LOS ANGELES — In the early 2000s, China seemed to be on an endless ascent. In 2010, China became the seat of the world’s second largest economy and, according to a Pew Global Attitudes Survey in 2005, the country had the highest percentage of respondents who said they had made progress in their lives over the past five years. Today, following the ravages of COVID, China released one of its weakest economic performances in decades. Trust in the country remains high, but overall global tensions are rising. China’s COVID era is very different.
Cruel Youth Diary: Chinese Photography and Video is a snapshot of the country’s now distant but significant period of growth in the 1990s and 2000s. Newly renovated Hammer Art Museum, the show is assembled from the collection of the Haudenschild family, a gift to the museum. The works included feature 16 artists caught up in the paradoxes of the time.
“Expelled from official art spaces by strict government guidelines, these artists have come together by showing their work in a network of non-traditional art spaces such as apartments, garages, housing developments and shopping malls” , notes the exhibition text (although I wish it had clarified that these artists were and continue to be primarily men). Ironically, “many of them found prominence in the global art market even as they faced repression at home”.
The exhibition welcomes us with the vertigo befitting a period of rapid economic growth and social change. Liu Wei’s “Unlimited” meets the viewer at the entrance with a meandering, serpentine assemblage of Chinese shopping areas and malls, interconnected with a series of escalators that form the scaffolding for a cacophony of growth. Zhu Jia’s “Forever”, produced in 1994, is a video piece captured using the then-new technology of wearable cameras, attached to a tricycle wheel as he cycled through Beijing.
Other works play with scale simply by showing it. THE Sitting on the wall series by Wang Fen (also known as Wang Peijun) shows the rapid urbanization of the Shenzhen and Haikou regions, with schoolchildren looking outward at these cities of millions that have evolved in just a few decades. At Xiang Liqing Rock never shows the density and repetition of Chinese dwelling places, and Song Tao’s “The Floor (Life Is Wonderful)” is a selection of some 20,000 photos of his daily life in Shanghai. These pair well with Shi Yong’s “Gravitation—Shanghai Night Sky,” a series of photos of skyscrapers on foggy city nights, and Yang Yong’s “Run Away (I am not who I am).” , composed of photos of The Youth of Shenzhen, with a sexy composition à la Wong Kar-Wai.
Two striking works are worth seeing: that of Yang Fudong The first intellectual series, an interpretation of a bloodied employee who has regained momentum in the wake of the 2020s anti-work movement (known as “flatin China), and “It Looks Like a Landscape” by Liu Wei, an assemblage of photos of naked bodies made to look like a Shanshui painting. Liu was upset that the 2004 Shanghai Biennale continued to reject his work, so he did something closer to what he thought the exhibition organizers expected from Chinese art. “I was really angry, really angry,” he said, according to the exhibit text, “so I decided to show them a donkey, but it looked like a Chinese landscape, so they loved it.”
Cruel Youth Diary: Chinese Photography and Video continues at the Hammer Museum (10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood, Los Angeles) through May 14. The exhibition was curated by Nicholas Barlow with Adam Moshayedi.
