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REVIEWS THE REAL THING
THE REAL THING: When Andy Warhol made his blue Mao screen print in 1972, two paradoxical icons – communism and the capitalist aesthetic of consumerism – collided. Possibly even
CONTEMPORARY Warhol couldn’t have imagined that one day the work would sell for $17.4 million to a Hong Kong millionaire.
ART FROM CHINA Times have changed. Since joining the World Trade Organisation in 2001, China has become one the world’s biggest economies. As the orthodoxies of Maoism
TATE LIVERPOOL dissolve into global capitalism, auction prices for Chinese art are at an all time high. But
30 MARCH – 10 JUNE where does this place contemporary Chinese practice? A vast show at Tate Liverpool
brings together 18 artists – including Ai Weiwei and Fake Studio, Qiu Xiaofei, Wang
Wei, Yang Shaobin and Zhuang Hui – presenting works all produced since 2000.
Perhaps to avoid criticisms of a parochial Western institutional perspective, curator
Simon Groom collaborated on the show with the Beijing-based writer and curator
Karen Smith, and the Shanghai-based artist and curator Xu Zhen.
We see the artist Xu Zhen’s 8848 Minus 1.86 (2005), a witty piece that plays with the idea of of_f_i cial authority by
claiming to have cut the top of_f Mount Everest – bringing back the souvenir as installation – and thus confounding the of_f_i cial
height as originally set by the British in 1856. Although conceptually nifty, Xu Zhen’s idea is made disappointingly clunky in a
gallery space fi lled with climbing paraphernalia and fake snow. More successful overall is the video work by Cao Fei, Whose
Utopia? What are you doing here? (2006). Here we watch workers in an Osram lighting factory in southern China slowly
break away from their banal production-line tasks to enact a gently choreographed sort of industrial ballet. A girl pirouettes
between the stacks of a vast warehouse, a man moves rhythmically in the packing plant. Cao Fei’s work is an elegant and
knowing take on the Maoist dream and nightmare in a world of manufacturing, not Marxism, one of individual labour but also
collective hopes. Yet we then learn that the piece’s concept resulted from Siemens’s invitation to Chinese artists to make work
within their plants. Suddenly the corporation, and not the artist, becomes the savvy author of the fi lm.
This is the uneasy theme that pervades the show: what becomes of Chinese art as a global commodity? On the show’s
opening night an incredible fi reworks display by the Yangjiang Group enacted an epic battle over the Mersey; a medium
both embodying an ancient Chinese art, and the transient, immaterial nature of art itself. Curiously, however, only guests
holding tickets were allowed to view it. The Tate had commissioned the sky? The unpleasant pull of this art’s commodifi cation
is only further enhanced by the press release, which in introducing the works commissioned by the Tate refers fi rst to their
substantial cost – £100,000 for Ai Weiwei and Fake Studio’s 2007 Working Progress (Fountain of Light), a glittery reworking
of Tatlin’s unbuilt Monument to the Third International, and £50,000 on the fi rework display. It puts utopian ambitions for a
brave new world in a strange new light. Sarah James
Cao Fei, Whose Utopia? What are you doing here?, 2006, video. © the artist.
one.linfive.lintwo.lin ARTREVIEW
p147-161 Reviews AR Jun07.indd 7 3/5/07 16:22:52
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