“Tracing the Milky Way”

This exhibition targets spectacle with works by six impressive artists, one of which takes the form of a massive installation. Curator Jérôme Sans posits the artists’ “visionary legacy” via the constellation of creativity mapped out by their pieces, which probe, each with a unique perspective, the depths of “who we are and the world we inhabit,” according to the exhibition text. Though each work is engaging, together they stand somewhat unevenly in relation both to this heavy concept, and to one another.

Dominating the main part of the gallery is Huang Yong Ping’s Leviathanation, 2011, a life-size train carriage with a gigantic fiberglass fish head mounted on the front, out of which sprout stuffed animals. Adjacent, in a work by Wang Du, a three-wheeled bicycle, of the kind often seen in Beijing loaded with objects to be recycled, has been stacked over twenty-one feet high with full Coca-Cola bottles. It is an absurdist representation of contemporary consumer culture, a spectacle created from the commonplace. The other works are not as gigantic; oddly juxtaposed are a large-scale painting by Yan Peiming in the gray tones he often favors for his work and a video of Yang Jiechang tautly shooting arrows at an oil painting on which the camera is mounted. Viewers have to watch the artist repeatedly reload, aim, and fire as if directly at them. The film shudders as every arrow hits.

Other rooms show two installations made during the 1990s by Chen Zhen that reflect on sociopolitical themes and the passage of time. One invites visitors to take posters featuring phrases like FROM RED BOOK TO RED CITY alongside old and new photographs. The only woman artist in the show is Shen Yuan, whose Class Room Assignment, 2011, a poised, dynamic installation of desks mounted about the walls and illuminated by single yellow bulbs, highlights what she calls “the latent language of things.” Composed of the quotidian, her installation is a far cry from her partner Huang’s show-stopping, biblical sea monster.