A Bright Cultural Landmark

By Mark Amery

With summer seemingly cancelled for the Wellington region, TheNewDowse’s programme in Lower Hutt has been one true hot spot. It’s inspiring to enter an art museum full of adults and children engaging with bright, adventurous art and design that feels very much of its cultural moment. 

From fearless local jeweller made good in Europe Lisa Walker’s survey exhibition, of small, smart and whimsical works - each cheekily asking the question ‘why not?’ of every material and approach to jewellery she comes across - to the Hothouse display of clever new Kiwi inventions, the Dowse’s summer programme is bulging at the seams with work that speaks brightly of the future.

You’re particularly advised to get down there before the end of the month when work by Michael Parekowhai and Cao Fei come down.

Parekowhai’s gargantuan inflatable bunny Jim McMurtry beautifully sums up our pop-cultural point in time. Like some overgrown blockbuster art exhibition, this Disneyfied chubby imported pest lies on its back, its body barely fitting into the Dowse’s central gallery (emphasising that this museum is well and truly a rabbit warren). Dosing, mouth open and drooling, Jim McMurtry is like a fallen statue, representive of our invaded culture - induced into a slumber by an overconsumption of foreign fast food and cheap goods.

The bunny lies nicely alongside Chinese artist Cao Fei’s survey exhibition Utopia, brought to New Zealand by Auckland’s Artspace and Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art. A recent representative of China at the Venice Biennale, Cao Fei’s work is to my mind just as slick and exciting as Yayoi Kusama’s at City Gallery, but far more thought-provoking.

Fei’s seductive and rich animation and documentary work responds with humanity to the complex space in which, with a wobbly pace, urbanisation and cultural change in China sees communism meet capitalism, east the west, and old spiritual values new physical aspirations.

Most visually impressive is the rollercoaster video tour through and around RMB City. This is a fabricated, fantastical oil rig-like island, with an attendant sophisticated but odd hybrid culture Cao Fei has constructed in the online world Second Life with the contributions of others.

Full of potent icons and symbols, it’s an astonishing kinetic digital sculpture; a surreal pop-collage of China old and new, erupting through and on top of itself like fungi. Everything from a giant Duchampian upturned bicycle wheel and toilet bowl are toppled together with the waterfalls of the Three Gorges Dam, the rusting hulk of the Birds Nest stadium, Tiananmen Square as a swimming pool, and a toy giant panda floating above it all by crane. Offshore a giant half-sunken shopping trolley bobs full of an assortment of modernist skyscrapers. The whole scenario pivots with constant cyclical motion. It’s a giant miniature train set that includes circling jet fighters, a floating Deathstar-like missile launcher, and fireworks bursting and snow falling. Everything is in the process of rising and sinking, being celebrated and eroded.

Like a new take on the avant-garde Russian constructivists, Cao Fei explores the potential of China’s utopian dreams. She suggests not just the obvious colossal environmental and social dangers that float on a wave of fresh financial currency but also importantly suggests the potential for positive change in the way we design our world, exploring collaboration and community in the digital world. “Communism is our utopia,” she writes, Second Life is our e-topia”.

I encourage you to explore the evolving culture of RMB City at home on-line (www.rmbcity.com), but in the gallery I found the more involving projects to be those involving documentation of real people. For the COSplayers project Cao Fei followed a generation of video gamers who have taken to dressing up as their fantastical animated superheroes and become a cultural phenomenon in real cities. Here in beautifully staged photography and film, fantasy and reality interact.

In photographs Fei neatly juxtaposes the brick by brick demolition of old China with labourers in Darth Vader and Spiderman costumes. A policeman wears the Golden costume of some futuristic Herculean God, complete with enormous cardboard halberd. Best of all a film follows youngsters with enormous scythes and preposterous golden armour as they traverse the perimeter wasteland jungles, flooded concrete ponds and choked highways of the city. These young adults may be refusing to grow up, yet in Fei’s hands their roleplaying gestures are the perfect poignant complement to the utopian architecture and environmental degradation of the modern Chinese city.

It’s this focus on the young as displaced outsiders in this rapid time of change that is most affecting about the exhibition. In the video project ‘Whose Utopia’ Cao Fei follows pretty straightly the conventions of the documentary photography projects of labourers during the American Great Depression. Her focus are displaced Chinese workers in a multinational Osram lightbulb factory in the Pearl River Delta area. Yet with every young worker who stands stoically before Fei’s camera, hope and potential shines from them like brilliant lightbulbs.