“ON | OFF”

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
January 13–April 14

View of “ON | OFF,” 2013.

“ON | OFF” gathers fifty mainland Chinese artists born after 1976, a watershed year marked in the collective consciousness by Mao’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution. Similar to the New Museum’s Generational, this vast exhibition aims to survey China’s young artists in concept and practice, and in a definitive fashion. Curators Sun Dongdong and Bao Dong begin with the conceit that young Chinese artists are often overshadowed by qualifiers like “young” and “Chinese,” which pigeonhole the meanings and densities of their work with about as much subtlety as the distinction between “on” and “off.”

What, then, are the statements and priorities of this generation? For many, size simply for the sake of its imposition is the order of the day: Large-scale installations by Xin Yunpeng, Tang Dixin, He Xiangyu, and Huang Ran embody this principle with works that offer spectacle but little substance. That said, other artists display a sensitivity to the patterns of commerce, production, and power that structure the world around them. Li Liao’s Consumption, 2012, features documentation of a performance in which Li purchased an iPad mini using wages earned from forty-five days of work in a Shenzhen Foxconn factory, simultaneously raising and disrupting Marx’s theory of the alienation of labor in the present context. For Uncertain Capital, 2009, Wang Sishun melted twenty thousand RMB into a solid metal cube, while Lee Fuchun’s B2B2C, 2010–12, investigates the modes of exchange and production inherent to e-commerce.

As a whole, “ON | OFF” is a boisterous exhibition and notably resists many of the connective moments that might create a sense of thematic unity or texture. For an exhibition that is as much an index of the times as it is a declaration of arrival, “ON | OFF” documents a complex and confused moment with all its contradictions, superficialities and depths

— Angie Baecker

Liang Yuanwei

BEIJING COMMUNE 北京公社
798 Art Zone, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Road, Chaoyang District
March 21–May 18

View of “Pomegranate,” 2013.

One gets the sense in Liang Yuanwei’s solo exhibition “Pomegranate” that she has set out to alter accepted notions of the role of the artist by constantly highlighting the variables and constants of production. Take, for example, Meaning, 2004, four small oil paintings that depict crinkled aluminum foil balls set against different colors that alter one’s perception of the foil. This work seems to encapsulate the hypothesis of the show, postulating that the meaning of an object does not only reside in its physicality—it must also ascribed by context.

Pomegranate, 2011, adopts a similar method. To begin, Liang crinkled a large sheet of paper and then flattened it out and applied various shades of red lipstick to the geometric shapes formed by the sheet’s uneven surface. At the time, the colors looked fresh, but after one year they naturally changed into darker hues. Inspired by this transformation, Liang then asked a designer friend to use the Pantone Color Matching System to process these shades—old and new alike—into 120 samples of paint, which are here applied onto a wall in two long rows. Two sets of two of these colors have been selected by gallery staff and are painted on the walls between Pomegranate, the 120 Pantone colors, and Meaning. These color pairs are an indispensable element of the exhibition, and the grand scale on which they are rendered alludes to Mark Rothko’s transcendent fields of pigment, an inspiration that Liang may have appropriated in her creation of visual space in her paintings.

On the one hand, this show seems to be a reminder of Liang’s basic interest in perception. Yet, on the other hand, the artificiality of these standardized colors also highlights agency and collaboration, which was previously absent in her practice. Meanwhile, the core of Liang’s practice remains constant, like time.

— Fiona He

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

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

Tang Da Wu

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ARTS SINGAPORE
LASALLE College of the Arts, 1 McNally Street
March 15–April 10

Tang Da Wu, Brother’s Pool, 2013, mixed media, dimensions variable.

As the father of Singapore’s contemporary art community, Tang Da Wu has long been the recipient of fond genuflection, though as the founder of the pioneering group The Artists Village, he has always eschewed the role of figurehead. Twenty-five years after its inception, the city-state’s art scene now buoyed by rhythmic jets of state funding, “Situationist Bon Gun” is a long-overdue institutional outing for Tang’s work, finally securing his place in a regional pantheon of late modernism.

