Xu Zhen

LONG MARCH SPACE 长征空间
798 Art Zone, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District
April 27–June 23

View of “Movement Field,” 2013.

Xu Zhen has reemerged from his art collective MadeIn Company with an audacious latter-day Earthwork. The smell of vegetation alerts the visitor upon entry that this is no ordinary exhibition: Carefully planted rolling knolls with a veritable maze of forking paths have completely taken over the white gallery space. One is reminded less of a traditional Chinese garden of ideal, miniaturized landscapes than a video game remake of Alice in Wonderland with the installation’s bizarre, flat cut-outs of fire, ginseng, and psychedelic bodhisattvas installed throughout the field. Urs Fischer’s intervening excavation of Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in You, 2007, comes to mind, as does Gordon Matta-Clark’s various architectural incisions, and even Wang Wei’s Temporary Space from 2003, which included an impenetrably sealed brick house installed in this very space. Yet, here, there is no physical evidence of the rawness intrinsic to these past works.

Or is there? Plotted according to Google Maps, various routes taken by protests and other mass movements are superimposed on top of each other. Visitors are forced to reenact fragments of these demonstrations while being unable to persevere in any one trajectory or know what exactly is being restaged. Included in the randomized imagery that acts as roadblocks are replicas of MadeIn’s previous works, such as last year’s “Movement” sculptures and “Turbulent” action paintings. The exhibition thus not only probes the logic of reproduction in the age of the Internet but also plays on the futility of participation in the ever-growing expanse of open knowledge.

— Daniel Szehin Ho

Wang Luyan

PARKVIEW GREEN
10 F, Tower D, Parkview Green Fangcaodi, No. 9, Dondaqiao Rd.
March 24–June 23

Wang Luyan, Sawing or being sawed - Revolving Madonna Litta D-10-06, 2010, acrylic on canvas, 118 x 78 3/4”.

Wang Luyan is Chinese contemporary art’s Zeno: He thrives on paradoxes. Even the title of Wang’s large-scale solo exhibition of recent work, “Diagramming Allegory,” suggests an internal contradiction. Housed primarily within two long exhibition spaces atop a shopping center, the show collars visitors with its theatrics before confronting them with a stalemate of reciprocal aggression.

In one hall, an oversize steel revolver, W Fire at Both Ends Automatic Handgun D13-01, 2013, has been reengineered to shoot in both directions; every action simultaneously triggers its opposite. A large painting on an adjacent wall, W Six Party Wrist Watch D13-01, 2013, reminiscent of Francis Picabia’s machinist works, depicts the face of a modified wristwatch whose interlocking gears dramatize the geopolitical maneuvers of the six-party talks that sought to diffuse North Korea’s nuclear aspirations, reflecting an unstoppable cycle of violence and vengeance.

In the other hall, large Doric columns flank The Church D11-02, 2011, a multipaneled, panoramic painting of a gothic cathedral’s silver interior seen from an otherwise impossible perspective: The razor-wire parquet and burgundy carpeting of the chapel’s floor extend from the work’s surface to cover the ground throughout the gallery. Nearby, paintings based on icons from both Christianity (Michelangelo’s Genesis) and Renaissance-era humanism (da Vinci’s Mona Lisa) are set into the wall like altarpieces, but their subjects now reveal an uncanny side. The original paintings’ familiar figures are comprised entirely of interlocking, circular saw blades. This combination of visual elements evokes a place where androids might worship after conquering humans and remaking the world (and our art) in their own frightening image. In this exhibition, Wang describes fundamental systems of belief as inherently brutal, self-defeating, or outmoded by “our industrial era.” We built the robots. They won the war.

— David Spalding

Choi Jeong Hwa

DAEGU ART MUSEUM
374 Samdeok-dong, Suseong-gu
February 26–June 23

Choi Jeong Hwa, Kabbala, 2013, plastic baskets, steel frame. Installation view.

