Out of the Blue
Macau Museum of Art shows “Refresh: Contemporary Art of Emerging Macau and Shanghai Artists”
As the extension of the Refresh: Emerging Chinese Artists exhibition held in September of last year at the Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art, the current exhibition at the Macau Museum of Art might reasonably be termed Refresh 2.
Its predecessor in Shanghai was on a pretty large scale, featuring works by 35 participants, most of them emerging artists under the age of 30. Among the contributors were three of the four Shanghai artists currently exhibiting in Macau – Li Mu, Li Xiaosong and Peng Yun. The fourth artist, Luo Xiaodong, held a solo exhibition at the Zendai Museum of Modern Art in March 2008 and paints in a rather personal style. Recommended by the museum in Shanghai, these four accomplished artists are in Macau ‘on business’ – to share and ‘refresh’. Earlier this year, I recommended 11 local artists to participate in the current exhibition. They were all under the age of 35 and had in recent years held solo exhibitions or taken part in joint exhibitions. After several discussions with the Macau Museum of Art, we whittled the list down to eight who were newer to art and asked them to submit their works. We invited four of them – Alice Kok, Hong Cheng Man, Chris Ho and Wong I Wai – to participate in the current exhibition.
Of the eight participating artists, three men and one woman reside in Shanghai, while three women and one man live in Macau. This coincidentally forms a perfect match of the sexes, and their works also fall into pairs, to some extent, in terms of form. For example, Alice Kok from Macau and Li Mu from Shanghai employ, by chance, essentially ‘low-tech’ means to represent their individual ideas through the medium of video. The former artist endeavours to dwell on the relationship between man and sky by videotaping several hours of the sky’s appearance. This piece of seemingly ordinary work is, as a matter of fact, Kok’s serious inspection of existing objects. There are too many things in life we think we know and which we seldom ponder; we take them for granted. Thus, our life tends to be based on the superficial. The artist here allows the ‘sky’ to take centre stage through the simplest, most direct means. It remains to be seen whether the viewer is likewise capable of being inspired.
Li Mu’s dual-screen video was inspired by his impression of Macau as a city of nightlife, all gaudy neon and clinking wine glasses. While it is a far cry from the city’s officially promoted image of a cultural and historical metropolis, it is nevertheless presented as another facet of the truth. Li’s ambition goes beyond a mere light-hearted impression of so-called colourful nightlife; what he sought was to continuously ‘refresh’ his own cognition and theories of life. While in ancient times, Wang Xizhi wrote his Lanting Xu (Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion) in an intoxicated state of mind, today we have Li Mu, who, in a similar state of mind, video records the imaginary bustling and dazzling nightlife of Macau in tandem with another video recorder documenting his act of recording. The device of playing the resulting two videos in juxtaposition is an innovative experiment. While the artist unconsciously presents his spontaneous response and feelings through the footage, he also provides a consciously recorded document of the process, by way of contrast. Macau’s dazzling nightlife seen through a ‘sane’ and ‘insane’ lens is a provocative concept.
It is not uncommon for installation art to employ daily utensils as its media. This art genre generally takes an idea as a starting point and tends to display the change in an object’s mode of existence or its existing state in a given space. Coincidentally both Li Xiaosong from Shanghai and Chris Ho from Macau employ objects available in daily life, such as the TV set, fridge, washing machine and fan in Li’s work and the claw vending machine in Ho’s. By pouring hot tar on daily household appliances which are perfectly operational, as in real life, rather than broken, Li Xiaosong makes them operate in a squeaky manner due to the extraneous tar, as if an oppressed man were struggling to break free. The work is labeled with Li’s home address, which makes the work an evident revelation of an individual’s state of existence. The installation with the claw vending machine by Chris Ho, on the other hand, used several real cats on the exhibition’s opening day, substituted since then with
toy cats. Visitors can insert coins into the machine to try it out, but the modified mechanical claws make a simulated movement only, which stops short of the real action. The coins will be donated to the Society for Animal Protection in Macau. Visitors who play the game are video recorded, their actions and responses used as part of the exhibit. The two artists represent their ideas by modifying and reinvesting significance into daily objects, as in the art work Fountain by Marcel Duchamp. Both of their works relate to and reveal their life experiences – Li’s discomfort with life and Ho’s concerns about animal rights – which, to some extent, represent certain aspects of their state of mind.
