Photo SF, Chinese Artist Network, and Wang Ning De

Before I stopped by Photo San Francisco this Saturday I did not exactly know what I should expect. Hosted by Stephan Cohen gallery and sponsored by 60 galleries and dealers from US and Europe, it was one of the largest such exhibitions in the West Coast. Not to my surprise, I found most works familiar, beautifully framed, and rather boring. There were plenty of works signed with famous but dead names, and it was not unusual to find several different prints from the same negative. San Francisco celebrity artists, such as Michael Kenna, Todd Hiddo and Richard Misrach, dotted a number of the booths. After all, this was a trade show where only “safe”, established, and highly decorative works were appreciated or aimed to be put through transactions. No one takes risks, and most of the attendees probably do not have a taste for edgier and more experimental works. For myself, I hardly learned anything new and quickly forgot most of the images that flashed through my eyes.

However, I did have one good discovery. At one of the booths I found Chinese Artist Network, a newly-formed and loosely-connected Bay Area group which helps to promote photographers of Chinese origins. I have long wondered that such a group might exist, and finding them is almost like finding an adopted home.

They only hang a few works in the booth, but one definitely caught my eyes. It showed two Chinese men in Mao suits standing and dozing off in the backdrop of sky and clouds. The makeup they wore made them look like carders in revolutionary Peking operas. Abby Chen, a lady who sat in the booth, mentioned to me that the photographer, Wang Ning-De, was one of her favorites. I browsed through a zine-like brochure on the desk and got a quick glimpse of a whole body of works from Wang. Somehow these images stuck to my mind.

The internet did not give me more information about Wang other than the short bio listed in the CAN’s website. The same website also showed ten photos of his, which more or less came from the same series. They showed various characters, solo or in group, dozing off against various backgrounds. The moods they created vary too: Some are disturbing, some are cute and humorous. But they invariably give very ambiguous meanings and metaphors. Why are they sleeping in these unlikely situations? What are they dreaming? Or, in one image, you would wonder whether the kid lying on the ground is sleeping or actually dead. Whoever sees these pictures will inevitably face the questions of interpretations. The pictures are obviously staged with great efforts, but the intention is never clear.

Sleepy human figures are not new in Chinese modern art. Fang Lijun, a major player from early nineties, painted a huge yawning face in the heyday of Cynical Realism movement. Several other painters also took the same approach, rendering typicalized Chinese faces with or without expressions, as a way of self-mockery or defiance of the fast-changing realities. Wang’s sleeping figures seem to have taken a cue from that period, but they evolved and expanded the limit of the cynicism. He introduced child nudity, art history reference (the dancing children greatly resembles Matisse’s famous work) and more narrative structures into these images, while all of them form a complete self-referential visual system where time seems to be frozen, sleeping is the norm of existence, and humankind are ever more isolated even if they are in groups. These images somehow depict a space between reality and dreams, and audience can further decipher and decide for themselves what stories they tell and what mood they can convey. The mystery is beyond the words.

Black-White Song Village (Hei Bai Song Zhuang) - Zhao Tie Lin

The Chinese avant-garde art movement in the last two decades is probably one of the most unique events in the art history that deserves some attention of the future historians. It is still unclear whether this movement would leave behind any significant works that would be long remembered, but study of this unusual phenomenon would shed some light on some very basic questions about art: Why do people make art, sometimes against all odds and out of all kinds of madness? What is the function or role of art in a society that is rapidly transforming itself? How does art survive and move from fringe to the center?

Zhao TieLing’s new book, Black-White Song Village, is not an ambitious project to set about to answer these big questions. Instead it focused on daily life of a dozen free-lance artists who live and work in a rural village on the outskirt of Beijing, which has also been compared to early SoHo in New York or Montmartre in Paris. The village is not the first congregated living environment for Chinese artists. As early as 1990, YuanMingYuan Painter’s village was once made quite famous due to over-exposure to media. The artists in that village were eventually dispersed when the district government decided to clean up the neighborhood. Quite a number of them moved further away from Beijing and settled in Song Village. Over the time the village grew in reputation and became a magnate for artists of all kinds, some of whom have already been well established internationally, while most of others are struggling and little known.

Zhao selected a range of characters and devoted one chapter to each of them. Mixing dialogues with black-white snapshots, he used the usual photojournalistic format. The style of the dialogues runs from casual chitchatting to serious conversation on art. The photo shots are usually candid and intimate. The featured artists, often seen from the back and at a low angle with light lit behind, rarely stared straight into camera and did not seem to even notice the camera’s presence. If they did happen to look at the camera, they appeared slightly coy. Zhao must have got to know them fairly well in order to shoot at such a close distance. The artists were chosen not by their success but by how well they represent certain group or certain hierarchy in the village. They often had more interesting stories to tell, although some of them seemed to waster their time away in the village because it offered an isolated utopia where irresponsibility and craziness could be tolerated. Zhao’s intention is quite clear: He wants to give a more comprehensive view with their most private moments. Observant but not intrusive, these pictures give no embellishment of such kind of bohemian life but shows the unpretentious and the unforgiving sides.

