Pass/Garden is another installation masterpiece by Guan Huaibin. At first, viewers are impressed by its numerous inner flasks of thermoses. He has arrayed them on the ground, suspending Lake Tai stones (water eroded rocks, a prized decoration in traditional gardens) above them. The juxtaposed objects invite the imagination into a series of associations. Inner flasks are fragile and explosive; in such a concentration they call to mind bombs. Lake Tai stone signifies the intellect and symbolizes gentility. Their delicate and irregular holes and tunnels also suggest the inner world of human beings. The commonplace flasks, by contrast, are ordinary and reflect the vulgarity of life. The suspended Lake Tai stones, on the other hand, seem hopelessly lonely and out of place. Their spatial combination and altitudinal arrangement are pervaded by a certain tension, as well as emptiness and uncertainty. Thus a form of violence is translated into quotidian existence and threatens to explode at any time, an appeal from the artist to reconsider what we take for granted.

Chinese people since ancient times have had a particular fancy for gardens. Farmers would enclose strips of earth in front, or at the back of, their houses to tend vegetable gardens, and gents and intellectuals would take care to construct personal greenhouses of great distinction. Gardens embody their creators’ or owners’ tastes and pursuits in life, and some masterpieces have survived hundreds of years. However, the garden in Guan’s work is nothing conventional. It displays, at different spatial intervals, eight installation and four image works of his from different periods. Their arrangement resembles garden architecture, so the term becomes part of its name. Guan further elaborated on the other part of its name: “’Pass’ is not simply a verb that describes a physical experience or a movement in a game; it also suggests mental activities and inner reaches of the mind.” Guan has created a soul garden for his viewers.

Who Are You?

Jin Feng often integrates people into his art. He has a friend in the police force with an artistic bent who dabbles in literature, poetry and modern art in addition to running an art magazine. The friend is famous in art circles, and Jin Feng is sometimes confused by the contrast between his status as a policeman and that of an artist. Such dissonance finally inspired his work Simulated Police. He had his friend, in police costume, sit in a black steel tube that looks like the pedestal of a platform, exposing only his capped head encased in glass above the foundation.

In a similar style, Jin created another live sculpture, this time featuring an old lady named Wang Xiaoliu from Hubei’s Danyang. Wang is famous in the city for adopting more than 200 orphans. Jin invited her into an exhibition case; also encased were part of her home furnishings and possessions, including a bicycle and a cupboard, and two of her grown up adopted children brought over two of their own children. Jin named the work Filing in Old Lady Wang Xiaoliu. By presenting Ms. Wang in the midst of objects and people that fill her real life, he hopes to capture the benevolence of this old lady in the historical record.

Most of Jin Feng’s live installations are successful; there are also controversial ones, such as Lu Xun Feasts Intellectuals erected in 2009 at Shanghai’s Xianheng Hotel. Lu Xun (1881-1936) was a rebellious writer of the 1930s and is still celebrated in China today. Jin Feng had someone act as Lu Xun and invited a group of cultural personalities. Soon after the group arrived at the hotel, “Lu Xun,” donned in his traditional gown, showed up and announced, “There are my friends as well as enemies sitting around every table; but what I’d like to talk about today is ‘universal love’ by philosopher Mozi of the Spring and Autumn Period.” The jaws of everyone present dropped, and they looked at him speechless. Then “Lu Xun” started to make toasts and talked to himself in the intervals, embellishing his monologue with the occasional joke and jest. All the while the cultural assembly sat silent and ate. Such embarrassment continued for two hours. Meanwhile, some Shanghai artists, upon hearing the news, stopped by to listen to “Lu Xun” but drifted away after witnessing the lack of response to his monologue. Later, some of the people that were present said that they held their tongues at the event because they didn’t think “Lu Xun” played his role well and was not the man as they understood him to be; others said that the occasion was simply a farce and did not deserve a serious response. The majority agreed that Lu Xun had lost meaning in contemporary China and was a figure to whom people today could not relate.

Magic Fibers Fool You

Shi Hui’s work Old Wall recreates a popular Chinese motif. At one of her one-woman shows, viewers saw a rugged old wall built as if of rocks of varied sizes and shapes, their shapes accentuated and amplified by clever illumination. But as they came closer and touched the “rocks,” they found they were made of pulp, bamboo and cotton threads. This is a fine example of Shi Hui’s fiber art. Shi Hui spent three years completing this masterpiece of hers and is proud of the result. The wall is ten meters long and composed of more than 100 “rocks” that are surfaced by rice paper and supported by a bamboo skeleton inside. The diversiform “rocks” exhibit subtle variations, and the folds of the rice paper develop dimension and cast shadows as the lighting technique simulates the elapsing “time of day.”