Gallery Weekend Beijing 2019 | Spike Art Magazine

Gallery Weekend Beijing 2019

26 March 2019

Beijing, Gallery Weekend Beijing, China, Simon Frank

Simon Frank on the third iteration of the Chinese capital's version of the globally appreciated model with twenty galleries and seven institutions participating.

Walking into 798 Art District as Gallery Weekend Beijing got under way for its third edition, and VIPs touched down to make an appearance before continuing on to Art Basel Hong Kong, it was slightly shocking just how nice everything was. The skies were an uncharacteristic shade of pale blue, air pollution was under check, and many of 798’s side streets had been repaved after months of digging, providing a smooth surface for the golf carts shuttling guests around. Though they probably can’t take credit for the weather, it was clear that the Seven Star Group (the state-linked corporation that serves as landlord to 798’s galleries and successor to the military hardware and electronics factories that once filled the post-Bauhaus industrial compound) had recognised the soft-power potential of the event.

At first glance, this year’s installment lacked a blockbuster focus like 2018’s Sarah Morris exhibition at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (though the institution has just been renovated, tidying up 798’s main drag). The closest equivalent was a refreshingly understated Richard Tuttle show at M Woods Museum. However, a handful of strong gallery and non-profit shows did a solid job of collecting new trends and voices in Chinese art. What still felt unresolved was whether this creative energy could be attributed to Beijing in particular, and who the target audience was — the international jet set catching up on developments in China, or local gallerists seeking affirmation?

798 Art District

As previews started on Thursday 21 March , I arrived at “China Landscape: Selections from the Taikang Collection”, hosted in a temporary space within 798.

The suggestion of officious traditionalism in the title didn’t put me in a particularly optimistic frame of mind, an impression not helped by the mass of security guards lined up outside the entrance. Fortunately the exhibition turned out to be a highlight, the Taikang Insurance Group drawing on their extensive holdings to provide a subjective overview of modern and contemporary art in China up to the present. While the show does start with Socialist Realist paintings of Chairman Mao, these works were positioned in relation to what followed, including early pieces by innovators such as Zhang Peili and Wang Guangyi. Recent classics were also on display, like Ma Qiusha’s video From No. 4 Pingyuanli to No. 4 Tianqiaobeili (2007), in which the artist recounts the parental pressure she experienced growing up as an only child and girl as she hides a razor in her month. Next-door is Liu Chuang’s Bitcoin Mining and Field Recording of Ethnic Minorities (2018). The 3-channel video at first seems overstuffed, drawing connections between cheap hydroelectric power in Southwest China, the Bitcoin mining it fuels, and ethnic minorities that live nearby, while also throwing in drone photography and Star Wars costume design. Yet the piece settles into a lulling rhythm, laying out the physical traces of immaterial networks.

Liu Heung Shing Installation view Star Gallery

Over at Beijing Commune, Liang Shuo’s solo exhibition “Scenery” also spun the concept of the traditional landscape into something else entirely, the artist placing his scroll paintings within an Arte Povera-like wood and metal labyrinth. Walking in a spiral, the viewer became part of the unraveling of the scrolls, which along with the expected temples and streams contained additions of vacant-eyed monkeys and dinosaurs, bringing in a touch of humor that was in short supply elsewhere.

What does it say that many would prefer to live outside of China and occasionally return for exhibition and funding opportunities?

Hong Kong photojournalist Liu Heung Shing’s “Spring Breeze” at Star Gallery also concerned itself with China’s past, albeit with a focus on recent history. The show, which won the Gallery Weekend’s prize for best exhibition, features Liu’s crisp black and white photos of daily life in 1980s China. If these scenes of young people rollerblading and otherwise hanging out may have been perceived as evidence of “liberalisation” when they wereoriginally shot, in an era when such uncomplicated narratives are collapsing, their ultimate significance has grown harder to grasp.

