Huang Liang Solo Exhibition & 12 Young Chinese Artists in “Look Deeper”
Huang Liang until April 19 @ Platform China project space
“Look Deeper” until May 17 @ Platform China
In Platform China’s project space, Huang Liang small solo show offers a morbid encounter with illness. Misdiagnosed with cancer in his early adulthood, cool shades of clinical gray seem to still haunt his memory. Although Huang Liang’s tactile painting style of oil on canvas is nothing new, or unfamiliar from academic artists, Huang shows talent with paints.
Small, unframed and unmounted canvases of hospital scenes are arranged across the wall like snapshots, juxtaposed with enormous canvases depicting X-rays.
Next door, 12 person exhibition “Look Deeper” is a fairly sparse selection of young artists, and feels a a little too much like a student show. Jin Shi, however, stands out with the work Retail Business––Karaoke, a three-wheeled cart (the type preferred by independent salesmen all over China) loaded with a television, microphones, and all the low-brow, kitschy glitz he could pack into it; there’s even plastic holders for you cup of tea.
I swear I saw something similar at the market outside my house, featuring not KTV but errenzhuan comedy. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get through the pack of dusty onlookers to check it out. The “clusterfuck aesthetic” of Retail Business––Karaoke and its over-use of gaudy, plastic baubles and invocation of elements of lower-class popular culture make it very similar to Liang Shuo’s “Fucking Beautiful” series.
Another collection of Jin Shi’s sculpture are some rather Weiwei-esque furniture recombinations, where he meshes second-hand furniture into disfunctional chairs, brusquely titled Chairs They remind me of the works of Ai Weiwei for their use of old materials and the way they reassemble familiar objects, attempting to alter our traditional senses.
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