By DPA
Kassel (Germany) : A leading Chinese artist, Lu Hao, has taken his criticism of international architecture to the Documenta art show in Germany with a huge installation that highlights the soulless appearance of modern office buildings.
China emerges this week as a dominant force at the expo with eight of the 113 chosen artists Chinese speakers. Only the German-speaking contingent is greater at Documenta, which takes the temperature of world art every five years.
Lu, 38, has painstakingly drawn in ink how Chang'an avenue in Beijing has changed. His two images, on old-fashioned scrolls, are 50 metres long and take up a large section of a gallery at here.
"The unique character of my city is getting lost," he explained in an interview. "Cities are becoming all the same."
The scrolls, now owned by Uli Sigg in Switzerland, show gleaming cubes of commercial buildings displacing traditional Chinese architecture, a form of globalization that Lu deplores.
Beijing artist Ai Weiwei has attracted the most attention – and spent the most money – with a conceptual-art performance, Fairytale, that requires 1,001 Chinese visitors to walk around a city and 1,001 Qing Dynasty wooden chairs to offer rest to art-show visitors.
The only female artist from China at Documenta, Hu Xiaoyuan, also brings an acute eye for traditional forms to Germany.
Her installations are about the poignancy of memory. One work, "A Keepsake I Cannot Give Away", comprises 20 antique embroidery frames with half-finished silk in them and even some of her own hair.
Another work, "The Times", comprises three four-metre panels of hanging silk. Sewn inside are plates, a pillowcase received as a dowry, a first love-letter and other precious personal items. They belonged to her grandmother, mother and herself.
Hu, 30, whose work is also being exhibited this month at the Kunsthaus museum in Graz, Austria, said she was still looking for a dealer and currently held her own sales three or four times a year.
She suggested that the rise of living Chinese artists internationally reflects the country's growing world importance.
Her compatriot Lu agreed that this reflected the recent social and scientific progress in China, noting that 20 or 30 years ago, Japan would have been the sole Asian country to be at such an expo. This year, only one living Japanese artist was invited to Documenta.
Video works by Tseng Yu-chin of Taiwan explore another aspect of the lost past: "the innocence of childhood".
The rapturous laughter of a four-year-old boy being tickled by his mother echoes through the august rooms of the Fridericianum museum in a video, No.5. In another "Who's Listening?" children smile during a game where their hair is splashed with yoghurt.
Documenta chose to juxtapose both the videos with artworks by Juan Davila and other western artists depicting graphic sex, placing a disturbing overlay on Tseng's sound and images.
A few metres away from "No.5" is an amusing video made 12 years ago by Lin Yilin. Entitled "Safely Manoeuvring Across Lin He Road", it shows a man using a pile of concrete blocks to protect himself from the traffic, and shifting it block by block towards the roadside.
Zheng Guogu also uses humour to make a point: his 2005 artwork for the Sigg collection, "Add Oil and March Forward", comprises seven lumps of fried dough about 20 cm long. It is only on a closer look that one realizes they are all in the shape of army tanks.
Other Chinese artists to be favoured this week in Documenta's pick of world art were Xie Nanxing, with a set of three oil paintings, and Yan Lei, whose acrylic paintings, "The Fifth System", play tricks with images of landscapes.
Documenta, set to attract 650,000 people, runs till September 23.