28 Chinese

This December, the international art crowd convened in Miami again for the 2013 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, the goliath art fair along with a myriad of satellite fairs and events. For any fair-goers who might feel interested or even just curious about Chinese contemporary art, “28 Chinese” at the Rubell Family Collection is a must-see.

As the culmination of the collector couple Don and Mera Rubell’s six research trips to China since 2001, “28 Chinese” features paintings, sculptures, photographs and video installations by 28 Chinese artists, and occupies the majority of galleries in the foundation’s 40,000 square-foot building. A quick skim through the artist list begins to reveal the unusualness of this show. Among the 28 artists, the only generally familiar names to American audiences are Ai Weiwei, Zhu Jinshi, Zhang Huan, Huang Yongping and Zhang Enli, all of whose work have seen more widespread representation and circulation in the Western art system. Here, Ai Weiwei and Zhang Huan are represented by several classic pieces from their most important series, with two iconic works by Ai Weiwei—“Ton of Tea” (2005), a minimalist cubic sculpture of compressed tea leaves, and “Table with Two Legs” (2008), a wooden sculpture reconstructed from two Qing-dynasty tables—and Zhang Huan’s “12 Square Meters” (1994), “1/2” (1998), “To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain” (1995) and “To Raise The Water Level in a Fishpond” (1995), all relatively older but still some of the most important performances in Zhang’s career.

While Ai and Zhang’s pieces delineate some popular themes and ethos common in the early works of Chinese contemporary art—traditional aesthetics and the spirit of collectivization—powerful works by Huang Yongping and Zhang Enli are absent in this exhibition. Huang Yongping’s disturbing installation “Well” (2007), with several ceramic pots of decaying snake, bat, goat head taxidermies posing as if they are looking out of the pots, is his only piece in the show. This work is meant as a metaphor for the power relations between East and West—the former constantly and involuntarily observed by the latter as “cultures of otherness”, while people feel scared but too powerless to escape from this awkward situation. Even if we leave out its necrotizing smell, in reality, the work does not serve the artist’s original intention well. As viewers step onto the wooden platforms in front of the pots and peer inside, the dead animals’ unexpected stares alarm the viewers instead, removing the meaning from this work. As for Zhang Enli, his four works depicting a wooden crate, two toilets and the back of people’s heads in this show are slightly disappointing, as they are neither the most sensational nor the most introspective pieces made by the artist.