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"Portraying Food (and the Absence of It)"
During a performance, Zhu Yu once ate what he claims was a human fetus. The work in this show, which features Yu and four other Chinese artists, isn’t nearly as provocative—but it elevates food to the level of art in ways that are unsettling, if not entirely successful.
Yu’s large-scale, hyperrealistic oil paintings find beauty in the detritus of a Chinese feast, as they linger over shrimp shells and pools of sauce on white plates. Chen Wenbo gives his brightly colored paintings of egg yolks connotations of disease by calling his series epidemiology. He also slices the canvases and hangs them with their panels askew, but their cheerful content doesn’t match their creepy titles.
Liu Jianhua’s hard and colorless ceramic models of food underscore the absence of edible material. And although viewers can discern the forms of cabbages in Shen Shaomin’s Experimental Field sculptures, the tangled assemblages of bones, bone meal and glue also evoke unborn chicks and broken shells. Ma Qiusha’s photographs suffer in comparison. She makes milk an effective stand-in for other bodily fluids, but pieces like Milk Toilet—in which the white liquid cascades down a person’s legs as he or she stands on a bathroom stall toilet—elicit little more than double takes.
Although the overarching concept of the show is unusually consistent, one wishes the curator, art historian Wu Hung, had provided more context for the role of food in contemporary Chinese culture. Without that information, the significance of works such as Yu’s leftovers is hard to grasp.
