Frieze Magazine | Shows

Previous Shows

Waterworks

Geng Jian Yi, The Content Is Disturbed By Its Shadow (2011)

Organized by critic and curator Philip Tinari, ‘GENG Jianyi, WU Shanzhuan, YANG Fudong: Waterworks’ features three alumni of Hangzhou’s China Academy of Art, a school known for producing the country’s top conceptually-leaning artists. The show’s modest scale provides a welcome contrast to the concurrent Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair – a glitzy spectacle of mostly oversized, commercially driven paintings. Unfortunately, the exhibition floats its curatorial concept on tenuous links between its art works and the subject of water, or waterworks (as markers of modernization), missing an opportunity to depart philosophically from the fair’s typical mercantile objectives.

Yang Fudong, Red Tassel (2011)

Geng’s two-part installation, The Content Is Disturbed By Its Shadow (2011), which functions as a pinhole camera, occupies the gallery entrance. The first half of the installation, a blacked-out room, forces visitors to grope in the dark upon entering. A glimmer of light produces a faint, upside-down projection of the installation’s other half: a stage-set-like space filled with furniture clad in tin foil. A bubble-blowing machine behind the pinhole further obscures the projection. The apparent objective is to demonstrate the disconnection between perception and reality vis-à-vis the installation’s two parts, ultimately providing, according to the wall text, a ‘metaphor for how information and ideas from beyond are transmitted into China’. Yet the installation lacks cultural context. The title ‘Waterworks’, we are told, takes inspiration from one of Geng’s earlier, unrealized works, Tap Water Factory – a panopticon-like maze begun in 1987 during the frenzy of China’s pro-democracy experiments. Connections like these should be elaborated if we are to accept the lofty curatorial claim that Geng’s pinhole camera serves as a metaphor for China’s reception of outside ideas.

Wu Shanzhuan, ‘Butterfrog’ (1992–2011)

Wu, a well-known pioneer of 1980s post-structuralism, is represented by ‘Butterfrog’ (1992–2011), a series of 420 illustrations, each relating to the mythical character the artist created by combining the names of the ‘butterfly’ and ‘breast’ strokes (‘frog swim’ in Chinese). Simultaneously playful and meticulously detailed, these colourful drawings and notations offer parodic takes on anatomical diagrams. Most impressive here is Wu’s dedicated research into various aspects of swimming and his vast quantity of illustrations realized over the past two decades. Individually framed and hung on a curved wall, the display vaguely conjures a body of water, though it is one more still than flowing.

Yang’s film, Yejiang/The Night Man Cometh (2011), comes across as the star of ‘Waterworks’. Executed in the artist’s signature black and white, surrealist style, the film features a cast of ghostly, forlorn characters in a snowy landscape. Yang is increasingly making the kind of art films that are so near feature-length quality that one wishes he were making feature films instead. Fans of Yang’s epic Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest (2003–7) will miss the slow pacing, precision and attention to historic detail of that earlier work. The Night Man more closely resembles Yang’s recent slick advertisement for Prada, First Spring (2010), as a highly seductive film that consciously manipulates its audience through old-fashioned special effects, enchanting visual juxtapositions and sweeping references to Chinese fables. The film is presented with related materials, including oil paintings and other inspirational research props. These materials’ strange display in glass casings resembling those of natural history and Chinese state-run museums marks one of the show’s more interesting curatorial decisions.

In ‘Waterworks’, Geng, Wu and Yang provide refreshing alternatives to Shanghai’s mainstream art world, awash in commercialized paintings. But rather than simply linking artistic themes with grandiose cultural claims, the curator might have produced a stronger exhibition by emphasizing the artworks’ breaking points – far more compelling than their coincidental ‘watery’ convergences.

Jenny Lin