The heading 'Van Gogh was here. From China with Love' is at once reminiscent of a tourist-scrawled line of graffiti, and indicative of the trans-global underpinnings of this show, in which UK-based artists Cai Yuan, Sheng Qi and Xi Jianjun respond to the mythologised work and life of Vincent Van Gogh. San Mei Gallery (also responsible for the newly restored Hackford Road house where the Dutch artist lived in 1873) broadens the ongoing discussion around Van Gogh’s legacy by exploring a history of art and influence beyond the Western canon. At the same time, the figure of Van Gogh and the history of Western modernism provides a framework for thinking through these established artists’ practices anew, questioning measures of value and exchange between different cultures and temporalities.
 |
| Can Yuan, Stargazer, 2019 Can Yuan, Sheng Qi, Xi Jianjun, To Old Van Gogh, 166 with Love, 2019 |
Two of the featured artists, Cai Yuan and Xi Jianjun, were officially banned from all Tate premises following their ‘interventional performances’ of the 1990s as creative duo Mad for Real. Their rap sheet includes jumping into Tracey Emin’s My Bed installation at the Turner Prize Exhibition of 1999 and starting a pillow fight. When I mention the infamous work to Cai, he gleefully tells me that the intervention was a spur of the moment decision, likening it to kids exuberantly jumping on their parents’ beds. For exhibition curator Katie Hill, these disruptive acts constituted part of the pair’s ongoing challenge to the ‘presumption of who is expected to appear where and why’ within both cultural institutions and national bodies.
 |
| Cai Yuan, One Man Demo, 2011 |
The current show continues in a tone of joyful rebellion, re-enacting the playful disregard for propriety of the earlier UK-based performances. One print documents Cai’s One Man Demo, a work in which he defied the newly erected security barriers to stand on Ai Weiwei’s 2011 Sunflower Seeds installation at Tate Modern. I remember going to see the work as a teenager and, like many others, being disappointed to find that visitors could no longer walk on the porcelain seeds as the artist had originally intended. The inclusion of Cai’s work is of course a nod to Van Gogh’s iconic Sunflowers, but it also updates the figure of the struggling artist, and calls attention to the power of art institutions in their role as mediators between art, artist and public.
With the Van Gogh and Britain show on display at Tate Britain just a few miles away, it seems only right that a fledgling gallery space, outside what Hill has previously dubbed ‘the narrow elitism of the art world’, should be representing artists who can identify with Van Gogh’s outsider status. The show combines a collection of responses to the liminal zone in which those perceived as ‘foreigners’ still exist today. This strange and ambiguous zone is given material form in Cai Yuan’s new quasi-anthropological installation, documenting his 2015 residency in the then dilapidated Hackford Road house. He connects to Van Gogh’s experience of the space through a series of intimate photographs and an assemblage of common objects, and Cai’s own experience of settling in the UK is expressed through surreal parodies of Van Gogh’s actions and paintings.
 |
| Sheng Qi, Salute to Van Gogh, 2019 |
The deep blue of the freshly painted gallery walls appears to reference the ominous, heavily laden skies of paintings such as Wheatfield with Crows, 1890 and Starry Night Over the Rhone, 1888; a fitting canvas for Sheng Qi’s Salute to Van Gogh and Salute to Yves Klein, 2019. These seemingly uncomplicated little paintings show a red and a white handprint against backgrounds made up of thick paint strokes in the cheery complimentary colours that recur throughout Van Gogh’s oeuvre. Before leaving China following the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, Sheng cut off the little finger on his left hand and buried it in a flowerpot. He is perhaps best known for a haunting series of photographs showing his mutilated upturned hand against a red background, cradling tiny pictures of people from a past from which he had been violently severed.
Despite a certain naivety of form and colour in Sheng’s new work, the paintings are a direct response to Chinese 20th century history, recalling and subverting the Communist regime’s sinister adoption of a colour scheme. From the beginning of the Mao era in which all three artists grew up, art was conscripted into the government’s revolutionary arsenal. Both art and literature were prescribed the utilitarian function of transmitting and reinforcing party propaganda amongst the masses, glorifying Chinese Communism and its deified helmsman Chairman Mao Zedong, as emphatically and singularly as possible. Thus, the styles of Western modernism that had found purchase in China earlier in the 20th century could not easily fulfil these objectives. Nor could the ancient Chinese brush and ink tradition, which was branded bourgeoise and therefore counterproductive to the aims of the party.
The aesthetic preferred by the regime consisted of bright and shining, mainly primary colours, employed in a strictly realist style. Propaganda posters dominated the visual culture until the 1980s when pressures on artists were relaxed and examples of canonical modern art from around the globe became available in China once again via books and catalogues. Hill emphasises how transgressive the immediacy of touch of the European modernist tradition became for a generation who had grown up under Mao’s revolutionary art programme. Sheng’s work is a salute to this fusion of aesthetic ideas that enabled him to truthfully express his own life experience through the physical, tactile act of painting. Proclaiming ‘Van Gogh was here’, this show reminds us of alternative art histories, of fraught transmission and of the transformations art and artists undergo as they cross cultures.
 |
| Cai Yuan, Untitled, Hackford Road (detail), 2015 Cai Yuan, Untitled, 2019 |
Beyond formal continuities, it is an insolent desire to break rules through which the contemporary artists’ ideological linkages to Van Gogh and other modernists are most strongly articulated. In a characteristically tongue-in-cheek gesture, Cai Yuan has taken a copy of Gombrich’s Eurocentric bible, The Story of Art, painted it’s cover gold to match the rice-covered canvases, blacked out the author’s name, and pasted it, like a flayed and mutilated corpse in an innocuous spot on the gallery wall. Like happening upon a witty piece of graffiti, you can’t help but smile at the vandalism, that seems to conjure more than it obscures.
Abigail Ashford
San Mei Gallery
London SW9
Until 15 August 2019
London SW9
Until 15 August 2019
No comments:
Post a Comment