First published on ArtSlant China.
Text by Robin Peckham.
After the Minsheng opening the Chinese art world decamped to Beijing for an ongoing two week block of art fairs and gallery openings, many of which chose to contextualize a vision of current art production far divorced from that simplistic narrative. “Jungle,” the latest group show at Platform China, eschews the curatorial narrative altogether in favor of a broad survey of new directions in art of the moment, a strategy the gallery has utilized before with mixed results. Each year, without fail, two or three interesting installations at exhibitions on this model pave the way for new careers, while the vast majority of tepid showings fall by the wayside. Many of the sculptural pieces on view in this exhibition are actually older work that has stood the test of time, or at least the last few years: Liu Wei’s perceptual cutting sculpture, Xu Zhen’s flashlight-illuminated keywords, Li Fuchun’s smoke-belching washing machine, Lu Yang’s mad scientist biological interventions, and Wang Sishun’s melted coins.
Many of these same artists appear again in the imaginatively titled “Seven Young Artists” at Beijing Commune, which offered a slightly more focused installation of often sloppy if inspiring work. Lu Yang showed her “Ghost Bed,” an installation consisting of a motorized silicon face on a bed of dust moving its lifelike muscles just ever so slightly, mimicking the uncontrollable behaviors of sleep. The piece initially premiered at “Plug.In” in Basel, but appears strangely suited to this new context closer to home. Other artists in the exhibition appear to be falling prey to the risks of overproduction that come with the heightened attention they have newly received; the exceptions to this rule lie in abstraction, found her in the works of Wang Guangle and Pan Xiaorong. Wang Guangle has contributed one of his coffin paintings, a magnificently ambiguous suture of local cultural reference onto the visible legibility of modernism, while Pan Xiaorong painstakingly cuts intricate patterns into blank or previously colored sheets of paper, offering a visual respite from the messy conceptualism of this raft of exhibitions.
Yang Xinguang, in his new solo exhibition “Snake in the Grass, Lines of Ash” at Boers-Li Gallery, accomplishes a similar feat. His practice enjoys remarkable continuity over time, although the young artist appears to be reaching towards greater experimentation with the properties of sculpture. Nevertheless, he remains highly attuned to visual realizations of classic poetic lines, as with “Most of a Tree” (2010), which collects a number of different configurations of wood and gracefully piles them in a corner of the gallery space. Likewise, “Thin” (2009) transforms a series of tree trunks into emaciated anthropomorphic bodies that reveal the structural grain and knot patterns within the original plant, reflecting the flow of energy through both the hand of the artist and through the material of his craft. Several works here venture into the territory of the illustrative, a dangerous project for such an unclassifiable artist, and these sit uneasily with his practice as a whole. “My Grandfather’s Cane” (2010), for example, positions a wooden cane on a steel ball balanced by a handful of small stones, which the artist sees as a metaphor for the balance between life and death. In this case, poetry only goes so far.