RED LANDS
Mao prints. Stuffed pandas; Serial products executed by attendants at their respective assembly line factories, unequivocally created for the market; they affect our reading of western art by proxy...To know who really did pass the squeegee will prove as irrelevant as to know who sewed up the stuffed pandas.
Gu uses Warhol serigraphs with a vengeance, first he expropriates their iconoclastic status by deflating the context in which they were produced, and then the mystique of their celebrity. He re-cycles them but only as metaphors. He mocks the process which authored them by placing real, poster-sizefamily portraits of his own children (originals) which unlike reproductions, have been painstakingly pencil drawn stroke by stroke. As if denouncing the chairmen line up as fakes (no more political than Warhol's wall flowers), Gu proposes that the meaning of art is related to the process of knowing, and that it is by this 'knowledge of subject in relation to object in relation to context, that art relates to life.
Warhol's prints as pop objects are as dis-locate and alien to what they represent, as GU XIONG himself in Western Canada when he arrived after the Tiannamen massacre.
In their respective exiles: the Cultural product from its political context; the producer of culture from his compulsory standardization, both seek re-interpretations. It's as if Mao had been made to get off the idologically barren wall assigned to its effigy at the National Gallery and forced to work the assembly line. The pictures warn us against what we are poised to become: complacent, satisfied, and factotum. Gu Xiong and his family portraits seem not to have escaped Mao's fate, with their second hand culture they too have been made into parodies for whom the trappings of modernity have been purchased at the expense of history, relationships, and identity- their Mcdonalisation a simpler form of freedom.
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Having worked at a fast food joint to support himself, Gu Xiong collected the detritus of his menial occupation: hamburger wrappings, napkins and pop cans, objects which inspired the backdrop of his installation at A space. They are the most pervasive element in the show. And in their wallpaper incarnation they become aWildean reference intended as a pun on modernity and its subscribers. The landscape Gu translates is littered with residues from our exhilarating freewheeling through nature , it wrap us up in Coca Cola Logos, Andy Warhol's, the Muppets Little-Chairman-Mao-Books and Licence Plates, Highways, Mounties, Atari, Big Macs and Blue Uniforms. The wall paper becomes the great wall of consumerism; a zen meditation on smuggling human ethos across cultural frontiers. On trafficking with memory and experience. The pattern unveils and critiques corporate and state despotism, which on one end of the wall strives towards designing producers loyal to the enterprise of progress; and a society of brain dead techno-consumers perpetually disposing of their identity labels on the other.
| Gu Xiong was born in Chongquing, Sichuan China in 1953, he received a B.F.A . in 1982 and a M.F.A. in 1985. From Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts, Chongquing. He was in residency in the Visual Arts Programme at the Banff Centre, Banff Alberta from 1986-1987 and 1989-1990. He currently resides in Vancouver |
site design by harold ortiz |
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