Cao Fei .Whose Utopia? (2006).Video Installation at Tate
Liverpool 2007. IMAGE COURTESY THE ARTIST

ON THE SECOND FLOOR OF TATE LIVERPOOL WAS A ROOM IN A STEEL plant. On the bare stone floors were sheets of steel, and heavy-looking, grimy machines stood as if temporarily deserted. In a corner, sat a bowl of noodles, chopsticks lying higgledy-piggledy on the side, as if hastily abandoned. The worker will be back any moment, I thought, to continue his lunch. Except, that he wouldn’t – because I wasn’t actually visiting a Chinese factory floor at all. The ‘steel’ equipment was fashioned from Polystyrene by Beijing-based artist, Zhuang Hui, and – appearances notwithstanding – had been especially designed for artistic rather than functional purposes.

Tate Liverpool’s blockbuster exhibition of contemporary Chinese art – one of the largest in the UK, the catalogue declares – was called The Real Thing (from the 30th of March to the 10th of June). And the issue of reality versus fakery often took a hilarious turn. Curator and critic, Xu Zhen, claims to have climbed to the top of Mount Everest and hacked off its peak. The show included photographs of his expedition as well as the trekking gear he wore while on it. And – in case we didn’t believe him – a snowy pile from the mutilated mountain was placed in a vast refrigerated container next to all these ‘proofs’ of his successful expedition.

Xu Zhen. 8848 Minus 1.86 (2005). Installation of snow in
refridgerated container, IMAGE COURTESY THE ARTIST

Co-curated by Karen Smith and Simon Groom, The Real Thing consisted of 18 artists; an attempt to give the British public an overview of contemporary Chinese art since 2000 and its presentation of the nitty-gritties of (dare I say “a real”?) China. Smith and Groom think that 2000 was a turning point for Chinese art, because it represented a watershed for China. It marked the widespread use of the Internet, an increase in infrastructure for the arts, and the swelling of the Chinese art bubble. To steer clear of anything that smacked of auction-house euphoria, though, they concentrated on videos, performances, and installations – with only one painter (Yang Shaobin) giving us a taste of the Cynical Realism that is making art dealers’ fantasies come true at international auctions. “This exhibition is meant to be more politically and socially engaged than the paintings usually are, we wanted to show what is really happening now in China,” Groom explained.

In the Liverpudlian context, the exhibition contained a whiff of social engineering. Liverpool is ‘twinned’ with Shanghai, and the catalogue is keen to point out parallels in the fast-growing economies of both. The ‘real’ agenda of the exhibition was to allow next year’s European Capital of Culture to bask in some of the glow that is coating Chinese contemporary art at the moment.

But – and more excitingly for viewers – the art itself often spot-lit the radically different way things work in the two cultures; contrasts that this show was, quite literally, happy to illuminate. Groom gleefully recounted artist Gu Dexin’s first visit to the Tate. Apparently, Gu saw the brilliant red boat, with its humungous funnel, that resides outside the institution and serves as the only mobile lighthouse in Liverpool, and thought it had been placed there in his honour. (Gu is after all, famous for his mammoth, phallic looking objects.) On learning that the lighthouse served a practical function that had nothing to do with art, Gu decided to make another one as his own contribution, using cheap materials and labour from China to accomplish the task. “We can’t turn the lights on, of course, because it’ll confuse the ships”, Groom admitted, somewhat wistfully. Ai Weiwei’s Working Progress: Fountain of Light might have had Modernist beginnings – it referenced the Constructivist Utopia of Vladimir Tatlin’s 1919 Monument, which finds its equivalent in talk of the “New China” today – but it also purposefully pointed to the radically different realities of East and West. Ai’s massive, crystal-encrusted structure bobbed along the waters of Albert Dock as a monument to China’s low cost of production.

As one of the curator’s of The Real Thing, Xu Zhen’s ‘helpful’ suggestions were (quite deliberately) even more bizarre for the P.C. gallery-going audience in Britain. Commissioning someone to attack a gallery visitor and stripping them of their clothing or giving visitors big knives to brandish at others, ranked among his ideas for the creation of special performance art pieces for the Tate.