THE REVOLUTION CONTINUES: NEW CHINESE ART

Fitting home for a veteran collector

Saatchi's new space in Chelsea is stunning, though the opening show veers from the sensational to the downright awful

Laura Cumming
The Observer,Sunday October 12 2008

The Revolution Continues: New Art from China
Saatchi Gallery, London SW3, until 18 January

You cannot miss it on the King's Road, where the illuminated signs glow like perpetual Christmas: the Saatchi Gallery is reborn! It seems like years since the County Hall fiasco and, indeed, it is half a decade since Saatchi tried to fit his YBA collection into those miles of oak-lined corridors and dark rooms where Ken Livingstone once plotted, al....... 查看全部 »

Fitting home for a veteran collector

Saatchi's new space in Chelsea is stunning, though the opening show veers from the sensational to the downright awful

Laura Cumming
The Observer,Sunday October 12 2008

The Revolution Continues: New Art from China
Saatchi Gallery, London SW3, until 18 January

You cannot miss it on the King's Road, where the illuminated signs glow like perpetual Christmas: the Saatchi Gallery is reborn! It seems like years since the County Hall fiasco and, indeed, it is half a decade since Saatchi tried to fit his YBA collection into those miles of oak-lined corridors and dark rooms where Ken Livingstone once plotted, all of which resisted the art at every turn.

Chelsea sees a return to the pristine white space with which Saatchi started in St John's Wood more than 20 years ago, except that the third - and surely final - reincarnation of his gallery feels far grander and more senatorial, fit for a collector in his late sixties. With its airy galleries, glass stairwells and walkways, its long views through rooms of all sizes, it's one of the most beautiful art spaces in London.

It is true, however, that the architecture won't suit a subtle video, still less a small easel painting, but Saatchi has never been very interested in either. It is also pointless to wish that he collected old art - what would really shine here would be some sky-high Tiepolos - or even that the works were permanent. The Britart collection, now sold, burned or dispersed, was eyeballed to death over the decades. The Chelsea gallery exists - in the short term at least, which is the longest you will ever get with Saatchi - for art that is quickly made and swiftly consumed, something like Nigella Express

The first tranche is contemporary Chinese, the second may well be Indian, Iranian or Afghan (even the curator isn't expecting to know until the last minute). What Saatchi is offering is a rapid glimpse of the kind of international art that circulates around the world's biennales and auction houses, plus some finds of his own, before he sends it back out for sale again. In the case of almost everything in The Revolution Continues, this feels exactly right, since it is so ephemeral.

The jokes are fast and thick. Here is chairman Mao sunning himself on Peggy Guggenheim's Venetian terrace; here he is riding in state with the Queen Mum. Now he is presiding over the McCarthy hearings (as well he might) and standing in for the face on a Quaker Oats label; only the most minimal adjustment and he is a dead ringer for an American farmer.

More than one painter is involved in this light running gag. Shi Xinning churns out the Mao-as-Zelig works while Zeng Fanzhi superimposes Mao's face over an image of Tiananmen, so that his ghost hovers above the massacre like the giant in Goya's El Coloso. Qiu Jie puns on the Great Leader's name with a calligraphic pussycat in a chairman Mao suit. Saatchi groups them together for critical mass, but is this humour deep enough?

Much turns upon Chinese cultural traditions. Zhang Xiaogang, who seems to be everywhere these days, paints nasty variants of the black-and-white family photos of the Cultural Revolution in which real people become replica dollies with glinting glass eyes. His work relies upon one-shot titles to complete the effect - the mother with two children is plangently called Big Family

Qiu Jie produces ultra-laborious pencil versions of Chinese watercolours in which Eastern content is gradually sidling westwards. Zheng Guogu drips white wax in cascades to get a three-dimensional Chinese scroll waterfall. Whatever these works mean to a Chinese audience, and I imagine they may seem more radical, they all thrive upon Western ideas of China.

In fact, the big surprise here is just how perfectly some of the art dovetails with Saatchi's personal taste for the rude, sensational and epigrammatic, as if he is catered for wherever he goes.

There are upside-down Gormleys, Chapman Brothers toy figures, here embedded in a giant turd. There are hydra-headed skeletons and bloody scenes from A&E. There is a Chinese Ron Mueck - quite literally: a hyper-real angel, like Mueck's morose model bowed down by the weight of his wings, in this case fallen dramatically to earth. And none of this is any better or more interesting just because it comes from China.

The higher up the building you go the worse the art gets, culminating in a room full of trashy Schnabels. These at least have nothing do with Saatchi since they are being shown by Phillips de Pury, the auction house that is covering the entrance costs.

But there are some works here that deserve a permanent home. Zhang Huan's funereal paddy fields at twilight are painted in ash; millions of lives come to dust. Li Songsong's multi-panel works turn enormous political gatherings into scenes of almost unintelligible complexity purely by varying the painterly styles. He takes our dangerously different interpretations of history and turns them into outstanding visual analogies, so that the eye searches around the People's Congress or the crisis meeting with Cuba unable to find a focal point or a place for the eye to rest.

Downstairs in the basement is the big fairground attraction without which no Saatchi show would be complete: 13 lifesize, hyper-real figures in electric wheelchairs, cruising and colliding like dodgems, each representing (very nearly) world leaders. Castro, Arafat, Archbishop Makarios in his long black robes, some drooling, some toothlessly dozing, are stuck with each other until the end of time. Isn't Brezhnev dead? Apparently not. What goes around comes around. The nightmare continues.

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