Dose of goodness
AT FIRST, THE loud bangs and crashes coming from the ceiling seem to be a sound art piece. Then, Xu Shuxian, project manager of Vitamin Creative Space, explains. 'Upstairs is under construction ... but it seems right for this show,' she says with a laugh.
Running at this alternative art space in Guangzhou until the end of this year is Zero Interface: Brave New World, a collection of videos, installations and photo montages by local artist Lin Yilin. The retrospective reflects not only the rapid urbanisation of the construction-crazy city, but also the growing social relevance of this progressive venue.
Vitamin Creative Space has come a long way since it was set up in 2002 by writers/curators Zhang Wei and Hu Fang. At the time, Guangzhou's alternative art scene was slowly emerging from the Pearl River Delta's smog and scaffolding. Although independent artists and collectives such as the Big Tail Elephant Group existed (of which Lin was a founding member), there were few official venues for the city's overflowing creative energy.
Describing itself as 'the first alternative art space in the Pearl River Delta', Vitamin supports and shapes the local arts scene, and exposes Guangzhou art to the world.
Valerie Portefaix - who, with partner Laurent Gutierrez, comprises Hong Kong's experimental architecture studio Map Office - calls Vitamin Space 'a kind of Utopian niche where cultural exchange can happen'.
Landscape of Sur-Consuming, the first exhibition at Vitamin's Chigang district gallery space, featured seven young artists (primarily from the Pearl River Delta) dealing with the theme of consumption in urban China, including some who would become Vitamin mainstays such as Zheng Guogu and Big Tail Elephant's Chen Shaoxiong.
Other important shows that have been staged at the space include Chen's Anti-C.S.X. (2003) and Zheng's My Home is Your Museum (2004).
Vitamin also helps international artists with projects in Guangzhou. In 2003, it helped to orchestrate British sculptor Antony Gormley's critically praised Asian Field, for which Guangdong villagers fabricated 190,000 small clay figures (later displayed in a Guangzhou car park). Other global exchanges followed such as urban flanerie by Dutch artist Jan Rothuizen (The Last Tourist, 2005), and Fools Move Mountains, an extensive project at Nanling Ruyang, an ecotourism site in the north of the province.
To help bring Guangzhou to the world, in the summer of 2003, Paris-based (but Guangzhou-born) curator Hou Hanru featured Vitamin Creative Space in the Canton Express portion of the 50th Venice Biennale. Vitamin's contribution, entitled Playing at Home/Playing Away: The Maze of Reality was presented simultaneously in Venice and Shenzhen, with web-cameras connecting the two spaces so viewers in each location could see one another, and in a sense share a visual reality at the same moment.
Portefaix applauds the 'strange ways' that Vitamin's Hu and Zhang curate - for instance, closely working with artists to create a project (My Home is Your Museum), or designing a show as curators and then selling it as a concept to other art spaces and biennials (Through Popular Expression).
She says she particularly admires the solo shows by Chen, Zheng and Xu Tan because the work was displayed and 'articulated in a unique way'.
These tendencies can be seen even in Lin's retrospective, and the line between artist piece (a brick wall sculpture) and curator's choice (the display of a video involving bricks placed on a scattered pile of bricks) becomes blurred.
The theme of urbanism and Guangzhou-as-art is also present. In his video Manoeuvre Across the Lin He Road (1995), Lin builds a brick wall on one side of a busy Guangzhou thoroughfare and moves it across, piece by piece. His newest works, the Future Relic series, are digitally manipulated photo-collages that twist, deform and unravel the urban fabric of Pearl River Delta cities to find strengths and stresses.
A key strength of Guangzhou art has been its distance from the mainstream. At first, the distance from Beijing encouraged greater political freedom (and the freedom to ignore politics completely). Distance from the booming art market in Beijing and Shanghai kept Guangzhou artists making interesting, personal works that weren't necessarily commercial.
Does the south China art scene differ from its northern counterparts? Definitely, says Portefaix. 'It's less market-driven [and the artists are] less intellectual, but hyper-receptive to the context. They don't obey rules or play Beijing's game.' She compares Guangzhou artists and organisers to 'bad kids with tonnes of talent'.
Being an outsider has been crucial for Vitamin Creative Space, but as it has continued to expand and evolve, the next stage may be infiltrating the capital.
After Zhang and Hu wrap up their From Sleeping to Swimming exhibition at London's recent Frieze Art Fair (following Through Popular Expression at the Singapore Biennial), they'll begin work on a new space recently leased in Beijing.
Ever the provocateurs, it may not exactly be an art space. In Portefaix's words, Hu and Zhang always 'play the role of critic, questioning a lot of what's going on'.
Of Vitamin's upcoming plans, Xu says, 'now we want to do research on art and society - with people from different backgrounds, not only art'.
Whatever avenues Vitamin Creative Space explores next, it's bound to keep expanding the definitions of art and what an art space can or should do.
