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Chinese art...It's dAPERTutto! The works by the nineteen Chinese artists chosen for the "dAPERTutto" section are displayed both in the Giardini, specifically in the Italian pavilion, and in the Arsenale. Amongst them, Cai Guoqiang (who has won the international Prize of the Jury), Chen Zhen and Wang Du have all been living abroad for many years (mostly in the U.S.A. and in France).The young Zhang Huan commutes between New York and Beijing, while the others are based in the People's Republic. The Italian pavilion hosts no less than ten Chinese artists, including Ai Weiwei, who has spent more than a decade in the U.S.A. He was a member of the historic" Stars" (Xing Xing) group of 1979 , and is here showing his works "Ceremonial Table" and "The Last Eclipse of this Century/Millennium". The latter comprises a number of photographs taken during the few hours of a lunar eclipse which occurred in 1997 on the fifteenth day of the eighth month - by coincidence, the day of the traditional Lunar festival. The installation alludes to the changes in our perception of the universe which occurred when man first set foot on the moon. From the stuff of legends, myths and the preserve of poets and lovers, the moon's surface was presented as a desolate and cold place. Its scientific image replacing centuries of imagination. Zhou Tiehai's works are situated in two different rooms; in one are his "Fake Covers", mock-ups of such internationally-famous publications as "Newsweek" and "der Spiegel" with news about himself or Chinese art digitalized on the covers. In the second room his large monochrome photograph "Press Conference I" (1997) depicts the artist suited, and standing at a rostrum in front of a row of national flags - it bears the sentence: "The relations in the art world are the same as the relations between states in the post Cold War era". Zhou's work is based on a clear-sighted and detached analysis of the mechanisms governing the world of art and the inter-dependent relations that exist between critics, artists, museums and the mass-media. Zhuang Hui's elongated photographs seem like symbols of institutional celebrations as they portray hundreds of people, all of whom proudly show they belong to a group - be it a school, a factory or an army...The artist, also in the photograph, positions himself at the edge of it, a metaphor for the condition of the contemporary artist, unable to be one of the ordinary citizens. This happens mostly because people are unable to concede to him even the slightest possibility of independent expression. Along with an ill-concealed narcissism, this condition is one of the driving forces of artistic creativity. The photographs of Wang Du's work "March, aux puces" (Flea market) have appeared in many art magazines. Be it for the colourful sculptures inspired by Pop, or for the fame of some of the figures portrayed, such as Yasser Arafat or Monica Lewinsky - while others remain completely unknown - this series of plaster sculptures have drawn much attention. Wang Du, randomly takes excerpts from various mass-media articles, and transforms the protagonists into a three-dimensional forms. The artist wants us to become aware of the chaotic flood of information and noise pouring in on us from all sides. Wang wishes to give viewers a chance to choose some of the objects and consciously accept them into their personal spaces, as one would gather together at a real "march, aux puces". Wang Xingwei's paintings, exhibited in the same room as Wang Du's, are a combination of Realism and Conceptualism: the result of the artist's selection and rejection, composition and juxtaposition of quotations ranging from the Cultural Revolution to Marcel Duchamp... His ideal audience are those who are able to catch and appreciate every single citation and nuance. Amidst his recognisable - yet reinterpreted -figures (e.g. Richard Hamilton, Marat, Beuys...) the artist himself, stands in various theatrical poses, which in turn parody images from past Revolutionary ocialist Realist paintings. His aim is both to emphasize the distance between "real life"and "art", in an attempt to rewrite the history of world's art in his own way. Yang Shaobin's huge paintings are shown in the next room, together with those of Fang Lijun, Franz Gertsch and Sigmar Polke. Szeemann has said of Yang's work that, "they are as strong as Baselitz's". The violence in them occupies the space where, as Daozi has written in his essay, "the scuffling bodies shamelessly bow and penetrate the sight, and the physical manifestations of tearing, breaking and entwining of present continuous tense seem to be the relative tensional effect in the tumultuous air". Fang Lijun's only work in the exhibition , an enormous woodcut composed of several panels, is displayed nearby. His style is