江衡将自己的展览构建在威尼斯大运河沿岸的于米歇尔宫殿，隐喻一段穿越生命、死亡和美丽的传奇旅程。展览将绘画和特定现场装置并列放置，按照艺术家的意图进行设计，是对当代中国社会道德价值观崩溃的清醒批判。展览采用著名的AC/DC 乐队在1979年发行的专辑名称作为标题，意在说明中国从一个相对贫穷和孤立的国家快速发展成为世界上最杰出的超级市场之一，但并不一定会走向快乐和幸福的未来。中国市场经济的快速发展已经完全改变了七十年代后出生、并幻想着用金钱‘购买’青春和幸福的一代人的生活习惯和生活水平，特别是其欲望和道德水平。

　　这次展览是一次独特的空间体验，将带领公众穿越五种不同的物质和精神上梦幻般的空间。专为该展览创建的高科技壮观设施似乎呈现出一个可怕的中国未来主义社会，在于米歇尔宫殿的传统建筑中营造出充满惊奇雕塑、绘画语言、眩目光芒和黑暗角落的超现实体验。 在欣赏江衡的作品时，需要记住的是，中国在过去的25年中已经经历了重大的经济转型，中国的GDP增长迅猛，并且其国际贸易和外商投资额的大幅飙升已经超出了所有记录。

　　中国的水墨画在历史上一直代表着传统社会中道德启示的来源，其形式和内容永远都是紧紧结合在一起的。而江衡使用一个看似无妨的彩色调色板和一种扁平的卡通绘画风格，却营造出了一种微妙的不安氛围。他的绘画完美地描绘出了花开花落、蝴蝶和芭比娃娃的媚俗形象，并穿插着骷髅、血和箭头，是对生命和死亡的一种戏拟。 因此，江衡作品中的“美”是一个分散注意力的因素，摹拟了中国年轻一代对西方社会生活方式的渴望和梦想。通过他的画作，江衡表明了这些梦想和愿望的灾难性后果。从广义上说，与传统的中国艺术作品一样，他的作品具有高度的象征意义，因为绘制的一切都反映了画家整体的直觉意识中的某一方面。同时，江衡在他的作品中采用与当代社会相关联的物体操纵和替换了传统符号。事实上，展览设施或绘画中没有只为艺术存在的东西。鲜花盛开和蝴蝶飞舞是大自然中积极力量的明显表现，而头骨和骷髅则告诫我们生命的脆弱和渺小。

　　作为中国“卡通一代”的重要代表，江衡专注于其绘画的表层，采用其在传统的学术油画方面的技术知识，将看似‘空洞’的扁平比喻形象与村上隆的‘超扁平’绘画，以及商业广告和卡通相联系。他的绘画表现出了中国年轻人的梦想，但经过仔细欣赏后，会发现其实是一种超现实的梦魇，在传媒时代重塑了中国绘画中经典的道家形而上学思想，尖锐地批评了中国对西方消费社会中的梦想和生活方式的热情崇拜。 通过这些展览设施，公众被离奇的作品所引诱和征服，与幸福相关的自然和传统元素成为了人类似乎消失的“后人类”世界中的机器。因此，《烟花》与《彩虹树》作品中，彩虹与梦想相关，烟花与庆祝有关。然而，作品中五颜六色的色彩实际上是在中国生产和在西方治疗时使用的药丸，反映了这样一个事实，中国生产的大部分药丸被西方国家用来治疗。这种基于实现永恒健康梦想的盈利产业通过成千上万的各色药丸，为艺术家提供了创造脆弱的雕塑装置的可能性。类似地，烟花将观看者包围在移动的彩色药丸构成的三维万花筒中，似乎在不断爆炸，并改变着周围的环境，产生一种迷幻的感觉。 同样地，《物语》系列作品的展览装置中，高高的竹子笔直地安放在室内中央，同时作为一种围栏防护。这种大规模、特定现场的雕塑装置将传统书法中代表学者精神、并随环境改变但不会破碎的东西变成代表花卉、蝴蝶和鞋的装饰元素。从自然和传统元素向珍贵的流行室内设计的转变似乎在质疑自然和人为转换之间的关系，凸显当代社会在自然面前的无能。 也许展览中最引人注意的装置就是重建了一棵光秃秃的树，这棵树正在脱落的不是树叶，而是中国细分品牌的芭比娃娃。散落在地板上的娃娃成为了女性美的思想及其被西方媒体推广的商品化的牺牲品。树上挂着的娃娃让人想起戈雅的随想曲，并暗示中国生产的金发碧眼的娃娃正在慢慢改变审美模式，并创造新的女性形象。

　　江衡吸取了著名西方艺术家，如达明安.赫斯特或坎帕纳兄弟作品中的关键要素，一直致力于将从西方角度传达的信息转变为从中国角度思考的内含。因此，《通向地狱之路》谈论的是价值观的快速消耗，将“美丽”用作一个倔强的元素，摹拟了中国年轻一代对西方社会生活方式的渴望和梦想，并暗示了其灾难性后果。众多的“少女”画作以及丰富多彩的雕塑装置成为了对令人不安的当代社会的描绘。作品的每一个细节都是非常重要的：鲜花盛开和蝴蝶飞舞是自然生命的明显表现，而头骨和骷髅则告诫人生的脆弱和渺小。

