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Recent years have seen a surge in the appearance of sculptures
in parks, streets and squares in Chinese cities. Of varying levels,
those sculptures are the first impression of public art in a lot of
people's minds, yet the word "public art" is still puzzling for
ordinary people.
What is public art? How can public art be really appreciated by
common people? And is there a different view of it, besides the
conventional model of the city sculpture?
These are big questions on the desk of many Chinese artists and
city authorities.
On July 15, the Public Art Center inside the Third Pole Creative
Zone in uptown Beijing made its debut exhibition. It can be seen as
an experiment through which the organizer, the Public Art Center
Committee, tries to answer these questions.
It can barely be called a "centre." It has neither independent
space nor doors or walls.
The exhibits are not displayed together in a hall, but instead,
each of them greets the visitors separately on different floors of
the Creative Zone, which is a modern shopping mall that includes
book stores, restaurants, gyms and beauty parlours.
People at every entrance of the building will notice a couple of
stone lions, which are frequently seen as essential features of
grand Chinese architecture as well as the symbol of royalty and
dignity in traditional culture.
Yet in the video works of Beijing artist Wang Gongxin entitled
"Always Welcome," the lion images on the TV screen continuously say
"Hello" to entering customers.
Computer technology adds cartoon-like special effects to images of
the lions that make their eyes roll and legs move.
As one of the earliest Chinese artists creating video-works,
Wang expresses his feelings about daily life, usually in a humorous
way.
Chen Shaoxiong, another pioneering video artist from Guangzhou,
capital of South China's Guangdong Province, displays a
three-minute video entitled, "The City in Ink and Water."
He spent two years taking photos of the hustle-and-bustle of
Guangzhou, changed these pictures into ink-and-water paintings and
showed them in videotapes dubbed with recordings of daily-life
sounds.
Based on his memories, Chen presents a daydream of the
metropolitan life.
Also on show are multi-media works by Zhou Xiaohu, Qiu Anxiong
of Shanghai and Hung Tung-Lu from Taiwan. Their creations tap deep
inside modern people and mirror the exhaustions and lost feelings
of humans in a mass-produced world.
The exhibition is a message from organizers that public art
doesn't need to be observed or understood with distance, reverence
and seriousness. Public art should come across naturally in any
public place and evoke emotion.
(China Daily July 27, 2006)
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