Liu Chuang Bitcoin Mining and Field Recording of Ethnic Minorities (2018) at “China Landscape: Selections from the Taikang Collection 2019”

Figuring out what this heritage means today may be where the group show “hic sunt leones” comes in. After stopping by the show at the 798 Art Center, where it was organized as the Gallery Weekend’s “Up&Coming Sector,” I caught up with curator Lu Mingjun, who explained he wanted to showcase the questions that young Chinese artists are currently pondering. Indeed, the show did an admirable job gathering together some of the most intriguing young artists from China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, with emphasis placed on essay film-like video works including Feng Junyuan’s research on cybernetics, Shen Xin’s Warm Spell (2018), a quasi-ethnographic look at a Thai resort island, and Liu Yujia’s The Pale View of Hills (2018), a potentially politically risqué portrait of a Uighur matriarch making her living posing for tourist photos.

Certain cultural codes and ways of doing business remain separate

With its mood of disquiet, the show leaves a complicated aftertaste. More than half of the thirty-one artists on display studied outside the region, and many works contain scenes in foreign countries. Not all of the artists are based in China, and others don’t live in Beijing or lack gallery representation in the city. What does it say that many would prefer to live outside of China and occasionally return for exhibition and funding opportunities?

Shen Yaoyi Revolutionary Ideals Higher than Heaven (1975-77) at “China Landscape: Selections from the Taikang Collection”

A similarly globalised outlook could be found in Liu Shiyuan’s exhibition at White Space Beijing in the slightly more low-key and prone to eviction Caochangdi Art District. The video A Sudden Zone (2019) is anachronistically structured around a landline telephone call, while sketch-like paintings with collage elements were displayed alongside an installation utilising the crates that had transported the works from Liu’s studio in Copenhagen. The artist seemed to be asking what images might still be universally legible in an age of constant technological flux.

Around the corner in Caochangdi is CLC Gallery Venture, a new collaboration between three smaller galleries, which, though not officially participating in Gallery Weekend, concurrently held the group exhibition “Under the Sign of the Internet.” Wang Jiang’s Accuse Guilt Like Numbering the Fur (2018), documenting the artist’s apparent theft of cigarettes from a Xu Bing installation, made an intriguing proposition: although much of the work mentioned above confronts the burdens of tradition and colonialism, it is worth considering that Chinese contemporary art has already developed its own assailable heroes, many of whom arguably could use a dose of well-intentioned critique.

Performance by Beio at the afterparty

Back in 798, a series of panels attempted to confront some of the issues facing the community. During a Saturday afternoon discussion on the condition of mid-sized galleries, Boers-Li founder Waling Boers explained the influence of WeChat (the Chinese chat/payment/everything app) to Eva Presenhuber (whose gallery held a pop-up through a Zurich Art Weekend exchange program). As if on cue, an audience member sitting in front of me started scrolling through Long March Space’s official WeChat account, looking at images of conceptual artist Wu Shanzhuan’s painting show at the gallery.

As afternoon turned into evening, the pace of schmoozing quickened. Back at 798 Art Center, VIPs like the Art District’s Chairman Wang Yanling and Hans Ulrich Obrist mingled before proceeding to the gala dinner. At the official afterparty that followed in a music venue nearby, Beio, a collaborator of the artist Chen Tianzhuo, performed a butoh-esque dance accompanied by the psychedelic noise of musicians Li Jianhong and Wei Wei. Surveying the scene with a friend as the following DJs moved things into a housier direction, we noticed a discrepancy: though many prominent foreign guests had made an appearance, few Beijing gallerists or artists outside of the younger generation could be seen. Certain cultural codes and ways of doing business remain separate. As I travelled to 798 the next day to a revisit a couple of shows, the sky was still blue, but a greyish brown layer of pollution was growing along the horizon.

Gallery Weekend Beijing 2019
22 – 29 March

SIMON FRANK is a writer and musician based in Beijing.