Platform China, Caochangdi Village
Found my way to Platform China an art space in Caochangdi Village today. Rather difficult to find [which doesn’t surprise me anymore] – further NE than 798 towards Bei Gao. From four lane expressways to wandering down lanes with high grasses either side, you suddenly find yourself faced with a large and impressive contemporary art space [or two]. Chatted with Xian Lei, the project manager, who kindly showed me around the space. The show on at the moment is Xu Ruotao – abstract paintings, quite interesting – working with digital and manual techniques. Platform China is more of an institute, Lei told me, rather than just a gallery. This village is where the cutting edge spaces are now located, with 798 being rather commercial these days in contrast. I asked about different media and she said they are interested in other art forms, and have shown a lot of video in particular, and plan to set up a Chinese video art library. I asked about the apparent absence of women in the Chinese contemporary art scene, and she said that, yes of course there are many female artists but often their work is not up to standard or tends to be about gender issues, which can get repetitive. This isn’t a terribly good explanation I don’t think, but of course things do get lost in translation, so it can be hard to tell. So far, there does seem to be a lot of evidence of [a] painting being the preferred medium [the most commercial of media, of course, a tradition that the West may just have shaken off by now] and [b] the idea of the ‘male’ ‘genius’, which seems to have a considerable hold over things.
Lei was on her way to an opening at the 798 site of Platform China and invited me along. The show opening was ‘Water Division’ by Jin Shan, some video and photographic work [not painting!]. The work was interesting, experimental but narrative performance work and seemed to be considering the influence of the West on China via religion and various philosophical texts. The photographs were stills of the performance/s. Unfortunately the sound of the two videos noticeably interrupted each other, a faux pas when presenting any kind of work with sound.
