Wastelands
荒原
Ai Weiwei | Cai Yuan | Cao Fei | HMFF, Anthony Key | Sun Haili | Sun Yi | WESSIELING
Oxford Visual Arts Development Agency (OVADA), Oxford
17 July – 9 Aug 2015
About
Wastelands is a contemporary Chinese art exhibition of installation, painting, sculpture and film presenting the works of eight artists who all have links to China. The exhibition explores the idea of ‘waste’ as a result of consumption through different landscapes and materials. Ranging from the ‘aesthetic debris’ in the work of Cai Yuan’s cardboard paintings installation to Cao Fei’s film Haze and Fog, a surreal and abject portrait of an excessively self-consuming Beijing in the form of a zombie movie. Featuring established artists such as the hugely significant figure of Ai Weiwei alongside artists with long-standing practices in the UK, it engages in themes around issues of neo-liberal ideologies, consumption, development and economies of culture.
A participative installation takes the site of an out-of-town shabby hotel in Nanjing: Dream Hotel. By Nanjing-based HMFF Collective, it is a performative installation that critiques China’s ‘economic miracle’, drawing on possible everyday realities of ‘shady dealings’ and low level surveillance. In another work about a site, the ‘new’ town of Milton Keynes is taken by Sun Haili, who makes a living sculpture out of a section of grass from the edge of the site die to development. Anthony Key’s Dolly is a sharply observed sculpture made from a supermarket trolley in an absurd take on consumption and reproduction. Wessieling’s work takes the garment label and site of production in the vast clothes industry, creating placards and brands to question positions of power and invisibility in the circulation of fashion. Sun Yi, a young artist uses daily newspapers as material for drawings in ink, combining fine art vocabulary with free disposable material for everyday consumption of news. Finally, a documentary by the globally renowned Ai Weiwei, shows an ambitious architectural project in the new city of Ordos Inner Mongolia that engaged in an ‘out of the world’ location […] where boom and bust co-exist and where creativity takes elusive forms’.
The exhibition is curated by Katie Hill, Director of the Office of Contemporary Chinese Art. It is co-produced with OCCA and funded by Arts Council England. With special thanks to the University of Salford and CFCCA - New Collection of Chinese Contemporary Art.
Selected Images
Courtesy of Rachel Marsden.
Cai Yuan, performing. Courtesy of Rachel Marsden.
Installation view, Wastelands. Courtesy of Artlyst.
Installation view, Wastelands. Courtesy of Rachel Marsden.
Anthony Key, Dolly, 2002.
Sun Haili, Section of Grass, 2013.
Installation view, Wastelands. Courtesy of Rachel Marsden.
Cai Yuan, Untitled, 2015. Courtesy of Rachel Marsden.
Cai Yuan, ISMS Series, 2015. Courtesy of Rachel Marsden.
Wessieling, Labels of Desire, 2015. Courtesy of Rachel Marsden.
Ai Weiwei, Ordos 100, 2012. Courtesy of OVADA.
HMFF Collective, Dream Hotel, 2015. Courtesy of Artlyst.
HMFF Collective, Dream Hotel, 2015. Courtesy of Artlyst.
HMFF Collective, Dream Hotel, 2015. Courtesy of Rachel Marsden.
Cao Fei, still from Haze and Fog, 2013. Courtesy of Cao Fei and Vitamin Creative Space.