Zhao was trained as a computer scientist but had a true passion for photo-journalism. After a few years in Computer Science Institute in Beijing, he gave up on science and devoted himself full-time to photography when he was well into his 40s. In the early 90s this could be seen as unusually rebellious and might have raised many eyebrows. From mid 90s, he published a series of books on marginal characters of the society: prostitutes, migrant workers, artists, people who exist outside the official system. It is a very rich and provocative vintage point: As China reformed itself from state-controlled socialism into a market driven free economy, more and more people left the land and old work units and ventured into migration without the official system to fall back on. Zhao wanted to document these changes and capture all the human dramas, both tragic and comical, with his lenses. By exposing the life of the poorest and most marginal characters, he also aimed to educate the prejudiced mainstream readers and hopefully bring changes to the system.

But with Black-White Song Village, Zhao hit a homerun since the material itself was highly relevant for his own artistic endeavors. His specialties, or his signature themes, are still there: The liveliest parts of the book are the anecdotes and life stories, narrated by the artists themselves. Their personalities and the hardships they encountered came well through the interviews. While letting the artists talked about their own ideas and strategies, Zhao also peppered his questions with his own thoughts on art and practice of art. He knew well that both the artists and himself faced the same questions : How can one maintain his atristic integrity while surviving in this market-oriented society? How does one pursue his/her individual freedom and financial success while remaining socially responsible? How far can one go in terms of self-promotion and making his/her works known? The answers are not so simple, and there may never be good answers.

As China continues to change and move forward, its internal art market is also slowly developing itself and the government also started to organize exhibitions and reform the art schools. Gone are the days when avant-garde artists had no other means to survive other than selling works outside China. Zhao’s first-hand sketches froze a particular time moment at a particular location, and his efforts would prove invaluable in the near future when the art scene could be entirely different from what is now. After all, the initial growth is often painful and slow and the pioneers often have a lot to pay.

Staging is Fun - Wang QingSong

Staged photography is all the rage now, and it is getting bigger and more expensive. Gregory Grewdson is probably one of the most prominent photographers specialized in this genre, using expensive equipments, a large crew and even Hollywood celebrities to create dark, surrealistic and suburbia epics. 

Jeff Wall, the Canadian who started this whole thing 20 years ago, stick to his more political themes, subtle but no less poignant. The Chinese artists apparently do not want to be left behind either: Wang QingSong, a photographer from Beijing and the brightest rising star, is taking New York art scene by a storm. Not only did New York Times use one of his images on last week’s magazine, it also dedicated an article about him on this Sunday’s art session, presenting it as a hard proof that Chinese modern art is catching up. Currently his works can be seen at his first New York solo show (Salon 94) and at the upcoming exhibition at ICP and Asia Society.

So what are all these buzzes about and why are the foreign curators so enthusiastic about him? I clicked through his website with these questions in my mind. I am usually a bit suspicious on Chinese artists who earned their fames in the West. Due to lack of official support in China and driven by greed, Chinese artists have a weakness to take shortcuts and cater to whatever the foreign art market wants. Some of them cashed out, while majority of them produced mediocre art and lost their true sense of creativity.

Regardless of any type of criticism, Wang’s images are definitely very impressive. They are very large prints (the longest is 31feet), eye-popping, colorful and story-telling. Any museum goer would be immediately drawn in by their sheer sizes, and he or she would not move away quickly because there are a lot to see and a lot to decipher. For western eyes, they can be both familiar and strange to look at. You may recognize Manet and Botticelli, you may know some Chinese famous paintings being referred but you won’t know which. The themes are inevitably both exotic and universal. To some degree this is the kind of modern Chinese art you expect to see (postmodernism practised using Chinese art tradition), but on the other hand, there are enough surprises to keep you engaged. The line between Western art and Chinese art is deliberately blurred here, and the visual and intellectual pleasures are abounded.

But Wang is not entirely original in his approaches. The lavish setting, the theatric posing and vibrant colors can be found in David La Chapella and Pierra et Gilles. The political pop and irony on commercialism have been overdone in the early to mid 90s by Wang Guanyi and a few others. The famila battle scenes were once staged by Paul Smith and Jeff Wall. The stitching of the scenes with help of photoshop to create long scrolls was probably first tried by Sam Taylor-Wood in her Five Revolutionary Seconds, and referring art history and famous paintings in staged photography is once specialty of Jeff Wall. But Wang is still the first one who combined all of above in his images, who borrowed Chinese art (both classic and revolutionary) so freely and in the end he formed his own particular vernacular to create visual wonders as well as a very dry but witty sense of humor to critique the absurdity of modern life (and the art world). Wang is very self-conscious. He can mock exactly what he intends to be.