Para Site “That Has Been and May Be Again”

Hong Kong, June 11 – August 21, 2016, http:// www.para-site.org.hk

The show surveyed Chinese art of the last two decades that stood on the sidelines of the official (art market) narrative of political pop and cynical realism. The artworks presented in the show link to the everyday directly, circumventing stereotypical pop imagery and instead telling small stories based on personal observation and experience. It is a lineage that very much deserves attention, both for its possibility to capture a specific state of mind of a generation and for the possibility of tracing a parallel art historical narrative.

The show has been curated by two young guest curators, Leo Li Chen 陳立and Wu Mo 武漠, at the invitation of the Para Site in-house team. The exhibition-making approach on one hand mirrored that of the in-house team in the survey-like, research-based approach. On the other hand, the exhibition emanated a more relaxed atmosphere, where individual artworks received enough space to breathe. The manipulation of individual artworks in order to produce a grand narrative is the general risk of the research-based exhibition-making style, but in this case, the danger has been mitigated successfully. The amount of artworks has been just right and their placement very careful, either the best or second best (to the Sheela Gowda show last year) to see in Para Site’s Quarry Bay space since they moved there. Walking around the space, one could feel engaged, with spikes of curiosity at different moments, without a feeling of being educated or manipulated too directly.

The central space of the gallery has proven challenging to fill in previous exhibitions. This time, this issue has been tackled successfully. Hu Jieming’s large automatic piano, playing back an abstract melody driven by the heartbeat of a young man jerking off on a TV monitor next to it, welcomed visitors with a strong presence that could not be overlooked. At first sight, one could see and hear the piano, a magnificent and calming presence. Then one noticed the reflection of the monitor on the polished piano surface, and only after a detailed observation the relation became clear. A number of other exhibited works gave themselves to a similar way of reading: A strong spatial presence, followed by an invitation to look again carefully and be rewarded with additional depth.

Artists featured: Chen Qiulin 陳秋林, Hu Jieming 葫介鳴, Jiang Zhi 蔣志, Leung Chi Wo 梁志和, Li Jin 李津, Li Jinghu 李景湖, Liu Chuang 劉窗, Liu Ding 劉鼎, Ma Liuming 馬六明, Qian Weikang 錢喂康, Wang Youshen 王友身, Yan Lei 顏磊, Yin Xiuzhen 尹秀珍, Zheng Bo 鄭波 and Zhu Jia 朱加.