In what should be considered one of the more important contemporary Chinese art exhibitions, curator Gao Minglu tries to assess what it means to be a Chinese artist in light of today's rapid development and political changes. So it is fitting that the last stop for "Inside Out: New Chinese Art" is the Hong Kong Museum of Art.
This historical survey showcases a wide range of art created by Chinese artists who live in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the West. And there are far more questions than answers rising up from the collective effort put together by the Harvard-based curator. They range from asking how globalization and commercialism effects today's Chinese art and artists to whether current location or birthplace of the artist plays a significant role in the work. Or, is there an "ethnic" Chinese art?
Since the exhibition's premier in 1998 at the prestigious Asia Society and P.S.1 gallery in New York, it has traveled to San Francisco, Seattle, Mexico and is now at its final stop in Hong Kong. Gao shows us that in today's art, artists voraciously consume and absorb disparate images, issues, and art mediums, and that the art world can no longer be easily divided into patterns of East versus West. The wide range of work includes traditional Chinese ink on scrolls, oil painting, ethereal performance work, installations, video and photography-based work.
PHOTO: MANRAY HSU
Within the complex diversity of the art, certain regional differences seem to emerge. For many of the mainland artists, the ways that language is used as a tool to negate meaning or to frustrate communication become dominant themes in their work. Xu Bing's Book from the Sky is an installation of books and traditional Chinese scrolls printed using 3,000 to 4,000 hand-carved characters invented by Xu that look like Chinese writing but are complete gibberish. Critics praised this work, while the authorities in China could not understand why an artist would spend so many years to create something meaningless.
In Song Dong's ethereal performance, the artist ritualistically stamped the river near Lhasa, Tibet with a huge seal carved with the character for water (
Precariously balanced between two unsettling points seems to be common territory for Hong Kong artists. One of the better-installed pieces is Kum Chi-Keung's <
PHOTO: MANRAY HSU
"Inside Out" also features a large selection of work from young and mid-career Taiwanese artists such as Wu Mali, Chen Hui-chiao, Chu Chiahua, Fang Weiwen, Hou Chun-ming, Chen Shu-chu, Lin Shu-Min, Tsong Pu and Wu Tien-chang. Referring to native Taiwanese folk culture, Hou Chun-ming uses traditional woodblock printing to create sexually explicit panels, while Huang Chih-yang creates Pollock-like swirls in his dramatic large scroll ink paintings of figures. The hyper-reality installation by Wang Jun-jieh's titled <
The "Inside Out" catalog is a "must have" for any student or lover of Asian culture. Besides 72 full-color pages of dazzling art, there is also a comprehensive chronology that relates politics to art over the past 30 years encompassing China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The catalog further includes a highly informative bibliography, and a selection of well-written essays by art historians and critics.
PHOTO: MANRAY HSU
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“M yeolgong jajangmyeon (anti-communism zhajiangmian, 滅共炸醬麵), let’s all shout together — myeolgong!” a chef at a Chinese restaurant in Dongtan, located about 35km south of Seoul, South Korea, calls out before serving a bowl of Korean-style zhajiangmian —black bean noodles. Diners repeat the phrase before tucking in. This political-themed restaurant, named Myeolgong Banjeom (滅共飯館, “anti-communism restaurant”), is operated by a single person and does not take reservations; therefore long queues form regularly outside, and most customers appear sympathetic to its political theme. Photos of conservative public figures hang on the walls, alongside political slogans and poems written in Chinese characters; South
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