Travelled to 798 Art District yesterday which was pretty interesting it was very cold so we didn’t hang around too long out there but there are many galleries smashed together into an old military building complex.
Apparently a lot of the gallery spaces are now quite commercial and the shine has gone off the place. For me it was still invigorating to see a place where so many large galleries existed and were still functioning. It remains to be seen how those spaces exist? Is it purely off sales alone? or is there govt funding provided for the spaces?
One of the large galleries Iberia gallery which appears to be a co-funded organisation with Spain had a young artists exhibition on called ‘works in progress : How artists work. I guess it is akin to the New exhibition series at ACCA in Melbourne.
Because the focus was on not only showing a final product but also on revealing the process f the artist there seemed to be a lot of artworks which used the ‘concept’ of ‘process art’ as the final product. I have seen a number of works here in China (admittedly I have not seen a lot of work yet) where the ‘process’ is revealed in the final work, and i am wondering if that is a current trend flowing through the scene? But of course these artists were responding to a brief so i will not go any further in the speculation about that. There were a few pieces which spoke to me – one was Zhou Xiaohu’s detective’s plan tagging. He hired 10 detectives to tail each other thus creating a surveillance loop. When displayed it became a 50 tv installation that you stepped inside of. Very well thought out. It made me think of a piece of material i read somewhere before coming here that plain clothes police are everywhere. this idea of more o the ground person to person surveillance seems different to the western idea of ‘eye in the sky’ type blanket coverage of areas. (London springs to mind here). I guess with the extra manpower and the fact that there are less open areas that can be covered by camera alone means that this is the case.
Another work which was pretty startling in its boldness was He Yunchang who had a rib removed from his body and fashioned into a necklace which he then wore around his neck and had photos taken of himself with his loved ones.
This work included video and photography from the surgery as well as the final photographs with the family members. Whilst being incredibly visceral for me, i wondered about the delivery method of the material and whether it needed another way to be expressed. This type of shock value art is ok by itself but the thing that other artists have done is to have a clear line of investigation they are following so that it feels all part of one idea. Stelarc for example is very dogged in his investigation of what it means to be human – and how the corporeal body is either part of that or not. In He Yuchang’s work I didn’t understand what was the idea. Maybe i missed it…
In one of the other major galleries GalleriaContinua was an exhibition by British sculptor Antony Gormley. His work was beautiful and made me very emotional. The taking apart and putting back together of the body as an architectural idea.
This main piece stood in a massive open gallery space – a suspended body shape held up and pinned to the walls by 682 ‘radiating trajectories that complete the tetrahedral node pattern of the matrix’ (Antony Gormley).
I loved the way that the scale of the work made me stand in awe of it. But the emotion was generated due to the fact that I was feeling the humanity of the work even though it was all steel and silk.
