Zhuang Hui .Factory Floor (2003). Installation view
at Tate Liverpool. 2007. IMAGE COURTESY THE ARTIST

Wang Peng is only a fraction less famous for the license he takes with his unsuspecting audience. Gate (2001), his ‘site-specific action’ in China consisted of locking visitors in his ‘gallery’. When they realized they were trapped in a darkened room with no means of escape, they were forced to break down the door; venting their fury on its padlock. Wang’s video at The Real Thing – Passing Through Beijing (2007) – took people-watching into less contentious territory. Wang placed a ball of string in his pocket and walked down the streets of Beijing, seemingly oblivious as it unravelled behind him and got entangled in Beijingers’ feet. Wang recorded their reactions on video. Passing was an astute depiction of the socio-political changes in Beijing – without any of the boring preaching we associate with the floating of this idea. Wang showed that Beijing is so far away from its days of obsessive state surveillance that not even knocking a policeman at Tiananmen Square with his string elicited more than a bemused grin.

But elimination of painting notwithstanding, whether The Real Thing had anything to do with the ‘real’ China is debatable. Videos, performance, and installations are hugely dependant of funding from Western institutions, and art writers and journalists are beginning to voice concerns that contemporary Chinese art is proverbially non-Chinese in origin – a major impetus for China’s art scene from the 1980s onwards was the meddling of foreign gallerists and curators who shaped it according to Western cookie-cutters. “Is Tate’s entertaining extravaganza nothing more than a Western construct, a re-packaging of an exotic China for Western audiences?” I asked. Groom waved the thought away with a derisive flick of his wrist: “I don’t know why the developing world is always beating itself up about this. It’s fatal to art and irrelevant now. Chinese artists don’t say they are Chinese, they say they are artists. Besides, we worked with Xu Zhen to curate this.”

Ai Weiwei and Fake Studio. Working Progress (Fountain of Light).
Mixed Media light installation, floating on Alert Dock outside Tate
Liverpool. 2007. IMAGE COURTESY THE ARTIST. ALL PHOTO CREDITS
TO DAVID LAMBERT/ROD TIDNAM, TATE PHOTOGRAPHY.

Certainly, The Real Thing presented a view that wasn’t about the simple consumption of the pretty. Cao Fei’s video took the idea of the exotic for a twirl. Her video, Whose Utopia? (2006) zoomed into Osram light-bulb factory in southern China, documenting the suffocating, almost robotic repetition of the work involved. Just as the monotonous movements and neon glare got oppressive though, gorgeously-dressed dancers floated into the factory. A delicate, tutu-clad ballet dancer and a woman with a turquoise-sequinned dress swirled around the rooms – lending them a sudden, if evanescent, atmosphere of glamour. Here, the mechanical re-production of bulbs overlapped into the manufacturing of fantasies, each one lending the other an aura of ambiguity.

For Groom, art is no longer about “place” because now “the plane is the studio”. “Of course, there is local specificity, but it is joined to universality,” he contested. The Real Thing did seem to convey something of the multi-faceted, local flavour of contemporary China – definitely a far cry from the China of gold and jade and fighting-flying maidens that is the movie industry’s version of a Chinese blockbuster. Moreover, even if you are one of those cynics (or realists?) who believe that anything Chinese is highly marketable in the international art world regardless of its adherence to factual accuracy, it would still be difficult to query the authenticity of a show whose artists seemed intent on giving the idea of the “real” a holiday.