May 6, 1997

Jun. 10, 1997

Art Watch Index - May 13, 1997

Art Watch Back Number Index

<<Chinese Contemporary Art 1997>> Location: The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art Period: Apr. 5 - Jul. 27, 1997 Information: The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art Tel.03-3402-3001 Zhang Huan Performance held in front of the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art in the early morning of April 6th. Wang Jin Performance of barter trading held on April 4th. Wang Jin Exposure Tokyo 1997· 4 seconds Chan Yuk Keung Ups and Downs in between the waves 1997 Gao Bo Tibet 1996 Zhan Wang Seduction 1994 Wang Gong Xing Public Corridor 1997 Photo: The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art WATARI-UM (in Japanese) http://www.cyber-bp.or.jp/ watarium/ The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art (in Japanese) http://www.tokyoweb.or.jp/ infomedia/museum/data/ watari/watarium.html CHINESE CONTEMPORARY ART 1997 (in Japanese) http://www.cyber-bp.or.jp/ watarium/chinaNOW/ The Tiananmen Square incident Chinese Democracy in 1989 http://www.nmis.org/ gate/themes/ Nathan.html The Gate of Heavenly Peace http://www.nmis.org/ gate/ People's Republic of China: III The Cultural Revolution Decade, 1966-76 http://www-chaos.umd. edu/history/prc3.html Plexus: Tian-Miao Lin http://www.plexus.org/ lin.html Plexus: Gong-Xin Wang http://www.plexus.org/ wang.html

<<Chinese Contemporary Art 1997>> - The Radicalism of the "Post Tiananmen Square Incident-Generation" Akira TATEHATA As we all know, since the '80's, exhibitions of contemporary art from Asian nations have been held frequently by Japanese art musuems, so much so that this trend could even be recognized as a boom. However, not many of them have focused on China. This could be because of the country's enormous scale, but more than anything else, the supressed situation after the Tiananmen Square incident has made the introduction to the public very difficult. Still, with the progress of the open economic policy, information about underground "Chinese avant-garde" activities have been made accessible to the overseas countries, allowing research to be conducted locally to a certain extent. The "Chinese Contemporary Art" exhibition held at the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art in Harajuku, took advantage of that opportunity, and was an exhibition introducing the trend of the young generation of artists in China. There were six artists from Beijing, and one from Hong Kong, and they were all born between the late '50's and the first half of the '60's. In other words, they belong to the "post Tiananmen Square incident" generation. Among this generation are artists advocating a nihilistic attitude called "cynical realism", including Fang Lijun, who held a retrospective exhibition in Japan last year, and also many artists who tackle installations and performances as in this exhibition. Perhaps due to their internal trauma developed from the encounter with the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square incident during their formative years, they all possess a deep rift between themselves and politics in the real world, and because of this, they may have been forced to pursue their expressions towards a heavy, introverted direction. The confrontation with the age What was important to be noted about this exhibition was that all the artists had come to Japan for the construction of the artworks, the symposiums, and the performances. Especially, the realization of the performance by Zhuan Huan was, indeed, a huge benefit. Actually, I had met him several times last year in Beijing, and when he showed me a video that contained images of him risking his own body, I had thought his work would never be able to leave the country due to its radicalism. In his performance held early morning on April 6th, Zhuan Huan placed a large wooden wheel brought from China on the roof of a building, hung numerous rubber tubes for blood transfusion between that roof and the window of Watarium, also hanging a bell between the two buildings, and kept on rocking the tubes by leaning his naked body on the wheel. It was certainly a heroic scene, in which as if a body carrying a solemn history confronted the contemporary age. Lin Tian Miao Bound Unbound 1997 One of the installations that caught the attention was by Lin Tian Miao, a female artist, who placed many domestic tools, which were covered with thread reeled around them over many years, on the floor. They were a group of fetish works that were feministic, but also strange and elegant at the same time, carrying an ambivalent nature of restraint from daily life and deviation from objects. Other works included Wang Gong Xin's work in which he implanted video monitors on both sides of the wall of a narrow corridor, and Wang Jin's performance of barter trading with the audience held for the opening of the event. The incisive, tense methods, and the sense of leisurely time and space of the respective individual artists, coexisted in the exhibition site. Though small in scale, the event was an effective project that will pave the way for the introduction of contemporary art in China. [Akira TATEHATA/Art Critic]

Art Watch Back Number Index

May 6, 1997

Jun. 10, 1997