In 1974, Mao Zedong decided China was part of the Third World, not the Second World as categorised by the Communist block. Mao's idea of the Third World deviated from Cold War-era political ideologies and discounted the history of colonialism and imperialism. His "Third World" was a band of non-aligned nations falling behind those which were more rich and powerful — the US and Soviet Union in the First World; Japan, Canada, Australia and the rest of Europe in the Second World.
In the ongoing exhibition "The World III in the Third World" at the Art Centre at Chulalongkorn University, curator Bao Dong ambitiously curates a manifesto decentring this "Third World".
Just Like The Other Shore by Lu Lei.
Bao proposes that the works by over a dozen Chinese artists on show deconstruct a world imprisoned by these categorisations. He is interested in a world beyond political and economical binaries, an independent world illustrated by Karl Popper's proposed view of "World III" — a world made up of abstract ideas and scientific theories.
Bao introduces viewers to his concept with Qiu Zhijie's Legacy Of The Third World, one of the two works commissioned for the exhibition. The piece is an imaginary map drawn using keywords and phrases as locations, in the traditional Chinese method of ink on paper. In this vast world, the rivers "Facebook" and "Twitter" flow into the Arab Spring. "Peaks of Super Power" and the "Mount of Globalisation" are elevated above their surroundings. "Corruption" lies in a low valley.
The use of calligraphy, in which Qiu has been trained and has explored in several previous works, continues the aesthetic traditions of China, although English terms are as prominent as their Chinese equivalents in Legacy Of The Third World. The work is a preoccupation with historicism. Its placement at the entrance of the exhibition raises the question of what the term "Third World" means today — in a postcolonial, postmodern world, it may be useful only as a definition of the hierarchy of nations around the Western-centred globe.
Ideologies and ideas are grounded in geography, in topography, some raised to the heights of Mount Sinai.
Exercise No.1, front, and Jungle, back, by Liu Wei.
The other commissioned work — a pink, luminescent resin sculpture by He An — dominates visitors' fields of vision as they enter the gallery. The work, also named The World III In The Third World, presents fragments of Chinese text. The 6m-wide glowing sculpture resembles an abstract skyline or Arabic writing, throwing light on the disintegration of language, and with it, the crumbling classification of a Third World.
These two pieces act as the doorway of a house. They hold the otherwise somewhat diffused exhibition together, offering a concrete — but perhaps overcomplicated — concept to a generous survey of the landscape of contemporary Chinese art. The rest of the work varies greatly in theme and medium. As such, the curatorial focus on redefining the Third World seems forced upon the wealth of works on display.
Following the first two pieces hangs a poster featuring an ordinary Chinese citizen in a plain nondescript white shirt. The man in the poster (copies of which are available free for viewers to take home), was created by combining different facial features of the five artists in the Polit-Sheer-Form collective (Hong Hao, Xiao Yu, Song Dong, Liu Jianhua and Leng Lin). The group explores the notion of shared experience, blurring the boundary between individuals. The uniformity of communism lingers close by.
Other notable works include mixed media works by brothers Chen Yujun and Chen Yufan. As Chinese emigrants in Malaysia, their work addresses the fluidity between various cultures — Muslim traditions surface in pieces centred around returning to their homeland to celebrate Chinese New Year.
Liu Wei's Jungle and Exercise No.1 bring to mind influences of the Arte Povera movement in their dynamic use of common materials such as wood and cushion foam. Wang Yin's realist oil paintings explore the context of localisation through the age-old medium. In Painter, a woman dressed in a kimono stands next to a man in Western clothes behind an easel. Veering away from traditional forms, Wang Xu Yang's ceramic sculptures derive their physical shapes from the scientific logic of computer algorithms, resulting in visual poetry of complex, geometric structures.
For Thai viewers, these various works, as well as many more by Chen Xiaoyun, Jiang Zhi, Lu Lei, Lu Yang, Song Kun and Xu Qu, are an interesting point of entry into contemporary Chinese art by artists of a relatively younger generation. They do not, however, conform easily into Bao's sophisticated theoretical theme. The conceptual link between each piece proves rather weak — in which world do these works actually belong?
The critical discourse (blame the poorly translated talk at the opening of the show, and an abstruse catalogue) does not translate into an exhibition addressing cultural sovereignty and political categorisations. Rather, the pieces allow for an immersion into Chinese art, bringing into interest the ultra-complex — politically and economically — country and probing into the manifolds of national identity.
- "The World III in the Third World" is on show until Oct 4.
- The Art Centre, Chulalongkorn University, is on the seventh floor of the Office of Academic Resources, Phaya Thai Road, and opens weekdays from 9am to 7pm and Saturday from 9am to 4pm.
Call 02-218-2965.
Legacy Of The Third World by Qiu Zhijie.
Light2 by Wang Yuyang.
