“Sprout from White Nights”

“Sprout from White Nights” does not want to be an ordinary group show of Chinese contemporary art. Instead, as curator Zhang Wei explains, it aims to be “an exhibition about artists’ experiences of their social space in contemporary China.” Looking at the exhibition’s collection of installations, multichannel video works, garden/lounge dwelling areas, and interactive new-media pieces, a malevolent visitor could point out that living in the social space of contemporary China must be very much like visiting an exhibition of globalized—hence Western—contemporary art. Be that as it may, this is an elegant and well-curated group show that features a number of good and even excellent works. A few contributions stand out: Hu Xiaoyuan’s frail Useless, 2008, a twenty-foot stretch of calligraphy paper that has been torn to small pieces and then carefully glued back together; Yan Jun’s sound installation 15 Minutes in Life, 2007, in which a subtle mix of city sounds, voices, and music infiltrates the spaces of the art center; and Liu Wei’s 7 Nights, 2007, seven dark glass boxes inside of which lights and mobiles attempt to re-create the specific atmospheres of Beijing during the different nights of the week. Chu Yun’s Constellation No. 2, 2006, also merits attention. It is a large collection of household machines—fans, washing machines, an electric toothbrush—crowded into a small, dark space; their indicator lamps form a constellation of red, green, and orange lights. The truly outstanding work, however, is Yang Fudong’s East of the Que Village, 2007, a six-screen video piece installed in a black box in the main exhibition space, in which the artist has documented everyday life in the village where his father was raised, focusing on a group of stray dogs that struggle to survive on the destitute land. The complexity of the multiscreen montage and the beauty of the pictorial compositions, combined with the films’ sober faithfulness to a specific space and time, come close to producing a concrete experience of a certain reality of contemporary China.