Shanghai Art and Science Fiction

Jiang Zhi -- "Objects In My Drawer"

I didn’t know I was interested in Shanghai’s contemporary art scene until I started reading the blog Asian Art Nerd.  The blog offers commentary and showcases Shanghai art (often via the author’s own photos) such as Jiang Zhi’s photographs, which recallsome bizarre combination of dreams, nostalgia, and horror films:

Jiang Zhi -- "Sucker"

Each image makes my skin prickle, as though images of my private nightmares are being put public display. It feels great to see them so clearly in focus, but also frightening, even embarrassing.

On a completely different note I’ve also been enjoying Space Canon, a blog reviewing Science Fiction exclusively. Sounds dull and common place until you actually read the thing. Here’s Space Canon’s recent review of an Arthur C. Clarke novel titled Imperial Earth:

Impetuously, a space-living
Man, still young,
Plots his first and last journey to
Earth, for him, a
Return to his long-forgotten birthplace.
In the ship, he trains for
All those forgotten rituals, including:
Life with gravity.

Everything he finds, including the most anodyne of
Animals, seems mystical, meaningful, alien.
Returning to his home on the moon of
Titan, he is
Humbled.

Here’s what the author has to say about this undertaking to read books from the SF canon:

I would like to become a kind of expert on the subject, and because there are no genuine, bricks-and-mortar institutions where a person can do such a thing. Because I would like to continue striding straight and calm into the future, assured of all possible realities, of how to foil the pitfalls of humanity when faced with sentient clouds, steel planets, and moon pools. And, while the canon of traditional literature forms a majestic, complex image of humanity, the space canon as a culture is as yet lightly-trodden, but full of important, and undoubtedly prescient, ideas.

Happy reading!

Alessandro Busci at Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art

Last month I saw a show of Alessandro Busci’s paintings at the Mark Wolfe Contemporary Art. Each of Busci’s paintings featured “train depots, service stations, power plants, and airports”. The enamel palettes used were vivid, usually limited to the brown chemical rainbows over iron panels, thrillingly lurid red paint, near-pure white, and an empty middle gray — now applied thickly, now diluted outward giving the impression of water and light on a runway.

Busci’s paintings speak to the part of industrialization that hard, dehumanizing, and sometimes bloody. In other ways, his paintings act as a paean to the great seductive joys of mass-production. There is a beauty to mass-production — the sense of a sudden rush of material wealth — but also a fear and latent violence, as it always seems in danger of growing into a Goliath, both cruel and easily toppled by its own great girth.

Unfortunately those amazing airport and factory paintings were shown in the wretchedly over-designed Mark Wolfe gallery. The gallery space juxtaposes a slick design aesthetic with raw cement pillars. It’s cold in a way that makes me breathy with claustrophobia. The Mark Wolfe gallery belies Busci’s paintings. While the “raw” space speaks to a similar appreciation of industrial design, the application of that design unwittingly implies a total lack of comprehension of the genealogy of the industrial aesthetic.

For these reasons the entire gallery space put me on edge, which might be considered a feat of architecture and design if the subtext (exotification of raw utilitarian architecture) didn’t distract so much from the artwork displayed.

In that setting Busci’s hauntingly beautiful chemical-and-metal paintings — which, given their color and the spontaneous yet sinuous application of paint seemed an homage to the blunt violence of industry — seem almost like mockeries of themselves. The paintings are inherently effective and powerful; and, unlike the gallery, they are infused with a sense of the history and psychological gravity of utilitarian architecture. However, when juxtaposed with the Mark Wolfe space, the paintings are subsumed and hence trivialized.

Busci’s paintings are wonderful but I would prefer to see them in more fitting space.