For one week a year, Shanghai feasts on art. Curators, gallerists, writers, promoters, collectors, and even artists swarm around umpteen exhibition openings, launches, events, talks and cocktail parties. And in the middle of all this activity is the ShContemporary art fair in the wonderfully daft 1950s Stalinist "Shanghai Exhibition Centre", which actually in Chinese is the "China Russia friendship hall," which clearly didn't work because by the early 1970s the two were on the brink of nuclear war.
Left: MadeIn 'Untitled', 2009; Centre: Shi Qing, 'Factory', 2009; Centre bottom: Shinji Ohmaki 'Where have the flowers gone?', 2009
1. Bourgeoisified Proletariat was nowhere near the centre of Shanghai: the exhibition was out at Songjiang, an hour on the train or bus from the fair through fearsome traffic, both cars and people. It was more than worth it. Curated by artists Yang Zhenzhong, MadeIn, Liu Jianhua, Shi Yong, Shi Qing, Jing Fengs (lao and xiao), Huang Kui and Alexander Brandt, it felt like an old-style pop-up guerrilla show, and with far too much to condense into a few words here, because ping pong ball rain and a sauna-church really were just the very beginning of a sprawling, intelligent, confronting and delighting exhibition.
Liu Wei, Kitchen Debate
2. Liu Wei, Kitchen Debate - What is the Kind of Good Life You Want, 2009. Keeping with the Russo-Sino-Commo theme, this work was hilarious, though it should have followed Hanne Darboven's dictum 'never apologise, never explain', because it would have been even better without an explanation. As it was, most people still had no idea why a modern Chinese kitchen would be installed in an art fair and dared not go through the doorway into it, behind the neat white railing, which gave the game away that the installation referred to the 'Kitchen debate' between then US vice-president Nixon and then Soviet Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Kruschev regarding a display of modern built-in kitchen (no greater alter to consumerism). Khrushchev: "We can leave this issue until I turn 99." Nixon: "Would there still be a need to discuss this when Khrushchev turns 99?" The 99th anniversary of Khrushchev's birth was the year Nixon died.
3. MadeIn, Untitled, 2009: MadeIn, formerly known as conceptual artist Xu Zhen, is omnipresent in Shanghai this month. Almost every major show involves him, sometimes also as curator (see 1. above). Here he presents a giant parody of a trade fair installation, promoting a parodic African tribe (crikey!). Within a giant slick loggia structure, five figures run along the raked ridge of an astro-turf hill with a Microsoft blue-sky behind them, for which company it could almost be an advertisement, or for Adidas or Nike or General Motors or for muddled pre-conceptions of African life.
Jia Aili
4. Jia Aili (Platform, Beijing) - a rare, new talent in painting. The 'charcoal and water' quality of his oils and their moody and witty subject matter, almost Murnau meets Walt Disney, considers the nature of looking with Michael Fried-ian intensity.
5. Anri Sala, Intervista, 1998. The video art star this year was Sala's mother. The original film from 1977 shows her giving an interview in their native Tirana but the sound reel was lost. For Intervista Sala employed a lip reader to provide subtitles: an anachronistic and stodgy piece of communism-speak. The translation, of course, lacked 'syntax, grammar and sense', and it completely shocked his mum.
Kara Walker
Zhou Yunxia
6. Snow White Dresses: Zhou Yunxia, Meninia, 2009 (Schübbe Project, Düsseldorf) and Kara Walker's A Warm Summer Evening In 1863, 2009 (James Cohan, New York/Shanghai) are to be savoured slowly. Yunxia's hommage à Velazquez is composed of frog-skins. Walker's tapestry depicts a 19th Century lynching in New York.
7. Shinji Ohmaki, Where have the flowers gone?, 2009 (Tokyo Gallery+BTAP, Tokyo), stencilled flowers of flour on a red carpet in the middle of the centre of the hall, art that walked away.
8. Nedko Solakov, A Life (Black & White), 1998/2009 (Galleria Continua, San Gimignano/Beijing). In the eternal construction site, Solakov's unfinishable work, was a Sisyphean poem. Funny too that the gallery is called 'Continua'.
9. Intellectualism: No, I don't mean this year's more cerebral than theatrical Discoveries section (all that Joseph Kosuth (Sean Kelly Gallery, New York) and somewhat effortful Hermann Chong, "Eight Memories (of J.G. Ballard)", 2009 (Vitamin, Guangzhou)). What really appealed to me was the lecture series. Genuine art criticism in China, whatever language, can be hard to find. Here was a challenging program of topics by serious art thinkers. Joerg Heiser's musings on what is contemporary in contemporary art were particularly interesting though ultimately unanswered (your correspondent blundered his question - perhaps we don't have a new term for what is going on in art yet because we don't need one yet).
10. Curated gallery displays - there weren't enough of them. So here's to the colourful Yayoi Kusama explosion at Ota Fine Arts (Tokyo). Other fine displays included OV Gallery (Shanghai), Long March Space (Beijing), Galleria 42 (Modena), and James Cohan (Shanghai and New York).
Brickbats
1. ShContemporary's Platform - ferreted away in the wings of the hall, it was dismal, empty, and the gallerists looked dejected; I think with good reason.
2. Marina Abramovic/ Ulay Imponderabilia, 1977 (Sean Kelly Gallery, New York). I love this video, watching people squeeze between the naked Abramovic and Ulay in a doorway. But stuck in the corridor in daylight at an art fair, it almost lost its liminal status, its ability to elicit an awkward discomfort.
3. Death and Taxes. If Shanghai wants to allow its art fairs to compete with 'free-port' Hong Kong, it is going to have to make it much easier for international galleries to bring art into China - ah, but would the Party do that? Free thought, good heavens, whatever next? Thirty percent tax also doesn't help. This sounds like crude commercialism because it is. What allows the intellectual and creative experiments that contribute to and surround ShContemporary is money, and the fair was much smaller this time because there was a lot less of it than last year.
4. Rumours that there won't be a 4th ShContemporary.
Chris Moore is a writer and a partner in the contemporary art investment firm, mooreandmooreart.co.uk. He lives in Shanghai and specialises in contemporary Chinese art.
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