Shanghai's First Ceramics Show

On Sunday went to the Ceramic Fair at Shanghai Mart. There was some international ceramicists as well as Shanghai based studios/galleries/artists and representation from other places in China. 
As I am only beginning to read Chinese for the non-Chinese visitor it was challenging to work out who the maker was of each piece.

There were conventional useable pieces as well as ceramics that were purely for their visual pleasure.

Highlights included large wall hung plates/bowls by a Taiwanese ceramist Wang Xiugong. These are about 75 cm in diameter. Think the gallery is Shanghai based.

This curved tea set by a studio artist, Langlang 朗朗 for d9design.

These were awesome but unable to find out much about the maker.

Great teapot and example of the labeling.
These were very painterly large ceramic pots and bowls.
Part of the exhibition was the International Ceramic Invitation Exhibition which included more experimental pieces from China and Internationally. This is by Sandor Kecskemeti. He also had much larger pieces persumably for public sculpture but I loved these small works.

Great tiny chairs by Renate Hahn and fragile curvy containers by Francois Ruegg.

Both of these works are by Zhang Jingjing 张婧

婧. She was exhibiting as part of two cities gallery stand. I really liked her fluid curved lines.

Transposing the Common II @ Eastlink Gallery

Transposing the Common II

Australian artist Rodney Pople and Chinese artist Zhao Qin

Eastlnk Gallery

7 November to 20 November 2009  

I have seen lots of exhibitions of paintings where the artist has just copied a photoshoped image. Often showing little awareness of the painterly surface. At first, I thought Pople’s pictures were just paintings executed with painstaking detail. They are in fact photoshoped images printed onto canvas then paint is applied often with rag to transform the surface. With much mixed media painting the paint is there to create a different spatial level. This is not the case with Pople’s works the paint is on the same plain as the photographic printed surface. The painted areas are seamlessly intertwined to the pre-printed; they are for the majority of the time indistinguishable. The paint changes the digital image and the digital image changes the paint. Though conversations on the death of a painting are themselves dead, and utterly dull, Pople’s work does bring a new angle on painting in the digital Baudrillardian world.

The subject matter of his work, which is what will turn off most people, is about turning on, the pornographic. Pople told me about how the church commissioned artists to paint nudes that were only for ‘private privileged’ viewing, works in which we now revel in their excellence and consider them to be high minded master pieces. What is the difference between these works and a porno mag? Pople puts both together in his mixed media paintings. Hot large breasted woman in overt ecstasy lay on alters where more pious virgins were originally.

Much of the imagery in Pople’s paintings comes from past paintings. Ingres’ famous lute playing nude in ‘The Turkish Bath’ plays for a page three like female entertaining herself.  Many other works have been pillaged the past for their iconography and replaced or added sexual female figures. Pople’s works are steeped in sex and European painterly religious history.

Not all paintings have such strong overt sexual references, interspersing two of the alter works was a painting of a shark swimming through a religious building. The painted shark helped to turn painted surface into a fluid moving one as apposed to the static still printed image. The two alter nudes either side became more watery just by conjunction.

Zhao Qin’s paintings work on the viewer at a much slower pace. There isn’t the same instant hit, but there is still as much force. The small works are colourful and highly textured. The imagery can be read as no less subversive or offensive as Pople's, but depends on how you read it. Can you read gun tooting space men with traditional Chinese architecture in the background as not subtly subversive when China recently celebrated a space walk.  Qin’s work is a dystopian world of bright glowing colours painted an almost innocently textured way. How could these small almost cute works be critiquing contemporary China? 

struggle for life and death Huang He Solo exhibition

At 1918 Artspace, 20 Moganshan Lu
Exhibition 'Struggle For Life and Death: Huang He Solo Exhibition'.

Black and white paintings and sculptures of figures on the floor with a single horn surounded by broken mirrors.

Trenton Doyle Hancock talk at James Cohan Gallery

BizArt - Yu Ji Acnestis

Prior to entering Yu Ji exhibition, Acnestis at Biz Art, you read the introduction to the exhibition/artist. This would warn or prepare any sensitive viewer for the uninhibited nudity in the show. The show it self consisted of video projections on the wall - sensitively curated. The videos were of a young Chinese man the majority of the time naked, pursuing women, the films capturing that sexual itch, constant desire. The filming was frank and unbeauitified an attempt to capture the intimate subtleties of communication between people. The videos were banal, non showy which I liked. There was also a video recorded backwards with two people meeting on a deserted street intersection. In this video there was also wonderful footage of a horse.

A show worth seeing but not my personal aesthetic, though no doubt a review will change my mind....

Nov 1^st – 30^th Nov

BizArt Center 50 Moganshan Lu,

Young Glass at Two Cities Gallery

Non-purposeful colourful objects: must be art? Studio Glass, purposeless objects made of glass, beautiful and see through. I went to the Two Cities Gallery to see “Young Glass” an exhibition of emerging glass artists. I was amazed by the diversity of the work there, not just between artists but also within the artists’ own practice.

When I think of glass art I immediately think of Dale Chihuly’s amazing organic glass creations and the expensive creations of Lalique. This discipline, like many others, is off the fine art map, by being too close to craft and supposedly not cerebral enough. In China, painting has been a prevalent power in the art scene for a long time now, but there are movements away from this with more new media and photography exhibitions. The glass in this show had strong links with painting, not the representational political pop but to abstract expressionism and traditional Chinese ink painting.

The most interesting artists work was Xue Lv who is exploring how he can express traditional Chinese ink painting through glass. One striking piece at semi circle of high-pressure casted clear glass contained a single black ink stroke. Lv other works all predominantly tonal or subtly incorporating incidental colours try to solidify the fluidity of ink but maintaining a feeling of fragility.

Another artist who stood out was Han Xi who produced colourful solid cast formed pieces of glass. The light came through the different colours of glass creating a different hold able colour mixing.

Exhibition glass artists: Xue Lv, Cheng Xiang, Xiao Tai, Yang Meihua, Wang Qin, Luo Xiaoshu, Zheng Wenqing, Li Wen, Han Xi, Guo Xiaoyan, Wang Sheng

Young Glass

Oct 31 – Nov 17

Two Cities Gallery, 50 Moganshan Lu.