Mathieu Borysevicz on the Lu Xun Park Project

2008.02.11

Back in 1999, Chinese artist Zheng Guogu, resurfacing from his first New York City subway ride, exclaimed, “New York’s subway is far better than contemporary art!” If the art-as-life/life-as-art debate is theoretically tired, there are still those rare lived moments, often in public space, when the two seem to converge. While art stays mired in a relentless and convoluted process of self-redefinition, it seems in these moments of epiphany, life pulses beautifully onwards.

Lu Xun Park Project · Documental, installation view, first floor.

All of these thoughts passed through my mind as I entered the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art a few weeks ago. Not having ventured to this once hopeful beacon of Shanghai’s cultural scene in quite some time, and with a few hours to kill, I decided to make the trip. According to its mission statement, the Duolun Museum is the "first professional, publicly funded contemporary art museum in mainland China." Its boxy modern building is located along historic Duolun Road amongst a stretch of preserved villas now occupied by cafés and antique shops in Shanghai's northern Hongkou District, in the sort of neighborhood that seemed, not so long ago, like it might be the next big thing. Since its promising opening in 2003—just before the current frenzy began—and through cycles of erratic leadership including several directorial coups d'etat, the museum has spiraled into a black hole on Shanghai's cultural landscape. Somehow my low expectations proved fodder for pleasant surprises, albeit confused surprise. This wasn’t an exhibition of works by artists, but it was art just the same. Or was it?

Photo by parkgoer Luo Jinshan.

As far as I could tell the exhibition Lu Xun Park Project · Documental was a Hongkou District Propaganda Department-initiated endeavor aimed to encapsulate the public park down the road in forms that resembled contemporary art. The Department accomplished this through a number of installation strategies that resulted in quite a noteworthy exhibition. The lower gallery walls were lined with a grid of framed statistical diagrams, some protruding out like drawers, mapping the ebbs and flows of park visitors throughout the year based on age, duration of visit, and preferred park activities. A mosaic of colored wheel charts in neat white frames became the backdrop for a scattering of potted plants and red bunted tables on Astroturf. On three tables in the center of the room sat albums containing photographs taken by park regulars. Cameras were given to a cross-section of parkgoers to photograph what they wished, however they wished, in and about the park. The result was an aesthetic and anthropological grab bag displaying sensibilities and perspectives that kept you looking and wondering. One sixty-one-year-old man photographed his home kitchen table bedecked with an array of fake flowers and knickknacks using a blaring flash, taking four shots from slightly varying perspectives. A twenty-year-old showed some photographs depicting construction drapes tortured by the rain and others simply portraying his friends caught off-guard. Another older woman, in unknowing homage to Ruscha, had cataloged all the buildings on the street leading to the park with a uniform, ever so slight leftward tilt. The photos reminded me of when I had just graduated from art school feeling that in order to make great art I’d have to forget everything I just learned. Naiveté has always been a welcome alternative to pretense, and in this case the two have solidified.

Park Bench, video installation, 2008.

On the other side of the hall tucked behind a circle of potted plants were eight television monitors stacked long-ways, two by four. Across the monitors played a virtuosic edit of a day in the life of a park bench. The park bench, playing host to the smallest unit of societal congregation, made for an intense investigation in behavioral and social sciences. Gridded across the eight monitors was a man sleeping horizontally on a single park bench. The film then cut to combined details of several benches–the head of the sleeping man, the torsos of a cuddling couple, the legs of a young mother and child, the bench all the while remaining intact behind them. Just like the impressionistic exploits of Georges Seurat, who explored the emerging concept of leisure in a rapidly industrializing society, here again, the video maker sits an unwinding cross-section of humanity before us. But there was no apparent author of this work, nor of three more large-scale video installations on the second floor. Here, a partially divided room allowed the viewer to see all three screens at once. In this dark labyrinth the indescribable pleasures of people watching rendered alive the experience of inhabiting a public park in China. With ever-so-slight adjustments to frame and composition, the "documental" eye behind the camera allowed the rich world of Lu Xun Park to take center stage.

Untitled, video installation, 2008.

The films were structured seasonally and presented a wealth of meaningful and vibrant juxtapositions. A wide shot of a summertime dance festival shows a thousand couples, many same-sex, bouncing in sync to the soundtrack of an over-blown speaker. Another screen shows a close-up montage of children. It cuts to a frame centered on a statue of Lu Xun, China’s early twentieth-century revolutionary bellettrist, as a man lost in a newspaper article walks in front of the statue and pauses for what seems like eternity. Still lost in the newspaper the man finally exits frame just as, in what couldn’t have been more perfectly choreographed, an older woman walks to the upper corner of the composition and begins carving out beautiful, slo-mo taichi movements. Another close-up of a cuddling couple on a bench zooms out to an old man in a wheelchair basking in the warmth of the sun. And the delightful movie of daily life, à la China's vibrant public parks, plays infinitely on.

— 文/ Mathieu Borysevicz