EXHIBITION SYNOPSIS
About Re-Visioning History
As Shanghai positions itself as a futuristic metropolis on the occasion of the World Expo, repositioning historical neighborhoods to give way to cool reflective glass, there is no better time to ponder the past. What is history and how is it recorded, constructed, preserved and obscured?
History is recorded through a slow accumulation of materials: official records, government reports, magazine articles, various archival photographs and objects which bear the stamp of that era but don’t necessarily reflect any tangible truth. As time goes on, historians construct narratives based on these archives which often reflect as much about the era of writing and the identity and politics of the writer as they do about history.
History amounts to more than a pile of yellowed pages lying at the back of a filing cabinet – it involves demonstrable acts of remembrance including the writing of textbooks, the publishing of biographies of national heroes, the filming of period war period films and the commemoration of various events with parades.
“Re-visioning History” seeks not to uncover the “true events” of the past, but to look at how history is written, taught and consumed. The group show is anchored by the works of Ren Hong and Zhang Dali and includes newly commissioned works by Robert Davis, Ben Houge, Monica Lin, Ji Wenyu, Qian Rong and Su Chang.
Ren Hong explores the faulty nature of memory, with historical images typical of propaganda poster imagery – cast in a variety of bright purples, greens and hot pinks. These dream-like renderings are then overlaid with an intricate filigree of patterns, which reference the filtering nature of time, which selectively twists our understanding of the past.
The show also features Zhang Dali and his “Second History” project whereby he displays different versions of photographs which were published in various print media throughout Chinese history. Zhang Dali takes a magnifying glass to history displaying the original photographs (painstakingly procured from Chinese archives) alongside versions of the same photographs, which have been altered for propaganda purposes. The differences are evident with certain people being erased from the photos, leafy backgrounds being drawn in and slogans painted on flags and walls.
The show will also feature a number of historical propaganda posters from the collection of Madame Mao’s Dowry with titles such as, “The Age of Decisive Battle” and “Safeguard the Orderliness of the Revolution: Transportation is Getting a New Look.”
We asked artists to enact their own analyses of history using the themes, ideas and imagery of the propaganda posters as fodder for creating new works.
Using the poster “Safeguard the Orderliness of the Revolution: Transportation Is Getting a New Look,” Ben Houge captures the layering, erasing and re-construction of history in his generative video work. The poster itself uses a nongminhua or peasant painting perspective to depict a busy street scene. In the video images, bicycles, cars and buses pop up in fragments, creating interesting rhythms and patterns. It’s work that explores and subverts the nature of propaganda through repetition and randomness and draws interesting parallels to Malevich’s ideas of suprematism and abstraction.
Robert Davis looks at the utopian ideals portrayed in these posters to see how they stack up against contemporary society in “We Build Houses We Will Never Live In,” 2010. He shrinks the posters to an intimate postcard format and layers them with paint, hand-written text and headlines cut from newspapers – adding in a plethora of small changes, which reflect the stratification of society.
Alexandrine Dévé also offers a contemporary update of the poster “Today We Play by the Pond; Tomorrow We Defend the Coast,” in her work of the same name. This work depicts a bunch of cherubic children playing with battleships. Dévé leaves much of the imagery intact, re-creating the flowers in excellent gongbihua style. She does, however, update the work to reflect the current social ecology with a comment on the roles of various social characters: the peasant, mistress and nouveau riche.
Monica Lin takes this same poster as her template using some of the motifs to create a kinetic sculpture, which explores the strange juxtaposition of children and war. In “Little Defenders” 2010, she’s taken model tanks and airplanes and coated them in a variety of soft pastels, thereby subverting their power. These objects form part of a mobile which makes a playful comment on the insidiousness of war play.
Su Chang’s work, “Street Garden” 2010 also explores the idea of innocence with a series of sculptures which feature children playing – the kind of innocuous public art that used to be ubiquitous in Shanghai – but has now been replaced by strident stainless steel sculptures. Here Su Chang is looking at the effacement of history from the urban landscape and the memories of that time which fade from our consciousness.
Qian Rong explores historical links to the past in “Local Snacks and Spy Films,” 2010 turning the propaganda aesthetic into a film poster aesthetic which references the use of film in collective memory. His watercolor and pen drawings feature images of generals, spies and villains juxtaposed with images of food such as dumplings. Here, food serves as a bridge between past and future generations and reminds us of the continuity of history.
Ji Wenyu also explores the theme of continuity in his work “History of the People’s Republic of China,” 2010. The work features a series of popular slogans taken from 1949 up until the present, meticulously printed on parchment paper, things such as “I don't care if it's a white cat or a black cat; it's a good cat so long as it catches mice,” and “To catch up with Britain and America is simple.” With each layer of parchment paper, the previous layer becomes fainter in a reference to the rapidly changing cycles of history.
