Tonight:
8°c
I am uncertain about contemporary Chinese art. Large paintings look handsome on Charles Saatchi's walls, flattered by the new gallery's scale, proportions and brilliant lighting, flattered too by the Serota hang in which very little is set against a tremendous lot of wall, but I must ask this simple question - are they any good? I have serious misgivings about their even being art, sensing that here is the response of craftsmen in a distant land to what they know of current Western art through the inadequate proxies of press and internet. Here are the Chapman brothers, Ron Mueck, Peter Doig and even aspects of Damien Hirst, all at a significant remove from the originals and lacking their technical accomplishment.
Were they less slavish and serious, we could, perhaps, take them for parodies, but there is in them neither wit nor pointed mischief. The hugely enlarged newspaper photographs are not subverted, merely blurred, by the crude handling of paint, the wet and sloppy brushwork, and nothing other than sheer size is added to the originals. Some images are spread over two or three large canvases, deliberately misaligned and mismatched in scale and tone: I must ask why. Why are grotesque faces made more grotesque by the vile pink of their skins? Is this some ugly riposte to our seeing the Chinese as yellow? And I am puzzled by the adoption of all Western forms of realism over the past half-century without giving any of them a wry slant.
Work in three dimensions - it cannot be called sculpture - is a little more entertaining. To see 13 life-size waxwork figures, all of them bearded dotards, some of them dead - Arabs, a Turk, an orthodox priest and an admiral among them - playing bumper cars in motorised wheelchairs may well keep visitors amused for hours by the endless variety of their slow clashes. I imagine too the model city with baroque churches and modernist skyscrapers constructed of dog chews attacked by Rottweilers. And for those intrigued by the extremes of sadomasochism, naked bleeding figures, life-size, hang from the ceiling of one lofty gallery.
Is all this art? Is any of it any good? At least the gallery is the nicest exhibition space in London, infinitely better than Tate Modern.
