Time to reflect

A scenic water town famed for its internet summit and theater festival, Wuzhen now aims to be a global hub for contemporary art exhibitions, Fang Aiqing reports.

After gaining global recognition for hosting the annual World Internet Conference and Wuzhen Theater Festival, the time is ripe for the water town in East China's Zhejiang province to explore its relationship with the world of contemporary art.

Running through June 30, artworks being shown at the second Wuzhen Contemporary Art Exhibition by big names like Anish Kapoor, Julian Opie, Gregor Schneider and Kazuyo Sejima are adding a fresh cultural dimension to the scenic ancient town.

Under the theme Now Is the Time, 90 works by 60 artists from 23 countries and regions - from sculptures, installations, performance art, images and videos to pieces driven by light, sound and smell - are exhibited in sites scattered between the town's lush trees, calm waters and gray-tiled buildings, and even in the renovated spaces of a traditional rice barn and a silk factory.

"The exhibition presents a current picture of contemporary art and raises questions for the artists and visitors to reflect on the anxiety and insecurity that the complex reality has brought us," says chief curator Feng Boyi.

Although the lineup may not be quite as illustrious as Wuzhen's first contemporary art exhibition three years ago that displayed the works of Damien Hirst, Ann Hamilton and Marina Abramovic, Feng believes the diversity of the artists and range of their works have been enriched this year.

The participation of Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Sejima is certainly one example of boundary-defying artists that Feng is referring to.

Her outdoor installation Another Layer of Surface Water is a pool of mirror-polished chairs set out on a stone-paved piazza that spread out like waves. Visitors can sit on the chairs, chat and watch the reflection of the trees, sky and nearby traditional architecture.

The video installation of 30-year-old Amalia Ulman, who likes to blur the line between fact and fiction in her enduring performances on social media platforms like Instagram, centers around Yiwu, a city in Zhejiang known for its small commodity market.

Starring in the video, Ulman captures city life through her distinctive narrative style, adding subtitles in her mother tongue Spanish, as well as English, German, Japanese and Chinese, and dubbed into Russian, where she ponders whether she might always feel alienated.

Some of the exhibits not only promote dialogue with their surroundings - a typical water town to the south of the Yangtze River - but also with their neighboring artworks.

On the square for open-air movies at the West Scenic Zone stands the renowned India-born British sculptor Anish Kapoor's stainless steel work Double Vertigo, whose concave and convex surfaces reflect one another on one side, while inverting the scene of the square on the other.

Yet, what Kapoor's work does not capture within the space is Chinese artist Wang Luyan's Open Confinement, a piece consisting of more than 600 glass spaces that resemble the floor tiles of the square, and are embedded in the floor just like the tiles.

Inside each of the glass spaces is a row of small figures of varying numbers - a motif Wang has frequently used in his previous works. Devoid of facial expressions, visitors can't tell which way the little figures are facing, or differentiate between their fronts and backs.

The cramped, submerged spaces of Wang's installation with its neighboring work encourages the viewer to confront the relationship between openness, confinement and personal boundaries.

"My work is more about concepts that stress insight rather than visual stimulation and therefore differ from Kapoor's work in essence," Wang says, adding that the main value of communication in art lies in distinction.

Lucy Adams, Kapoor's assistant, enjoys the dialogue between the two works, although, as she admits, she mistook Wang's work as being made up of light bulbs at first.

Wang is just one of the participating artists who chose to emphasize the relationship between their work and the site.

Swiss artist Katja Schenker, who has been focusing on performance art and installations, created a sculpture outside the silk factory using a local camphor tree over the course of her monthlong stay in Wuzhen.

The tree was cut into many parts, restructured and then cast in concrete. The branches reach out in all directions, seemingly struggling to shake free of the shackles of the cement, while the tree is actually being supported by the concrete in an upright position.

According to Schenker, it took a long time for the locals to help find a suitable tree that had grown straight and reminded her of the human body.

And as a performance artist who values the process, Schenker was impressed by the collaboration with local craftsmen, which she described as a collision and fusion of working methods rooted in different cultures.

This year's exhibition also hosts a youth program where 12 Chinese artists under the age of 35 compete to convey their outlook on the present and future through their own artistic language.

The program aims to cultivate young artists and provide them with a platform to raise their profile and promote their work internationally, says Chen Yu, chief producer of the exhibition.

Experimentation inspired by their contemporary life experiences and the creative use of diverse mediums were encouraged by the organizers.

Top winner Wang Tuo's three-channel video work Spiral explores how human desire raised from the two-dimensional world becomes magnified, consumed and deepened in the real world by juxtaposing architecture with otaku culture - the stay-at-home video and anime culture.

"It's hard to judge artwork. I would say we are rewarding the direction they take art toward rather than the individual artists themselves," says established artist Song Dong, one of the judges of the program, adding that the main purpose of the competition is to offer encouragement.

Feng points out though that the works of the younger artists tend to fail to connect with the surrounding site or reality itself. Instead of embracing social involvement, younger artists tend to indulge more in private discourse or focus on technique.

To some extent, the two contemporary art exhibitions in Wuzhen have become a matter of personal identity for Feng, especially when he and the two curators, Wang Xiaosong and Liu Gang, successfully established the contemporary art exhibition brand for the town in 2016.

From his perspective, one of the main difficulties the exhibition faces lies in fitting in with its environmental setting while appealing to visitors that are not used to urban galleries and exhibitions.

Having once curated an art exhibition in a village, Feng objects to contemporary art shows set up in unequipped villages and towns by local government officials simply to benefit their careers.

Yet, with Wuzhen's mature tourism infrastructure, stable tourist volumes, developed economy and a cultural environment built on its history and successful theater festivals, Feng believes the town will be able to provide a competitive, high-end environment for future modern art exhibitions.

He especially values the accessibility of the exhibition, which allows the visitors to absorb the messages the artists convey in their works and help them to improve their knowledge and aesthetic appreciation of contemporary art.

To help this, more lectures and public events related to contemporary art have been planned before the exhibition ends, Feng says.

Contact the writer at fangaiqing@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily Global 05/14/2019 page14)