The China Project

187 Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection YANG Zhenzhong Yang Zhenzhong began experimenting with video and photography in 1993, using these media to capture common expressions, objects and behaviours, and to free them from their everyday meanings — often through simple digital effects and repetition. His works, infused with absurd humour, challenge social conventions to reveal the dreams, aspirations and fears underpinning contemporary urban life in China. Yang’s desire to articulate the lived experience of rapid change is afforded by his Shanghai base. Unlike artists in Beijing who, in the mid to late 1990s, regularly experienced political and artistic censorship, Yang draws attention to social issues in ways that need not directly challenge ideological agendas. Yang and fellow Shanghai-based artists such as Yang Fudong share an interest in the experimental possibilities of video and photography; with their short production time, digital- enhancement and unique temporal nature, these media offer the potential for direct dialogue with a broader audience already accustomed to cinema and commercial culture. Yang’s video work 922 rice corns 2000, for example, shows a hen and cockerel — common Cultural Revolution symbols for rural productivity — beside a small pile of rice, satirising the control and surveillance of food consumption. The viewer is invited to follow this contest for nourishment as voiceovers and counters (at the bottom of the screen) tally the birds’ progress in an absurd dramatisation of competition and consumerism. His work I will die (Shanghai version) 2001 explores the subject of mortality through a local framework. Shanghai residents of varying ages and backgrounds are asked to recite the simple phrase ‘I will die’ directly into Yang’s camera. As he records each subject, the viewer’s attention is drawn to the non-verbal elements that the participants bring to this simple, yet difficult, admission of inevitable death. Many giggle in embarrassment, while others act with exaggerated bravado or self-conscious sentimentality. Simultaneously playful and affecting, the work crosses linguistic and cultural barriers as it addresses a universal theme. Shanghai also forms the focus for Light and easy 2002, a series of photographs in which enormous objects are seemingly balanced on individuals’ outstretched fingers. Digitally composed, these images play with the signifiers of social order, capitalism and wealth: speed (a motorbike), control (a police car), desire (vending machines) and war (a military truck). These balancing acts feign invincibility and ease, displaying showmanship that goes beyond necessity, as well as mocking ambition. In the largest of these photographs, Yang inverts the city skyline and extends his own hand to the Oriental Pearl TV Tower in Pudong, one of Shanghai’s most famous landmarks. China’s economic advance is most evident in this city, whose glittering horizon signals its eclectic architectural history, cosmopolitan past, prosperous present and future potential. In Light and easy , . . . it seems the artist is ‘showing his finger’ to the entire process of change that is taking place. But the work might also be interpreted in another way. The weight of change, as long as it is . . . perceived as being an exterior phenomenon . . . is nothing! 1 endnote 1 Per Bjarne Boym, ‘Rhythmical landscapes, refrain and horizons’, in Light as Fuck! Shanghai Assemblage 2000–2004 [exhibition catalogue], National Museum of Art, Oslo, 2004, p.14. opposite Light and easy 2002 Type C photograph, ed. 8/10 / 120 x 181.7cm / Purchased 2005. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation above 922 rice corns (stills) 2000 Betacam SP and DVD formats, 8 minutes, colour, stereo, Mandarin (English subtitles), ed.7/10 / Purchased 2005. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation