“Polit-Sheer-Form: Fitness for All”

A festive ambience permeates the retrospective exhibition “Polit-Sheer-Form: Fitness for All.” In one room, the collective Polit-Sheer-Form created wallpaper out of every single official invoice for expenses incurred at their previous gatherings (Polit-Sheer-Form Chronology, [2005–14]). At the center of this document-plastered space is gym equipment (of the sort found in residential compounds throughout China) where museumgoers are invited to work out. On a blue platform in another area, a circus performer tirelessly beats the surrounding walls with a whip. The hue of blue—Polit-Sheer-Blue, as the collective calls it—evokes the neutral, global brands of political entities, as well as the blue skies one rarely finds in Beijing.

At a gala before the retrospective’s opening, Polit-Sheer-Form created a site-specific project: a knockoff version of China’s famous state banquet. Rather than merely stimulating a convivial setting for political activities, however, the artists were in effect framing the vanity of a former national ideology in an utterly contemporary context while also infusing it with nostalgia.

The five members of the collective Polit-Sheer-Form—artists Hong Hao, Liu Jianhua, Song Dong, Xiao Yu, and curator/critic Leng Lin—were all born in the 1960s. They have distilled their collective childhood memory of the great Chinese leaders into a standard iconography: portraits, colors, flower beds, political posters, and so on. Their communality has intriguing conceptual underpinnings: As they often mention in interviews, the group’s members have seen artists’ egos inflate ever since China’s economic reforms opened up the art market; to set themselves apart and legitimize their pursuits, they practice as a collective rather than as individuals.

Translated from Chinese by Angie Wu.