Opening: 17 April 2008, 6pm - 8pm Exhibition: 18 April to 24 May 2008 Arndt & Partner, Lessingstrasse 5, CH - 8002 Zurich
Arndt & Partner Zurich is showing new works by well-known Chinese painter Shi Xinning:
When Mao Zedong died, Shi Xinning was seven years old. The artist’s Mao series, begun in 2000, shows the founder of modern China and hard-line proponent of isolationist politics in a wide variety of international contexts. It thus recalls something that, given the speed with which today’s future-oriented China is integrating itself into the process of globalization, threatens to be forgotten – that in all his ambivalence, the still (and now increasingly) venerated Great Chairman has become a part of Chinese collective memory. Shi Xinning retrospectively corrects the unbalanced power relation; by inserting Mao into his painted photographs of film stars and leading figures from the worlds of art, literature and politics, Shi depicts the “hero of the Long March” not only as a politician but as a sociable guest, easy conversationalist and lover of art. It is an artistic intervention that brings into focus the fact that nothing was further from Mao’s mind than the furtherance of cultural dialogue or assigning even the slightest importance to artistic freedom. The first of Xinning’s Mao paintings, Duchamp Retrospective Exhibition (2000–2001), immediately became a classic. It was a triumph of free artistic creation, a vehement challenge to the reduction of art to the propagandist socialist realism that had been practiced for decades, even after Mao’s death. In Shi’s works Mao is required to be and do what he denied his people; he becomes a dedicated protagonist of political events in the capitalist West, and lounges in a bourgeois manner next to high-society beauties on sofas or in villa gardens. In the new work L’Être (2007) Shi Xinning places the political philosopher Mao in an exemplary way next to the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. The work is based on a photograph of Sartre looking at the misty Seine. The title L’Être is an unmistakable reference to Sartre’s main work L’Être et le Néant (Being and Nothingness, 1943), and one imagines a conversation between the two men, both of them Communists concerned with human liberation, yet utterly different in their attitudes to the self-determination of the individual this implies. The one, Sartre, who argued that the being (“existence”) of the individual precedes his or her divine purpose or meaning (“essence”), thus confronting each of us with the task of defining our own aim in life; the other, Mao, who put forward an opposite argument, subjugating individual aspirations to the maxim of anti-bourgeois Communist China. Perhaps they might have been able to talk to one another by the beclouded river, and to consider the questions of whether perception of the world depends on the individual, and of the role of humankind in the world. This work aptly exemplifies the artistic intention to which Shi Xinning repeatedly draws attention in conversation: visual narrative. He refuses to classify his canvases as collages, as the inner logic of the entire scene is important to him, despite the obvious false contexts of some of his images. “ I want to tell apparently absurd stories. But I still find it important that a context of meaning emerge through the image’s interpretation. Naturally, for the Chinese viewer this is usually different from how it is for a Westerner.”
Excerpt from a text by Ulrike Münter, Burned into the Collective Memory: Mao Zedong - The presence of the past in the paintings of Shi Xinning, in: Checkpoint #5, 2008, the gallery review of Arndt & Partner
