Smash Palace

Overview

Smash Palace looks at Chinese contemporary artist’s reactions to the shocks of “new China.” All of the shiny newness of Communist China is presented as having smashed the customs, culture, habits and ideas of old China, replacing it with anxiety, greed, corruption and ever taller skyscrapers. As per usual, White Rabbit Gallery has presented a slick exhibition in a range of media to which it is impossible to not have an emotional reaction.

The overall impression of Smash Palace is a tactile one. There’s Zhou Jie’s CBD (2011) a fragile porcelain city covered in bizarre tentacles and bumps sitting on a bed of rice. It is just asking to be touched and smashed into tiny pieces. Looking over this work from the far wall is Madeln (Xu Zhen’s) Under Heaven 20121018 (2012) which has been made from incredibly thick dollops of oil paint, squeezed from an icing bag. The paint has been applied so thickly that it will take years for it to dry. When viewed up close, the viewer has an almost irresistable urge to touch the icing-sugar-like dollops, or even lick them from the surface of the canvas.

Cheng Dapeng’s Wonderful City (2011-12) compares urbanisation to “speeding". "It’s dangerous for everyone, drivers and pedestrians” (Dapeng), yet it is also the vehicle from which he earns his living. It draws the viewer in to gaze and want to touch the resin 3D prints of animals, plants and human city mutants. Even Zhang Tingqun’s line works are inspired by cracked china bowls, hinting at the fragility of life in contemporary China. This fragility is a theme that unites many of the works in the exhibition, and is picked up again and again to varying degrees.

Jin Shi recreates the tiny cupboard-like living space of a city dweller. This work has a caustrophic effect, leaving the viewer with a strange desire to walk into the filthy, minuscule room, purely to see if it is possible for them to fit inside it. The comic book like animations of Adventures in Mount Yu 1. (2010) and Adventures in Mount Yu 5 (2011) are described by the artist Tu Pei-Shih as “colourful but fake plastic sweets, pretty to look at, but if you eat them they make you sick.” The viewer almost wants to grab these assemblages on screen to rearrange them into a happier story. One that would be far more suited to the bird sounds and astroturf underfoot in the viewing room. Unfortunately the rape and murder of children — as well as the land —cannot simply be rearranged so that it does not exist.

Smash Palace is an exhibition that cannot leave the viewer untouched. The full force of a country that is beginning to show its cracks is presented by White Rabbit Gallery in a carefully curated show. The physical effect of the exhibition alone will leave you wanting to reach out and gently touch — or, perhaps, smash — the works on show.

White Rabbit opens Thursday-Sunday 10am-6pm. Image: Cheng Dapeng, Wonderful City (2011).