The survey of contemporary Chinese art that closed at the Chicago Cultural Center earlier this month presented among its 30 artists the work of only one woman, 32-year-old Cai Jing, who also is included in a show at Artemisia Gallery that makes reparation for the former neglect.
“Between Ego and Society: An Exhibition of Contemporary Female Artists in China” offers painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and video by a baker’s dozen of women in their 30s and early 40s.
After seeing their works at the gallery of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Artemisia member Sungmi Naylor decided on who would exhibit in the present show, and academy curator Weng Ling selected individual pieces.
The emphasis is on more personal work than was the case at the Cultural Center, where various kinds of Western-influenced figure painting and abstract sculpture reigned supreme. Here only two artists — Liu Hong and Yu Hong — paint the human figure; the rest are fairly diverse in regard to medium and expression.
If the West still exerts influence, it often results in work such as Liu Li Ping’s photorealist painting, which relates the technique to traditional Chinese landscape and produces a look that forces Western viewers to think of photorealism differently, it being here both mysterious and delicate.
The show contains not a single image of Chairman Mao nor any overt political attitudes that require (or benefit from) the irony of Pop Art. And even a covert concern for women after the Cultural Revolution takes unexpected shapes that range from Chen Yan Yin’s spiky constructivist sculpture to Zhang Lei’s mattresses appliqued with poetry to Ruan Hai Ying’s metaphorical arrangements of soil, stones and herbs.
The oldest artist with works on view — Shi Hui, born in
1955 — is also the most traditional, practicing the folk art of paper folding. She creates, however, a miniature geodesic dome that refers to Western modernism as much as to Eastern nature, and the same might be said of Sun Guojuan’s semi-abstract floral paintings, with their echoes of the canvases of Czech pioneer Frantisek Kupka.
All of art history, from every country, seems to be open to these artists, including the early ’90s craze for minimally altered objects from the world of commerce and temporary installations. Jiang Jie makes the former particularly unsettling; Yin Xiuzhen gives the latter some of the emotional resonance of Ilya Kabakov.
The lone video piece, by Lin Tianmiao, also reflects on the traditional “women’s work” of sewing in a simple yet surprisingly fresh way that uses the medium in conjunction with an altered object from the everyday environment nearly as poetically as has Bill Viola.
Apart from the aforementioned figure paintings, there are no visual cliches on show; only Pan Ying’s drawings of ribbon clusters appear as a thin formal exercise, and Cai Jing’s paintings on bicycle seats border on precious eccentricity.
In sum, this is one of Artemisia’s happiest group efforts, in nearly all ways rewarding the members’ extra enterprise. It’s an especially nice way to close the summer gallery season.
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The exhibition continues at 700 N. Carpenter St. through Saturday.
