With their latest exhibition, “Digging a Hole in China,” OCAT Shenzhen investigates the differences between Land Art and artists working with land in China in the 21st century.In the West, particularly in the United States, Land Art grew in the 1960s as an extension of the frontier mentality. Artists like Richard Long and Robert Smithson would head into deserted spots and rural outposts, and create work within the land. Just as their ancestors had in the previous century headed to these lawless frontiers to escape from the rigid civilization of the East Coast of the US, so too did Long and Smithson and others. They headed there to escape the increasing commercialism of the American art world.By the time this movement reached China in the mid-1980s, however, the average young artist’s relationship to land was very different to their Euro-American counterparts. For 20 years, thousands of educated youths had been relocated into the countryside as part of the Maoist “Up to the Mountains, Down to the Villages” (shang shan xia xiang) program, where they were to be reeducated by rural peasants. Some settled into rural life, but for many the concept of land was tainted by the experience.Most of the artists in the show are part of the generation after this migration, with all of the artworks dating from 1994 to the present day, meaning that the show marks the concept of land as it has developed from Mao to the modern day, where the consumerism that Western Land Art was critiquing has come to China and Google Earth has made any idea of the rural frontier outdated.In works like “Upstream,” 2011, by Xu Qu, however, ideas of resettlement and frontierism still remain. A 15-minute video shows two people journeying into the unknown on the Liangma River that is close to the artist’s home.Other exhibited artworks investigate current anxieties surrounding land, issues like private versus public property and reality versus virtual reality. The former is explored in Liu Wei’s “1m²,” 2006, in which the artist excavates a square meter (the base measurement of private property) of a public highway, while the latter is explored in both Cao Fei’s “RMB City: A Second Life City Planning,” 2007-2011, featuring a surreal computer-generated pop city, and Zheng Guogu’s “Liao Yuan,” in which he tries to recreate world-building computer games in reality.At “Digging a Hole in China,” these are also joined by works from Colin Siyuan Chinnery, Li Jinghu, Lin Yilin, Liu Chuang, Wang Jianwei, Xu Tan, Zhang Liaoyuan, and Zhuang Hui.“Digging a Hole in China” runs from March 20 through June 26 at OCAT Shenzhen.
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