Chinese Contemporary at FotoFest

At Bering and James, Xing Danwen's photographs of architectural models are digitally turned into stage sets for scenes of urban despair. They're well done and come across as fairly insightful takes on China's brutal urbanization. Zeng Han is also at Bering and James. In his images of architectural and individual oddities, a Cinderella-esque castle and teenagers clad as anime characters for cosplay, Zeng seeks out China's evolving popular culture with fairly good results.

The New World Museum features Cang Xin's series Man and Sky as One. Many of his massive color photographs use as their backdrop the spectacular mountain formations most of us have only seen in traditional Chinese landscape paintings. They're even more stunning in the exaggerated color of Cang's photographic landscapes. Skies are bluer than blue, grass is so green it almost looks plastic. In these surroundings, Cang stages various scenes, mainly involving naked people and fire. There is a feeling of individual and collective rituals and ceremonies to the images, but they still fall short. They aren't quite strange enough or spectacular enough to really move beyond large, attractive images. Cang seems to be hinting at deeply profound content that the images don't quite deliver. Maybe it's because of some cultural gap, or maybe it just isn't there.

Chinese contemporary art is in a weird place right now. It really has only a 20-or-so-year history, but it is garnering tremendous international commercial interest. And while the political environment for artists has loosened up considerably, it is far from completely free and unfettered. That is no doubt reflected in the choices artists make. And while there is good, interesting and original work being made in China, there is also a huge amount of work that seems glossy and specifically targeted towards a Western market and/or that seems to be simply mimicking pre-existing art strategies without internalizing them. I'd like to see what's going on 20 years from now.