Like Reprocessing Reality, Thirteen -- a group exhibit of videos from Chinese artists at PS1 in Queens -- closed a day or two after I was there.
At the time, PS1's entrance contained a sort of teaser for the exhibit: to the sound of vicious, howling wind, a video mounted at painting height next to the reception desk panned over a black-and-white map tagged with flickering orange and grey dots.
Entering the exhibit itself, the first thing you see -- shown in darkness, alone in its own room -- is a red-orange lantern carried through streets at night, seen in fragmentary glimpses. This lulls you into a predictable lush orientalist mode, so that once you're into the next room and onward you're slammed into a different world: koi snuff it in a washing machine, newscasters ramble, subways rumble, a cheerful, manic-looking tap dancer and martial artist is ignored cruelly by the people he dances for in the park, but doesn't seem to mind. Black-and-white characters flick ashes into their open flies, a detached, deliberate-looking gentleman carefully arranges filmy strips of pink fabric in a forest and hangs himself from a tree.
Artists are 8gg (team consisting of Jiang Haiqing and Fu Yu, Beijing); Cui Xiuwen (Beijing); Dong Wensheng (Changzhou); Cao Fei (b. 1978 in Guangzhou, lives in Guangzhou); Hu Jieming (Shanghai); Huang Xuaopeng (Guangzhou); Li Songhua (Beijing); Liang Yue (Beijing and Shanghai); Lu Chunsheng (Shanghai); Ma Yongfeng (Beijing); Meng Jin (Chong Qing); Xu Tan (Shanghai and Guangzhou); and Xu Zhen (Shanghai).
