Sultry, huh? Untitled (Marilyn / Mao) is just one of many striking works in the Peabody Essex Museum's new exhibit, Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection, open to the public Saturday through May 17. Of course, if I told you it was a Warhol from the 1960s, you'd just be mildly amused. What's striking about it is that it was painted in China in 2005, by the artist Yu Youhan. It's one of several openly subversive images of Mao in the exhibit - in a room that also includes numerous propaganda posters of the Chairman. The relative possibility of free expression in China is one of the threads running through this exhibit, which features a timeline of contemporary artists' freedom there - the dark era of the Cultural Revolution, the famous 1979 "fence exhibit," the post-Tiananmen Square clampdown, and the more recent loosening amid the country's explosive economic growth.
Current government restrictions on artists often seem "random," said artist Zhang O, who splits her time between New York and Beijing and attended this morning's press breakfast. Problems can result if an organizer has offended an official or failed to make the proper arrangements. And of course some topics, such as Tibet, are not to be discussed. But there is much more freedom than there used to be, she said. "You can do sex and violence (in art)," she said. "Lots of people do to get attention, because there are so many artists in China." Ah, freedom.
Boston is one of only two U.S. venues for the exhibit. Collector Uli Sigg is a Swiss businessman who worked on the first joint venture between China and the west in the same year as the fence exhibit. At the museum this morning, he said he was shocked to find that no one, in or outside China, was collecting contemporary Chinese art in any organized way, and so he set out to do so. He collected widely - "like an institution, not my personal taste" - assembling 2,500 pieces by 250 artists. One result is this broad survey, which includes painting, photography, video and installation art and covers 10,000 square feet in three galleries, even though it has been considerably scaled down from its appearance at Berkeley. The opportunity to re-shuffle the works at each venue and re-appraise different aspects of Chinese culture is why the exhibit is called Mahjong.
Much more after the jump...
Top, Untitled (Marilyn / Mao), 2005, Yu Youhan, oil on canvas, 63 x 48 inches, Sigg Collection, courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum. Bottom, 2000 A.D., 2000, Yue Minjun, Painted plyester, 25 figures, each 74 x 18 inches, Sigg Collection, courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum.
Although the exhibit has been in the works for a year and a half or more, at PEM it was installed by the museum's first contemporary art curator, Trevor Smith, who just started work in September. One of his most interesting moves was to feature a few pieces from the exhibit in parts of the museum where PEM exhibits its own collection of Chinese art and artifacts. In a gallery filled with porcelain from the 1700s, Smith has put an ironic little bust called "Boy Reading Mao Book" by Xu Yihui and a work called "Obsessive Memories," by Liu Jianhua, which is basically a case full of small sculptures of women from the waist down, wearing all sorts of frilly dresses and kicking up their legs. One's political, one's cheerfully pervy, and both suggest that Chinese artists have come a long way, baby.
In another gallery, next to a gorgeous traditional silk robe belonging to PEM, is a work called "A Dream of China" by Wang Jin - it's also a robe, with equally exquisite patterning, but made of clear polyvinyl and monofilament. It's halfway between beautiful and a shower curtain. That's just one of many works in Mahjong in which artists overtly wrestle with traditions - artistic, social and personal. The dramatic nine-photo work "Family Tree," by Zhang Huan, documents what happened when he hired artisans to write his family history on his face - by the end all but his eyes have disappeared under the ink.
Zhang O's work tackles tradition and also takes advantage of new freedoms in China. Called "Horizon," it is a wall-sized collection of 21 photo portraits of Chinese girls aged 4-6 from one rural village. Girl children in rural communities are the "most repressed" people in the country, Zhang said, and she posed them primarily in squatting positions, as if the energy contained within them is about to explode. (I wanted to pose Zhang with her work, but - ironically enough - I was not allowed to take a photo inside the exhibition.)
The artist's choice of medium is a parable of liberation in itself. She said art education there focuses on techniques rather than philosophy and personal voice. Schooled as an artist since age 7, she said that she was "fed up with painting" by 23. "I wanted to do something on my own, secretly, so I began to use the camera to express myself," she said, choosing her new medium in part because there were no photo classes at her art school.
She's not the only artist in the exhibit who uses young girls to express something about the future of the country, as in this image, "On The Wall - Guangzhou (II)," by Weng Fen:
This is one of several stunning images of the mind-boggling growth of China's cities. Shi Guorui's "Shanghai, China, 15-16 October 2004" is a 20-foot-wide panorama of that city's newly hatched skyline, in eerie black and white reverse, like a negative. The artist rented an office with a view, covered the window with a black cloth, poked a 5mm hole in the cloth and then hung a huge piece of photo paper on the back wall - turning the entire room into a pinhole camera, with an exposure time of hours.
Some conceptual pieces that left me cold. Ai Weiwei's installation features 56 neolithic urns bearing some of the earliest painting in China's history; the artist covered the designs on half of them with whitewash. Um...so? But others were surprisingly effective, mostly notably Song Dong's 1996 "Breathing," with two photos of the artist in a prone position, as if at the bottom of a pushup. He is blowing on the ground - trying to melt a tiny bit of ice in a frozen Beijing lake in the daytime in one picture, and trying to create a tiny patch of frost at night in the middle of Tiananmen Square in the other. Described like this, it seems too on-the-nose, almost maudlin, but in fact it's a little moment of heartbreak and, because of the exhibit that surrounds it, also full of hope.
Top: Family Tree, 2000, Zhang Huan, 9 color photographs, 4 ft. 2 in. x 3 ft. 4 in. each, Sigg Collection, courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum. Bottom: On The Wall - Guangzhou (II), 2002, Weng Fen, Color photograph 49 x 67 in., Sigg Collection, courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum.
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