Gallery News: BIG WAREHOUSE

The BIG WAREHOUSE, a gallery nestled in Shanghai’s trendy Moganshan Road is "one of the two galleries you must visit in Shanghai," according to curators Ann and Jessica. BIG WAREHOUSE distinguishes itself from the other galleries on this artsy strip with exhibits and installations that fuse abstraction and objectivism. Unlike some of the more conservative galleries on the block, here one can find experimental works by lesser known and, for the most part, younger artists. Works range from small, austere, geometric designs with basic tones in white, black and gray, to wall-sized canvases that burst with flowing, vibrant colors.

The curators informed me that although the majority of the artists displayed are Chinese, most patrons are foreigners. Last month one work sold to a Chinese individual, but this purchase was by and large the exception. As might be expected, the traffic through the gallery is almost entirely foreign as well, and includes people on a three-week holiday or more permanent expats. Moganshan Road, located in an industrial area of Shanghai, once offered the solution to high rents required for large art exhibitions. But with its increasing prestige and visibility the street now caters to out-of-towners, from whom it receives most if its financial support.

Yi Ling, perhaps the most well-known and abstract of the artists displayed in BIG WAREHOUSE has a number of works that combine both Asian and English-language influences. From a distance, his works appear to be a mass of lines, squiggles and geometric shapes laid out on a single color background. However, up close one can view the many objects and influences at play. Chinese characters and lotus flowers join English words like “love” and “2005.” In the left hand corner of one piece stands a rendering of the Oriental Pearl Tower, symbolic of Shanghai.

Outsider influence merges and emerges in many of the gallery’s works. Chinese artist, Cao Bing, who has a handful of abstract pieces displayed in BIG WAREHOUSE has created a 180cm x 150cm oil on canvas abstraction of Michael Jordan. Against the dark gray-black background, Bing paints a bald, muscular bust of the American icon. Without the label however, it would be possible to walk by the painting without recognizing the subject. The face and torso consist of color and muscle contours, but Bing adds no distinguishing features. In an additional attempt to abstract his subject, Bing divides the entire work into a grid of thousands of squares. This mosaic effect emphasizes the abstract quality of the work – we are viewing an icon not an individual.

Artist Jiang Gao Liang creates more visceral pieces than the artists with whom he shares gallery space. A series of three 120cm x 120cm pieces are the focal point of the second room. Shanghai-born Jiang has a three-piece oil on canvas series that explores a period in the artist’s life. Trained in clothing design, Jiang embarked on his painting career just recently in 2004. The series in BIG WAREHOUSE represents a period when Jiang dedicated himself exclusively to fashion. All three pieces are vibrant abstractions of flowers, which upon closer observation contain fourteen depictions of female models in two horizontal rows. Although the tones of the series range from murky and dark to colorful to almost washed out by light, the fourteen models are a constant feature in all three pieces. Color drips down the canvases, largely obscuring these figures, draped in couture and posed as if gliding down some imaginary catwalk. The small figures fade in and out of each flower, at once beautiful and intangible.