With the much-heralded ascent of China’s economy and the continued robustness of the art market (even in the face of global economic queasiness), Arnolfini’s current exhibition, “Far West,” could hardly be more timely. An “interactive shopping experience,” the show addresses the commodification of culture inherent to globalization with a series of works that simulate the dynamics of the marketplace by demanding participation and exchange. Liu Ding’s installation Products, 2005, consists of a room appointed with furniture, fake peonies, and porcelain dogs. Its deep-red walls are crowded with numerous banal paintings depicting the same scene: two cranes flapping their wings in a sickly-sweet-colored landscape. Created assembly-line style in Dafencun, a Chinese village famous for mass-producing and exporting oil paintings, these canvases are shown in various stages of completion, highlighting their means of production. The installation is accompanied by a series of unfinished paintings for sale, “Take home and create whatever is the priceless image in your heart,” 2008. SOI Project’s Fruits, 2007–2008, and Yoko Ono’s Mend Piece for Merry England (Imagine healing your heart as you mend), 2008, also encourage participation in the art process, imploring viewers to reintroduce the human touch to mass-produced and dispossessed materials. Michael Lin’s bold floral wallpaperlike posters—based on traditional Taiwanese patterns—are available for purchase, as is the music playing in the galleries (created by Support Structure). A digitally animated film presents a preview of RMB City, Cao Fei’s interactive online community in Second Life. (Institutions and collectors are invited to buy buildings and program events and activities in them.) It’s a fast-paced, dizzying vision, with rapidly shifting shots of vehicles flying, smokestacks blazing, and cranes swinging. Set on a densely developed island, the city encapsulates the contradictions of contemporary Chinese society: A Mao statue, arm outstretched, bobs in the surrounding waters, while Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV building dangles from a crane, circling the city like a nursery mobile. Such contradictions and uneasy realities ground “Far West,” which otherwise appears like a shiny product, proffering fantasies of ownership and interaction.
