徐震：可能性第一
Long March Space, Beijing
1 - 30 November
originally posted on artreview.com
If I had a drunk uncle, Xu Zhen would be him – he would show up on Thanksgiving in sweatpants and a tie, and would embarrass the family with tasteless jokes about Senator Clinton or President-elect Obama. However, Xu is only 31, and already a certified Chinese art star, with his provocative and manipulative videos, installations and photographs.
An exhibition title appropriated from Adidas’s advertising campaign tricks us into believing that Xu Zhen, Shanghai’s ‘merry prankster’ of the arts, was going to play with consumer tendencies (the exhibition’s Chinese name is The First Possibility). But the show, a series of large and detailed installations, has its own lifeless and one-dimensional marketing, setting up boring binaries like limits vs. boundaries, living in reality vs. living under observation, and historical facts vs. media-filtered facts.
The first work we see in the Long March Space is titled Decoration. It’s a model of a space station suspended about two meters from the ground in a darkened space; we are unable to see inside its shell, but one bright light shines from its singular window out onto a painted globe. In the next room we see observational video of two “cosmonauts” apparently inside the space pod; we assume this by the prominent digital clock on the wall, and the same globe is visible on screen just outside their window.
The set in the next room rivals any Universal Studios backlot, but pushes Xu Zhen’s repertoire of politically incorrect, controversial work into the realm of poor taste. The Starving of Sudan turns the spacious white room into the scene from the shocking 1993 photograph of an emaciated Sudanese toddler being preyed upon by a vulture; a politically-charged image that won its author Kevin Carter the Pulitzer Prize, and contributed to his suicide shortly after. Heat lamps warm the grass- and dirt-covered floor, where a stuffed vulture assumes the proscribed position and a (real live human) pudgy African toddler in a ragged diaper pantomimes the actions in the original photograph for the camera of Xu Zhen, who filmed at the opening performance. The boy’s mother looked on from the sidelines while visitors captured the scene for their blogs, and girls in high heels grinned – how “cute”. On subsequent visits to the installation the little boy was still present in the space, but might possibly be replaced with photographs now.
If Xu Zhen revels in scenes of self-ridicule and awkward, mixed messages, The Starving of Sudan is a new triumph in absurdity. Not only is the work conceptually undeveloped, Xu’s failure to address China’s current involvement with Sudan begs the question of whether he is even aware of the discussion surrounding China’s role in Africa, especially Sudan. To what degree is this work a cognizant reference to the ‘mediated fiction’ of reportage on Africa in the heavily biased and censored Chinese news media? Xu Zhen will perhaps prove less able to handle the scrutiny of audiences in Beijing than his hired child actor will deal with this strange tableau that will haunt his childhood memories.
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