Gao Weigang is an anomaly, a supreme practitioner of artistic pragmatics. Having toiled away in relative obscurity as a teacher of oil painting in Tianjin, he accidentally found himself in Beijing a few years ago to close a real estate deal for an artist friend, and while there, he decided to show his work to Ai Weiwei, having long admired the more established artist’s efficiency in getting things done. One thing led to another, and Gao Weigang was eventually offered his first show at China Art Archives and Warehouse (CAAW), in Caochangdi. That was 2008; a year later, he had another solo exhibition in Magician Space, the small 798 gallery owned by the artist with whom Gao Weigang had come to the city just three years earlier. These two exhibitions could not be more different from each other: one is all about exploring craft and material; the other is about enforcing concepts and relationships. For the artist, this is partially in order to maintain his creative energy, a process that involves moving from one work to the next without looking back. Mostly, though, it’s all about keeping himself amused.

Foreign Body, Gao Weigang’s exhibition at CAAW, was striking for the way it literally inserted what appeared to be a complex and mature body of work into the discourse revolving around the art exhibited at CAAW, with which it had previously had almost no contact. The works were all produced between 2007 and 2008, during which time the artist participated in literally no other exhibitions. And yet here—on the outskirts of Beijing during the capital’s Olympic year—this artist demonstrated new directions for Chinese conceptual painting and issued a challenge to the more highly professionalized corners of the broader art world.

The work in Foreign Body ranged from straightforward oil-on-canvas works to paintings on rocks, paintings with rocks attached to the canvas, sculptures consisting of electric fans, and paintings on half-destroyed pieces of furniture. Perhaps most interesting was the fact that with this intelligent approach to painting, and despite the artist’s professed boredom with two-dimensional work, he remains willing to experiment with the figurative while avoiding iconicity. The admirable subtlety evident in the two major paintings of futuristic interiors is also reflected in their conceptual rationale: here, Gao Weigang demonstrates a play between inside and out—those two key terms of Chinese contemporary art history—by imagining spaces of always-already-existent science fiction. The sterile interior of the gallery space is projected into a future—here reminiscent of Jamesonian temporality—and the technes transforms the present without having to enter it. In other works presented in Foreign Body, the artist experiments with an expanded realm of painting that borders on both sculpture and installation while retaining a strong sense of medium specificity.

For his 2008 solo exhibition at Magician Space, Blind/Bee, Gao Weigang replaces the object with action. If in Foreign Body he displaced his desire for cognitive experimentation onto the material world, tearing into specific objects with a furiously transformative energy, in this exhibition he grapples with this same energy in an attempt to interpolate the audience into the
space between the artist and his work. Likewise, the emphasis on craft is replaced by mass production values and manufactured simplicity—though the comparison may be critically facile, it would be difficult not to link an immaculate upright vacuum cleaner on a pedestal against a white wall with Jeff Koons’s vitrine-encased Hoovers from the early 1980s.


photo: Gao Weigang, The First Interior View, 2007, oil on canvas, 200 x 380 cm. Courtesy of the artist and China Art Archives & Warehouse, Beijing.

The premise of the central piece, Bee, is simple: at the end of each day, Gao Weigang vacuums the floor of the gallery space, emptying the collected debris into a sealed glass vial displayed in a row of sixty such vessels on a shelf against the wall, each one labeled with the date of its collection to emphasize the temporally discrete nature of any individual visit to the gallery. In this piece, the artist makes a complaint about the quality of audience engagement achieved in Beijing, claiming that Bee forcefully incorporates them into both the physical format of the exhibition and the social structure it implies. Participation is both coded and negotiated as failure. Ultimately, the piece absorbs all traces of organic activity within an architectural structure—the key concept is that this activity is spurred on by the exhibition itself, leading to conceptual feedback loops far more complex than the one-size-fits-all ideal allowed for under the regime of relational aesthetics.


photo: Gao Weigang, Bee, 2009, detail of collected debris. Courtesy of the artist and Magician Space, Beijing.

It would be possible to speak of the piece as an experiment in the production of social sculpture in that the artist makes an indirect physical connection with the audience and then transforms the evidence of such a relationship into an art object. Gao Weigang, however, is looking for something very specific here: far from calling into being a relationship between specific viewers, this work actually anonymizes them categorically, reducing them to a single set of subjects that are diagrammatically in opposition to the label “artist.” Participation is therefore accidental, and indeed almost surreptitious. Gao Weigang refers back to bees: though split into distinct classes with separate functions, all are biologically equal—that is to say, members of the same species—just as all viewers are made physically equal by virtue of their bodily residue left in the gallery.