The other two artists who make use of daily objects are female – Hong Cheng Man is from Macau, and Peng Yun is from Shanghai. Coincidentally, apart from this shared feature they also both make use of the position of objects as opposed to a setting, as well as the characteristics of such a material relationship, as the vehicle for their concepts. Peng Yun places her work – a white brick wall – at the entrance to the Museum (MAM). This creates an oppressive feeling and introduces the tension of the work to the originally spacious, comforting reception area; the power of the work is thus made manifest (its impact would be even stronger if the passageway for the handicapped and the emergency exit could be excluded from it). She attempts to make each visitor stoop to negotiate the opening in the wall, on the other side of which lies a mattress that represents cleanness, softness and warmth, as well as a room that projects a sense of psychological security. The space is made in such a way that visitors have to walk on the yielding mattress and leave their shoe prints on it, in the same way that someone enters your life, somehow affects you and departs without you knowing.... Peng Yun even produced a video for this installation featuring a finger repeatedly writing the words ‘Do not leave me’ on skin. The fingernail scratches the skin, suggesting the sensation of pain and triggering discomfort in the viewers. At the last minute she decided not to include the video, as she believes without it the work represents her idea in a manner that is strong enough. This work indicates her sensitivity to space.
Hong Cheng Man’s work is positioned in the centre of the exhibition area and takes the form of a room furnished with objects and her childhood memories. As in Peng’s piece, visitors cannot avoid ‘visiting’ her room. Her personal experience, Little Hong Riding Hood, and the famous children’s story Little Red Riding Hood have much in common. Have the Macau people, who pride themselves on their self-restraint and respect for privacy, now become too indifferent to others’ problems in the process of minding their own business?
Viewers are well advised to do their own reflecting on that question through this work.
Art is often perceived as highbrow, unintelligible and irrelevant, but that is not necessarily the case. On the contrary, art tends to stimulate reflection on the current age and on our lives. The manner in which these artists make use of space deviates from the convention in exhibitions at MAM. They engage viewers in an interaction with their works and thus enable them to have personal experiences. No matter how complicated or varied art and imaging are – be they sensual or intellectual – art, by its very nature, exists in the sensual world between art works and human beings and dwells more in our imaginative world.
The other two art works, last but not least of the batch, are deliberately or inadvertently impregnated with this idea. Wong I Wai, aged 19, is the youngest participating artist. While she literally depicts the Chinese character ‘laziness’ – the theme of her work – with a collage of Velcro tape, she nonetheless intends her viewers to abstractly sense what she is driving at via her home-made jackets and shoe covers, which adhere to the Velcro. By ‘laziness’ she does not mean the normal tendency to idle; rather, she refers to the inertia of the young living in affluence, an indifferent attitude towards society and things around them and the helplessness they feel in their inability to change anything – a concept hard to convey in words.
Lo Xiaodong from Shanghai, on the other hand, presents his impressions of Macau in two works, each comprising four paintings. The tangible ‘bird-cage’ image of Lisboa Casino on the left, which has been for years an impressive piece of architecture as famous as the Ruins of St. Paul’s to both residents and visitors, appears cut up into interconnected sections. The ‘frame’ on the right, however, in thick layered paint, corresponds to the cut-up images in the paintings. Whether the thickness of the ‘frame’ (the material dimension) and its abstract counterpart (the connotation of the work) in conjunction with its complementary abstract images can prevent the viewer from reading too much into the work or over-judging it remains to be seen. It is a good question, contemplating the mode of painting.
Is art the result of deliberate calculation or that of personal intuition? Different people have different answers. As far as the participating artists in this exhibition are concerned, their works bear the hallmarks of calculation. However, from what I saw in the course of the creation of their art, I sense more of their artistic authenticity, based on their intuition. It is this authenticity that is believed to keep an individual ‘refreshed’, that encourages the probing of the very nature of art.v
