4 hours in London…Ai Weiwei and Xu Bing

I’m sitting here typing…typing to distract myself as I’m currently in recovery from numerous hospital tests including a pretty intrusive renal operation that’s making me walk like a cowboy. I’m hoping someone will buy me some chaps for my birthday tomorrow so at least I look the part. Got to make light of the situation right? Somehow. It’s rather uncomfortable, quite awkward and a little bit soul destroying. I’ve put my impending 28th birthday (and “Rachel”) on a hiatus for a while (what a great word, hi-a-tus…)…so whilst I’m trying to forget about that and really can’t do that much (other than nap, watch terrible daytime TV and meander through the world wide web), I thought I’d fill you in on the very last-minute happenings of last Saturday.

‘Background Story 7’ (as shown above and below) is a direct response to a hanging scroll of a Chinese landscape by Wang Shimin dating to 1654 and is specially commissioned for the British Museum. ‘Background Story’ was started in 2004, taking place in various institutions in China and abroad. The six previous works in the series have been in a horizontal format as responses to traditional handscrolls, but at the British Museum he has worked for the first time in a vertical format to correspond to the traditional Chinese hanging scroll. Here, Xu’s interpretation shows the use of materials such as hemp fibres, dry plants, corn husks, crumpled paper and debris sourced from sites across London, placed on a backlit screen. Seen from the front, the work looks uncannily like the Wang Shimin scroll with the brush-like strokes of a Chinese painting, but as you step behind the artwork, the illusion is shattered as you see how the process and image is constructed. Xu directly explores the relationship and tension between art and illusion and intentionally challenges the relationship between the original image and medium of Chinese painting and calligraphy…”Unlike the traditional Chinese painter who creates a simple illusion by committing a landscape scene to paper in a realistic manner, Xu extends the artist’s remit. He creates a work that reads as a landscape painting, but is neither a landscape nor a painting and uses three-dimensional materials to imitate two-dimensional brushstrokes. Each of Xu’s unique installations pushes the viewer to confront the limitations of the way we habitually process and respond to what we see.” As you can see below, the scroll is placed on the left hand wall within the space as a point of reference. Xu’s re-representation of this historic piece, looks into the time-honoured Chinese practice of entering into “dialogue” with a past model or artwork, to create new contemporary work.
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There is a real sense of temporality in the work as it was made and can be deconstructed very quickly, therefore only existing for the duration of the show at the British Museum. To me, this directly references the fast-pace and rate of change in China and it’s economy. In addition, it made me question whether the work not only examines how we view our periphery landscape and the traditional craft of Chinese painting, but also how we now view China in a contemporary and global context…so is ‘Background Story 7’ a metaphor for how we view China today? Do we only reference China against it’s past and history? Can we look behind China’s veneer and see the reality within? Or is the “reality” fabricated (as such like in the artwork), constructed by others so we only see what we are shown? Not the truth. I did ask Xu about these notions and he disregarded them immediately, saying the work purely spoke of ideas of art and illusion…of different ways of seeing and public engagement with traditional Chinese craft. I don’t agree though, and I wondered whether Xu just didn’t want to engage in these types of conversation. Political points of view never came into discussion, and were very quickly avoided or skimmed over in broader contexts. Very interesting considering his show opened in the same time frame as Ai Weiwei’s new exhibitions at Somerset House and the Lisson Gallery.

This is a section of the original scroll by Wang Shimin…and a peek behind the illusion…

…and this is the corresponding section from the backlit lightbox…incredibly similar, which made me think it must have been an arduous task to get it perfect. A very clever and now longstanding concept.

Prior to the opening of the show in London, and a month into the detention of Ai Weiwei by Chinese authorities, the ‘Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads’ project was also opened at the Grand Army Plaza in New York. Alexandra Munroe, the Guggenheim Museum’s curator of Asian art and my previous colleague and manager during my NYC days ( I heart NYC), provides her view on the project, Ai’s concept of “social sculpture,” and the arrest and disappearance of this artist, in this short video ‘On Ai Weiwei’, from New Art TV. The Guggenheim Museum has spearheaded a petition effort to free Ai Weiwei, which you can still sign here and add to the over 137,000 names. Do it today! Also, The Guardian’s online video Ai Weiwei: ‘One of the most daring artists today’ let’s you hear further contemporary perspectives by artists and exhibitors on the status of Ai Weiwei in the global domain, and his growing importance in China and the West. So many articles are written about Ai Weiwei on a daily basis, it is often hard to keep up with the new perspectives and theories that surround his detention. This week, there was one huge development…Ai Weiwei’s wife was allowed to visit him at an undisclosed location. Like many others out there, I believe this might just be a small turning point in the situation, giving us all a little more hope. I need hope at the moment. I escaped London by 12.30pm that day, and it was an intense 4 hours…all I could think about was whether seeing these exhibitions did make me engage and see things different…see China differently…

“Does simply bearing witness change everything?”