Changing China is a vivid terrain

The scale of China’s transformation in the last two decades is at once difficult to fathom and oddly familiar. Whole cities have been bulldozed and rebuilt to accom- modate the migrating millions. A tightly wound culture has gradually unfurled, opening itself to global influences. The Chinese are beginning to see themselves as a vast pool of consumers.

Art has been sprouting amid these billows of change, responding to and egging on the cultural flow. “Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video From China,” straddling two New York City museums, stars many contemporary Chinese artists who have embraced new, media-based techniques.

The exhibit, which encompasses both the Asia Society and the International Center of Photography, opens a window onto strange but vivid terrain at a moment of efflorescence.

The best stuff here sings of the fears and exaltations of rapid change, which isn’t to say everything in the show is shining or new or even as interesting as it ought to be. The Chinese art world has been communing with the international avant-garde for the last several years, absorbing themes, technologies and approaches that look grandly generic instead of belonging squarely to China.

The most successful of the show’s four themed sections are the least abstract. “People and Place,” at the ICP, spotlights the dramatic reconfiguration of the urban landscape, as armies of huge apartment complexes darken the sidewalks of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.

The need to arrest a vanishing present is one felt by many of the artists, who mourn even as they welcome the new city and the freedoms it represents.

While driving through Beijing, Wang Jinsong created a vast archive of almost identical white-terraced towers. “The process was like blinking,” he writes in the catalog. “Later, when I assembled the 1,000 black and white photographs, I felt suffocated; I felt surrounded by thick, gray-colored walls, with cultural relics and people cramped and squashed in the middle.”

Wang builds an enormous grid out of his thousands of pictures, an embodiment of the man-made environment bearing down on his individuality.

Zhang Dali tags buildings slated for demolition with a larger-than-life-size caricature of his face. Feeling that changes wrought by money and power were wiping out the city’s humanity, Zhang determined to reclaim it by injecting his own features into the landscape.

In some cases he enlisted construction workers to carve face-shaped holes out of crumbling walls, then photographed the result. In the poignant “Forbidden City, Beijing” (1998), we look through Zhang’s hollowed-out profile toward an ancient sun-kissed pagoda etched against the sky. It is a sign of what endures in the midst of epic urban destruction.

Things come and go too quickly for Chen Shaoxiong, who grabs hold of the present and pastes it into makeshift monuments. He photographs buses, bicycles, pedestrians and street signs and glues the images into miniature dioramas that freeze-dry the ephemeral, elevating it but at the same time shrinking it to the size of a manageable memory.

Works like these resonate with all of us who have watched personal landmarks and public histories reckon with the wrecking ball. The more specific these pictures are in recording the death and rebirth of China’s cities, the more they speak to the universal experience of the modern metropolis.

When the art veers into common conceptualist rhetoric, however, it sinks under the weight of its own mundaneness.

The section of the exhibit titled “Performing the Self” recycles the worst trends of the last few years -- an unhealthy combo of super scale and flavorless content. The works here “reflect hybrid new conceptions of selfhood and personal identity in contemporary China,” the text says.

What they actually reflect is too much munching on stale Cindy Sherman, as when An Hong gears up as a cross-dressing Buddha and snaps a big self-portrait, or Hong Hao dons a wig and tinted contact lenses and snaps ... a big self-portrait.

How to maintain a sense of self in a mass society had preoccupied Western artists of the mid-20th century, leading Abstract Expressionists to fashion existential statements out of drips and splatters. The question was refined in the 1980s by artists who concluded that the self, closely examined, deconstructs into a series of media-sanctioned poses.

In the same way that China has been modernizing and liberalizing at warp speed, its artists have been fast-forwarding through similar episodes of self-discovery. The result is chaotic, derivative and facile, a jumble of Western avant-garde cliches with a regional twist.

In this teeming show, one trio of photographs stands out for its grim simplicity and stark personal testimony. After partaking of the abortive euphoria of Tiananmen Square in 1989, Sheng Qi went into exile -- but not before chopping off the little finger of his left hand as a way of memorializing the uprising in flesh. The exhibit contains three photographs he made upon his return.

In each, his mutilated hand is open against a Communist-red background. In his palm lies one of three vintage black-and-white miniature snapshots: of himself as a little boy in a worker’s cap, of his young mother smiling into the middle distance and of the terrible patriarch, Chairman Mao. The suite mixes the personal with the epic, the traumatic with the nostalgic. It telescopes recent memory and distant history, and it reports on violence with unsentimental frankness.

Like so many of the works gathered here, Sheng Qi’s images are oversized, super-clear and lavishly printed. What makes them special is that they are utterly specific and timely, unafflicted by rhetoric or pretense.