We've all seen the classical statue: a small boy or naked cherub urinating into a fountain basin.

"It's art," grown-ups tell giggling schoolchildren, and art makes such naked displays acceptable in public places.

Like any good artist, Jin Shan likes to grab our social conventions and shake them up a little. So, for the 2007 Venice Biennale, the Shanghai artist crafted a replica of himself out of silicon, with his trousers lowered, and installed a pump used in garden fountains to make the figure urinate into a Venetian canal.

The curator Ian Russell writes in the catalog for Jin's recent US show: "Raising the question of why it might be acceptable for a statue based on a baby to be depicted urinating, but unseemly for a statue of an adult to be depicted similarly, Jin Shan exploited the alarm or disgust of visitors to highlight social prejudices and racial stigmatization."

When the artist and his helpers were setting up the figure at the water's edge, the first to object were the police.

"Then they looked at our papers - showing it was an official entry in the Biennale - and they said OK and went away. But they were not happy."

While most Italians who saw the finished installation were amused, a group of drunk college students were obviously not. Jin says he does not know if their response to the image of a Chinese man urinating in their canal was racial, or simply shock.

"They set it on fire. They burned it. They pushed it into the canal," Jin says.

The artist, whom critics describe as a jester, a sensationalist, and an agent provocateur, found some pleasure in the fact he had indeed provoked a response.

That is what artists are supposed to do.

Jin's recent US shows were about another shocking incident and the public response. The exhibition's title, My Dad Is Li Gang, is now a familiar phrase to Chinese but requires a little explanation for the US audience.

In late 2010 the son of a local police official in Hebei province was driving a car and hit two students, killing one. He fled the scene shouting, "Go ahead, sue me if you dare. My dad is Li Gang." Public outrage erupted, provoking a storm of debate that eventually led to the successful prosecution of the driver, Li Qiming.

"So many absurd, terrible and amazing stories emerge every day," Jin says, "and these stories become the inspiration for my work."

Jin captured the moment in a piece displayed at Brown University in Rhode Island, with an abstract replica of a modern space station connected to a replica of a traditional three-wheeled cycle crafted from glue.

Back at home, Jin is represented by galleries in Shanghai and Beijing, and he teaches drawing and watercolor painting at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology.

Jin knew he wanted to be an artist at an early age, thanks to the influence of his father, who was a stage designer.

"Life is very important to the artist," he says. "No good life, no good art." That doesn't mean Jin seeks material riches, but a wealth of experience.

"I have kind of two lives: hanging out with ... rich people as an artist is one," he says. "But I also spend a lot of time with poor workers. I want to know their ideas, experience their factories. When I see 10 men living together in a small room, I go and chat with them as a friend to know about their lives, so it's more real than studying some social research.

"I want to make work from both two sides. All of your ideas come from real life, whatever we can make that life to be."

mikepeters@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 12/16/2012 page4)