Huang Xioapeng, for example, has convoluted the global matrix to absurd proportions. In Huang’s What Does “Globalization” Mean To You? (2009), a billboard size banner announces the results of a kind of ventriloquist telephone game。 For the artist compresses references to globalization through internet translation programs from Chinese to English and back again only to continue the recycling process culminating with the phrase: “thanks to the expansion of the empire economic and culture exchanges become possible to the maximum extent and previously isolated civilizations become linked.” The pronouncement, with its market driven global utopia that subsumes history and binds together all civilizations both past and present, is a cross between the capitalist avatar Adam Smith gone amok, and mega-computer HAL from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Christopher K. Ho also mines the circuits of public advertising in a project that has its roots in a previous public artwork installed in Mexico City’ s MACO contemporary art fair. There, he placed a text made from vinyl on both the outside and inside of a shipping container that was used for exhibition. The text, written in Chinese, stated on the outside MADE IN MEXICO and on the inside CREATED IN MEXICO. The geo-cultural semantic difference creates a tension between burgeoning economic consumer societies accelerating exponentially in both China and Mexico。For The Pavilion of Realism, Ho will create a variant of this with a text in Spanish stating HECHO EN CHINA，and inside the exhibition space will be a phrase in Chinese proclaiming CREATED IN Mexico. Not only does this interface global economics with semiotics，but because the artist’s ethnicity is Chinese and my birthplace being Mexico, the work is now layered with another level of complexity. There are other artists who also comment on the disparity between countries at the ground zero of global markets and trade and the clash of cultures that, to a degree, alludes to the commercial and nationalist undercurrent of the pavilions featured in the 2010 World Expo
Zhang Hongtu has conflated the culture of commerce and the commerce of culture in his Kekou-Kele (Six Pack) (2002) and Mai Ding Lao (2002). Kekou-Kele is a porcelain work replete with cobalt blue decorations that hark back to the Ming Dynasty; yet what they consist of are six individual pieces in the shape and actual size of Coca-Cola bottles. Not only does this work mine global relations and creeping malaise of low brow culture into the register of high Chinese art, but the work also resides within the trajectory of other artists who have used similar iconography such as Andy Warhol’s 210 Coca Cola Bottles (1962). Mai Ding Lao also addresses this； but in this case Zhang has transformed McDonald’s Big Mac and French Fries receptacles and plastic cutlery into cast bronzes decorated with dynastic Chinese ornamentation and McDonald’s logo. Michael Yeu Tong also mixes Western and Chinese sources in his blue ink and paintings where Arcadian vistas are punctuated with a yuppie on a laptop, guys in all terrain vehicles, and a battle ship that floats idyllically by。Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung’s video animation and related digital paintings titled In G.O.D. We Trust (2009), on the other hand， tropes the moniker on the US Dollar bill but ciphers it through what has been coyly referred to as the cult of Barack Obama. Hung’s pieces are kind of DJ mixing and mash-up of myriad global sources and references where the 44th President of the USA is now guised as Christ, Buddha, Krishna, Whereas Hung’s whirlwind iconography meshes global anxiety through the deification of Barack Obama, Gordon Cheung engages in another form of reification via his 10 panel polyptic titled Top Ten Billionaires,2008 (2009).
