It’s known as the industrial factory to the world. But in recent years, China has been shuttering and relocating a number of its manufacturing complexes, as air pollution shrouds its skies — and attracts the world’s scrutiny.
In Shanghai, this decampment of industry has inspired the theme of the city’s 10th Shanghai Biennale, “Social Factory.” The show, which opened November 23, is held for the second time in the Power Station of Art, itself a converted electric plant along the Huangpu River, and the country’s only state-funded museum for contemporary art. In the show that spans three sprawling floors — each around the size of a Wal-Mart superstore — the organizers of the Biennale take a step back to ask what forces could lead to a new social life, if the structures of industry continue to fall into disuse.
The 70 artists in the show from across 20 countries offer enthusiastic answers, from revolutionary folksongs sung on the trails of northwest China to a cross-dressing space mission told through Cantonese opera. It’s not surprising that the works are fresh and forward-looking. A large crop of the artists are remarkably young, perhaps reflecting the youthful curatorial team, which, along with lead curator Anselm Franke, includes Hong Kong’s Cosmin Costinas and Taipei’s Freya Chou.
“It is a good moment to slow down,” Franke said at the VIP preview Saturday evening. “Where does the breathtaking development leave people and social relations?” For the past decade, Franke, who is the head of visual art and film at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and curated the Taipei Biennial in 2009, has been visiting Shanghai, observing its frenetic rate of change.
On opening night, ARTINFO crossed paths with a few of the young artists at the Power Station. Here’s a closer look at their works, and art’s changing role in China, outside the churn of the market.
Ming Wong
Hours before the VIP preview, the Singaporean-born, Berlin-based artist known for his virtuosic mimicry of historical figures — real and imagined, female and male — dusted the flashing screens of his video installation, “Windows on the World,” 2014. “I think of this as the deck of a space station,” he said, cleaning paper in hand.
Across 24 screens, footage flashes of China’s lunar landings, Chinese space-themed cartoons, and scrolling computer texts outlining the cultural history of science fiction in the country. In a lower monitor, a panicked Sandra Bullock in the blockbuster movie “Gravity” orbits the earth. But here, the real star is a coiffed, rosy-cheeked Wong, tunneling through a “Solaris”-inspired setting in a natty silver space suit. The station in the film is constructed with bamboo and fabric, and the trebles of Cantonese opera wail in the background.
“I wanted to use Cantonese opera — this genre that’s traditionally locked into the past —to talk about the future,” said the terrestrial Wong.
Today, science fiction’s popularity has reached a feverish pitch among Chinese readers — and, apparently, artists. At the Biennale, the theme is taken up in Anton Vidokle’s “Cosmos,” Yin-Ju Chen’s “Liquidation Maps,” and Shambhavi Kaul’s film collage, “Mount Song.” Their futuristic projections all borrow from the grab bag of history — including the Soviet Communist project to awaken the dead and episodes of political violence in Asian history, as interpreted through star charts. Here, there’s a call to carry the past with us as we hurdle into what’s ahead.
Trevor Yeung
Born in 1988 in Hong Kong, Trevor Yeung is one of the show’s youngest artists, and the work he presents is also… well, green. In a wide corridor on the second floor, rows of waxy passion fruit grow beneath glowing greenhouse lights and a trestle overhang. But the healthy trellised stalks, now about human height, won’t ever reach the lattice hung above, which will continually be raised higher and higher throughout the show. Here, the grasping tendrils reflect humans’ frustrated strivings, Yeung said, while watering the plants.
“Just like in a real farm, you must tend to the plants everyday,” he explained. “But here, at the museum, we will hire outside people to do it. You have to come up with a whole new system.” It’s a particular challenge he is familiar with living in Hong Kong, where gardens are spread across city rooftops, converting a gritty landscape into lush oases and urbanites into farmers.
In the show, the work resonates with the nearby pieces also centering around the natural world. American-born, Japan-based artist Adam Avikainen has hung indigo-dyed sheets and scarecrow dolls — evoking the missing generation of farmers in Japan who have instead migrated to cities — to a somewhat spooky effect. Chinese artist Zheng Guogu farms a plot of land in his hometown of Yangiang, collapsing the divides between the cultivator and artistic creator.
Libbie D. Cohn and J.P. Sniadecki
For a split instant in “People’s Park” — a gorgeous documentary film touring a spirited park in Chengdu in a single 78-minute take — you catch a glimpse of the young filmmakers in the reflection of the golden-gilt poster frame. They are a bizarre sight: Cohn sits in a wheelchair wielding a handheld camera as Sniadecki pushes her, long microphones in hand, through the colorful park that’s alive with karaoke singers, open air waltzing, taichi, and energetic pop ballads. In making the film, the duo, who are associated with Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, became another of the park’s performers, filming 23 single takes over the summer of 2011. “It may be the closest we will ever feel to performing a tightrope act, with so many opportunities for something to go wrong at every moment, at every turn,” Sniadecki told ARTINFO in an email.
Earlier this year the film showed at the Whitney Biennial, but at the Biennale, it fits perfectly into Franke’s curatorial framework, recording a space that is neither organized by state or commercial concerns. “This energy felt democratic because the park was boisterous, dynamic, and self-organized; it offered a fresh contrast to many other public spaces in China,” the 24-year-old Cohn said. “The film is very much about the multiple ways of looking together,” she added.
In the poetic “Red, Blue” showing nearby, by Zhao Tao, this shared act of looking and public space gains further political meaning. Zhao films parks in Guangzhou and Bangkok; quiet moments — men sleeping on tarps, a boy lost in play — before the incipient protests. Hong Kong artist Firenze Lai paints psychological portraits of individuals in cramped quarters. Likewise, Liu Chuang depicts private spaces, reproducing the anti-burglary windows that float across the second floor.
Ho Tzu Nyen
There’s no telling if Ho Tzu Nyen’s film “Earth (Black to Comm),” 2009-12, set among industrial detritus, flickering florescent lights, and dark pools, represents a scene of death or resurrection, of awakening or slumber. The 50 actors sparking life into paintings by Caravaggio, Girodet, and Gericault move with languid electricity, almost by the dictates of some unknown logic, or maybe even spirit — the word isn’t too grand to evoke. The artist is known to dive into medieval Christian theology in his celebrated film “Cloud of Unknowing,” and as with that masterpiece, “Earth” was inspired by a book of Western art history, a tome on French post-revolutionary painting.
Western art history aside, does his film have to do with his home city of Singapore? At an opening dinner, the artist explained that the film’s painstaking, labored movement reminded him of the slow hours of hot Singaporean afternoons. The many ethnicities of the actors, so intimately filmed, are unique to the island-city’s richly diverse demographic. Ho recruited the actors from a local martial arts school. When he talked about the film production, he described it as mechanic and factory-like, as he militaristically dispatched demands — something hard to imagine from the gentle, soft-spoken artist. It was completed in one day, a mere three shots. Other projects in the Biennale, like Liu Ding’s Social Realist busts and Li Xiuqin’s sculptures made in collaboration with a blind artist, likewise make the process of art-making central, and shared.
