The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Established in Shanghai in 2009 by artist Xu Zhen, MadeIn Company is a company that makes art, curates exhibitions and supports art criticism, research and discussions. Many of its projects to date have commented on the workings of the art system and the media through forms of participatory critique. The name MadeIn plays on China’s image as an art market leader in the last decade, the period in which contemporary Chinese art attained great international cultural cachet and came also to be associated with inflated values. Ironically, in the second half of the twentieth century, ‘Made in China’ was synonymous with low-cost and low-quality mass-produced products. ‘MadeIn’ suggests fabrication without a maker, industrial processes and international exchange, where the country of production may be central to the identity and value of the object. 1 The art world’s pursuit of markers of the exotic was brought into focus in one of MadeIn’s first exhibition projects ‘Seeing One’s Own Eyes’, which presented a collection of works of ‘Middle Eastern contemporary art’ actually made in China. These featured Islamic architectural elements and burqas, as well as broken bricks and barbed wire. Viewers were reminded of how art may act to reinforce received ideas, and were asked to reconsider their assumptions about the relationship between art objects and certain political and economic realities. 2 ‘Spread’ — a series of paintings, installations, animations and large- scale collages on canvas developed by MadeIn since 2009 — draws imagery and ideas from political cartoons, comics and other sources. Over time, this series has generated a particular aesthetic which, for MadeIn, constitutes an abstract language encapsulating new ideas of beauty and reality. 3 Strategies of juxtaposition and layering are fundamental to these works. The installation in APT7, Spread 201009103 2010, was inspired by two comic book images, one of a forest and one of a rainbow. These are conceptually overlaid and made three dimensional through painting a lurid rainbow in acrylics across plastic shrubbery. Described as an installation image, the work substitutes the representation of reality with a comic book display which functions as an art world ornament. Xu Zhen notes that the concept of the ornamental strongly relates to notions of civilisation, and civilised communication, commenting: ‘As we choose a certain kind of ornament, we are actually facing a choice of civilisation; it is also a reminder of our own class’. 4 Also part of the ‘Spread’ series, the large-scale collage Overrun the four seas 2012 incorporates elements appropriated from divergent artistic traditions: Hokusai’s The Great Wave woodblock print, Chinese dragons and demons, a figure drawn from Hieronymous Bosch, a Japanese snake monster with a woman’s head (from a scroll painting by Sawaki Suushi), a Botticelli beauty with an eye in place of her head, a man peering out from above Renaissance arches, and other references to art and architecture pointing to ‘various aspects of History, Humanity, stories, mythologies, and colonies’. 5 All of this imagery floats on a sea of clouds. Historically, the four seas were bodies of water found in the four cardinal directions moving out from China, the ‘Middle Kingdom’. The expression ‘overrun the four seas’ may refer to China expanding its sphere of influence outwards, or to foreigners moving in. The collage plays on this ambiguity. In Overrun the four seas and the ‘Spread’ project broadly, MadeIn configures and juxtaposes diverse elements to ignite curiosity and a desire to create new meanings. For Xu Zhen, this offers ‘another kind of answer, and a game with different playing rules’. 6 The year prior to establishing MadeIn, Xu Zhen commented: I think artists can do anything — we’re no longer restricted to being painters expressing beauty, nor a fixed part of a certain social structure. We can express feelings freely — that includes challenging regular people’s common sense, psychological bottom lines and moral taboos. The meaning of this kind of challenge lies in helping people to see certain issues from a new point of view. 7 Devoted to researching ‘contemporary culture’s infinite possibilities’, MadeIn Company is today an ironic art market leader, working to undermine convention and established style by tweaking the rules of contemporary art’s contract between object, viewer and context. 8 Kathryn Weir 1 The name ‘MadeIn’ also phonetically translates into Chinese for ‘without a roof’ (‘mei ding’), perhaps suggesting a sense of openness or collectivity. 2 See Xu Zhen and Chris Moore, ‘Made up interview’, in Action of Consciousness , MadeIn Company and ShanghART, Shanghai 2011, p.21. 3 See Useful Life 2010 – MadeIn Company [exhibition catalogue], ShanghART, Shanghai 2010, p.4. 4 Xu Zhen, email to the author, 27 August 2012. 5 Xu Zhen, email to the author. 6 Xu Zhen, email to the author. 7 Cited in Guo Xiaoyan, ‘8 key figures of China’s new generation artists’, in Breaking Forecast: 8 Key Figures of China’s New Generation Artists [exhibition catalogue], Ullens Center for Contemporary Art/Timezone 8, Beijing, 2010, pp.19–20. 8 See MadeIn Company , <http://www.madeincompany.com/en/produce. asp>, viewed 31 August 2012. MADEIN COMPANY The rules of the game 150