Metro Pulse/Artbeat/Tradition and Transnationalism

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What:
Tradition and Transnationalism: Three Contemporary Chinese Artists

Where:
Ewing Gallery, 1715 Volunteer Boulevard

When:
Through February 7

Call 974-3200 for information.

The world of Wenda Gu and two other contemporary Chinese artists

by Heather Joyner

Imagine standing within an immense box constructed of gossamer panels. Or go do it at UT's Ewing Gallery.

Tied together, sections composing the aforementioned box extend 15 feet or so above us and as many feet sideways in a blur of brownish tones. Monumental but fragile—almost transparent—the panels feature imaginary Chinese characters woven from human hair. Like an insect suspended in a spider's web, we're surrounded by space, but are virtually contained. We're perhaps provided with written instructions for escape, but cannot read them. A subtle opening faces the west wall, away from the main gallery. Hair swept from floors of countless barbershops around the world makes up this remarkable net, an enclosure both personal and impossibly beyond individual capacity. As in China, we're reminded of the perpetual tension between the "I" and the "We"—formerly between "Me" and "Mao." It's a world that Wenda Gu, creator of the above installation (titled "United Nations 2000"), knows well.

I am by no means an expert on the political history of modern Asia. I do, however, believe that at the dawn of the 21st Century in the Year of the Snake, China looms large in more than a geographical sense. Its considerable might and economic potential could well position it at the top of the world heap in decades to come. But at the top in what sense? In his Devil's Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce has defined "millennium" as "the period of a thousand years when the lid is to be screwed down, with all reformers on the under side." But who are the reformers, and which side are they on?

An emphasis by the powers-that-be throughout the 1990's on getting rich and competing with the capitalist West has not benefited artists in China, nor has it done much for human rights. Following 1989's Tiananmen Square uprising and massacre, slogans encouraging wealth are rampant, whereas the ideas of potentially threatening artists and intellectuals have been shoved under the rug like so many Chinese checkers. For a brief period before Tiananmen, it looked like chucking Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution and welcoming foreign influence might result in a Renaissance of sorts. Instead, most artists have flourished afield as expatriates.

The work of a few such artists can presently be seen at the Ewing Gallery, if only for one week longer. Like serpents, we're sometimes required to act without hesitation. In addition to Gu's box, we have He Gong's large, dark paintings and Chen Danqing's impressive triptychs and epic tableau consisting of ten canvases. It's all very BIG and bold for reasons beyond scale, yet the show is somehow earnest. Call my observation a Taoist-Zen cliché, if you will. Art In America critic Eleanor Heartney calls the work "Cynical Realism [bridging] pre- and post-Tiananmen years—[combining] the Zen renunciation of self and a Fluxus-style attack on the preciousness of art."

The exhibit's three avant garde artists all maintain residences in Manhattan, although Danqing has relocated to head the art department of Beijing's Tsing Hua University after 18 years in the U.S. Gu is working on approximately 30 simultaneous projects from New York and installs exhibits in places like Hong Kong and Shanghai as well as in Europe. Like Danqing, Gong teaches in China (spending half of the year at Sichuan University), and is planning—alongside Knoxville Art Professor Tom Riesing—an exchange program between Sichuan U. and the U. of T. Interestingly enough, Sichuan is the same university that in 1981 urged painter Luo Zhongli to modify a portrait that numerous official critics found controversial. Size-wise, it apparently alluded a bit too much to propagandist portraits of Mao Zedong.

Danqing's two massive triptychs, each sandwiching a photo-realist painting between images in color, could be considered companion pieces in that they both juxtapose similar elements. The black, white, and gray portions successfully evoke a bland Communist era. Danqing's mastery of traditional style and content combined with a "modern perspective" and traditionally-rendered 20th century subject matter works to produce rigid chaos. The poet Charles Baudelaire asserted that Romantic bigwig Eugène Delacroix restored to painting "the feeling which delights in the terrible." The same might be said of Danqing. Equating recent civil unrest with classical themes and including dated-looking scenarios of a woman being mauled at a party or ballerinas posing en masse, his work forces us to question how events are presented. We're also pushed to examine our perceptions of events within time. All I can say about Danqing's ten-part "Still Life, 1995" is that it must be seen to be fully appreciated. Encompassing everything from an absurdly disembodied leg a la René Magritte and Edouard Manet's "Olympia" from the knees down to the central image of a junked Nazi tank strewn with bicycle parts, it's a show-stopper.

Gong's paintings "The Thick Growth of Grass, #2 and #3," are likewise in-your-face, but more introspective than Danqing's. Sweeping fields of black pigment are dotted with gold squares containing miscellaneous personal effects. "European Train Station, 1996," although less abstract, similarly emphasizes a small square shape—in this instance, the block of light at the end of a tunnel.

Heartney writes, "It's a mistake to see modernism and postmodernism solely in Western terms—Chinese history and tradition offer contemporary Chinese artists their own set of influences to extend or battle against, while also reminding us that Chinese artists are buffeted by the same tumultuous, global changes that affect their Western counterparts." Whether as one or many, we have much to consider. And art, no matter what its origins may be, plays an intriguing role in our quest to understand our world.