These candid portraits, in which some are in profile while others are frontal, are rendered in Cheung’s trademark, dazzling explosion of color with the superimposition of image onto stock listings. As the images bleed and coagulate on the surface in dialectic of foreground and background like polychrome palimpsests, Cheung proposes a straight forward yet complex and visually poetic possibility: are these mega rich with their global contacts and webs of financial and political power, the shadow government affecting all sectors of human existence? Jin Yangping, on the other hand, conflates Pop imagery with images of factory workers. The grueling long hours and persistent toil are offset by images of cartoon characters. Not all artists in The Pavilion of Realism target economics, however; for some comment on the 2010 World Expo as an asymmetrical relationship between native/foreigner, East/West, male/female, and sometimes it is hard to tell in which way the scale of power tips? This is evident in the work of Ying Mei Duan. Coming out of the East Village art scene in Beijing in the early 1990s, a powerful work in the exhibition is a performance piece titled Friend (2003). The piece begins with Ying Mei innocently walking with magnifying glass up to her eye as she slowly makes her way while being captivated by her enlarged, macroscopic surroundings. As she ostensibly sashays her way across a room, she discovers through her optical apparatus a nude male of European heritage. Ultimately, her girlish curiosity leads her to inspect the genitalia of the nude；the subtext is quite clear here。Whereas the European has historically gazed at the Other as non-European and as available, the role is reversed as the male is objectified. This notion of desire from within towards what lies without is also what operates in the work of Sarah Tse. Tse’s piece is a site-specific installation consisting of 100 images of objects colored in pink. Pink dolls, pink stuffed animals, pink clothes, pink candy etc become gendered signifiers yet when grouped together allude to an attempt to internalize or naturalize what the theorist and philosopher Judith Butler called gender performance. That is to say, that gender within culture is a not rigid category or absolute but, in fact, is fluid and malleable. Other artists also target the intricacies of the popular as is the case with Sherry Wong, and her depictions of 21st century flânuers, Goths, and dandies. Her renderings of subcultures, whether they are punks, nightlife denizens, or religious fundamentalists, are piercing studies that border on the anthropological. Kwan Sheung Chi also mines popular culture with a vengeance: his performance video titled Doing it with Chi… making an Exit Bag(2009) is wry take on American cooking shows hosted by Asian cooks. The difference being is that what is being taught by Chi is not the plat du jour, but a technique in how to make an exit bag for suicide. Like television personalities, Chi manages to do this with an infectious smile. Artifice is employed here as a way to explore a kind of 21st century anxiety that would push people to take their lives。 Exploring what lies beneath the surface is also discernable in the art of Gao Lei and Jiang Chongwu.
Gao, for example, has employed his photographic practice to construct tableaux that feigns history, nature, and social relations. His pictures at first appear to be oddly rendered but, in fact, are a kind of tromp l’oeil in their artifice. Events take on an air of fiction; in other words, he uses photography to ontologically reveal the falsity of the factual. Jiang Chongu also articulates a blurred line between reality and its opposite in large scale sculpture that incorporate taxidermy. One work appears to consist of a deer trapped in an art shipping container, adding an altogether new twist on the nature/culture dichotomy. Lui Lei also creates sculpture that culls from many sources that occasionally appear to be a kind of technological device that one may find at a World Expo. Part inventor and faux technophile yet always poetic, Lui’s work oscillates between numerous registers. His sculpture encompasses a broad purview of formal qualities and is steadfast in its thematic focus. One work is ostensibly like a three-dimensional flowchart that connects the US with the rest of the world. Likewise, one can detect a similar protean sensibility in the videos of Ni Haifeng. Ni’s eclecticism derives from what appears to be the circulation of imagery where his subject matter takes on the air of the nomadic and peripatetic. He explores facets of global commerce and trade yet acts as both researcher and artist in his vocation. Ni uses materials that we often overlook and gives the stamp of value to something bordering on fetish: a shipping palette becomes a plinth for sculpture, therefore confusing ever still the relationship between art and commerce. Other artists in the exhibition include Gao Lei, Lui Min, Meiya Lin, and Wang Yishu. The first two artists work in highly saturated, large scale photography. Gao constructs tableaux which is then photographed, Some of these include scenarios of social wastelands, bureaucrats, and overgrown flora and fauna that seem to slowly obliterate human existence. Min also constructs mise-en-scene, but this work parodies what the critic Benjamin Buchloh has called “the aesthetics administration。”Lin also focuses on conditions by which social order is naturalized and internalized by the social body。In The Times are Summoning（2007），the artist has transformed morning exercises by children done in mass into something between ballet and military spectacle. Wang also reveals the quotidian as rife with the uncanny：beasts including zebras meander and frolic through urban settings like lost pets in search of their masters。Realism is used as mimetic foil to comment on the politically charged couplings of rural and urban，developing and developed nations，pre-modernity and modernity， and center and periphery.
As attested by the works presented，The Pavilion of Realism is a timely exhibition in addressing themes that may not be the official province of foreign pavilions participating in the 2010 World Expo. However, such an oppositional attitude is what is needed today in an art world where market forces dominate, even after the so-called global, economic wane。This negation has subsumed critical artistic practice into commodity culture。In the same way that art, in this context, serves to elide reality, what is thus needed today is an art that returns to the real. Or, in paraphrasing the author of the Realist Pavilion when asked why he does not paint angels, Courbet’s response was…that he had never seen any.
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【编辑：袁霆轩】
编辑：admin