The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

199 Zhu Weibing and Ji Wenyu’s collaborative installation People holding flowers 2007 comprises 400 individual figures made from the same mould. Their hands, faces and feet are brightly painted, and each wears an immaculate identical black business suit, white shirt and red tie. Each figure holds a large pink velvet flower extended on a green stalk above their heads. Their colourful faces are blank and expressionless, although a sense of dynamism and movement is created by this field of figures, all in similar poses holding lush, tactile flowers to mesmerising effect. Zhu and Ji have been making ‘soft’ sculptures together since 2003 while maintaining their individual practices. Ji is well-known as a painter in the style of Political Pop, an artistic movement — along with Cynical Realism — which arose following the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. At this time, many artists turned away from the political and cultural idealism of the mid to late 1980s Chinese artistic orthodoxy to make works that were gritty representations of the absurdity and mundaneness of life. As the Chinese economy continued to expand and urban development accelerated through the 1990s and 2000s, the forces of consumerism and individualism became key artistic subjects. Political Pop had responded to this new climate by appropriating elements of the mass media imagery that characterises both popular culture and propaganda art, and socialist realist styles and Cultural Revolution-era images were merged with the aesthetic of advertising to create a style embracing ironic, playful and critical attitudes. Ji’s paintings feature gaudy pastiches of advertising imagery and other contemporary sources, and comment on issues such as the growing sex industry, and the materialism and the realities of contemporary life in urban China. Zhu formally studied art and craft techniques in Shanghai, and the technical precision required for the delicately balanced figures in People holding flowers owes much to her training. In their sculptures, Zhu and Ji combine these influences to create a contemporary fusion of Pop art with Chinese folk art and other popular art forms, such as handicrafts sold in the market. Previous soft sculptures by Zhu and Ji include Watch the view 2005, depicting contemporary apartment living contrasted with the landscape aesthetic of traditional Chinese art. Others, such as those in the series ‘Make beautiful’ 2005, are confronting, life-sized and garishly made-up soft mannequins, wrapped in towels and designed to lounge on chairs in a gallery space; in Chinese new potted landscape 2006 and the 2005 series ‘In Garden & Out Garden’, Zhu and Ji present both beautifully made soft landscapes and whole cities nestled inside porcelain plant pots. Through these works, the artists comment on the aspirations of a society with growing global purchase. People holding flowers deploys a particularly potent symbol for Chinese culture: the flowers inevitably recall Mao Zedong’s dictum to let ‘a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend’, which preceded the bloody purges of the Hundred Flowers Campaign of 1957. As artists of the post-Cultural Revolution generation, Ji and Zhu endow these flowers with an additional significance — that of a carnal and material force. Fleshy, artificial and seductive, the flowers represent contemporary society’s increasing consumerism, particularly evident in China’s rapidly growing cities. The mannequins’ blank faces, however, contrasted with the joyous and celebratory feel of the flowers, suggest the emptiness and self- perpetuating nature of this desire. Through the symbol of the flowers, the homogenising effects of mass consumption and the subservience of the individual to the state under communism are implicitly contrasted. With this work, Zhu Weibing and Ji Wenyu take up the legacies of Cynical Realism and Political Pop, applying their perceptions to an era of what might be dubbed ‘collective consumerism’. Abigail Fitzgibbons Zhu Weibing and Ji Wenyu People holding flowers