Tang’s latest installations critically reflect the newly instrumentalized status of contemporary art in Singapore. In Banquet (all works 2013), he imagines the aftermath of a feast set for arts bureaucrats. Jagged sheets of glass are corralled in the center and draped with a wine-stained tablecloth, while Van Gogh’s straw chairs—no longer so humble, rendered here in steel—are strewn about, supine, prone, and airborne, bathed in a bilious yellow light. In an adjacent gallery, a cairn, titled Brother’s Pool, is blanketed with shards of shattered mirrors and cordoned off by a steel fence. The stones belonged to the late Catholic educator and sculptor Brother Joseph McNally, founder of the art college that hosts the show. This theme of posthumous appreciation speaks to the state’s relatively new impulse to collect and canonize the modern art it had long ignored and suppressed. But the formal refrain of encompassment suggests that when it finally achieves visibility, art is bound to suffer the same bureaucratization as everything else in Singapore. (Indeed, the Situationist reference is timely—or perhaps fittingly belated—if one recalls Guy Debord’s rejection of Socialism as “bureaucratic capitalism,” a hybrid Singapore may well have perfected.)

Tang’s knack for bent political allegory is most evident in Untitled: A steel sheet purports to be an oversize Penguin edition of Orwell’s 1984, propped up by six white radishes. On the shelf above, a brush bearing the family name of a young nation’s aged founding autocrat is wedged into a glass bowl at an angle that vaguely resembles a guillotine’s blade. It’s a flash of the dissonant ambiguity that made Tang’s reputation, a foil to the mute anxiety of a republic with no public sphere.

— David Teh

Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra

ART PLURAL GALLERY
38 Armenian Street
March 22–May 25

View of “Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra: Windows of Opportunity,” 2013.

For almost a decade, Indian artists Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra have been using different media—product design, graphics, sculpture, installation, and video—to explore identity and social problems that affect their homeland. For their first solo exhibition in Singapore, the artists have created a series of paintings and a site-specific installation that reflect on the diaspora in Punjab, a state located in northwestern India where more than twenty thousand immigrate illegally every year. This move is predicated on the widespread belief that living in the west (which in India is connotative to living in nations like the United Kingdom, Belgium, or Germany) guaranties a better lifestyle and social status.

Visually stimulating, the paintings on view address identity, consumerism, and migration issues in a critical yet provocative and humorous way. Dominus Aeris: Escape 3, 2012, depicts a video game–like landscape where floating hot-air balloons, mansion-like houses, trees, paper planes, a Canadian flag, and a Facebook-like icon, evoke Indian middle-class dreams. Building off this is a series of diptychs, “Pinball - Windows of Opportunity,” 2013, consisting of portraits of young men and women outlined in oval-shaped airplane windows. Encased inside pinball machines, these paintings parallel the experience of migration with a mechanical game. Pinball players must keep the ball in motion, avoiding the game’s many traps and obstacles, if they are to accumulate points. Migrants face a similar situation, their game dependent on overcoming the difficulties of the never-ending quest for adaptation. Playing off this theme is an orange racetrack that loops around the gallery space in different directions. Lacking a clear finish, it seems at best a futile take on migration marathon mania, where, regardless of its player’s effort, ambitions remain ambitions and success comes in the form of endurance and not achievement.

— Claudia Arozqueta

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

Pinchas Cohen Gan

TEL AVIV MUSEUM OF ART
27 Shaul Hamelech Boulevard
December 7–May 19

Pinchas Cohen Gan, “Standard Religious Art,” 2012, oil and acrylic on canvas, 70 x 50”.

This retrospective focuses on the development of Pinchas Cohen Gan’s conceptual syntax and perception of the pictorial space over the time he spent in New York from the 1970s to the present. In an attempt to underscore the considerable breadth of his influence, guest curator Galia Bar Or has presented manifestos, private journals, and artist’s books. Of significant weight within this exhibition is the series “Standard Religious Art,” 2012, the artist’s most recent work. Here Cohen Gan gestures at his own exploration of Christian imagery (to which he devoted an exhibition in 1993) and his continued preoccupation with dogma.

The series includes three white canvases over which the artist has collaged a variety of materials in a specific, repetitive rhythm, including an image of a religious scene, notations and drawings, and iconic Christian imagery. Throughout these works, he notes distances between shapes, draws geometric formulas of areas, and makes references to chapters in Psalms. Hints of his own traumas appear in cryptic remarks, which he has added in Hebrew, such as “REMEMBERED ART IS A FORGOTTEN GRIEF.”

Many of Cohen Gan’s mixed media works merge poignant, brutally honest social commentary with textual and formal lyricism, exposing personal experiences of displacement, primarily, his immigration from Morocco to Israel at the age of five. In the 1970s, for instance, he published an artist’s book that documented visits to refugee camps in Jericho; his ominous paintings from the early 1980s denounced the Lebanon War; and more recent works—like the three white canvases described above—raise questions about truth and social mores by creating literal and visual hybrids that use political, societal and personal failures as subject matter. In short, he has always been a tenacious critic. At a time where many feel that Israel pays little heed to the outcomes of its actions, the decision to celebrate his works in an established museum seems almost subversive.

— Rotem Rozental

“Theater of the World”

MONA - MUSEUM OF OLD AND NEW ART
655 Main Road, Berriedale
June 23–April 8

View of “Theater of the World,” 2012–2013. Foreground: Coffin of Tai-es Khen, ca. 600–525 BCE. Background: Paa Joe, Coffin: Mercedes-Benz, 2010.

Upon entering this exhibition, visitors are confronted with a dark foyer containing a small amphitheater of objects. Modernist paintings, wood sculptures, and golden artifacts fill its shelves. Posted on the wall is the key to this curatorial assemblage: a folio-size copy of an etching depicting The Memory Theater, ca. 1530s, by philosopher Giulio Camillo. Camillo designed this auditorium for François I of France, hoping it would “assemble every human concept and every thing that exists in the entire world.” Curator Jean-Hubert Martin uses this historical invention as the basis for his resonant show, which explores death, abstraction, epiphany, and ritual. Martin’s curatorial style is particular: He curates with a deliberate and sculptural aesthetic by placing works side by side, like an installation artist with a wide-ranging but systemic logic.

The exhibition spans sixteen rooms, the most successful of which highlight the theatricality of Martin’s curatorial flair. Especially engaging is the dark tomblike room that focuses on death, memorial, and the abject. The audience here observes several glass display cases, which present, in turn, a visceral sculpture from Berlinde De Bruyckere, Lange Eenzame Man, 2010; an Egyptian coffin (of Tai-es Khen), ca. 600–525 BCE; and the decorative, hand-painted Coffin: Mercedes-Benz, 2010, by Paa Joe, which is indeed a casket made of wood, glass, alkyd paint, acrylic, fabrics, foam, glitter, and nails. Nearby, in the “Phantasm Gallery,” Martin restricts the viewpoint to a black semicircular wall. What ensues is a dance with objects. Illuminated by a dramatic pin light, a series of masks and animal bones are unveiled one at a time in a steady rhythm. These performative curatorial actions are what make this exhibition successful insofar as they negotiate a space between museum and gallery show, and between performance and exhibition.

— Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris

“New13”

ACCA: AUSTRALIAN CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
111 Sturt Street Southbank
March 16–May 12

Sanné Mestrom, Weeping Woman, 2013, aluminium, bronze, internal irrigation, water, dimensions variable.

New, a curated exhibition of emerging talent, has become a much anticipated annual attraction for ACCA, and this year’s “New13” includes works by Benjamin Forster, Jess MacNeil, Alex Martinis Roe, Sanne Mestrom, Scott Mitchell, Joshua Petherick, and Linda Tegg, curated by Charlotte Day.

Scott Mitchell’s New Millennium Fountain (all works cited 2013) surprises viewers before they even enter the galleries. Square mirrors perch here and there around the foyer, catching the eye and drawing viewers into a treasure hunt of reflections. The Olafur Eliasson–esque tunnel of vision leads outside, to mirrors around and on top of the building. Mitchell pursues the concept further in a rear room of the gallery, a dark and hermetic space, where the mirrors intermittently draw sunlight inside to illuminate two large inflated objects, manufactured from sheets of clear plastic.

Linda Tegg’s video Tortoise, Melbourne continues with the theme of reflections. At first giving the impression of portraying a kinetic sculpture composed of pieces of mirror, the piece soon reveals the presence of performers manipulating the shiny surfaces from behind. The dancers at once conceal their bodies and beguile onlookers with their moving reflections—a form of high-art burlesque.

Benjamin Forster contributes the installation Arrangement of Extra-Linguistic Factors—an array of deconstructed electronics that makes the dark room seem almost like an Aladdin’s cave of technology. For Dysgraphia, a computer screen detached from its frame displays flickering red, green, and blue lines. A brief inspection indicates that the colors are independently affected by sounds from a radio, a set of speakers, and the room itself, all picked up by microphones that have been placed around the space. Forster’s Universal Grammar (Chomsky), a USB device plugged into a laptop, autonomously types sentence after sentence of perfectly composed nonsense. On the opposite wall, Constellations ( ___ of the phaistos disk) displays tiny screens flickering with static, with occasional images briefly appearing.

Including a diverse group of artists, this year’s New feels more composed and sober than those before. Rather than being a collection of early-career practitioners, those represented in “New13” seem more like fully fledged artists who haven’t yet been recognized for their talents.

— Elizabeth Pedler

Song Dong

GALLERY 4A (ASIA AUSTRALIA ARTS CENTRE)
181-187 Hay St
January 5–March 30

View of “Song Dong,” 2013.

The Chinese artist Song Dong’s eclectic output can sometimes project indifference, but it can also be surprisingly intimate. “Dad and Mum, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well” explores Song’s relationship with his deceased father, and serves as a reader of sorts for “Waste Not,” a concurrent exhibition at Sydney’s Carriageworks comprising over ten thousand neatly arranged objects collected by the artist’s mother during the last five decades of her life. Whereas in “Waste Not” Song provokes consideration of time and accumulation via a reflection on his mother’s hoarding complex, his exhibition at Gallery 4A is more diaristic, combining video and photographic works with numerous personal quotes by the artist emblazoned on the gallery walls.

The personal is always political for Song, and so a work such as Touching My Father, 1997–2011—in which video footage of Song’s hand is projected onto two framed photographs of his father—is at once a private expression and an archetypal representation of generational disconnect, symbolizing the relationship between a father who suffered through the Cultural Revolution and a son who came of age during the Tiananmen Square protests. The use of superimposed imagery in the work is repeated throughout the exhibition to portray familial ties through a revisionist perspective; this can be seen, for instance, in the two-channel video projection Father and Son Face to Face with a Mirror, 2001; the photograph Family Member Photo Studio, 1998; and the single-channel video Father and Son with My Daughter, 1998/2010, which stages an interaction between Song’s daughter and his father, who died before the girl was born. Reminding one that “touch” can refer to both an emotional and a physical connection, the exhibition juxtaposes Song’s unabashed sentimentality with his tactile treatment of the video medium, with some of the works created by filming scenes in front of preexisting footage, instead of more sophisticated digital editing techniques. Framing a personal account of post-Maoist relations between Chinese parents and children within the universal themes of family and memory, Song’s exhibition uses art therapeutically to rewrite the shortcomings of the past.

— Wes Hill

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