Contemporary Chinese Art
10.-23.10.11
Today Art Museum, Beijing
Installations
Today Art Museum show an exhibition by contemporary Chinese artists, based on the concept "Guanxi".
Guanxi describes the basic dynamic in personalized networks of influence, and is a central idea in Chinese society. In Western media, the pinyin romanization of this Chinese word is becoming more widely used instead of the two common translations—"connections" and "relationships"—as neither of those terms sufficiently reflects the wide cultural implications that guanxi describes. ... At its most basic, guanxi describes a personal connection between two people in which one is able to prevail upon another to perform a favor or service, or be prevailed upon. (From Wikipedia)
What I find in this exhibition is rather the absense of personal connections and relationships. The people of Zhang Dali's "Brownian Movement" are connected through the intricate structure, but they seem rather trapped and isolated, in the maze they have made. Otherwise there is an interesting variety of "nonsense-machines" - machines with no purpose, but with personalities like "scholar" and "fortune-teller". And a very interesting project turning Chang'an Avenue into technical structures.
Zhang Dali: Brownian Movement
Qiu Zijie: The Scholar
Qiu Zijie: The Fortune-Teller
Shi Jinsong: The Code of Chang'an Avenue
Shi Jinsong: The Code of Chang'an Avenue
