Cover Story	Permanence and Change by Cynnie Gaasch

"Memory Dress" by Yu Hong (Albright-Knox)

(photo: Rose Mattrey)

The massiveness of the project “The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art” curated and driven by Professor of Art History Gao Minglu is a recurring theme. Not only did Gao, formerly at the University at Buffalo and currently at the University of Pittsburgh, spend five years working on this project, but he also enlisted three major institutions to accomplish the project: the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the UB Center for the Arts, and UB’s Anderson Gallery. While at the University at Buffalo, Gao organized the exhibition “Chinese Maximalism,” a precursor to this show, in 2003 with some overlapping artists. As his authority in 20th and 21st Century Chinese Art grew, so did the necessity for an encompassing exhibition that could realize Gao’s vision of the unfolding world of Contemporary Chinese Art. As the exhibit expanded, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery joined Gao and UB’s collaboration with the Millennium Art Museum in Beijing.

Next, Gao brought in an assistant curator for film, Bingyi Huang, and a project director, Holly Hughes, who is Associate Curator at the Albright-Knox. The team put together a major publication of the exhibit with the assistance of staff from all of the institutions. It is a bi-lingual, art historical text that shares the title of the exhibit and adds extensive historical context as well as many more artists to the dialogue. The exhibition was premiered at the Millennium Art Museum this summer, and then traveled by boat to the United States this fall. It was delayed for weeks at customs in New York. Thanks to an amazing crew here in Buffalo, the exhibit opened seamlessly to the public at UB’s Anderson Gallery and Center for the Arts, and the Albright-Knox on October 21. The show is one of the largest of its kind to travel to the United States, with Buffalo the exclusive U.S. venue. It is entirely unique in its collaborative involvement of these three institutions.

The scale of American Art—Abstract Expressionism, Earth Works, and large-scale sculpture—made a step up from the European parlor paintings. In other words, the art works were simply larger in size than their European counterparts. The sensibility for this scale change has been attributed to the great expanse of the American West. However, if American Art is huge, what about the work coming out of the Great Continent of China? Not only do they have more land, but more people. To the United States’ 296 million, China boasts 1.3 billion. How do our various experiences of the world affect the objects we make about it, and what of freedom? Freedom is old hat, and waning in the U.S., but it is a predominant notion in China; though everything is still owned by the government, the freedom of artists to negotiate sensitive terrain is evident in this exhibit.

"100,000 Kilometers, 2004/2005" by Wenda Gu. Installation of bricks and hair. (Albright-Knox)

(photo: Rose Mattrey)

Mighty endeavors are featured in this exhibition that surveys the past 20 years, many of them reflecting on the presence of the Great Wall of China and its meaning today. Wenda Gu’s “100,000 Kilometers” opens the exhibit of the Albright-Knox and fills a large gallery. Made entirely of human hair, the smell of the room is a little overwhelming, and the feeling of a tomb threatens to take over. The piece is composed of walls built out of bricks formed in hair, surrounded by transparent walls (like rice paper scrolls) formed with hair on all sides. Just the labor involved in creating this piece is impressive.

Xu Bing’s “Ghosts Pounding the Wall” is made from actual rubbings of The Great Wall. The piece reaches up to the 30-foot high ceiling of the Albright-Knox’s Sculpture Court and covers the floor. Again, the labor of Xu and his assistants is evident in every mark made on the huge rice paper scrolls that fill the gallery. A mound of dirt in the middle of the floor, covering the image of the wall, pays homage to the laborers who lost their lives as The Great Wall was built over the course of four centuries during the Ming Dynasty (14th – 17th Century).

The Chinese have always been known as impeccable craftsmen, and in today’s society, that craftsmanship has been translated into a massive working force. The force of people’s struggle with the built environment—the city— is also pervasive. This dichotomy is evident in much of the work in “The Wall.” At Anderson Gallery, “Urban Landscape” by Zhan Wang is an elaborate construction of a city made of silver flatware and stainless kitchenware, rumored to be based loosely on Buffalo’s skyline. Also at Anderson, Lu Shengzhong’s “Wall of People” meticulously covers a wall with three-inch people cut from red paper.

"Super Market" installation by Yin Xiuzhen (UB Center for the Arts)

(photo: Rose Mattrey)

Yin Xiuzhen takes over the second floor gallery at the Center for the Arts with “Supermarket.” Two 20-foot tall shopping carts are surrounded by three-dimensional quilts placed on the floor of cities and rural landscapes and old-fashioned sewing machines.. During the opening of the exhibition, seamstresses sat at the machines making the quilted scenes. Chen Quilin also made use of the shopping cart in “I Exist, I Consume and I am Happy,” a funny exploration of the role of women, by staging a performance in the court of the Center for the Arts during the opening. In a wedding dress and busily applying make-up, she was rolled into the crowd inside a shopping cart. Eight men were tied to the cart with dog leashes and collars, and they fought to reach cupcakes placed just out of arm’s reach. The first man to grab his cake won the bride.

