MAY 2 – JULY 11
XUE SONG, mixed media
Chicago, Illinois;
Artist Xue Song, from Shanghai, uses discarded and burned materials as his
medium. Mr. Xue takes such diverse materials as propaganda leaflets from
the cultural revolution, teaching manuals for traditional Chinese painting,
and calendars as the source of his obsessive collages.
To commemorate a fire in his studio, in which he lost much of his work, Mr.
Xue coats his canvases with ash before carefully burning each piece to be collaged.
A transformation occurs through this singeing process in which discarded and
found objects become purified and vital parts of a documentation process which
is at once humorous and satirical.
Mr. Xue uses such cultural and political icons as Marilyn Monroe, Mao Zedong,
and Richard Nixon in his collage constructions. For example in “Shaking
Hands,” Mr. Xue juxtaposes the outlines of Mao Zedong and Nixon shaking
hands. Behind Mao are clippings recounting Mao’s memory of the moment
he met Nixon which includes torn paragraphs from Mao’s famous “little
red book.” Mao’s head is filled with nonsensical ancient forms
of calligraphy contrasting a hodge–podge of cut up modern Chinese characters
which makes up his body.
Nixon’s body and face are made up of ash and black paint. Behind Nixon
are America’s red and white stripes but within each red stripe is an
astounding collection of war planes and weaponry. Within each white stripe
are torn pieces of American propaganda and clippings from the Chinese newspapers
from Nixon’s perspective about the moment he met Mao Zedong.
Xue Song’s work has been seen exhibited internationally, including shows
at: Shanghai Art Museum; Art/ 33/Basel, Switzerland; BM99 Bienal da Maya, Maya,
Portugal; ArtChicago; Zacheta Modern Art Museum, Warsaw, Poland; and the National
Art Museum, Beijing. Mr. Xue’s works have been collected by such corporations
as Microsoft and Southwest Bell.
GALLERIES
II, III and IV : PUSHPAMALA
N., performance photography
Julie Walsh, director of Walsh Gallery, first saw Pushpamala N.’s photography
in a slide show in spring, 2001 by renowned art critic Geeta Kapur at The School
of the Art Institute of Chicago. Later that summer, she saw her work at a large
show of contemporary Indian art curated by Gulamohammed Sheikh in Manchester,
England. Pushpamala N.’s photos are a delightful and odd tribute to Indian
female archetypes and stereotypes referencing old Bollywood films, songs, novels
and photography. Although Pushpamala N. uses herself as the subject in each
of her photos, she also includes celebrities from the Indian art world such
as Atul Dodiya as well as friends and strangers she meets.
Much like Cindy Sherman, Pushpamala N. has succeeded in finding a whole artistic
vocabulary within popular culture. Effortlessly shifting between genres like “the
thriller” or “the fairy tale,” Pushpamala is clearly fascinated
with evoking the viewers’ own projections. Walsh Gallery’s February
21st show will exhibit her photographic series entitled “Phantom Lady
or Kismet” as well as “Sunhere Sapne or Golden Dreams.” The “Phantom
Lady” is an excessive spoof on “the thriller.” The loose
plot involves twins separated at birth and the “Phantom Lady’s” attempt
to find her sister again. In “Sunhere Sapne,” Pushpamala uses hand
painted photographs of herself to explore her own existence through the avenue
of archetypes, feminine stereotypes, and the inexhaustible world of clichés.
Geeta Kapur describes Pushpamala’s N.’s hand tinted photographs
as being “the perfect simulacrum; the copy of a copy, the original of
which does not exist.”
Pushpamala N’s work has exhibited at: National Gallery of Modern Art,
New Delhi; Johannesburg Biennale, South Africa; Los Angeles Biennale, USA;
and the Tate Modern, UK.
*Pushpamala N.’s exhibit coincides with “Vision of Transcendence:
Painting and Sculpture from India, the Himalayas, and Southeast Asia” at
Rhona Hoffman Gallery March 21–April 25, 2003 and “Himalayas: An
Aesthetic Adventure,” at The Art Institute of Chicago, April 5–Aug.
17, 2003.
Thus in the next couple of months there will be a critical mass of Indian art
available to Chicagoans for the first time.
