China Sensation: New Art from Chengdu

The title invites sweeping assumptions: “China Sensation: New Art from Chengdu,” as if the show could illuminate grand thematic arcs particular to the quixotic Asian nation, or as if Chengdu’s art scene were about to suddenly erupt into international prominence.

Deployed in the largest exhibition area in the Art Gallery of Alberta’s temporary location (an empty, historic, downtown store houses the AGA while its old site is under construction), “China Sensation” was meant to be the centrepiece of the space’s inaugural shows—a survey of works by emerging and established artists from a faraway city, never before seen outside their country of origin, further celebrated by a lavish catalogue.

Although Chengdu has a whiff of the exotic, it was initially the least romantic of circumstances that brought the AGA’s executive director, Tony Luppino, to the city: a government-facilitated business and cultural exchange program. Still, Luppino was excited by the art he found in Chengdu, a startling mix of influences percolating through an urban environment not dissimilar to Edmonton’s. Catherine Crowston, the AGA’s chief curator and deputy director, was dispatched to Chengdu in January to follow up Luppino’s studio visits and solidify the show selection in partnership with the rather opaquely named Chengdu Profound Culture Promoting Co., Ltd.

Chengdu, like Edmonton, is a business- and industry-friendly regional economic powerhouse in the middle of an agricultural plain; a growing metropolis concerned with shaking off a slightly provincial image and assuming the mantle of a world-class cultural centre. It would likely be as much of a mistake to draw broad conclusions about the state (no pun intended) of the Chinese art scene based on “China Sensation” as it would be for someone from another country to extract a synopsis of current Canadian art making from, say, a large Edmonton group show.

Yet, it’s almost impossible to put down the culture-coloured glasses when confronted with works that seem heavy with private meaning. Viewers privileged with intimate knowledge of China, the province of Sichuan, or Chengdu itself may better judge when pieces are invested with allegory that relies on cultural specificity for total understanding. Those less fortunate may be wracking their brains for random information on China lodged there, hoping for some sort of cultural key to help unlock the signifiers.

The question of meaning gains complexity due to the confounding Kafka-esque bureaucracy that bogs down the Chinese government— it’s a society that lapses into relaxed permissiveness, but remains far from open. It would be difficult to ascertain the ultimate impact of censorship on the show, from the reflexive self-censorship of those who come regime-raised, to rumoured last-minute meddling by officials.

Beyond all caveats, “China Sensation” is an absorbing show that disrupts easy descriptors. There are noticeably repeated aspects of practice, elements and motifs— commonalities that beg to be accounted for within a show that is stylistically wide-ranging and encompasses recent work by 22 artists at different points in their careers, from the precociously young to long-standing community anchors, splayed across four, linked, labyrinthine rooms.

Arguably, the most immediately striking feature of “China Sensation” is a pervasively dramatic sense of scale. The great majority of the works are massive, people-sized or larger, immersive pieces of rampant physicality and unassailable presence. Most are canvases, their physicality underscored by the medium, artists’ exertions fossilized in brush strokes. (There are three sets of photos and two sculpture series; apart from these, the show is entirely made up of paintings that freely mix genres and pilfer techniques or effects from printmaking, photography and illustration. Likewise, the photos are documents of happenings and constructed environments.)

The ambitious scale heightens the intensity of a frequent trope— the terribly ordinary animated by the fantastical, belying a sense of constant encroachment, or at least fluidity, between the realms of the imaginable and the everyday.

Babies turn up in several works. Yongkang Xu’s identical twins and triplets in his evocatively titled series, “The Beautiful New World,” are painted in exquisite photo-realistic detail. Their exactness and multiplicity would be creepy enough, invoking issues around fertility and cloning, even without being substantially larger than real-life adults. Considered against the cultural backdrop of China’s famed one-child policy, they take on a more nuanced significance.

Shuo Chen’s “The Fast Development— Baby Series” consists of five, royal purple, ceramic infants yawning, napping and stretching. The sense of scale is perverted in an entirely different way here— the babies are normal size, but they have giant erect phalluses. A meditation on entitlement?

A celestial-dwelling toddler is portrayed as creator in Guoqiang Zhang’s Desire—a smallish diptych that echoes The Creation of Adam, with one chubby baby hand giving life to a snout and curly tail of a cherubic pig. A mural-scaled piece shows a grander swath of heaven—a pile of fleshy angelic pigs worthy of the Sistine Chapel, snoozing on frothy clouds near their dozing tot/creator, save one startled porcine sentinel. Zhang’s pigs are intended for consumption in Meat, where they spill from the sky to share pride of plate with pissed-looking turtles.

Food—especially pork, and, in one disturbing series, flamingos—is another common subject. Xueming Lian’s “The Lust for Food” series is bloody and gross, in opposition to Zhang’s cynically rosy heaven, while Lian’s enormous “Tangling Bitter Gourd” paintings envision pulpy turquoise flesh as pristine alien landscapes.

Notions of obedience, rhetoric, heroism and innocence are expertly wrought in “Kill All the Pests,” Crayola-bright paintings by Peng Jiang that read like oversized comic panels. Jiang hovers between the darling and the gory, with his uniformed schoolgirls and boys locked in gladiatorial combat with giant invertebrates. A pigtailed girl with a note pinned to her blouse dispatches a caterpillar with a gigantic scalpel; a Boy Scout surrounded by shotgun casings blows away a ladybug. The titular command takes on an urgent ambiguity. Who are the pests?

This slippery upending of meaning transforms the best pieces in “China Sensation” into provocative puzzles. Chengdu is not merely exporting art, but the trenchant questions of our shared future. ■

“China Sensation: New Art from Chengdu” was exhibited at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton from April 14 to June 10, 2007. A large portion of the show will travel to the Peter Robertson Gallery in Edmonton from October 18 to November 10, 2007.

Mary Christa O’Keefe is an Edmonton-based freelance writer.