A second performance artist, He Yunchang, took the masculine counterpoint on the steps of the Albright-Knox on Friday, October 21st. Naked, he climbed into a Plexiglas box and was encased in cement. Surrounded by concerned spectators in weather that dipped below 40 degrees, the artist endured for over an hour before the plexi was removed and the cement rolled away. In China this summer, the same performance lasted 24 hours and the cement hardened. He was then broken out of the encasement with sledgehammers. Liability and safety became the limiting issue here in Buffalo, and the performance had him shivering out of loose cement rather than breaking free of its confines.

He further experienced the difference between the U.S. and China on the following day when he tried to conquer Niagara Falls tied to a boulder, again nude. He was escorted away by the police, and two young artists who came to assist him were also fined. The freedoms he has experienced in China are no longer present in the United States, and, sadly, the institutions that brought him here to present his work are not speaking about the event. Instead, I was referred to lawyers.

"Chinese Offspring" by Zhang Dali (Albright-Knox)

(photo: Rose Mattrey)

Freedom of speech is evidenced in so much of the work on display. He Yunchang is not the only artist pushing at boundaries. Back at the Albright-Knox, Ma Liuming navigates The Great Wall nude in “Fen. Ma Liuming Walking on the Great Wall,” a montage of black and white images from a performance in 1998. Zheng Lianjie wraps bricks from the Great Wall in red ribbon, and surrounds the space in piles of Coca Cola cups. Again a montage image of a performance, the red lines of the ribbon work beautifully with the graphics of the Coca Cola pile in a piece that symbolizes the onslaught of capitalism juxtaposed against the care for China’s heritage. It is hard to imagine any performance artist getting away with exploring the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. unclothed, or how about someone piling Coke cups—or better yet, french fries—around the base of the Statue of Liberty? Sadly, issues of “national security” would just not allow activity like this in the United States anymore.

History is the subject of Yu Hong’s “Memory Dress,” a piece filling one gallery that documents the 35 years of the artist’s life with prints on white cloth hung from clothes hangers. There is an image for each year, including Chairman Mao, the front page of a paper after the collapse of the World Trade Center, and personal remembrances of younger years.

Identity in the changing world is a source for some of the works. Zhao Bandi’s “Panda Series” (see cover of this issue) investigates environmentalism, survival and the perception of Chinese people with photo light boxes that have actually been placed throughout Beijing. Three of these light boxes are at the Albright-Knox. The lovable stuffed animal panda becomes a strong symbol for the artist’s fear of the changes happening in his country.

Zhang Dali’s “Chinese Offspring” addresses a sense of powerlessness mixed with ultimate individuality. The artist cast 15 people in various positions in fiberglass. The figures were then hung upside down, in a tight configuration. The fiberglass is a pure white with the exception of redness around the genitalia. The suspended figures evoke utter defenselessness. Differently, Xing Danwen’s “Urban Fiction” suggests a loss of the individual. The artist manipulates photographs, placing people into living situations on architectural models, with a slightly plastic, luminous light; they look real enough to be scary.

"Hundred Chai" by Wang Jinsong, close-up of photo montage. (Albright-Knox)

(photo: Rose Mattrey)

Another investigation of the constant growth and change in today’s China is “A Hundred Chai – To Be Demolished” by Wang Jinsong, a collection of a hundred identical marks painted in various ways (brushed or sprayed, red or white in color) on the faces of buildings that are earmarked for demolition with this symbol. Jamie Moses, the publisher of Artvoice, in his recent cover story “Artvoice Goes to China,” referred to the Chinese government’s moves to take down entire villages in order for development to continue. One example is a massive damn being built on the Yangtze River in order to supply valuable electric energy. The damn will flood towns and villages, relocating 1.5 million people and erasing their histories. The images created by Wang resemble gravestones.

Oil paintings by Liu Xiadong further investigate life of contemporary Chinese people. China is a country that is changing at an unstoppable pace, yet its people somehow manage to hold onto a wonderfully rich (and ancient) history. “Through the Ages” shows uniformed schoolboys and girls standing at a street corner, separated by the corner of a building’s wall. As has been the case “through the ages,” men and women in China tend not to socialize with each other outside of marriage. “The Stinky River” is a title that sounds like a Chinese proverb, but is rather a picture of the “cesspool of sewage, poison” as the Yangtze River has been described. “The Man with Nothing to Do and a Dying Rabbit” uses the Chinese Zodiac sign of the rabbit to describe the loss of diplomacy. Liu seems to be referring to an individual’s powerlessness against progress, regardless of educational and monetary gain.

Throughout the run of this exhibition, which continues through January 29th, films are being screened at the Albright-Knox, including screenings of “ Estranged Paradise” by Yang Fudong at 8:30 pm on November 11, and “In Expectation” by Zhang Ming on November 18 at 3pm. Film and video are also in installed in spaces throughout the galleries, with some must-sees. “Very Fantastic” by So Man Ye at the Anderson is a fanciful animated video that shows a woman walking through her life as the city changes around her. “Together with Migrant Workers” by Song Dong is poetic and expansive in black and white, made by a dancer who enlisted the help of 200 migrant workers to perform a minimalist piece about the populous country and the massiveness of the workforce, also at the Albright-Knox. Admission to Anderson and the Center for the Arts is free. Exhibition admission to the Albright-Knox is $12 if you are not a member of the Gallery.

To read this story online and view performance art video clips from “The Wall,” visit www.artvoice.com.