Minmay emphasizes the generic idealization of her blue hair and disappearing ultramarine miniskirt.
Minmay, reputed to have ended an interstellar war by grace of her vocals, poses with her microphone, encircled by her synthetic tribute of flowers, while a more celebrated ecclesiastic idol hangs in the background fuzz, obscured by Minmay's visage. Oftentimes Hung's selection of religious artwork is arbitrary, investing little if any research into the particular significance of the piece. This vagueness of intent helps bewitch any cerebral dissection of Hung's photography.
Hung Tung-Lu, Lian Dongya, and Taiwan's Miao Xiaochun substitute real subjects for artificial humanoid "dummies," staunchly raising the question of how powerful perceptions can be in empathizing with others. The artificial and ugly are thus shown as comparatively easy to dehumanize.
Launched in 2007 as the cover art for his homonymous album, Zuoxiao Zuzhou’s photograph You Know Where The East Is also serves as a subtle indictment of the system's lack of humanity. Taking things one step further, his use of pigs stacked in a pyramid draws on the culturally rooted Chinese motifs of happiness and success, while questioning the means by which this is achieved. Founder of the 90s rock-band "NO" and pioneer of the avant-garde artist community "Beijing East Village," Zuoxiao Zuzhou has a strong reputation in China's punk and rock communities. Over the past years, though, his interest in photography has given a new medium to his message. Often obscure and humorous in delivery, Zuoxiao, born in Nanjing by the name Wu Hongjin, continues to be the subject of anticipation for new work.
Eli Klein offers high quality artists and topics; only the gallery's limited access to these photographers' most astute works remains naggingly obvious, leaving the audience hungry for more. Most pieces are fresh, and can be appreciated together in the span of their context, while Liu Zheng's date back as far as the early 90s, obfuscating the timeframe of the exhibition. Overall the show achieves its goal in passing by China, presenting some of the most exemplary work of the country's art scene and its development of contemporary photographic identity available in the U.S. today.