almost comic strip -like, and yet has that great economy of line which is typical of the very best of traditional Chinese art. With all the communicating energy of his earlier "popi" or what might be termed (rogue) character paintings, this work is predominantly blue in colour. It has the power reminiscent of the Dazibao of the 1960s and 1970s, or of the cinema posters on which the artist worked at the very beginning of his career. Qiu Shihua is not only the oldest of the Chinese artists exhibiting, but one of the oldest represented in the whole dAPERTutto (this fact comes over very clearly as the artists are actually listed in the catalogue by age. ). Not so well known in his own country, this unusual painter has become popular in the West thanks to his participation in international exhibitions -like the Bienal de Sao Paulo and the one here in Venice. Unfortunately the light which flows generously from the ceiling is most inadequate in revealing what is "underneath the monochrome". A crepuscular light would, instead fully reveal, at close observation, a rarefied landscape emerging out of imperceptible variations in colour. When looking at the painting one must perform both a mental and spiritual exercise, abstracting oneself from one's surroundings and plunging into the apparent uniformity of the canvas. Xie Nanxing is on the other hand, the youngest of the Chinese artists, born in 1970. Despite his young age, he has already won (together with Zhou Tiehai and Yang Mian) the Contemporary Chinese Art Award. His works, although they appear to be created with technological aids, are in fact achieved solely with the use of a brush. Using distorted photographic images as an iconographic source, the artist shows us bare rooms strewn with evidence of an unmentionable private violence. The details are depicted as they might appear to a befuddled and hurried observer, thus creating an atmosphere of surprise as this is extended beyond the surface of the painting into the artist's very studio, which adds to the violence portrayed. Zhang Peili's room surrounds the viewer with two sets of monitors, displaying his earlier video "Uncertain Pleasure" (1996) and the more recent "Just for you". The pleasure one gets from scratching an itchy part of one's body is not debatable - what we might wonder is, whether the very viewing of this action actually causes the same pleasurablefeeling of relief in the viewer or becomes a more painful experience. The title also refers to the instability one might feel at the shifting role of the artist, particularly as it relates to culture in todays China. As Lydia Yee writes, Zhang Peili "heightens the sense of banality by concentrating on the commonplace and by employing excessive repetition". This appears equally so in "Just for you", where each monitor contains a different person singing Happy Birthday - in an uneven and often pretty awkward way. Irony and detachment elicit an amused yet perplexed response in the viewer. The other nine Chinese artists included in the dAPERTutto section are displayed at the Arsenale, where the gigantic spaces can either enhance the artworks' energy or be overwhelming. Yue Minjun's two huge paintings are hanging on both sides of the space, right after the impressive "House of beer-cages" by Winter & Horbelt. On one wall hangs Yue's polyptych "Life", where the usual self-portraits are here shown focussing on the posing of the body, in a forced, impractical manner. It is indeed a very "theatrical" attitude, where nonsense and irony play an important role. On the other side is "Everybody Connects to Everybody", more than 5 meters long, showing several Yue Minjuns holding each other closely with the usual emotionless smile, like a world of obliviously happy clones. Zhao Bandi's large posters, portraying a popular hero of today's Beijing and his tiny panda bear mascot, have, after some delay been lined up on a white partition wall. The artist takes the commonplace with regard to personal hygiene and safety, and transforms them into "ideological campaigns", mocking the "propaganda" system and at the same time displaying a very subtle and effective sense of humour. His keen interest in detail adds a formal achievement to the idea and completes the images impeccably. His posters can be seen distributed widely in Beijing's Underground, thus gaining an audience that reaches beyond contemporary art circles. Wang Jin's photographs and transparent costumes are displayed in a defined area. The work entitled "China, the World of the Mortals" consists of traditional costumes of the Beijing Opera recreated in see-through plastic. The transparency of the elegant PVC garment emphasizes its emptiness - the hollow memory of a great culture. His picture "To Marry a Mule" portrays himself with an improbable bride - a mule - as a parody of the camouflage which