Strangeness at the Beijing Art Gallery

I awoke on a beautiful Sunday morning around 10am. The sun was out, and there was a breeze in the air, which offset the recent heat wave just a bit. My roommate Jaeyhun, a Korean doing his MBA at Beijing University (the most popular of the dozens of uni's in Beijing), asked me if I'd like to join him in going to the art gallery. With nothing planned for the day I was thankful to be invited to something other than spending the day on the internet. So, packed my camera and left. The museum is only about half an hour from our apartment by bus, which by the way, costs me only 4mao (that's 0.4RMB, which is like 6 cents!).

That's Jaehyun in the red shirt.

Jaehyun was primarily interested in seeing the René Magritte exhibit, which was being advertised as the primary exhibit. So, I expected it to be on the first floor, but it wasn't. We had to work our way up to the fifth floor until we'd see Magritte. All the same, I'm glad, since in between there were some impressive paintings, as well as a host of modern art that just kept surprising me at every turn.

The first floor was entirely dedicated to a famous Chinese artist named Zhan Jianjun (詹建俊). He's been painting his entire life, and is now in his 70's. Much of his art depicts nature and minorities in exotic locations within China.

The first piece that caught my eye. Featuring Jaehyun in the foreground.

Close-up of the painting work from the above painting.

Some of the propaganda work he was commissioned to do by the Communist goveClosrnment. It translates into something like this: "We are the successors of the Communist deal".

Former Three Gorges Valley. Now flooded to provide back-pressure for the Three Gorges Dam, largest Dam in the world.

I loved the eyes of the woman in this painting. I'm assuming she's Uighur, a native of Xinjiang, the Northwestern-most province in China.

This piece is the only one in the area that had a reflective-glass cover, boo.

A well deserved close-up for this piece.

A summary of the Chinese artist's life

The next gallery was on the 3rd floor. This was where the modern art began. I found one of the artists to be particularly silly, and didn't take any pics of their art. Wish I had to show you what I meant. She painted cityscapes, with superimposed random household objects in different colour tones and perspective, and essentially just 'floating' around the image. Items included toilet paper rolls, little chairs, couches, lamps, people, naked people, toothbrushes... things like that. So weird. The next weird artist was very interesting though. He did a 3D image of an entire biblical-like scene, composed of dozens of the same man, naked, in the middle of different acts. Then, there were four large, backlit billboards on a plastic medium, showing the scene from four different angles. Add to that, there were sound effects, though mostly just of random men grumbling and yelling nonsensical things in what seemed like English.

This was the only picture of the weird superimposed items artist that had no superimposed items, and therfore, the only one I cared to photograph.

The next surprise was a paper-maché artist. This truly struck me as odd, but in a bit of time I could see the purpose. There were mostly large, tubular-like objects with a strange white and beige, gluey coating. These 'tubes' were arranged in different formations. All a bit strange, but pleasant to look at all the same. They had touch of HR Giger going on, since they looked spine-like. There were some other photographers there, serious photographers with serious equipment. One guy had a large-format camera!

The inside of the one of the "tubes".

Regular cameras use negatives that measure 35mm diagonally, whereas large-format use 128mm negatives. That's 8cmx10cm, just the negative. On top of that, large format cameras can utilize optical effects that are impossible to do with regular cameras. This is accomplished by changing the angle of the lens relative to the film. On top of the effects, the resolution of large-format is roughly 16times that of 35mm.

When we finally reached the Magritte exhibit, I took one photo before I was told that photos were prohibited. Even though I'm not using a flash!?! Total bullshit. Anyway, I managed to snap this one literally as the woman was talking to me. I snapped it in defiance, but then grudgingly put my camera away. To get a good idea of Magrittes work, just google-image it. He's was a french surrealist, with some pretty cool art.

I finished the day with a nice bowl of cherries and bay berries. That's right, bay berries, called yangmei (杨梅) in Chinese. I'd never seen them before I came to China. They're really good!