　　JIANG HENG

　　HIGHWAY TO HELL

　　Consuming Beauty in Contemporary China

　　Il consumo della bellezza nella Cina contemporanea

　　curated by Ilaria Bonacossa and Ji Shaofeng

　　Jiang Heng articulates his exhibition through the spaces of Palazzo Michiel as a metaphorical journey through life, death and beauty. He thus allows highly technological and spectacular installations that emerge from an undistinguished future of Chinese social-capitalist society to coexist with the traditional architecture of Palazzo Michiel in a surreal game of light and darkness, of sculptural surprises and painterly statements. The exhibition develops as an encompassing spatial experience that pushes the visitors to traverse a series of six diverse oneiric spaces that are both physical and metaphysical.

　　Whilst traditional Chinese ink and wash painting was devoted to the representation of what was considered a source of inspiration, in which form and content were permanently tied in an bond; Jiang Heng, instead, uses an apparently harmless pastel coloured palette, a flat cartoon painting style to talk about the rapid consumption of values in contemporary China. Thus ‘beauty’ in his work functions as a distracting factor, an element that mimics the aspirations and dreams of youth, whilst suggesting the catastrophic possible outcome. In the broadest sense, like in traditional Chinese art the work in the show is symbolic as everything that is painted, reflects some aspect of a totality of which the painter is intuitively aware. At the same time, in his work Jiang Heng manipulates and substitutes traditional symbols with objects associated with contemporary society.

　　Nothing in his installations, composed of sculptures and paintings, video and light exists for art’s sake alone: flowers blooming and butterflies fluttering become visible manifestations of the invisible forces of the universe, whilst skulls and skeletons admonish us on the fragility and insignificance of life.

　　The public thus traverses installations like High and Upright Character in which a series of large bamboo are installed upright in the center of the room and at the same time guard as a fence its perimeter. This large scale, site-specific sculptural installation turns what, in traditional calligraphy, represented the spirit of the scholar, which can be bent by circumstance but never broken, in a decorative element for the representation of flowers, butterflies and shoes. The shortcircuit activated thus from the transformation of natural and traditional elements into precious objects, that recall pop interior design seems to question the relationship between nature and man made transformations, highlighting the contemporary incapacity of respecting nature.

　　Two separate installations Rainbow of Pills and Rainbow Tree play with the idea of dreams associated with the rainbow. The work is inspired by the fact that China produces most of the medical pills, therapeutically consumed by the west, partnering in this desire to artificially control the human body’s cycles. This profit producing industry based on the dream of perpetual health offers the artist, through hundreds of thousands of coloured pills, the possibility of creating fragile sculptures of a rainbow and of a tree on the verge of breaking. Fireworks, instead, is a video installation that surrounds the viewer completely in which the explosion of a series of fireworks reveals that instead of coloured light or burning particles what are vertiginously turning and mixing around the viewer like in a 3D kaleidoscope are actually small multi-coloured pills.

　　Present from China is a new installation that reinvents the iconography of Goya’s Disasters of War, where a series of fully assembled and desembodied parts of barbie dolls eerily hang from an apparently dead tree. In some ways, Barbie reflects China’s shifting role from manufacturer to consumer. Even if at first the sexy stereotyped blonde was considered distant from the Chinese paramenters of femminine beauty, which centers more on cuteness and girlishness, that sex appeal, now these dolls are highly diffused in young consumers. Barbies and other children’s toys have historically been made in developing countries where cheap labor and land can easily be had. Once an economy has developed enough that labor and other costs are no longer considered a bargain, Mattel has moved on. Barbies have gone from being ‘made in Hong-Kong’ in the 1960s to ‘Made in Indonesia’ by the 1990s, and now ‘Made in China.’ Jiang Heng with this installation seems to underline the disturbing and perverse relationship China has towards foreign models of imported beauty.

　　Finally the The Ultimate is a large installation where in a totally darkened room the grid of Minimal sculptural tradition is turned into a chamber of horror. Five  rows of skulls are uncannily illuminated from underneath as trendy design objects that together with a large painting of a series of flowers that bloom from a skeleton seem to show the ‘vanitas’ of contemporary society.

　　As an important representative of the “cartoon generation” in China, Jiang Heng concentrates on the surface of his paintings, using his technical knowledge of traditional academic oil painting in favour of apparently ‘empty’ flat figurative images that relate to Takashi Murakami’s ‘superflat’ paintings as much as with commercial advertising and cartoons. His paintings and installations develop as representations of young Chinese people’s dreams, hopes and nightmares, absorbing key elements from western artistic production of the artists such as Damien Hirst, or the Chapman Brothers yet transforming their messages into a very personal reading of contemporary Chinese society. Through his work, Jiang Heng has been reinventing in contemporary media the classical Daoist metaphysical aspects of Chinese painting, transforming the moral aspects of traditional art into a contemporary critique on the un-critical appropriation of western consumer dreams and their production.