Michael Workman

It's a freezing 1996 New Year's Eve in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, where in 1989 Chinese students and protestors who assembled to advocate for Democracy were beaten down with military force. In this same location, Chinese artist Song Dong lies face down on the pavement. Put on a pair of headphones and you can hear Dong's slow and steady inhaling and exhaling. It's called "Breathing," and he does it steadily, carefully, over a period of 40 agonizing minutes until ice crystals and then a sheeted layer start to form around his mouth. Two local institutions--the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Smart Museum of Art--have teamed up to bring the work of Mr. Dong and many others to Chicago as "Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China," which premiered at New York's International Center of Photography this summer and opens at both locations this weekend.

Chinese art has made headway in recent years, showing up at the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Venice Biennale. This show was curated by Wu Hung, who is a professor of art history at the University of Chicago and consulting curator at the Smart Museum, and Christopher Phillips, a curator at the International Center of Photography. These two men have produced a sweeping survey of some 130 works by a total of sixty Chinese artists, with roots as far back as the 1976 Cultural Revolution.

But China has come a long way from seeing the role of culture as solely an instrument of the state. Much of what appears here evidences a response to changes in Chinese political attitudes toward a version of Western-style capitalism, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, which in turn led to more global art markets. And where access to those markets sprang up, artists flooded in from throughout China, moving in large numbers "from the provinces to major urban centers such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou." Has that transformation been a fruitful one? "Between Past and Future" takes as its study what's known as "experimental photography," or "shiyan sheying," an avant-garde movement in photography that has emerged as a major trend. Hung and Phillips have also divided the show up into four parts: History and Memory, Reimagining the Body, People and Place and Performing the Self, the first two appearing at the Smart, the latter two at the MCA.

But the essential question remains exactly how much artistic freedom the People's Republic will tolerate. Results have been mixed. While video artists such as Chen Guang have been allowed to show erotic imagery and another artist was permitted to rip up a Communist flag in shows at the 798 Factory (a gallery housed in what Beijing hopes will come to resemble New York's SoHo district), film director Yimou Zhang continues to see his movies banned for unflattering depictions of modern Chinese life.

Yet what of the complexity of Chinese artist's view of themselves from the ground? A kind of answer can be read in the form of Li Tianyuan's unusual "self-portraits." Produced with help from the Institute of Remote Sensing and the Institute of Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tianyuan took satellite shots from 800 kilometers above the earth, then with a standard camera, and finally using a microscope that magnifies to 500 times. The results have been collected together as the "Tianyuan Space Station, 12 December 2000," a view of the self-image of one Chinese artist through the lens of a longing reflection. It's a powerfully suggestive range that moves from the familiar, insuperable collective of the People's Republic to an individual atomized from the whole.

Made to order

And on the subject of collective efforts, also premiering this weekend at the MCA is Dutch-Australian artist Fiona Tan's new video installation "Correction." This show's the result of a laudable joint effort by the MCA, New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art and the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles to commission new works by contemporary artists. Prompted by a newspaper statistic citing the two million people now incarcerated in U.S. prisons, Tan visited facilities throughout California and Illinois where she took portraits of inmates. It's significant that she chooses to make her portraits using moving film rather than still photography; while her subjects may offer the occasional tractable movements, they remain bound and captured by the constrictive frame of her camera's viewfinder.

"Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China" shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago Avenue, (312)280-2660 and the David and Alfed Smart Museum of Art, 5550 South Greenwood Avenue, (773)702-0200. Through January 16. Fiona Tan show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago Avenue, (312)280-2660. Through January 23.

(2004-09-29)

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