Freedom ghosts

There is no greater pleasure than to cast down and break a tyrant’s statue: the idol has fallen, his rule is over.

There is no sweeter spectacle than a knocked down bully cop who protected the tyrant.

A piece called Officer marks the entrance to the exhibition “China China” that is located in the PinchukArtCentre. Its author, 30-year-old Zhao Zhao, came out to Tiananmen Square (where the communist government shot down a peaceful demonstration in 1989) in Beijing in 2008 wearing the uniform of the security forces officer, who was one of the people who did the shooting. The police did not discover him right away, but when they did, they brutally arrested him. Officer was inspired by this story: a monumental social realistic limestone sculpture, which was torn down and broken into large pieces (with the head separated), with the arrest date of the most famous Chinese artist of today Ai Weiwei carved on it. Zhao was Weiwei’s assistant for many years. The sculpture is bold and plain, like a kick on the riot policeman’s shield.

Weiwei ranks first in ArtReview’s 2011 guide to the 100 most powerful figures in contemporary art. After living in the US for over 10 years, he returned to China in 1993, and since then the communist government has had a talented and principal opponent inside the country.

The minimalist elegance of ideas and the striking scale of performance are typical for his projects. One only needs to recall the stadium “Bird’s Nest,” designed by Weiwei for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, or the Sunflower Seeds (100 million of sunflower seeds, evenly scattered on the floor of the Tate Modern’s huge Turbine Hall in London; porcelain seeds have been hand-made and painted).

Weiwei’s installations Rooted Upon (2009) and Fairytale (2007) occupy the whole second floor of the gallery. Even though these are two separate projects, they make up an organic piece and certainly are a distinct center of the whole exhibition.

Rooted Upon consists of 32 (the original amount is 100) huge stumps of old trees, brought from all major Chinese regions, dry, hard, and polished over time. They fill the room, turning it into a park of large hieroglyphs.

Fairytale is a project carried out specially for an influential exhibition “Documenta” in Kassel. Weiwei paid for the tickets of 1,001 of his blog readers to Kassel. He also provided them with the necessities of his own design: from suitcases to beds in hostels. Weiwei documented this wonderful journey of his poor fellow countrymen, who did not even dream of ever visiting the West. Photos (535 out of 1,001) on the walls in Kyiv are a part of that documentation. Hundreds of people, photographed from the same angle against a limited set of typical Western urban landscapes. The idea is clear and easy to read in both installations, however, together they form a new sense quality. People torn off their roots, and roots pulled out of soil; 1,000 as a plurality and 1 as a unique person; the same background and composition and absolutely different faces; similarly dried stumps with not even two alike among them. Weiwei knows how to work with such pluralities and open both their beauty and their hopelessness: 550 bicycle wheels in the installation Forever Bicycles can each rotate around its own axis, but all of them are rigidly attached to the power vertical – a perfect embodiment of the combination of savage capitalism and authoritarian regime that prevails in today’s China.

In general, a symbolic replacement of a human with an object is one of the exhibition’s leitmotifs. After Officer and Forever Bicycles, this story is continued by Eyeliner – fashion store designed by 35-year-old Cao Fei. At first, it looks like a regular store with some clothes and chairs for visitors; however, clothing labels contain stories printed in fine print, stories of those who wore those clothes; photos of the stories’ main characters are placed alongside. This boutique features clothing as a story and story as a characteristic of the clothing, and a human somewhere between them.

Teenager Teenager by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu makes a darker impression. This installation consists of wax figures of nicely dressed ladies and gentlemen that sit in a cozy bourgeois living room with huge stone blocks instead of heads. At the feet of the still members of this social hallucination, living children, completely hidden in cardboard boxes, are crawling around, and the only sound they make comes from the whistles they blow. Children in boxes at the feet of stone-headed grown-ups make up a good image of how generations do not hear and do not want to hear each other.

Sounds of live boxes are blocked by the noise from the next installation by the same authors – a group of blindfolded men behind a metal fence in a specially constructed armor room puts together and takes apart guns. This exercise, familiar to any person with Soviet past, looks like a threatening biomechanical performance, in which it is not a man playing with weapon, but a weapon possesses a man. In both, the first installation, where characters do not see each other, and the second one, where participants rely on their automatic reflexes only, to see means to have a choice, to get identity, which eventually destroys any tyranny.

