Like Thunder Out of China includes works by 14 artists

MONTREAL - Chinese contemporary art doesn’t often get to Montreal, but when it does, it makes its presence felt.

Like Thunder Out of China is an exhibition of 37 works by 14 artists that inaugurates the permanent gallery space at the Arsenal, which is proving to be a major attraction. Jean-François Bélisle, director of the Arsenal, said 1,200 people visited the exhibition on a recent Saturday, four times the average turnout for shows in the adjacent rental space.

Miss Mao No. 3, a large stainless steel piece by the Gao Brothers, is the sole sculpture. Mao, wearing the braids of a Manchu prince, is depicted as a young woman with large breasts, a Pinocchio nose and the teeth of a vampire, said co-curator Margot Ross, an art consultant who was director of the defunct Galerie Pangée.

The Chinese government confiscated previous versions of Miss Mao and can make it difficult to export art, said co-curator Pia Copper, a Paris-based curator and publisher who has lived in China.

Chang Lei’s Animal Farm is a photographic collage of Communist leaders, past and present, reviewing a parade ground filled with animals, all of which seem to be in a state of alert. “Animals sense an imminent change in the weather before humans do,” Copper said.

Chang also has several oil paintings on canvas that portray sexless nude men and elephants, which are a national symbol. Chang, who was in Montreal for the exhibition, said the word “elephant” is pronounced the same as the word for “reality.” He said the figure in Sanguinolency of Chinese Civilization No. 2 is a self-portrait in which he represents Chinese males, who lack the “balls” to confront the government and take control of their lives.

The government uses pornography as an excuse for censorship, Copper said, and He Yunchang makes fun of this in Ai Weiwei Swimsuit Print. It is a photograph of a group of men and women covered only by images of China’s best-known dissident artist.

Mao appears throughout the exhibition. Qiu Jie represents him as a cat — Mao’s name translates as “cat” — in political posters done in a pop art style. Mao in Winter depicts him as an intellectual, again with a cat’s head.

Han Bing presents working people in industrial landscapes holding bricks that evoke Mao’s Little Red Book of writings. Mao promised the peasants they would live in brick huts, Copper said.

Mao iconography is the subject of a 500-page book of photographs that Copper launched at the vernissage. Mao includes archival photos from the civil war, his image in propaganda and on consumer goods, and as he is portrayed by artists in the exhibition. (For more information, visit horizonseditions.com.)

Cang Xin makes charcoal self-portraits with symbols of his spiritual quest on 650-cm-tall scrolls. He’s not overtly political, Copper said, but he believes that “if your being is in perfect order with the universe, the political order will also be in order.”

Zhang Huan’s My Boston I is a photograph in which a book has apparently been smashed over the artist’s head. Andrew Lui, director of Han Art, said Zhang was commemorating the destruction of Confucian books in 213 BC by China’s first emperor.

Lui praised the curators for creating the exhibition, but took issue with its political aspect. “It’s not deep, not eternal,” he said. “To be against the government is trendy. … This art will last as long as the government does.”

The tension in traditional Chinese art was between the individual and the culture, he said. Now the tension is between the individual and the political system, a more shallow tension, he said.

Laura Vigo, curator of Asian art at the Museum of Fine Arts, said the prevalence of Chinese dissident art in exhibitions in the West over the past 20 years is partly the result of artists who are “riding the horse of what Western collectors are buying.”

Social-intervention artists are easy to enjoy, but there are many more interesting artists who are more experimental, harder to understand and lesser known in the West.

“I would love to show seminal artists who deal with everyday activities,” Vigo said, citing conceptual artists who use traditional media like ink and textiles.

But the exhibition is a laudable endeavour, she said. “It’s not easy to bring it here.”

The only recent exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art in Montreal were Red Flag at the Museum of Fine Arts in 2011 and a Gao Brothers show at Art Mûr in 2009.

Vigo got a strong reaction from students in a class about Chinese art she taught recently at McGill. “There was so much interest,” she said.

“It touches on a global reality” of China as the future superpower.

Flawed or not, Like Thunder Out of China is an exciting, must-see exhibition.

Like Thunder Out of Chinacontinues until July 27 at the Arsenal, 2020 William St. For more information, visit arsenalmontreal.com.

Galerie D, the dental office where art soothes you as you await the drill, is celebrating its pending move across Amherst St. with a one-week exhibition of work by 40 artists. Zïlon will do a live painting performance at the vernissage on Saturday.

The basement, a warren of small rooms, has been given over to Décover magazine’s wide range of artists to create installations.

The Wzrdz Gng of graffiti artists prepared its room by emptying a fire extinguisher filled with paint on the walls. Philippe Chabot, a master’s student at UQÀM, was pondering how to make visitors feel like they are inside a painting.