"State Legacy" goes back to Shenzhen from Manchester
By admin on 2014-12-22

Wang Guanyi's installation, "East Wind - Golden Dragon."

    By Newman Huo

    BEIJING, Oct. 22 -- A contemporary art exhibition, "State Legacy: Research in the Visualization of Political History," is being staged at the OCT Contemporary Art Terminal in Overseas Chinese Town (OCT), Nanshan District of south China's Shenzhen following a two-month show in Manchester, Britain, from April through June this year.

    The exhibition, which will run though Nov. 30, presents works by five prominent contemporary Chinese artists: Wang Guangyi, Lu Hao, Sui Jianguo, Wang Jianwei and Zeng Li, who have all tried to respond to the achievements and problems of China's industrialization and modernization from different perspectives of visual art.

    The exhibition is the result of a two-year collaboration between John Hyatt, director of the Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design at Manchester Metropolitan University, and Huang Zhuan, director of the OCT Contemporary Art Terminal.

    "Manchester and Shenzhen are two cities with special meanings as the former is the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, and the latter, the experimental field for China's reforms and opening up," Huang said as the exhibition opened in the city Friday.

    "This may explain why the two cities have been chosen as hosts for the State Legacy exhibition, through which we have tried to deal with visual reactions to China's recent industrialization and modernization and cultural issues accompanying those visual reactions," Huang said.

    According to Hyatt, the art works chosen for the exhibition illustrate many aspects of the social, cultural, psychological and political changes China has gone through in recent years.

    "To have brought them to Manchester, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and a relatively regenerated post-industrial city, is to construct a critical examination of the legacy of the industrialization and modernization of China within a global background," Hyatt said.

    According to the artist Wang Jianwei, who attended the opening of the exhibition in Manchester on April 3, some Western scholars attending the "Art History and its Global Provinces" conference at Manchester Metropolitan University on April 2 to 4 showed strong interest in the exhibition.

    "The most exciting thing for me is that through the exhibition we were neither simply showing our strengths to win the recognition from outsiders nor simply determining our differences from others," Wang said.

    "Instead, those issues which we're concerned about in our works are no longer regional and cultural issues restricted to us, but have become public issues arousing the interest of scholars from other countries," he said.

    An internationally acclaimed artist, Wang Guangyi has a high degree of sensitivity to cultural and political issues, and has always been able to integrate seriousness with cynicism in his works.

    His installation, "East Wind — Golden Dragon," is actually a replica model of the first ever Chinese-produced car, which was presented to the late Chinese leader Chairman Mao as a gift in 1958.

    An artist completely dissimilar to Wang Guangyi, Wang Jianwei is theoretical but not intuitional in his works.

    His installation, "The Tiananmen Grandstand," is an imitation of the grandstands at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, originally designed by Chinese architect Zhang Kaiji in the 1950s.

    A native of Beijing, Lu Hao has always reserved a special sentiment towards the ancient city of Beijing.

    Lu's installation, "Replicated Memory," comes from another kind of utopian imagination of restoring the nine city gates of Beijing, which were destroyed during the 1950s.

    His work comprises a large-scale light box showing a map of Beijing, with the ghost-like models of nine city gates hanging above.

    Zeng Li's work records another paradoxical historical event. His photographs, "The Shuicheng Iron and Steel Works," detail the development of an iron and steel plant first established in the mountains of Guizhou Province as a product of the so-called "Third Line Construction Projects" in the 1970s.

    Sui Jianguo's video piece, "Raising Speed on the Railway," is a multi-screened projection of a high-speed train as it travels around a circular testing track. The work was inspired by a bus ride the artist took to the Zhangjiang Development Zone in Pudong, Shanghai in June 2006.

    A book of selected essays, images and background research documents has been produced to accompany the exhibition.

    Three Chinese scholars, including Wu Hong, Wang Hui and Zhao Tingyang, have contributed their research theses to the State Legacy project.