Go Figure!

Overview

The West's love affair with Chinese artists is rolling on. White Rabbit Gallery’s new show was only recently unveiled, and now Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation are following with a sample of Swiss businessman Uli Sigg’s stockpile of contemporary Chinese portraiture.

Go Figure! takes an enlarged view of the idea of portraiture — the face and the body are not thematic concerns but vessels for broader comments about Chinese politics. There are works by Yu Youhan and Ai Weiwei, but the exhibition’s centrepiece is Old People’s Home by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, an installation of motorised wheelchairs listlessly propelling ancient feeble men around the room. It's hyper-real and life-sized and downright creepy.

There are no direct models of world leaders, but there are weird and deliberate resemblances — one is an Arab leader, one could be Fidel Castro, one is a Greek Orthodox priest. One holds an empty beer can, another reads the Moscow Times, one is sleeping, but he could be dead. The guts is in the details — traces of delicate white hair on the back of a hand, a hearing aid, an ominous melanoma spot. The overall effect is a kind of old people's dodgem car rink — the wheelchairs have censors to stop them from bumping into you, but you almost feel like they might. You're left with the gentle, eerie whirs of wheels and the stopping and starting of motors.

Old People’s Home is a meditation on the transient nature of power, and perhaps best read as a psychological take on the depths of denial dictators plumb. Their self-mythologising is, to a point, futile, as their bodies and minds must eventually hurtle towards oblivion like the rest of us. However, leaders die but their systems and legacies live on — China is surely proof of this — so the analogy of Old People’s Home can only be drawn so far. But there’s an odd satisfaction in seeing once fearsome rulers caught in their own unstoppable senility. It's natural justice, a type of inbuilt obsolescence.

The great contradiction of a country undergoing massive economic transformation without real political change, of a wide open free market with fierce authoritarian rule, remains the potent inspiration for generations of new Chinese artists. Go Figure! offers us one more glimpse of this strange new world.

Image: Yu Youhan - Untitled (Mao Marilyn), 2005