Chinese Video: Chord Changes in the Megalopolis at Morono Kiang Gallery, Los Angeles

Chinese Video: Chord Changes in the Megalopolis
Ai Weiwei, Cao Fei, Wang Wei, Liu Ding, Xu Zhen, Wang Jian Wei, Chen Chieh-Jen, Dong Jun, Lin Yilin, Yang Zhenzhong, Zhao Liang, Jiang Zhi
Curated by Kevin Power
Morono Kiang Gallery, Los Angeles
September 13, 2007 - November 17, 2007

Morono Kiang Gallery presents its third exhibition, Chord Changes in the Megalopolis, a group show featuring the work of twelve video artists. This will be the first time that many of the videos will be shown in the U.S.

It is a monstrous clich to argue that China is in a process of massive change: it is, and in many aspects, it isn't. That is to say, change as a visual phenomenon is rapid, but as a psychological process its pace is much slower. There are zones of curious and intense frictionsideological, social, and economicbetween what was and what is, what may be and what will not be. Chord Changes in the Megalopolis seeks to look at the way in which a number of Chinese video artists are living, documenting, reflecting upon, and conceptualizing these changes. Many of the videos focus on sociocultural changes and the redefinitions of social status and ambition in the new frenetically expanding megalopolis, with its changing urban landscape and its concentrated takes on fast, modern, consumer living.

Videos include Ai Weiwei's Beijing: Chang'an Boulevard, a strangely obsessive but astutely conceptual piece dealing with Beijing's ring road system, which stands as a register of growth, social zoning, traffic density, human loss, and bewilderment, as well as Cao Fei's penetrating and poetic piece on the life of a milkman and her more parodic play with cultural identity and consumer change in Hip-Hop. These works provide paradigmatic statements that frame the diverse ways in which the artists included in this show represent the rhythms and momentums of social change.

This exhibition does not pretend to define ideological oppositions, but rather it seeks to show the diversity of readings and positions being taken by Chinese artists as they react to and analyze the particularities of their own circumstances and interests. The work varies from direct but poetically evocative documentary-style reportage to subtly worked metaphors. Xu Zhen creates an ironic tongue-in-cheek ideological deconstruction of frontier tensions in 18 Days, a work that is at the same time an existential adventure; Dong Jun provides sensitive register of the life of an art school model who, now eighty-four years old and economically reduced to subsistence living, has a passionate desire to avoid all thought yet remains elegant in her gestures; Chen Chieh-Jen re-creates in a wondrous, almost Bergmanesque fashion the industrial experience in an abandoned textile factory that he restores "momentarily" to life. Wang Wei shows two interrelated works, the first of which documents the life of a family of brick sellers who collect their bricks by demolishing buildings in the morning and then have to sell them off before nightfall because they have no storage space. The second video resituates this sociological document as the artist asks the same family to build a brick wall in a gallery as an art installation; the artist has negotiated with them and agreed to sell the bricks back to them at half price as one of the conditions of the realization of the piece.

These works reflect the pulse and the radical nature of the changes taking place in Chinese society. Some artists choose to do so by examining dramatic psychological dislocations that have disturbed former definitions of identity, as in Liu Ding's Stop, or Wang Jan Wei's Dodge, and Lin Yilin's One Day, a video of the artist wandering the city with his leg handcuffed to his wrist.

These video works have clear elements of social critique, but above all they are interrogative, perceptive, and personal.

Kevin Power is Chair of American Literature at the University of Alicante (Spain) and is also a Visiting Professor at Instituto Superior de Arte (Havana, Cuba), as well a lecturer at other universities in South America. From 2003 to 2005 he was assistant director of the Museo Nacional Reina Sofa in Madrid. He has worked as a critic and curator for the last twenty years.

MORONO KIANG GALLERY
218 West 3rd Street, Bradbury Building
Los Angeles, CA 90013
www.moronokiang.com