Situating the Inaugural
By David Tung
“A few years ago, while I was attending an art
exhibition at
Although the pile
of coal will not be on display at Wang Mai’s solo exhibition, Gateway of Infinite Wonders, opening April
24th at the 25000
Born in 1972 in
the northeastern Chinese
In 2002, Wang
Mai, along with several other artists, began migrating back to the city when
news of available affordable spaces at Dashanzi became known. Originally an old military electronics
factory, the Dashanzi area has slowly been converted over the past three years
into a series of artist studios and art galleries, and has become the center
for
As Bakhtin
formulates in his analysis of “carnival,” festivals are not merely an occasion
in which to celebrate. Rather,
their usage in society has been to relieve tensions that arise due to
inequalities in the social systems.
While the Dashanzi Art Festival is a celebration that demonstrates the
achievements and accomplishments created by the art community in a short period
of time, this view is inherently limited in understanding how festivals also
function as a means to invert power hierarchies in which the base and degraded
become celebrated. Without a doubt,
the art festival serves as a symbol of the continued viability of contemporary
art in China and its willingness to challenge established aesthetic systems by
celebrating these seemingly “questionable behaviors” of contemporary art that
normally receive censure. However, this
is due more to a seemingly antiauthoritarian and antigovernment stance than an
actual inversion of aesthetic hierarchies.
Artists have continuously used media to leverage Qixing Investment Group
to preserve the area, and Qixing has turned towards governmental organizations
to put a check on artist activities, creating this illusionary conviction of the
avant-gardism of the art community because it is “antigovernment.” Rather, it is the combination of abandoned
factory space and neglected socialist historic memory used as a forum for
contemporary art that should perhaps be seen as the “avant-garde” nature of the
festival.
Although the
timing of Wang Mai’s exhibition along with the opening of the Dashanzi Art
Festival was by chance, his works foil the absurd contradictions that belay the
festival. Wang Mai has been likened
to a sorcerer and magician because he takes things and transforms them into
something else. Yet, this is only
accurate in the sense that the spell he casts on the audience is the belief
that he in fact has alchemic powers.
Rather, Wang Mai is a recycler.
If one carefully examines the “materials” of Wang Mai’s works, be they
installation, performance, or drawing, one is continually confronted with the
idea of society’s refuse (both physically and metaphorically). An old wooden cabinet made in a
communist factory serves as the primary part of his work Misty Rainbow Pass, cultural institutions ritualized to the point
of banality serves as his topic in Spring
Festival Variety Show and May 1st
International Labor Day, and overflow of news media is refashioned in a
series of drawings of Uday
(Hussein). These are society’s
leftovers and throwaways. Wang Mai
does not transform society’s garbage into gold so much as he transmogrifies it
into art. Like other artists at Dashanzi,
his studio is “remade” from an abandoned factory building; whereas the new high
rises that will come to occupy Dashanzi at the end of next year are really a “transformation”
of this site. He does not transform
old cabinets or the detritus of media broadcasts into artworks, but like the
piece of coal, they are the artworks themselves.
What these works
reflect is the lot of contemporary Chinese artists. Contemporary Chinese art is still seen
as inferior copies of Western art.
This viewpoint arises from a stagist and progressivist understanding in
which modernity flows outwards from the centers of Europe and the
In this regard, the
art festival is a showcase of the remains/garbage of these marginalized
positions. This “inferior” art is
in fact celebrated. However, rather
than use this as a departure point for reinterpreting modernist aesthetics, the
festival falls into a self-glorified manner that attempts to say, “look, we
have contemporary art here in China, that proves that we are modern too.” The framing of the festival in such a
manner is an attempt to align contemporary art practice in China with an “advanced”
culture (implicitly Western) and therefore another step in the progression
towards China’s modernization (as is evident by the “Soho” label that everyone
has seized upon as a reason why the factory should be preserved). Unfortunately, while promoting artistic
endeavor in
One should not
read Gateway of Infinite Wonders as a
cynical criticism about the empty “selling-out” of the Dashanzi art community
to the commercialized interests of the art market in order to preserve what
amounts to a landfill. Rather, Wang
Mai’s art shows how garbage is also “power laden” by recycling both icons, many
which have lost their lustrous exterior, and restoring them to (and sometimes
creating for them) a fetishized and posh nature. In Outdoor
Antenna, the viewer is presented with a woman sitting atop a television
screen. With a cigarette in one
hand and a microphone in the other, she rules over a giant mound of
garbage. The amount of garbage we
generate, as we are reminded by Shohat and Stam, is a signal of wealth; the
power elite can also, “gentrify a slum, make landfill a ground for luxury
apartments, or dump toxic wastes into a poor neighborhood. They can even recycle their own fat from
rump to cheek in the form of plastic surgery.”[2] Wang Mai’s work is not just a reflection
of this absurdity being played out in the form of the Dashanzi Art
Festival. Rather, it is an
imitation of this process that calls it into question through simulation. The dregs of the media and the leftovers
of a factory are beautified art that masks the true nature, or perhaps in the
inverse process of subaltern studies, elevates the base and menial to the
highest esteem, only to break them down by contradictions that they hold within
themselves. This is the reversal,
the upside down aesthetics that Wang Mai presents in his works; the beauty of
the base that is presented beautifully.
His art attempts to question the idea that we actually know that which
we intend to know. While Dashanzi
Art Festival seeks to show the world the emergence of contemporary art in
Names:
王迈 – Wang Mai
卢杰 – Lu Jie
大山子 – Dashanzi