Chinese art from the 1970s to now @ Whitworth
I’m looking at a vast monochromatic screen print, Untitled (Three Leaders) (1989), a trio of figures with a familiar and foreboding Chairman Mao at the centre. Mao brandishes his Little Red Book with a smile, a publication formed of his own quotations that members of the Chinese Communist party were ‘encouraged’ to carry. My phone vibrates in my pocket with a news notification; Ai Weiwei, the artist responsible for this work, has just been granted a six-month visa to allow entry to the UK, just in time for his Royal Academy exhibition opening mid-September. In some respects Ai Weiwei has become a shorthand for the realities of suppressed and ‘criminal’ artists restricted by the oppression of a Leninist single-party state, a kind of political poster boy.
The eighty works that form the M+ Sigg Collection exhibition come from Swiss collector Uli Sigg, who has amassed the largest collection of Chinese contemporary art in the world. His collections, controversially, will form the basis of the M+ museum of visual culture, opening in Hong Kong in 2019, with the Whitworth exhibition being the only opportunity to see these works in the UK before that event.
Opposite the Ai Weiwei canvas we see the 1984 works of Wang Peng, arguably the first Chinese performance artist: 84-ink-5 and 84-photo (1-12), nude body-prints in ink and the photographic documentation of their making. When these were created, installations and performances in art galleries were criminal offences and dissident activity, seen as representative of the evils of capitalism, and the body prints were made in secret and hidden for many years.
In the same gallery is a small paint box owned by artist Zheng Ziyan, a member of the No Name Group. Members of the group adopted these small boxes as they were easily concealed or could be disguised as a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book. In the Cultural Revolution artists were banned from painting without government approval and these boxes allowed the group to continue with their work without suspicion. Elsewhere, a toilet roll in a vitrine, Umustbestrong (2004-2005) by Liang Yuanwei, contemplates determination and discipline in the face of turbulent political adversity. Using a typewriter, the artist painstakingly types the repeated title onto the entire length of the fragile toilet roll, seeming to encapsulate the efforts that Chinese artists have endured: careful and clandestine approaches, gallant and exhaustive methods.
Of course, it’s hard to capture 40 years of art history in any exhibition, but the Whitworth have managed to demonstrate an attentive and conscientious look at the importance of Chinese art without falling back on platitudes. We see more familiar proponents such as Zhang Huan and his Family Tree (2000) and of course Ai Weiwei with the monumental Still Life (1995-2000), laboriously composed of lines of Neolithic axe-heads, but these are not without context. The true triumph of this exhibition is its ability to open further discourse, to present and question an important passage of art history with refined grace, unpatronising and fastidious.
The M+ Sigg Collection: Chinese art from the 1970s to now runs until 20 Sep at Whitworth Art Gallery, free