Though often a platform for debuting new technologies, Expos are more than just trade shows. They are imbued with the kind of “global peace and goodwill” that is typical the Olympics, with an added layer of utopianism – and notions that “science will save the world.” We only need to recall phrases such as “Building the World of Tomorrow” the theme of New York’s 1939-40 Expo or the brilliant “White City” of Chicago’s Columbian exhibition 1893, which was thought to uplift Chicago and provide a beacon for enlightenment ideals throughout the world.
That utopian Expo metanarrative still exists, but modern Expos have evolved into a platform for nation branding and just plain old branding (think KFC concession stands in he American Pavilion).
“Make Over,” takes in to account many of these issues and focuses as well on the physical transformation of Shanghai’s landscape – on what’s being covered up, what’s being raised and what is rising from the ashes.
Using a smoke bomb as his medium Qiu Anxiong sets off a number of questions about this process of transformation. “Smoke” 2009-2010, points to issues of transparency through the act of setting off a smoke bomb outside the gallery. Much of the Expo renovations are happening behind walls and scaffolding – we know very little about the inner workings of this great branding machine.
Gao Mingyan will help augment this feeling of crisis with his work “Constraint,” 2009. Using the façade of OV Gallery as his canvas, Gao has given OV a military-style face-lift with barbed-wire, sandbags and roving search lights. This gallery (under siege) plays with the idea of image; by creating an a tense atmosphere of danger and crisis, Gao hopes to challenge the utopian branding of Shanghai.
Lu Jiawei, examines branding on a more personal level with his photography series “The Same Standard” 2009-2010 .The artist photographed people of different professions, socioeconomic backgrounds and nationalities in the exact same suit and then Photoshopped out their faces and bodies – therefore erasing their identities. Here Lu uses the Expo as an international event to look at the globalization of dress – and how the suit (which bears the character for “West” in Chinese) has become a standard – a kind of signifier or respect but also a sign that the wearer is seeking respect from others.
Wu Ding also looks at the idea of image in his video work “Goat Squeezed Out of a Sphincter” 2009-2010, we see a white-collar man going to work, when all of a sudden he feels quite ill. He stumbles to the bathroom and begins to throw up into the toilet. The next scene features the man in an operation room having replicas of buildings excised from his stomach. Here we see how our obsession with our own image can cause a certain kind of pain and malaise.
Su Chang examines the idea of image from a different angle in “Shelf Life” 2009-2010. The work consists of a series of photos of a cake covered with fluffy white frosting which spells out this optimistic slogan, “The Future Will Be More Beautiful,” a phrase which could easily be used as a generic slogan for any Expo. The cake is a typical Chinese “naiyou dangao” (frosted birthday cake) adorned with strawberries, flowers and various other foods. The cake represents a kind of celebration, while the foods which degrade at different rates reflect the slow uneven disappearance of the Expo and its infrastructure once the party is through.
Maya Kramer takes that question into mind in her installation work “View from Yesterday” 2009-2010, two stereoscopes which feature images of the Shanghai Expo grounds and Flushing Meadows Park in Queens – the site of two New York World’s Fairs in 1939 and 1964. Flushing Meadows was once an industrial coal ash dump (described in The Great Gatsby as, “The Valley of Ashes”) and its rehabilitation mirrors the clean up of the Shanghai Expo grounds. The stereoscope creates a sense of vision and depth asks us to look beyond the fireworks. Kramer’s piece also includes a series of tiles made from maps taken from various times in Chinese history (colonial era, 1950s, 80s and 90s). Delicately overlaid, they mimic the floor tiles often seen in French-style apartment buildings of the 30s and reflect the city’s many-layered history.
Ji Wenyu also employs layers with a collection of 60 Chinese slogans that have fallen in and out of vogue over the years ever since 1949. “The History of the People’s Republic of China” 2009-2010, looks at the idea of Chinese history as a calendar where one flips the pages and where one idea is quickly replaced by another. It’s a piece and reflects the constant cycles of rebirth and reinvention and re-branding which characterize modern China.
