Lyle Rexer, New York–based independent writer and critic and editor of the upcoming Aperture title The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography (May, 2009), is currently traveling in China for the Shanghai Biennial and reporting for Exposures.

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The Biennial — Ants! by Chen Zhiguang

The Biennial: Smiling Dinosaurs by Yue Minjun

Yesterday’s tallest building, nicknamed “the bottle opener’ just dedicated in the Pudong district, seen from the old city — tourist’s perspective.

September 12
In a presentation by the photographer Liu Heung Shing, organized by our host Pearl Lam to celebrate the publication of his book “China,”  the vast compendium of documentary images by various photographers, I noticed a number of art photographs.  I mentioned one to him that I had just seen at the Museum of Contemporary Art  titled “Princess,” by Zhang Peng, which depicts in all its photoshopped glory a little girl sitting on a couch and made up as an ancient princess, with an outsized, elaborate headdress of what look like Christmas tree ornaments.  He instructed me to look closely at the image in his book, which was the straight version before the artist altered it.  The headdress was considerably smaller and actually heightened the ambiguity of the photograph. Shing has seen and photographed as much as anyone in China over the last three decades, and he lamented the rise of Photoshop because it knocks the ground out from under all documentary image making, and perhaps from under photography itself.  I have been listening to this argument for more than a decade, often hashed out in the pages of Aperture itself, and like most writers, I feel that we need a new word to describe objects confected in the digital workshop, something like (again) George Bush’s “truthiness,” but something better than “photoish.”  Peng’s princess (version 2) is photoish. But not until listening to Shing, who like Capa or Cartier-Bresson or a hundred other great photographers had spent their careers in the belief that bringing a version of visual reality to others was the equivalent to telling a truth, not until thinking about how unknown China was to most of us growing up except for the images we managed to see in magazines and occasionally on TV, not until this moment did I feel with Shing that we have lost something essential, and that something is hard to calculate.  It is a combination of credibility (or credulity, if you like) and surprise.  Shing was in the business of delivering China to the West, and yes his version was constrained by editors, altered in the darkroom (think of all the Mao-era photos in which purged officials vanished in the darkroom), recontextualized and subject to deliberate misinterpretation, bla bla bla, but his photographs confirmed China and China’s difference as another reality.  They and others like them were the very reason I could stand in Shanghai and say, “I’m in China!” because they measured the imaginative distance I traveled. They established that distance.  Without a sense of their truth, it was all just a story, just something someone might have made up, like the butterfly dream of Chinese philosophical legend or a little girl princess.

For me, to be in China is to say I am living not a dream but a photograph.

Lyle Rexer, New York–based independent writer and critic and editor of the upcoming Aperture title The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography (May, 2009), is currently traveling in China for the Shanghai Biennial and reporting for Exposures.

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Shanghai, Sept 8.

Ben Davis of artnet, who is here in Shanghai, put it best: Shanghai is a cross between SimCity and Los Angeles.  Buildings spawn clones of each other like spores breeding, and one begets others just like it.  This has a long precedent in Chinese art.  As early s the bronze age, the Chinese mastered a mass manufacturing system based on modular parts that allowed craftsmen to assemble 10,000 figure for the emperor’s tomb.

And so it goes.  It helps explain the peculiar quality of so much of what I’ve been seeing in the galleries and especially at the Biennial here.  So, an installation of Michael Lin ‘s at Shanghai Gallery that involved him  buying the contents of an entire store in his neighborhood in Shanghai (everything from rubber gloves to soup spoons) looks like a number of projects in various galleries and Biennials.  There is a different sense of originality, or, maybe the market is growing so fast, there is no way to satisfy it without working different variations on successful themes.

The Biennial takes place in the stately confines of the Shanghai Art Museum, which is in fact quite small, but inside there was so much work, so arbitrarily arranged, that it felt like a fair, impossible to get your bearings.  The theme: Translocalmotion.  Something about dislocation, urbanization, growth and movement.  Honestly, the scheme becomes more elaborate every year, the attempts to control and justify the work more intricate, and the larger motives behind the  presentation more transparent.  There is just so much money, so many new buyers, so much entertainment buzz around all this.  Before we get to the art, a few vignettes:

For the opening and the thirsty VIP visitors (there seemed to be 10 million VIPs here), the sponsors provided all that was available: Martell cognac and Starbuck’s coffee. (MOMA, are you paying attention?)  Potato chips and diet Coke.  In the elevator, here was the conversation: “I was so lucky.  I had just enough time between Helsinki and Seoul to stop in Brussels. I was in Beijing for three days and I have to get to Singapore after the show here.  Will I see you in London?”  This was repeated over and over again, often by wealthy American and European women with their well-polished teenage daughters in two, and the curators and dealers whom you never get a chance to see in New York but are all here.  “New York is so over,” one dealer said to me.

