- Venue
- Hayward Gallery
- Location
- London
What provoked me to see ‘Art of Change, New directions from China’ was Nosheen Iqbal’s exhibition preview for TimeOut London, which suggested it to be radical, avant garde and shocking. I have to admit, that going into the show, my knowledge of contemporary Chinese art was very limited and consisted mainly of work by Ai Weiwei, but I was excited by Iqbal’s description and intrigued by the unknown.
Walking into the first room of the Hayward gallery, I became anxious about the rest of the show. I haven’t experienced much performance art first hand but had built up a feeling of excitement to see the work I had read about. Yet the first room of the gallery, full of concrete block sculptures, with a crude, empty making space set up like a building site, and black and white spray paintings covering the walls, made me question if I was in the right place. With a seemingly large number of invigilators positioned around the room, and looking over the balcony as I entered, I couldn’t help but feel tense and nervous about the work that lay ahead of me.
The next room confused me even more, an all white room with empty shelves on the walls. It made a little more sense once I found the small description on the wall explaining that performances would happen every 40 minutes; not that I saw any sign of it in the time I was there, (retrospectively I also read about another performance where people in striped clothing followed individual viewers around the gallery, that was also not happening when I was there). Slowly moving through to a bigger white room, I was surprised at the same blank walls. A huge white box took up the center of the room, I could hear noises from within but found no sign indicating the work.
I moved across to a small doorway in the corner of the room, which was half my height. I went to enter the concealed room to find two people already inside taking part in what looked like quite a personal performance. I crouched in the small doorway, watching ‘Happy Yingmei’ 2011/2012 performed by Yingmei Duan, from the side. Creeping through a clearway in some dead branches towards the men viewing her, she made very faint and harrowing noises, gave the viewer a small piece of paper and invaded their personal space. Yet her nightdress and soothing nature coaxed the work to be a conversation rather than an invasion, it seemed as though she fed off the reaction of the viewer quite individually making each performance similar, but unique.
Getting up and returning my attention to the rest of the room felt surreal after being drawn into the hidden room, and I felt myself skipping over the Madein Company’s video recreating and pushing the limits of the famous photograph by Kevin Carter – ‘Vulture stalking a child’. But as I was leaving the room, I caught a glimpse of the work that was the white box taking up the center of the room. Out of the corner of my eye, I realized that someone in the box was throwing items in the air above it, I was immediately attentive, waiting for the next item to be thrown, moving, trying to find the best angle to see from. It almost became a game for me, trying to get a photo of the object in the air; I was enamored with it for a good 15 minutes. The dichotomy of the wall obstructing the audiences view, and separating them from the artist, creates almost a humor through imagining the artist inside the box, throwing such frivolous items in the air for you to see.
The next piece I encountered also had a similar effect on me – the poster piece for the exhibition, Xu Zhen’s ‘In Just a Blink of an Eye’ 2005. I encountered a female figure who looked frozen in mid-air, as if a photo of someone free falling. I first thought she was a hyper-real sculpture, reminding me of other participating artists Peng Yu and Sun Yuan’s piece at the Saatchi gallery ‘Old Persons Home’ 2007, involving super realistic sculptures of world leaders. I wasn’t particularly intrigued by it, but again, as I started to walk away, her gaze shifted from staring straight up, to straight at me, then quickly back up. I thought I had imagined it, but lingered, determined to see her move again, which of course she did, because it was a performance piece, not a sculpture. After a few minutes of pondering how she was suspended, I guessed that her baggy clothes concealed some kind of support structure she was laying on. It seems as though both this and the previous work rely on a distance from them, almost an assumption that the audience won’t notice, but then the artist subverts that, and draws the viewer back in.
My attention quickly moved to the piece on the wall next to the figure, the only sign of the artwork was the small plaque on the wall indicating that the work has been ‘created using paint that refuses to dry’[1], more interesting, it said ‘Be warned: touching this work leaves a stain that will not wash out and culprits will be marked.’ [2]Although there was nothing to see, the paint piece was one of my favorite works in the show, possibly for the fact that it kept me thinking after leaving the exhibition. It made me question a lot about what I thought the work was; the alleged paint, the text on the wall, the game between the artist and viewer, the feeling it creates in the audience, or something else? This introduced me to the idea and potential of invisible artwork.
I moved on anticipating more of the same kind of work but I was disappointed, the rest of the exhibition consisted of objects and sculptures that I didn’t find held my attention for very long. The whole top floor of the Hayward gallery was filled with work that was not what I had expected to see from reading Iqbal’s preview. Coming out of the exhibition I couldn’t help but feel slightly let down with what I had experienced. There were a few pieces I had really engaged with, and felt a reaction to, but there were many works that didn’t grasp my attention in relation to the performances I had enjoyed at the beginning of the show. Not to mention that a whole bunch of performances weren’t even happening. I almost feel like I should have spent my hour looking around the show, in the first two rooms alone, enjoying the works I have highlighted, and potentially getting to see those which would have interested me more than models of dinosaurs or rooms covered in mud. Perhaps the layout of the show should have been different; the performances mingled between sculptural works, rather than feeling like there were two halves to the exhibition. Then I think the juxtaposition of the 3D and video works, next to live performances may have made my experience more rounded and therefore more enjoyable.
Bibliography
IQBAL, N. 2012. Art of Change: exhibition preview [online]. Available at: http://www.timeout.com/london/art/article/3693/art-of-change-exhibition-preview [date accessed 01/09/2012]
[1] Direct quote from description next to the work, in the Hayward Gallery.
[2] Direct quote from description next to the work, in the Hayward Gallery.
