STRAYED REPRESENTATION at O’Born Contemporary (131 Ossington), to February 21. 416-413-9555. Rating: NNNN
Can a show of paintings that riff on puns in a language you don’t understand possibly work? In the case of Strayed Representation: Paintings From Beijing’s Space Station Gallery at O’Born, the answer is yes.
Fu Xiaodong, the Beijing-based critic and curator who opened experimental art “lab” and gallery Space Station in 2009, has collected recent work by Han Jianyu, Meng Site, Shang Chengxiang and Yang Fan.
The key to this show is, of all things, magical realism each artist uses representation to create uncanny fields of visual tension. Given the myriad Chinese puns, a great deal of wry nuance is lost on a non-Mandarin speaker. But that doesn’t make the work any less intriguing.
Han’s painting of a rosy-hued bridge cutting across a grey-green forest appears merely dreamlike at first. As you look more closely, however, the radical discontinuity between bridge and forest becomes increasingly unsettling. The structure doesn’t appear to fit at any level – even the scale is off. The sense is of an artificial object wilfully imposed on a natural environment.
The same incongruity haunts Shang’s giant disco ball at the top of a waterfall. It could be read as a poke at Beijing’s burgeoning hyper-capitalist party culture crashing into a traditional landscape. In both paintings, an arbitrary and artificial force (governmental, ideological?) weighs down the natural world.
Censorship of dissident voices has been on the rise in China under the leadership of Xi Jinping, which explains the palpable anxiety in these works. Prominent human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang is currently facing jail time for publishing sarcastic tweets, for example, and Ai Weiwei is still under close scrutiny by the authorities, so artists, writers and activists definitely feel pressured to stifle their criticisms of the status quo.
All of these paintings, however, reflect the painters’ determination to express themselves.
art@nowtoronto.com
