Print

Mail

wiki links

[ART JOURNAL] The human spectacle

By Noah Buchan
STAFF REPORTER
Wednesday, Feb 18, 2009, Page 15

VIEW THIS PAGE

Grating describes the placement of Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! (呼累！呼累！呼累！), a sound installation that echoes throughout much of the first floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (MOCA). Sounding more likes shrieks of pain than squeals of joy, the work distracts visitors from appreciating the other pieces nearby.

Though the installation by Qin Ga (琴嘎) sets an annoying tone, Spectacle — To Each His Own (各搞各的：歧觀當代), a group exhibit put together by China-based independent curator Gu Zhenqing (顧振清), is for the most part worth a visit. Twenty-eight artists from Asia, North America and Europe working in new and traditional media investigate the individual in society and raise questions about how new media affects human subjects.

Jin Jiangbo’s (金江波) God, Go Ahead With Chatting (天哪，你去聊吧) enlivens the old theme of information overload in the digital age. The video and sculpture installation shows a man slumped over a flat screen monitor that rests on a table. Above him hang 20 other monitors showing different Web pages. Is the man dreaming of the monitors or are they the cause of his catatonic state, or both?

Located across from Jin’s work is Xu Zhongmin’s (�?�) Sisyphean Egg Shape #1 (蛋形 No.1). Stainless steel skeletons bound together with string rotate frenetically on an egg-shaped sculpture split while a second group of skeletons continuously scale the egg’s yolk, a sequence that evokes the manic activity of contemporary life and the difficulty of following one’s own path.

The artist collective 3P = 3 Players (3p小組) — consisting of Xie Rong (謝蓉), Wang Mei (王玫) and Li Hong (李虹) — recruited pairs of volunteers from different walks of life to film their thoughtful video installation Relativity (相對論), a meditation on eye contact as a means of communication. The artists had their subjects face each other for three minutes and used three cameras to film their reactions.

A middle-aged woman sheds tears in front of the doctor who cured her cancer; a little girl giggles uncontrollably as a taller, emotionless boy stands in front of her; a diminutive worker shifts uncomfortably, eyes moving back and forth, as he faces his expressionless boss. The cancer patient’s tears, the girl’s laughter and the worker’s nervous expression all reveal a depth of human character that I have rarely seen on film. I found myself transfixed as I wondered how I would react if I had been one of the characters in the videos.

The above works by Jin, Xu and 3P = 3 Players appear at the beginning of Spectacle and are rich enough in content to warrant exhibits of their own, though the unsettling noises emitted by Hurray! push visitors further into the museum.

Less impressive are Timm Ulrichs’ Tears, a video of an old man crying that seems to represent the sadness people feel in their daily lives, and the clash of good and evil as conceptualized through multiple images of a girl skipping in Tomasz Wendland’s Angels. Both reveal little about their subjects and can be passed with a yawn.

More engaging is Tiong Ang’s digital short Models for (the) People, in which an African man stands in the middle of a street in Shanghai as passers-by gawk at him, a meditation on the superficiality of collective perceptions and cultural stereotypes.

Other notable works include Miao Xiaochun’s (繆曉春) film Microcosm (坐天觀井), which uses Christian symbols and computer generated graphics of scenes including the Garden of Eden and Armageddon to show how curiosity can lead to both creation and destruction; and Weng Fen’s (翁奮) sculpture Ideologies, a model city made from 100,000 eggshells that when seen from above looks like US$100 and 100 renminbi notes.

VIEW THIS PAGE

This story has been viewed 1212 times.