Also, symbolic substitution rules in Xu Zhen’s Movement Field. He arranged a real park in two halls, with live plants, hills, and pebbled paths. Photocopies of author’s works with politically relevant names serve as sculptures in this park. It turns out that the pattern of paths in the Movement Field follows the route of the protest march that went through many cities once. Zhen takes the revolution project and presents it as an art project, thus occupying a winning position.

Zhao Yao offers a similar approach, but with a different goal. Last year, he traveled 4,000 kilometers from Beijing to Tibet to have some pictures made of denim blessed by the living incarnation of Buddha. His part of the exhibition consists of giant photos of Lhasa temples, covered with paintings brought from the travels. Psychogeography is in action here: whether the paintings are visions from other reality in Tibetan landscapes, or Tibet seems to be a mirage compared to the materially embodied art.

Another interesting internal parallel is between Weiwei’s archaeological Rooted Upon, Fei’s Eyeliner, and the “anti-archaeology” of Purification Room, created by Chen Zhen (1955-2000), space, filled with contemporary everyday items, from supermarket carts to dishes and computers, covered with an even layer of reddish clay. They look as if they just have been dug out of the ground, though they were covered with dirt intentionally. In such paradoxical way, consumption acquires an absolutely different quality: if Fei tells small and specific stories, Weiwei transfers stories into the plane of symbolic abstraction, Zhen tries to tell a great story, which is objective through the banality of items that surround us.

If we speak about symbols, Zhang Huan made two real live piglets in a wooden barn with hay the center of his installation. It was done not only because of the importance of those animals in everyday Chinese life, but first of all, because of the legend, related to the terrible earthquake in Sichuan in 2008: 49 days after the catastrophe took place, a live pig was rescued from under the ruins. It was even given its own name, Zhu Gangqiang. Number 49 is important in the Buddhist tradition, it is believed that a soul of a deceased person stays on the earth for this number of days before the new reincarnation. Huan took the saved animal and it became a centerpiece of his art. In general, Huan’s works can be described as post-catastrophic: he paints a saved pig and people with ash on canvas, and keeps live pigs as a memory of destruction.

Perhaps, the most frivolous section is Yan Xing’s Sex Comedy (his equally provocative works have been exhibited in PinchukArtCentre before): striking artifacts are laid on a table, covered with white cloth. Situated near exquisite silver cutlery, are wooden replicas of dildos of various ages (some originals were even made before our era). Young men dressed as servants take care of the table; they make some ordinary routine gestures with set expressions on their faces, making it all look somewhat absurd and ridiculous, considering the whole entourage.

And finally, a significant esthetic pole of the exhibition, absolutely opposite to Rooted Upon, film Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest by Yang Fudong. Fudong is the most famous Chinese video artist today. He uses 35 mm film and then transforms the material into exhibition format. Last year, visitors of Kyiv ARSENALE could see his work The Nightman Cometh (2011). At the moment, three out of five parts of Fudong’s main work are exhibited at the PinchukArtCentre.

The premiere of the first part of Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest took place at the Venice Biennale in 2003, and all five parts were completed before the Biennale in 2007. The film is based on an ancient (3rd century AD) plot of Chinese literature about the seven Taoist sages, who fled from the authoritarian Confucian government to enjoy poetry, nature, and the pleasures of life.

Fudong’s videos are always black and white and silent. Each part of Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest is made according to a similar principle: a group of young people (performed by non-professionals, artist’s friends) in the forest, at the seaside, or in a city is performing actions that may appear both logical and reasonable, and absolutely meaningless. From the point of view of traditional cinematography, this is an unjustified waste of screen time. However, this is not entirely a film, but rather a video art, and Seven Intellectuals is a unique performance film, the characters of which create their own artistic reality with their actions, opposed to the world of hierarchy, constraint, and rationality. Just as in other Fudong’s works, the dramaturgy of escape and dreams is combined with fascinating meditativeness. Seven Intellectuals can be viewed from any point, at any time, and this flow of images absorbs the viewers’ consciousness completely. Fudong’s art is literally a pure form of visual poetry.

In general, at the “China China” exhibition, we have a rare privilege: to see the art of a great country on the verge of breathtaking changes. A unique situation has formed in Chinese art now: powerful, diverse resistance to the pressure of dead official ideology is embodied in perfect shapes. We see artists gifted in various ways, but all of them value freedom the same.

And when freedom comes, some will be at a loss, some will withdraw into their shell, but others, instead, will become stronger. But it will happen later. For now, they see freedom in their dreams, and these dreams are the best thing they have in their lives.