British sculptor Antony Gormley showing at Shanghai’s Long Museum, but admits it should be Chinese artists getting the chance
Gormley sees huge potential in contemporary Chinese art shifting global values and hopes his ‘Still Moving’ exhibition is a catalyst for more Chinese artists being given the same kind of attention he receives
Life-size models of naked men litter the cavernous front gallery of Shanghai’s Long Museum. Their appearance is wretched. Some are curled up in the fetal position. Some are bent down with their heads against the wall. Others hang from the ceiling, bound at the ankles, or slump over each other in a heap, reminiscent of a funeral pyre.
These cast-iron figures were made in the image of their creator, British artist Antony Gormley, who had the Holocaust in mind when he originally crafted them to show in Vienna in 1995.
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But this collection of 60 sculptures, called Critical Mass, also alludes to man’s continuous evolution in that some of the crouching, kneeling and standing figures are lined up in the classic “ascent of man” procession. The flexibility of the figures’ placement allows the meaning of the work to shift as it moves from city to city.
When he placed them within an old military fort in Florence two years ago, Gormley called the collection an “anti-monument evoking all the victims of the 20th century”. In 1998, they were placed in the courtyard of the Royal Academy in London to invade what Gormley called “the sense of august decorum” brought about by the academy’s celebration of the hierarchy of Western art.
