Art in reality – Beijing 798 Biennale explore a shifting community

Hu Huishan Memorial, by Liu Shikun

 

 

 

 

By He Jianwei

The 706 Factory in 798 Art District got a new addition for last Saturday’s Biennial: a low-ceilinged shed for Three Gorges resettlers with thre single beds and an old wooden door.

“During the past 10 years, more attention has been going to the underprivileged and people left living on the fringes of society. This awareness has imbued the contemporary art scenewith a sense of community spirit,” Zhu Qi, curator of the first Beijing 798 Biennial, says.

Three Gorges resettlers, casualties of Wenchuan Earthquake, migrant workers and mental patients were the topics of the night. They embody contemporary art’s focus on shifting communities.

Contemporary art has achieved great success in the domestic and international markets, but it has become alienated from China’s domestic conditions.

But that might be changing.

Over the last few years, the contemporary art scene has developed a strong sense of community awareness.

Many artists join the people abandoned by society to form a relationship with them. “They cause chang by influencing, inspiring and mingling with people and communities,” Zhu says.

Mobile Drugstore collects new proposals for healing the mentally ill.

Mobile drugstore

Guo Haiping, a Nanjing artist, made headlines last year when he went to live with committed mental patients for two months to teach them painting. Some patients demonstrated such a talent that “art therapy” became recommended for other mental patients.

At the exhibition, Guo and other two artists showed their newest installation: the Mobile Drugstore. On August 3, Huang Yao, Luo Li and Guo piled into an Iveco bus in Nanjing and headed for the capital by way of Anhui, Shandong, Tianjin and Hebei provinces. At each stop, they collected new proposals for healing the mentally ill.

Mobile Drugstore

“We wanted to learn what people thought and how they dealt with mental problems,” Guo says.

By the time they arrived, they had collected 42 proposals from local artists, including art and literature therapy for manic depressives.

In Bangbu, Anhui Province, Wang Lei, a local artist, highlighted the problems of the “lonely child”: the icon of the one-child generation. He designed a black T-shirt with the characters “lonely cd.” “We discussed the mental problems of the only child, such as loneliness, melancholy and delusion. All of us wore T-shirts to show our concern for the problem,” Guo says.

The bus arrived in Suzhou, Anhui Province, on August 5. There they found many people who had turned to religion to relieve their physical and mental suffering. The city is home to 700 churches and 200,000 Christians.

“The architecture of churches was approved by th local government. Most people who turned to Christianity did so because they had developed some incurable disease,” Guo says.

They also went to hospitals to pick up patients’ prescriptions. In Linyi No. 4 People’s Hostal, they tried to talk with Yang Yongxin, the psychiatrist made infamous for his use of electroshock therapy to “cure” Internet addicts.

While they could not dissuade Yang, they did pass on their art therapy proposals to one of the doctor’s colleagues.

Read more