The gallery is as big as an airplane hanger. Thirty-four upside down poles reach almost down to the floor. On each pole is a black flag with a painted portrait, larger than life size, of a sick child or orphan. These flag poles are mounted in two parallel lines, set far enough apart so that you can walk down the center or go between the flags on either side. A wind machine mounted on the ceiling blows air through vents at the bottom of the poles, keeping the flags in vigorous motion.  Dematerialized by being represented on these flapping flags, which you can touch, these children are portrayed as distinct individuals. It’s almost impossible to talk over the deafening noise. And so you feel alone even when friends are nearby. On the far end wall is a silver international landscape, painted roughly with large brushstrokes. It covers the entire enormously high wall.  You can see this painting in the background when you move between the flags. The other walls are white, but the floor is dark. Seeing so much black and silver in this somber, even macabre setting, I felt as if I were in a vast morgue.

Just a year ago at the grand ceremonies of Beijing Olympics, where children also played a role, many full color flags flew right side up. This installation, by contrast, is in a public gallery space, which feels, still, very private. According to the handout, Yan Pei-Ming’s goal is to give these lost children “back a place in the world,” in “a peaceful nature where they can regain their visibility.” That statement must be ironical, for the installation is hardly peaceful. In movies, black and white is used for flashbacks. Yan Pei-Ming gives the children a place within an imaginary world, a totally artificial nature in which even the wind must be produced mechanically. By his critical reference to the illusions of the rhetoric of the Olympics, vastly expensive events which diverted funding from the fundamental needs of the population, he makes a powerful political statement, all the more potent because it is extremely elliptical.  In China, one often feels that public life is upside down. This is a virtuoso performance.

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June 21 to August 2, 2008

Xiong Wenyun’s project, Moving Rainbows, began ten years ago, when her travels to Tibet inspired her to create installations transforming local architecture and lines of trucks along the Sichuan and Qinghai-Tibetan highways. Using colored plastic tarpaulins that added exuberant hues to Tibet’s mountainous landscape, Xiong created a moving rainbow of trucks as they made their way along the high roads of the region. The colors she used—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple—echo those seen in the prayer flags drivers and journeyers left alongside the highways they traveled on. According to a statement by Xiong, Tibetans “say that this color sequence comes from rainbows, and that rainbows are god’s ladders.” Xiong, who is a well-known, highly active artist who studied at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts and then researched color in Japan, took this order of hues and made it her own by covering the trucks and the doorways of roadside cabins. As an artistic venture, Moving Rainbows involved both Tibetan society and a sharp sense of the environment; Xiong possessed the wherewithal to complete her plans, so that the procession of trucks and the covered entrances encountered along the way celebrated her sense of sublimity found “in this beautiful, innocent sequence.”

The artist documented Moving Rainbows with still photography and videos, which formed the contents of her show at Three Shadows. It is clear from them that the line of vehicles enlivened the steep landscapes of Tibet, as well as being of strong interest as art in its own right. There are photos of officials taking part in the departure ceremonies, Xiong standing alongside monks kowtowing their way to Lhasa, and the brightly colored clothing of minority peoples in the area (another inspiration for her color scheme). One has the sense that Xiong’s interventions not only reflect the high, joyous spirituality of the people she worked with, but also the inner life of the artist herself, whose quiet presence in the project connects persons to the sites she chose for her interventions. Color is central to her imagination. Indeed, she says, “I believe this order [of colors] is the most pure form of the universe.” Xiong’s presence served as a bridge for so involved an undertaking; a sure sense of hue as well as a gift for bringing people together enabled her to realize Moving Rainbows. Like many people who do public works of art, Xiong has had to portray her efforts through photography, which only gives a fraction of the excitement participants clearly felt. A documentary approach, after all, doesn’t do justice to the complex interactions and extraordinary visuals inherent to the artist’s design.

Nonetheless, the joyous nature of Xiong’s idea comes across, despite the fact that the record is partial. This piece is being written a very short time before Beijing’s hosting of the Olympic Games, and China is clearly worried about protests, most especially those having to do with Tibet. Xiong’s treatment of the landscape, which includes coloring rocks and trees cut for timber, is ecological and not political. Yet her audience, knowing what it does about China’s incorporation of Tibet within its own boundaries, as well as the commercialization of Lhasa, may well see the artist’s efforts as a way of bringing attention to the colonization of a remarkable culture. As an environmental activist, Xiong has created a process-oriented art whose dimensions are quite literally heavenly as well as humanist. Her images capture the noble nature of the landscape, as well as the moving portrayal of the people who live within its mountainous terrain. Her grand action is undertaken with a true spirit of humility, something that China has lacked in its assumption that Tibet must be modernized at all costs. What is needed, more than anything else, is Xiong’s sense that the interaction between people and landscape is something sacred, and not an excuse for raw profit or environmental exploitation.

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