Text by Robin Peckham
Exhibition runs through 5 December 2009
Tang Contemporary (Gate No. 2, 798 Art District, Beijing)
As usual with such group shows in Beijing, it is unclear what exactly Tang Contemporary and curator Wei Xing attempt to do with their new exhibition “The New Attitude of Image” The incoherent but indubitably grandiose title seems to suggest a meditation on visual culture and affect in art, a survey of image-making in China, or something of that ilk. Indeed, the gallery has even organized an “academic discussion” between the participants in order to legitimize the selection of work and accumulate critical capital for the program. In reality, the exhibition is a survey of new work by several leading painters, including Chen Wenbo, Liu Wei, Qiu Xiaofei, Wang Xingwei, Wang Yin, Xu Zhen under the alias MadeIn, Yan Lei, Yang Yong, Zheng Guogu, and Zhou Tiehai. The work included is wildly uneven and spans multiple genres of contemporary painting, hardly warranting evaluation as a single project.
Wang Xingwei, Wang Yin, and Zhou Tiehai are included under the rubric of conceptual painting. All three artists emerged under this banner with bitingly satirical and occasionally surreal painting in the 1990s, and have continued to pursue highly specific and rigorous forms of practice since then. In this exhibition, Zhou Tiehai’s “Uli Sigg” (2009), depicting the collector carrying a fish, seems to have allowed the thinness of humor to get the better of him, while Wang Yin’s faceless “Self Portrait” (2009) has veered towards a worrying pretension all too common in artists with limited domestic audiences relatively ignored by the international critical and market complexes. Wang Xingwei emerges on top of this bunch with his “Sell Eggs” (2008), a remarkably funny composition that incorporates geometric forms and text. The work nevertheless feels dated despite its recent vintage, belonging to an older discourse of painting that fits better with the critical modes of the 1980s than this exhibition.
Qiu Xiaofei’s sole painting in the exhibition, “Stiffness of the Limbs 1,” may be the most visually interesting work. Depicting an inverted architectural scene, a geometric model, a reclining figure, and the titular text in intriguingly disparate registers on a painterly black background, it belongs to a project that interrogates the connections between political utopia, history, memory, and insanity. The influence of Kippenberger is obvious, but the work nevertheless fits seamlessly alongside the artist’s earlier explorations into the work of memory in the processing of reality.
The other standout works come from Liu Wei, whose series “Yes, That’s All!” is based on a failed video signal–a body of work that has earned him the moniker “Caochangdi Nam June Paik.” The two canvases appearing here are largely abstract renditions of the theme marked by white, yellow, and black bands across the face of the work. Improbably, the artist has managed to sidestep the high-stakes debate between supporters of automated conceptual painting and painterly work that plagues the contributions of Xu Zhen, Yan Lei, Zheng Guogu, Yang Yong, and Chen Wenbo to this exhibition.
It would be fantasy to call for the abandonment of assistant-dominated painting studios in contemporary China, but the current economic and creative climate has led to decreasing interest in painting that reproduces image-as-image without interpretation. Liu Wei avoids this predicament by moving into abstraction, while Qiu Xiaofei insists on a painterly filtration of memory. The older generation of conceptual painters–who have carried on a more or less uninterrupted vision of the painter’s studio for several decades–envision themselves as creators rather than producers or even reproducers. The remaining artists leave themselves open to a form of criticism that would have been unimaginable two years ago, but such painting simply feels excessive within this recent discourse of image-based art.