Beijing Encounters Brit-art Aftershock--

Beijing Encounters Brit-art Aftershock

2007-05-23 14:56:08 [ Big Normal Small ] Mark Berthold 　Comment

Beijing is less outward-looking than such coastal cities than Shanghai. But it’s increasingly hosting exhibitions of contemporary art from western countries. A notable recent example was the Guggenheim curated exhibition Art in America: 300 Years of Innovation at the National Art Museum of China. Aftershock: Contemporary British Art 1990-2005 at the excellent bilingual Capital Museum was decidedly smaller and more daring.

The exhibition was lit like an avant-garde Plato’s Cave. This, combined with the unconventionality of the exhibits, produced a slightly hallucinatory effect. The day I visited only a few other visitors were to be spotted among the hushed shadows and light. Such spaces are rare in Beijing and facilitate a degree of self-awareness that jostling crowds preclude. It is perhaps for this reason that I encountered this gent in front of a Douglas Gordan video.

Is his fist raised in anger or rather an exhortation urging the fallen figure to get back on his feet? Either way it was an intriguing spectacle whereby the viewer shades into active participation in the work.

In my Beijing’s 798 Art District in this space we saw Zhao Limin addressing the issue of militarism. This work by Mona Hatoum is twee by comparison, but nonetheless is accorded the digital nod of approval.

More arresting is this sculpture of Stephen Hawking by Jay Joplin and the painting by Jake and Dinos Douglas in the background increases the impression of a cosmos-induced contemporary crucifixion.

Later this year Beijing’s National Art Museum of China will host an exhibition of paintings from Madrid’s great Prado Museum. Hopefully this will include later works by Goya-Western painting’s first truly modern sensibility and more genuinely “shocking” than anything seen here. I am also hoping that the hosting museum’s website at www.namoc.org will have an English version by then in this city of 15 million.

Mark Berthold Copyright 2007

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