a "trendy" wedding requires. His other image refers to the artist's performance "Battling against the Flood - the Red Flag Canal". In it, Wang Jin emptied a 25-kilo sack of red pigment into a canal, creating a powerful visual effect. The photograph and video referring to the performance called "To Add One Meter to an Unknown Mountain "(May 22 1995), which - as far as I know - was a joint project by several artists from the former Dong Cun (East Village), appear here as a collaborative work by Zhang Huan. It was enacted using a group of nude bodies lying one on top of the other to the height of one meter on the summit of Miaofang mountain near Beijing. Man and nature are united by their lack of significance, their lack of a name. The same theme was taken up two years later in Zhang Huan's "Raising the Level of a Pond". The artist invited some of those who had been thrown out of work by the recent ruthless modernisation of Chinese industry to stand isolated from one another in a pond, and thus raise the level of the water. Liang Shaoji's "Nature series" looks like an oasis of peace and calm. Mounted by Liang, the dozens of tiny beds form white blankets; the result of the spontaneous weaving activity of silkworms, spread over a white surface and substituted with the glass base suggested by the artist. Liang Shaoji is very happy to explain the absolute value silkworms have in his eyes: they represent every aspect of life, and so deserve our full attention. The artist told me how his whole life is now shaped in a way to match the silkworms' vital cycle. As a metaphor of life and the universe, they create an art which is immortal. Ma Liuming has two works on display: his recent video "Fen-Ma Liuming Walks Along the Great Wall" and one of his oil paintings, entitled "Baby '98 n.2". In the video, the artist uses the very symbol of Chinese civilisation as a basis for what I would call a "walk toward the definition of the self, of his own self". The challenge thrown down by the artist's laboured walk along the steep and often crumbling wall is directed at those who, throughout history, have established the rules that decide who has his "papers in order" and who lies outside the norm; who is indefinable and therefore suspect, and a threat to the stability and security of the status quo. Lu Hao's fragile architecture models, even though carelessly packed by a Beijing's shipping company, arrived without any major problems. It is a pity that the artist cannot use, as he would have liked, live birds, fishes and insects inside the "most ideological buildings in China", as the critic Li Xianting puts it. He actually feels that, due to the use of synthetic animals, his works have lost much of their impact. Nevertheless, he would have otherwise incurred many difficulties, and this is the first time he has come up against the Western attitude of defending animal rights. If one thinks that, after all, his entrapped animals are very much a metaphor for human beings, one understands the reason why they have been forbidden here. Chen Zhen's installation is located further on, in one of the newly open areas of the Biennale. His neighbouring artist must have been pretty disturbed by his noisy - though fascinating - work. Entitled "Jue Chang - Fifty Strokes Each", it refers to the Buddhist dictum that anyone who approaches the Buddha to inquire about spirituality should be beaten, to teach him that one cannot speak of what lies at the very foundation of religious doctrine. The work consists of a series of chairs and beds whose flat surfaces have been replaced with animal skins, which are meant to be beaten and make a sound. Through beating on the hides, the visitors will be awaken by the rhythms of improvised music, and at the same time will exorcise the obscure violence which is potentially present in all of us. And finally comes Cai Guoqiang's complex installation-in-progress, the result of meticulous and hard work besides the conceptualising involved. At the far end of the Gaggiandre, when the visitor is exhausted by the long walk and overwhelmed by the richness of the sensory stimula, she/he will find a cool, sombre realm in an ancient storeroom currently filled by dozens of clay sculptures. Cai has been inspired by the "Rent Collecting Courtyard", a group of over one hundred sculptures created for the Cultural Revolution, as a symbol of new China. His work is in progress for two reasons: because it has been created in situ by several specialists chosen in China, and because some of the sculptures have been deliberately left unfinished, to suggest the changes that inevitably occur in time and space - and meaning. |
 Cai Guoqiang "Venice's Rent Collection Courtyard": Reporters viewing a sculpture
 Wang Xingwei "Poor old Hamilton" 1996 220 x 180 cm oil on canvas
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