In the next room, a black granite sculpture entitled Blind hangs on one wall. Two dimensional, it has a crisply hexagonal silhouette reminiscent of a honeycomb, and it is backlit by pure white fluorescent lights. Its surface finish is more or less matte, but movements and figures can be detected when the overhead light strikes its face at the proper angle as the viewer moves by it. This piece feels significantly more physical than the vacuum
cleaner, and rather out of place amid the general atmosphere of gestural conceptualism, almost like a foreign body within the exhibition Blind ultimately instigates a move of interpellation. The viewer stands blinded before it, unaware of his/her own reflection in the failed mirror that one faces. Whereas Bee creates a physical relationship with the audience, this piece creates a specular one. The opacity of the black object calls attention to the existence of both the mirror and the vacuum cleaner as tools, configuring their relational functions within the rubric of the technes explored in Foreign Body.


photo: Gao Weigang, Bee, 2009, artist vacuuming the floor. Courtesy of the artist and Magician Space, Beijing.

On the floor against the wall separating the two installations there is positioned a single line of heavily theoretical text ending with the declaration: “The tragedy is rooted in being controlled by others and oneself. No exemption.” Dissatisfied with visitors’ tendencies to ignore curatorial wall text, Gao Weigang decided to incorporate his artist’s statement into the physical design of the exhibition, once again forcing his audience into social participation by requiring their physical negotiation and ambulant exploration. Like the vacuum, text is a tool. But where the vacuum piece seems so direct, the effects of the discursive baggage thrust on the exhibition through this textual aside are ambiguous at best.


However, none of this criticism will matter to Gao Weigang. The artist has already moved on: the only aspect of his practice that interests him is whatever comes next. Any given work is dead as soon as its exhibition has passed. Curatorial work and exhibition design should be merely instrumental, and methods of display—from vials to vitrines—are never part of the work itself. Though it would not be incorrect to draw parallels with the Small Productions group in Hangzhou, Gao Weigang insists that the artist should never conceptually restrict him- or herself—his working method involves moving on, but without clinging to preconceived notions of how this practice should function. Formal restriction will always devolve into an end in and of itself, and this is creative failure. Every work should be seen as its own project; the artist need only organize his oeuvre from time to
time and move on.

That is to say, art should be produced practically. For Gao Weigang, Adorno’s absolute art and Henri’s total art are irrelevant. The idea of life functioning as art is a fantasy at best; art is an activity like any other that must take place within a reasonable territory—albeit a romantic one. Philosophical pretension, political punditry, and social responsibility should thus play no role in the art world; instead, art should exist for the amusement of the artist.


photo: Gao Weigang, Bee, 2009, detail of text installation on the gallery floor. Courtesy of the artist and Magician Space,

This attitude towards artistic production is increasingly common among young artists in China. It would be too easy to link this to failed art education during the auction market bubble, or even to a jaded reading of the pseudo-political art produced by an older generation of artists. I would like to propose that this mode of production may become the norm for internationally operating Chinese artists, and will exert a positive influence at that. Effecting a counterinfluence against the increasingly referential insularity of conceptual work in centers like New York, this model offers an autonomy for the artwork while denying the autonomy of art. Furthermore, it transforms art as practice into a socially embedded activity that may operate on a plane immanent to infrastructural logistics, manufacturing, textual criticism, urbanism, art history, media production, and so on, without requiring any of these social constellations to act as a prior term.

What such a model might offer emerging artists at this particular moment is a shortcut to relevance that avoids becoming embroiled in an overly academic field of art historical discourse. The merits of begging for inclusion in this Western-centric narrative of the contemporary far exceed the limitations of this brief sketch, but the fact remains that, following this model, Gao Weigang has been able to execute conceptual artwork legible within a porous discursive sphere populated by Mandarin-speaking artists and curators, international observers versed in the Chinese artistic vernacular, and local Beijing audiences. Perhaps the success of discreet cultural production relies on nothing else.

photo (top): Gao Weigang, A Rock with a View, 2008, oil paint on rock, 17 x 25 x 10 cm. Courtesy of the artist and China Art Archives & Warehouse, Beijing.


AUTHOR'S BIO

Robin Peckham is a Hong Kong-based writer researching the structural history of art systems in the greater Chinese world. He is also an organizer of the Society for Experimental Cultural Production.

This review was first published in Yishu in November 2009. For more articles from this issue, see the Table of Contents at www.yishujournal.com.