Since his debut in the early 1990s, Choi Jeong Hwa has been a central figure in Korean contemporary art. Yet, “Kabbala” is his first exhibition in a museum. This curatorial omission is somewhat understandable; Choi has never been considered an artist per se. Rather, he’s more often seen engaged in the work of an interior designer, architect, industrial designer, art director, stage designer, and entrepreneur. At one point, Choi self-deprecatingly took on the moniker “AAA,” or “Always Almost Artist,” which today, after this sprawling exhibition, sounds almost as accurate.

Kabbala, 2013, the exhibition’s title piece, is a thirty-three-foot-wide and sixty-foot-high cylindrical installation comprised of 5,400 green and red baskets in fourteen variable sizes. These custom-made baskets were arduously knotted together over seven days of intense labor by the artist and eight installation experts. Gazing at the gigantic structure, which is suspended from the ceiling of the museum’s central hall, one begins to sense the meaning of the title: Surely some mystical transformation has taken place to turn plastic, one of the cheapest industrial materials, into a sublime work of art.

When Choi first used plastic in his artwork in 1991, the artificial, superficial, cost-effective, mass-produced, and rapidly consumable material perfectly represented the vulgar reality of Korean society, which was exclusively geared toward rapid economic growth. Now, for this exhibition, Choi includes it among other practices from his multidisciplinary background; he redesigned the museum’s lobby, made sofa sets for the lounges, created a children’s play-zone, and installed his own kitsch objects. Thus, the show actually points to a more fundamental transformation, one that Choi has taken part in, at a time when nonartistic activities are deemed art.

— Jung-Ah Woo

Grete Stern

MUSEO DE ARTE LATINOAMERICANO DE BUENOS AIRES (MALBA)
Avenida Figueroa Alcorta 3415
March 18–July 1

Grete Stern, Botella del mar (Sueño Nº 5) (Sea Bottle [Dream Nº 2]), 1950, photomontage, 9 1/2 x 12".

In 1948, a year after Eva Perón’s efforts helped secure Argentinian women the right to vote, Idilio magazine was campaigning for their right to dream. For a column titled “El psicoanálisis le ayudará” (Psychoanalysis Will Help You), the primarily female readership would submit descriptions of their dreams to editor Richard Rest (the nom de plume of philosopher and sociologist Gino Germani), who then decoded the meaning of each vision using popular psychology. Additional commentary—often more cynical than sympathetic—could be gleaned in the accompanying illustrations by Bauhaus-trained émigré Grete Stern. From 1948-51, the artist created over 150 photomontages for the column, the originals of which she would later exhibit as an autonomous body of work, Los sueños (The Dreams). Idilio’s readers tended to be middle-class, upwardly mobile young women who imagined their lives playing out like their first lady’s, a kind of polite cosmopolitan in a modest tailored dress. Stern borrowed this sensibility when staging photos of her friends and neighbors, which she then spiked with surrealistic elements: In Niño flor (Sueño Nº 11) (Flower Child [Dream Nº 11]), 1948, a blond toddler sprouts from the stamen of a calla lily, while in Sin título (Sueño Nº 3) (Untitled [Dream Nº 3]), 1949, a giraffe takes a woman for a joyride in a Buick convertible.

In the selection of images on view here, Stern’s illustrations convey a certain subversiveness, but also a faint annoyance with women whose submissiveness implicated them in their own oppression. She depicts one woman contently sitting cross-legged in a birdcage, a fan folded coyly over her face; another woman is shown curled up in a corked glass bottle, her own little wish sent to sea. A third stands in for the stem of a lamp, a man’s thick finger resting purposefully on the switch at the base of her knee. Three recurring motifs—turtles, trains, and the seashore—converge powerfully in En el andén (Sueño Nº 2) (On the Platform [Dream Nº 2]), 1949, which shows a locomotive with a tortoise head surging out of the ocean, its mouth agape, as a woman on shore draws back in alarm. Sirena del mar (Sueño Nº 16) (Mermaid [Dream Nº 16]), 1950, centers on a female pelvis, washed up in breaking waves. Male hands float over the body as if in the middle of a magic trick, having conjured this derriere divine from the depths of the sea. With women appearing as both subject and object of their fears, desires, and fantasies, what Stern’s collages offer is a psychoanalytical portrait of partial empowerment.

— Kate Sutton