Then there is the story or proverb told to me by my Shanghai writer friend about the man who wanted to draw a dragon but instead drew a snake.  It was a beautiful snake but he wasn’t satisfied with its snakeness so he put legs on it.  So much of the pieces here were like that, some core of interested but then the need to cover very base – so an installation became a video which became set of photos, etc.

At the Biennial, I was surprised at how little actual photography there was. Almost none.  There were several of Thomas Ruff’s digital JPEG rip-offs, one especially striking of the Pearl of the Orient communications tower here, which is a wonder.  That seemed especially redundant when the developing landscape is already virtual, generated, as Ben Davis said, out of a repeating computer program.  The other two “photographers” represented were the Korean Kim Sanggil, with gigantic Struthlike urban construction photos, of buildings not yet finished or not quite “readable” in a functional or aesthetic sense.  There was an idea lurking here (OK, not an idea, exactly but a kind of special pleading) and the work looks good because he knows how to pick a spot, but the critical verbiage around this was impossible, repetitive, and slightly missed the point.  I was not at Venice when Rob Storr was criticized for his (on the one hand) no paintings and (on the other) too academic presentation, but I guarantee you it did not suffer under the weight of language that this one did.  What was mpost worrisome was that much of this language did not come from the Curators but from the artists themselves, especially with the video works.  The other photographs were from the German documenatrist, Klaus Mettig, from his series “Don’t Be Left Behind.”  Straightforward stuff  and striking ethnography from marginal parts of China, but the elaborate theorizing! Oy.

Objects (like photos) are so over.  Put it in a video.

Lyle Rexer

Lyle Rexer, New York–based independent writer and critic, author of the upcoming Aperture title The Edge of Vision: The Rise of Abstraction in Photography (May, 2009), is currently traveling in China for the Shanghai Biennial and reporting for Exposures.

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September 6, Shanghai

If this is Saturday, it must be an ordinary night at Pearl Lam’s penthouse on Hengshan Road in the elegant French Concession district: cocktails and sit-down dinner for 60, at a table she designed herself, art by Zheng Huan, Zhan Wang, and other Chinese blue chips, all orchestrated by a woman who has mastered the ability to run at full speed in 4 –inch heels.

It’s the first in a series of events hosted by Lam around the opening of the Shanghai Biennial and the SH Contemporary Art Fair here.  Lam is the design maven and gallerist, raised in Hong Kong and London, who is using her considerable wealth to make China the center of the global art world and push an agenda of cultural hybridization.  Not global, but not local either.  The penthouse is her command headquarters and indoctrination center. Everyone, it seems, has to pass through, and once you are processed by Pearl, you may be ready to see things her way.  After all, from up here, Shanghai seems to go on forever.

Is it working?  Form the crowd, you had to believe it could. To a person, everyone in the crowded apartment (crowded? at 10,000 square feet?) was relentlessly bi-continental, with multilanguage business cards and dual addresses.  There was even a 30 something would-be novelist from Park Slope (amend that: as my wife informed her, 20th Street and Sixth Avenue is not Park Slope.  She was crestfallen to hear it, having just moved from Manhattan.  Philip Dodd, head of Made in China and sometime BBC correspondent (he had just done a long interview with Philip Roth that was punctuated with many “next question” responses, although it might interest some to know that Roth’s two favorite pieces of American literature are Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms) insisted that he had no fixed address and spent his entire life “on airplanes.”  We suspect this phrase will be right up there with “How’s your Mandarin?” in the new millennium. Really.  I’ve never felt so out of it since I arrived at Oxford without having read Jane Austen.

Jin Hua, a press officer, professor (?) and writer from Beijing was here working with SH Contemporary Art Fair, was seated next to me and seemed to have an easier time working with the chinaware than I did.  My plate was precariously balanced on a porcelain server in the shape of two open hands designed by the superstar Peter Ting.  The sight of 60 plates offered up by 60 pairs of white hands was uncanny, to say the least, like a Cocteau film.  I expected them to seize my food and not let go.  To take my mind off that, I asked Jin Hua what he thought about the American election (as if Shanghai were, say, the upper west side).  He looked at me with a puzzled expression then smiled.  You know, in Beijing no one cares.  The United States is so far away.”

A brief note to scholars:  As Philip Dodd mentioned to me, the great next task of photo historians is to write a real history of Chinese documentary photography.  There are unusual caches of material but most is yet to be discovered and outside of Rong Rong’s pictures of Beijing’s “East Village” from the 1970s and 80s, nothing has been done.  Based on the incredible wealth on display among Shanghai collectors, funding would be available for a lifetime’s work.

And the art?  More about that to come.