Artist and activist Ai Weiwei first met independent curator and art critic Feng Boyi after returning from New York to Beijing in the early '90s. The duo soon started working together, releasing a series of underground publications known as the Red Flag books that tried to conceptualise the practice of Chinese artists while presenting international contemporary art to China. The series proved extremely influential with Chinese artists, turning for some critics into a manifesto for China's emerging avant-garde.
As the year passed, Ai and Feng continued their research and eventually managed to shook the system with a seminal exhibition that entered history. In 2000, while the Shanghai Biennale was taking place, Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi organised a peripheral event entitled "Fuck Off" (Subtitled in Chinese: "Ways to Not Cooperate") that featured forty avant-garde artists. The exhibition was closed by the authorities for its radical content, but, by then, many curators from other countries had already seen it, and the event had acquired cult status.
A new exhibition at the Groninger Museum, entitled "Fuck Off 2" and inspired by that first milestone for Chinese contemporary art, will soon be celebrating Chinese avant-garde artists while tackling the issues of free speech, artistic freedom, censorship and democracy.
Curated by Ai Weiwei, Feng Boyi and chief curator of the Groninger Museum, Mark Wilson, the exhibition includes this time 37 contemporary Chinese artists and artist groups, and analyses the current sociological, environmental, legal, and political climate in China today.
The Groninger Museum has a special connection with Ai Weiwei since it hosted the second solo museum exhibition by the Chinese artist in 2008 and also acquired the works "Water Melons" (2007) and "Grapes" (2009) directly from Ai Weiwei for the Museum Collection.
Critique against censorship is expressed by the selected artists in radically different ways: printmaker and illustrator Wu Junyong comments on politics in a style that may be reminiscent of Chinese art, while conceptual artist Zhang Dali juxtaposes enhanced and retouched photographs employed for political propaganda to the original images to spot alterations and comment about the veracity of contemporary mass media and about the "real Vs manipulated" dichotomy.
Photography is represented by quite a few young artists including photographer and freelance writer Lin Zhipeng, who created the blog North Latitude 23 and produced shoots also for creative and fashion magazines, and Ren Hang, known for carefully staged and at times ambiguous images with an exploitative and fetishistic twist about them.
In the tradition of the first "Fuck Off" event, this exhibition also features controversial works such as He Yunchang's gruesome performance "One Meter Democracy" (2010) in which he cut a one-meter long wound on the right side of his body using it as a metaphor for the control exerted by governments over people's bodies.
Some of the performances included attracted the attention of the authorities: Cheng Li's controversial "Art Whore" aimed at comparing the act of commercialising modern art with trading sex, and consisting in the artist engaging with a female partner in unsimulated sex acts before a selected group of invited artists at the Contemporary Art Exhibition Hall in Beijing, landed him a sentence to a year of re-education through labour in March 2011; "Free Sex" (2011) by sex-worker advocate Ye Haiyan, known for her campaigns to improve the conditions of China's sex workers and AIDS victims that led her to work as a prostitute in a low-cost brothel, resulted in constant pressures by the authorities, the media and even Internet hackers.
Freedom of expression remains one of the core themes of this exhibition, even though in quite a few cases the most interesting point about these artists is not just their allegiance to their practices, but also the fact that their works often have universal meanings and strong connections with global social issues, including the pursuit of identity, doubt on the truth and legality of old authoritative value systems, government control and punishment.
While introducing visitors to contemporary art from China, "Fuck Off 2" also promtps them to ponder about the real meaning of taking one's own decision, exterting one's free will and achieving freedom individually, nationally and internationally.
"Fuck Off 2", curated by Ai Weiwei, Feng Boyi and Mark Wilson, The Groninger Museum, The Netherlands, from 26 May to 17 November 2013.
Image credits:
All images courtesy of The Groninger Museum
1. Wu Junyong, Don't be Silent, 2011, Illustration
2. Zhang Dali, Second History, 2005, Photography
3. Ren Hang, Untitled, 2012, Photography
4. Ye Haiyan, Free Sex, 2011, Performance
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Member of the Boxxet Network of Blogs, Videos and Photos
Comments