The composition of yesteryear
- Source: Global Times
- [13:59 June 29 2010]
- Comments
Red Memory, No.100 by Ren Hong. Photo: Courtesy of OV Gallery
Located on trendy, leafy Shaoxing Road, the OV gallery is currently holding an exhibition entitled Re-Visioning History, featuring works by Zhang Dali and Ren Hong from Beijing, together with a number of pieces by local artists.
The exhibition looks to explore potentially interesting, artistically fertile and contentious themes.
Visitors are confronted with what history actually is and how is it recorded, constructed, preserved and obscured.
Reading the accompanying text we learn that history is recorded through, "a slow accumulation of materials: official records, magazine articles, archive photographs and objects which bear the stamp of that era."
Significantly, the text also mentions that the accounts created by historians can say as much about the social or political conditions at the time of writing as they do about the history they describe.
At its base, the exhibition investigates, "how history is written, taught and consumed."
Ren Hong's works are the most visually striking of all the exhibits on display. Each of his canvasses has two components: a simple, repeated motif (bird of prey; sun) and an image representative of historical propaganda posters.
They are rendered in vivid colors, and the repeated patterns give the works a kind of pop-art/wrapping paper quality. The images he creates are blurry, partly through the effect of the patterns and partly due to the lush, fluid painting style.
These qualities combine to induce in the viewer a sense of how history becomes hazy as it is filtered by the passage of time and the cumulative symbolism of subsequent generations.
The wrapping paper quality may also be an attempt to comment on the enthusiasm many younger people have for ironically embracing propaganda art and posters.
This directly links to the focus of the exhibition - here we have art which forces reflection on the complex bi-conditional nature of history, the past influencing the present while the present influences the past.
Not all the artworks manage to engage simultaneously on an aesthetic and intellectual level, unfortunately.
Zhang Dali's painstaking project to record instances when photographs were modified for propaganda purposes is certainly interesting, but perhaps more for the historian than the gallery visitor.
A lot of gallery space is dedicated to his images, which note occasions when certain people were removed from pictures, or when leafy backgrounds or slogans were added. It is a bit of an exercise in eyesight and some of the manipulations are too uninteresting to care about.
Plus, image manipulation is nothing new and is a technique used by media and governments throughout the world. His 239-page book, A Second History is on display for those who find this area fascinating.
The works by Shanghai locals and expats are mostly disappointing. A pleasant mobile has been created by Monika Lin, which replaces children's toys with gunships and tanks that have been painted in soft, gentle pastel colors.
