Yang Fudong

SHANGHART BEIJING 香格纳画廊 (北京)
261 Cao Chang Di, Old Airport Road, Chaoyang District
May 12–June 15

Yang Fudong, Close to the Sea, 2004, ten-channel video installation, 23 minutes. Installation view.

ShanghART’s Beijing outpost and the adjacent ARTMIA Gallery have given over their spaces to two of Yang Fudong’s majestic and baffling videos: Close to the Sea, 2004, and Revival of the Snake, 2005. Although the works premiered at the 2004 Liverpool Biennial and in 2006 at the Parasol Unit Foundation, respectively, this occasion marks Yang’s first solo exhibition in Beijing and the debut of the two videos in China.

Each piece is made up of a ten-screen video installation, with eight monitors lining the darkened walls of the room and one hanging in the middle with projections on either side of it. Close to the Sea is the most successful at taking advantage of this format: The eight screens each display one or two musicians, standing on craggy rocks by a brown, turbulent sea. Intermittently, they sound their instruments with single notes, which combine cacophonously. In the center of the room, one side of the screen portrays two lovers happily frolicking on the beach, while on the other they cling to a raft that is being mercilessly tossed around in the same sea. If the seaside orchestra is meant as accompaniment to the dueling narratives of young love and bleak survival, its dissonance amplifies the conflict between the two stories.

Best known for his works that explore the ennui and romance of being young, cultured, and cognizant in modern China, Yang focuses his attention here on existential issues. There’s a chilling poignancy to showing Revival of the Snake now in Beijing: Yang, born into a military family here, tells the story of an exiled soldier wandering a harsh northern Chinese winter landscape. The soldier’s isolation ends only once, briefly, when he crosses paths with a rural funeral procession. Is this the beginning, the end, or some in-between point of the soldier’s journey? Yang leaves the viewer with no clues.

This exhibition is also on view at ARTMIA Gallery, 261 Caochangdi Airport Service Road, until June 15.

— Angie Baecker

Jennifer Wen Ma

ULLENS CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART | 尤伦斯当代艺术中心
798 Art Zone, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang Di | 朝阳区酒仙桥路4号798艺术区内
April 15–May 27

Jennifer Wen Ma, Hanging Garden in Ink, 2012, ink, plants, dimensions variable.

Jennifer Wen Ma’s Hanging Garden in Ink, 2012, a site-specific commission, offers her latest experiment with the organic properties of mo, or ink. Inspired by the mythical hanging gardens of Babylon—King Nebuchadnezzar II’s offering to his wife who was homesick for trees and mountains—the work is a towering structure of ink-dipped foliage. The plants will continue to grow over the course of their installation in the long, narrow hall, with fresh green shoots sprouting beneath thick layers of black.

Ma began working with mo several years ago and has now inked all manner of flora: At a solo exhibition in Taipei’s Eslite Gallery last year, Ma covered orchid and chrysanthemum plants, bamboo, and plum and cypress trees with gallons of the stuff. Who Would Have Expected to Encounter Ni Zan’s Gentlemen in S-Chanf?, 2011, at the 2011 ShContemporary art fair re-created a traditional Chinese ink landscape as an installation, blackened snow pines and soil placed in front of a white sheet of canvas. Germinating Thoughts, 2011, presents the words AMOR FATI on a lawn with ink and grass seedlings.

Employed in classic Chinese painting as a tool for crafting two-dimensional likenesses of natural subjects, ink is here conceptually repurposed. Ma asks how the densities of mo can manipulate its physical subjects: Does ink obscure or does it illuminate? Is black the color of vitality or of death? Ma’s obfuscations demonstrate that compositions have the capacity for growth, and that darkness can give form to life.

— Angie Baecker

Lee Wen

SINGAPORE ART MUSEUM
71 Bras Basah Road
April 20–June 10

Lee Wen, More China than You, 2012, vinyl stickers, video, velvet curtain, dimensions variable. Installation view.

Lee Wen is no coward, though he is famous for being yellow. In his ongoing “Yellow Man” series, the Singaporean performance artist is seen in videos and photographs with canary-yellow poster paint smeared all over his body. The photograph Strange Fruit, 2003, for instance, shows his jaundiced frame on a beach. Since red Chinese lanterns dangle over his face in these works, Lee’s identity is further obscured. The whys and wherefores of his colorful goings-on—tongue-in-cheek riffs on stereotypical readings of Chineseness —are examined in “Lucid Dreams in the Reverie of the Real,” Lee’s current midcareer retrospective, which boasts his photographs, installations, and videos from the past twenty-five years.

More China than You, 2012, takes bold potshots at authority—slyly suggesting a similarity between the city-state’s so-called socialist democracy and Red China’s restrictive policies. Visitors enter a suffocating, windowless room, on the walls of which crimson vinyl stickers spell out political slogans, such as HARMONIOUS SOCIETY; ONE PARTY, TWO SYSTEMS; and RULE OF LAW. With World Class Society, 1999–2000, Lee makes even more not-so-fond fun of political propaganda. Viewers peer through a funnel made out of a snakelike length of white fabric to encounter a TV set, on which a man holds forth on Singapore’s “world-class” attributes. “We are a world-class city, we have a world-class economy, we have world-class facilities . . . ,” he drones. Tunnel vision, anyone? As we leave the installation, pale pink badges catch our eye: They are printed with tiny globes sprouting wings.

Undoubtedly, Lee’s exhibition at this government-run institution is in tune with Singapore’s bid for global recognition as a cultural force. After years of looking askance at performance artists, the powers that be are now feting them in mainstream museums. Apparently, Singapore’s “world-class” politicians feel the need to vote for liberalism—at least when it comes to the arts. Still, for me (a Singaporean who has long since flown the coop) the best part of Lee’s deliciously provocative show is the fact that he is getting away with it.

— Zehra Jumabhoy