Legacies of Exchange: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Yuz Foundation
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Mon, 06/28/2021 – 18:19
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Legacies of Exchange: Chinese Contemporary Art from the Yuz Foundation
In the spirit of an ongoing legacy of cultural exchange between China and the West, LACMA has partnered with the Yuz Foundation in Shanghai to curate collaborative exhibitions and to share access to the museums’ diverse collections of artworks. Legacies of Exchange is a celebration of this partnership, and the first major showcase of works from the Yuz Foundation Collection in Los Angeles. The exhibition centers around encounters, exchanges, and collisions between East and West by bringing together works of Chinese contemporary art created in response to global capitalism, international political conflict, and the Western art historical canon.
China has a rich history of material, intellectual, and cultural exchange. Beginning in the second century BCE, the “Silk Road”—a loose collection of trade routes—was famed for transporting the most luxurious goods of its time across Eurasia and the outside world. These routes allowed for the communication of new technologies and resources, but equally made way for destructive forces. They served not only as transportation routes for goods such as silks, gold, and porcelain, but also as pathways to war and imperialism, contributing to a multifaceted legacy of exchange with China that has been centuries in the making.
Introduction
Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, 2011
Ai Weiwei here reinterprets a set of water spouts that once decorated a fountain water-clock in Beijing’s lavish Yuanmingyuan (Old Summer Palace). The water spouts, which were designed by Jesuit missionaries in the eighteenth century, told time by spouting water in shi, a traditional Chinese unit of time representing one twelfth of a day, equivalent to two hours. They depicted the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac, each of which is assigned to years, months, weeks, days, and one shi.
Yuanmingyuan was plundered and destroyed in 1860 by French and British forces during the Second Opium War. When three of the fountainheads resurfaced at an auction in 2000, they became a national symbol of cultural heritage that had been lost to Western imperialism. Their recent, highly politicized status fuels their value in the art market and fervent calls for repatriation.
Ai Weiwei
China, b. 1957, active England
Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, 2011
Bronze
Yuz Foundation Collection
Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads, 2011
Breaking the European Canon
In 1978, the first exhibition of European painting to be shown in modern China travelled to Beijing and Shanghai. Paysages et paysans francais 1820–1905 (French Landscapes and Peasants, 1820–1905) was just the beginning of an influx of accessible European and American art publications and exhibitions, which many young Chinese artists saw as foreign and enticing.
New avant-garde practices developed rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s, and as Chinese artists sampled from their pick of Western and Eastern influences, the trend of subverting classic European paintings emerged. Whether using a new style or medium, replacing a central figure with a signature character, or re-imagining an entire scene, many of the edits made by these artists contribute to a sense of irony in their work. For example, Qiu Anxiong’s The Doubter replaces the tragic figure in Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat with a robed chimpanzee. Zhou Tiehai combines the iconic cigarette mascot Joe Camel with works by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Jacopo Palma, and Peter Paul Rubens. Yue Minjun replaces the central figure in Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas with his signature pink laughing man. By contrast, Liu Wei offers an earnest recreation of Vincent van Gogh’s Portrait of the Postman Joseph Roulin.
Breaking the European Canon
Frida: A Woman, 2013
At a mobile book stand in the 798 Art District of Beijing, Chen Ke stumbled upon an album of photographs documenting Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and her family, which she purchased immediately. She was inspired to paint recreations of the photos themselves, as well as scenes from her own life and pregnancy at the time. These drawings, sculptures, and video form a mixed-media “album” of Chen’s understanding of womanhood, from early pregnancy into her daughter’s infancy.
Chen Ke
China, b. 1978
Frida: A Woman, 2013
Mixed media Yuz Foundation Collection
Frida: A Woman, 2013
Da Xian: The Doomsday, 1997
These oversized tea bowls appear at first to bear the motifs of historical Chinese porcelains; however, these designs are actually drawn from ceramics of the British East India Company, an exploitative trading company—and opium trafficker—that colonized parts of South, East, and Southeast Asia from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Though they emulate traditional Chinese styles, the motifs on the bowls depict the flags of a number of European colonial powers, as well as storehouses that held European and American imports during the British occupation of Hong Kong (1842–1997). Imported Western food items fill the tea bowls, each product marked with an expiration date of July 1, 1997—the very day that sovereignty of Hong Kong was transferred back to China.
Huang Yong Ping
China, 1954–2019, active France
Da Xian: The Doomsday, 1997
Mixed media installation, gelatin silver print, watercolor on paper
Yuz Foundation Collection
Da Xian: The Doomsday, 1997
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Advertising and Brand Culture
China underwent a number of economic reforms to move away from communism and towards capitalism following the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), a sociopolitical movement led by Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong that aimed to modernize China through the destruction and suppression of tradition. Nike, Coca-Cola, and many other U.S. brands first began selling their products in modern China in the 1980s. As trade regulations were loosened, foreign goods were increasingly imported into the country, bringing on a new era of consumerism and branded culture.
These radical changes inspired many young artists at the time, who saw the China they knew rapidly changing. Political Pop—characterized by the combination of advertising imagery, Pop art aesthetics, and references to Chinese propaganda art—grew out of this period, acknowledging similarities between political idolatry and brand worship. Capitalist consumerism, no longer a new subject in Chinese contemporary art, can now be considered through the lens of its lasting impact on Chinese culture and daily life.
Advertising and Brand Culture
Bird’s Nest Stadium 25 Jan 2008, 2008
Using a custom-built pinhole camera and the ancient technique of camera obscura, Shi Guorui captures a ghostly image of Beijing National Stadium—also known as the Bird’s Nest—and its surrounding landscape. Designed by artist Ai Weiwei, the stadium was built to house the main events of the 2008 Olympics and was a shining symbol of the new, modernized China. However, controversy clouded the construction of the new stadium, including the displacement of thousands of residents to make way for the structure.
Shi Guorui
China, b. 1964
Bird’s Nest Stadium 25 Jan 2008, 2008
Gelatin silver print
Yuz Foundation Collection
Bird’s Nest Stadium 25 Jan 2008, 2008
Pantheon, 2014
Like the Great Pyramids in Giza or the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, Rome’s Pantheon was not intended for ordinary people. In a series of oil paintings, Shi Zhiying compares the architectures of sacred sites she has visited around the globe, often highlighting repeated forms found within each monument. Though created for different deities, spanning distant cultures and time periods, these spaces each demonstrate a desire to connect with a greater force through architecture.
Shi Zhiying
China, b. 1979
Pantheon, 2014
Oil on canvas
Yuz Foundation Collection
Pantheon, 2014
Tobacco Project—The Language of Smoke: 1902, 2004
First installed within an old tobacco-processing warehouse in Shanghai, The Language of Smoke is part of Xu Bing’s series Tobacco Project (1999–2011), an examination of the early importation of American tobacco into China and the lasting impact of this now prominent industry. From a nebulous haze emerge the neon characters of 1902 advertisement, selling British-American tobacco in China:
Smoke invention. The most convenient and satisfying
new method of manufacturing wrapped cigarettes,
made by machine. Neat,
pure, and the healthiest.
Xu Bing
China, b. 1955
Tobacco Project—The Language of Smoke: 1902, 2004
Installation, neon lights
Yuz Foundation Collection
Tobacco Project—The Language of Smoke: 1902, 2004
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