Birdhead artists Song Tao and Ji Weiyu offer a different take on history with “Tang Dynasty Poem” 2009-2010, a photo installation which features photographs of characters garnered from street signs and store signs, cut up and arranged into a Tang dynasty poem. Bird Head’s work reverses the Expo paradigm of turning old into new, by turning new (Chinese vernacular typography) into old, forging a link through language with their Tang ancestors.
Ancestors also play a role in the work of Jiang Hongqing, “Props Series-Paper City” 2009-2010, which explores issues of transience and instability. The video installation features a background of towering apartment blocks with a burning model of a house in the foreground. The video is projected through a hole in the gallery wall and the house model is displayed on the floor below. Here Jiang employs the Chinese tradition of “ghost money” (whereby paper objects are burned for use in the afterlife), to explore the transience of the residents of Shanghai and to create a contrast between the material and the spiritual.
Christina Shmigel picks up where Jiang leaves off playing the role of archivist in her work “The View in Fragments” 2009-2010. Shmigel’s elegant vitrines (those often used to display jewelry and precious jades) are repurposed to house small models of Shanghai’s most overlooked architecture. She’s not interested in the French Concession villas or the idealistic geometrical confections of the Expo. These inconsequential fragments – pigeon coops, worker’s barracks and mobile phone number stands – which beg the viewer to re-examine the city’s most mundane architecture with new eyes.
Ben Houge and Jutta Friedrichs explore the human element, namely the city’s itinerant peddlers who will be forced to give up their trade and take their hawking to the city limits during Expo times. In “Paved Landscapes” 2009-2010, Friedrichs took to the streets to interview the vendors about their experiences, and picked up a selection of their wares – hair rollers, sponges and pinwheels. Like insects trapped in a block of amber, these goods are sealed in two pieces of resin. These two window-like blocks are encased in a layer of cement-coated concrete – like a kind of sarcophagus sealing over a layer of once lively street life. On top is a potted yellow rose (almost like a bouquet on a coffin), which echoes the city’s elaborate floral displays which come into bloom for big international events like APEC summits.
Houge offers a companion piece “Shanghai Traces”, a video work, which stars the aforementioned objects animated so that they tumble down the screen in a cascade of miscellany. This tumbling not only represents the transience of the lives of the vendors but also captures the visual effects of a raid by the “urban managers” 城管who force the vendors to flee, sometimes scattering their wares in the process.
While Friedrich and Houge deal with the process of creating an idealized city, Chen Hangfeng explores idealism as a metaphor. “Bubble City, Bubble Life” 2009-2010, involves bubble machine surrounded by a wire cage; as the bubbles emerge, they will hit the walls of the cage and burst, with only the smallest managing to escape. The work uses humor to create a tension between ideals and realities. The bubble has the intriguing property of reflecting our world in a small round idealized shape but also conveys a sense of speculation, fragility and emptiness.
Ning Zuohong takes a slightly different tack with his installation “Make the Water More Beautiful and the Sky More Blue” 2009-2010 – individual goldfish tied in plastic bags hanging in front of an image of a blue sky with fluffy clouds. Here we have the goldfish in an artificial environment enjoying the illusion of an idyllic, yet foreign landscape and points to themes of urban alienation, displacement, dreams and our perception of reality.
The questioning of reality is a cornerstone of the work of Jin Feng. In “Believe it or Not” 2009-2010, he presents a series of “fake news” items carved into the plaster wall in the gallery. The items were taken from articles posted by journalists on the internet – stories fabricated by writers who didn’t have enough time or motivation to go out and find a true story and conduct interviews. Here Jin is asking us to look closely and critically at what we read to tease out the differences between, advertorial, proper journalism and absolute fiction.
What’s common amongst these varied approaches is an appeal for the viewer to examine our world through a different lens and to exercise their critical faculties when dreaming of the future.
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