Hugo Tillman
June 2 to 26
F2 Gallery
319 Caochangdi, Chaoyang district
T: +86 10 6432 8831
www.f2gallery.com
www.hugotillman.com
The solo exhibition of film stills serves as the culmination of Hugo Tillman's two-year 'Film Stills of the Mind' project. The New York-based artist, who conceived the project after he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, interviewed approximately 80 contemporary Chinese artists and made films based on the interviews. The project recalls Cindy Sherman's 'Untitled Film Stills'. But rather than appear in his own work, Tillman directs the artists themselves to act out fantasies and scenarios that he created after the interview process. Dark, personal, quirky and entertaining, "Film Stills of the Mind" maps the psyche of the Chinese contemporary art world. The show also reflects a rise in status for Chinese artists, even here on the Mainland.
Hugo Tillman, "Film Still of the Mind"
Courtesy of the artist and F2 Gallery (Beijing)
Anatoly Shuravlev
June 2 to July 14
Galerie Urs Meile
Caochangdi N 104, Chaoyang district
T: +86 10 6433 3393
www.galerieursmeile.com
Shuravlev's work explores the positive tension between disparate media, notably painting and photography. Shuravlev's unique multi-stage process involves layering watercolor, photography and acrylics.
Anatoly Shuravlev, "Look at", 2007
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne
Fast Break
Until June 20
PKM Gallery
46-C Caochangdi, Chaoyang district
T: +86 10 8456 6245
PKM Gallery opened their new Beijing space last year with a show by New York artists who took 9/11 as their point of reference. "Fast Break" shifts our attention to the Korean peninsula with a showing of fourteen Korean artists. HAM Jin's miniature wax sculptures almost always steal the show. The thumb-sized figures are cute because they are so tiny. Here at PKM, the figures either fall from the ceiling or cling for dear life to a paper airplane. As the nude figures scream and fall through space and hang on to the plane, their mouths are blown wide open by wind force. Complete with microscopic sexual organs, these mini-creatures turn from cute to grotesque when you examine them under a magnifying glass.
KIM Sanggil presents photographic studies of city buildings. The photos are cool portrayals of a bright afternoon (or morning) where the structures at once stand firm and smothered in piping and air conditioner units. What we see are the backs of the buildings, complete with rust stains and faded paint jobs. These people-less back-alley shots allow the structures to take on a life of their own. The lives of the buildings seem estranged from human lives. This essential detail intensifies under the bright sun, lending each shot lyrical coldness.
On the second floor, YOON Jeong-mee contributes warmer, but no less ironic, portraits of Korean children surrounded by their toys - like little emperors and empresses of a material world. Elsewhere, SONG See-hee presents poems projected in light on the gallery floor in an installation called "Evening Primrose." The poems were written by sex workers in Amsterdam's Red Light district. They read better, though, when they are site-specific (they were previously illuminated on the cobbles in the Red Light district).
The most enduring aspect of this group effort comes from video artist PARK Chan-Kyong. PARK's video, "Flying", examines what a plane symbolizes to Koreans north and south of the 38th parallel. For South Koreans, it suggests freedom through travel. For North Koreans - memories of American bombardment. This tension gains narrative energy as the camera focuses on a specific plane ride from South to North Korea for the first North-South summit in 2000. Set to a soundtrack from Yun Isang's 1977 composition, "Double Concerto", the video turns haunting as the plane lands. The reception in Pyongyang is impressive as the masses enthusiastically wave flowers of welcome in a gesture that feels both hopeful and staged.
YOON Jeong-mee, "Pink Project - Yerim and Her Pink Things"
Courtesy of the artist and PKM Gallery (Beijing, Seoul)
Liu Wei
Until June 20
Universal Studios-Beijing
No. A8 Caochangdi, Chaoyang district
T: +86 10 6432 2620
www.universalstudios.org.cn
If you enjoy doses of wry social commentary, this is your show. Liu Wei captures both the political and physical atmosphere of Beijing with a 150 sq metre installation entitled, "The Outcast." The floor of a dilapidated social meeting-hall is covered in sand and shreds of newspapers. Huge fans blow powerful gusts into the hall, literally bringing the harshness of the city's weather flying into the chamber. Liu Wei's painterly "Purple Air" series is also on show - suggesting all the metallic and purple tints of Beijing's eerie sky - along with new installation pieces featuring police car sirens and unanswered telephones. There is enough noise and sand in the air here to imply a dirty sense of ongoing urgency - for both political and aesthetic circles.
Liu Wei, "Purple Air IV-3"
Courtesy of the artist and Universal Studios-Beijing
Tibet Contemporary
Until June 17
798/Red Gate Gallery
Dashanzi, 2 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang district
T: +86 10 6525 1005
www.redgategallery.com
The exhibition marks the first in Beijing of Tibetan contemporary art. Chinese artists frequently travel to Tibet for inspiration and for a change of scenery. This show is historical in that now the Tibetans themselves are coming to the capital.
Tsewang, "Golden Boy"
Courtesy of the artist and Red Gate Gallery (Beijing)
Song Dong
Until June 8
Beijing Commune
4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang district
T: +86 10 8654 9428
www.beijingcommune.com
The current show at Beijing Commune serves as a retrospective for the artist. Since the early 1990s, Song Dong has utilized several media - including performance, photography, video and water calligraphy - as a way to meditate on China's high-speed urbanization. Few artists have been able to so fluently articulate the connections between contemporary and classical Chinese art - as in his performance calligraphy series from the mid-1990s, 'Writing Time with Water'. Song also questions the optimism resulting in Beijing's building boom in video works like 'Breaking a Mirror' (1999). In one part of the series, the artist films a mirror that reflects a bustling downtown area. He shatters the mirror with a hammer to reveal what's behind: a ghetto of people, whose lives are left untouched by China's rapidly expanding economy. Song Dong manages a fine line between irony and sincerity, rebellion and resignation.
Song Dong, "Breaking a Mirror" (1999)
Courtesy of the artist and Beijing Commune
What is Mona-ha?
Until June 24
Beijing-Tokyo Art Projects
4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang district
T: +86 10 8457 3245
www.tokyo-gallery.com/btap
The show examines the work of the Japanese movement, Mona-ha, active between 1968 and 1971. Mona-ha's exploration of tension between natural and artificial materials - wood and barbed wire, rocks and paper - is delicate. The artists succeed in that each piece here emits the energy of living beings without losing the still qualities of their component materials. This is one of the most refreshing exhibits in the city this month - even if it feels a little cramped - if only for its peculiar attention to how simple objects relate to the space that encloses them.
Koshimizu Susumu, "Paper, stone", 1969
Courtesy of the artist and Beijing-Tokyo Art Projects
Stacey Duff has an MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University (US) and has lived in Beijing since 2003, where he is a regular contributor to ArtZineChina. He is also a poet, having previously published in magazines like Conjunctions, Skanky Possum and Octopus, and forthcoming work will appear soon in the new San Francisco magazine, Canteen. Since 2005, he has reported extensively on Chinese contemporary art as the art editor for TimeOut Beijing.
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