wRev_Dance With It_CC_TM_CC.pdf - Tom

Please enable JavaScript to view the full PDF

AAP Online Review CITY: Beijing GALLERY: Taikang Space EXHIBITION: Dance With It AUTHOR: Tom Mouna Dancing: an alluring concept that hasn’t been given much exhibition attention in China. Presented by Beijing’s Taikang Space, “Dance With It,” curated by Su Wenxiang, was a show of nine artists resolutely focused on the topic—specifically, the significances of Western-style dancing in China from the late-1970s up to the present day. In the first room, viewers were invited to put on a set of wireless headphones and listen to music from a specially created playlist, emphasizing the inextricability of the imported tunes, such as Kraftwerk’s 1983 track Tour de France, from the country’s dance culture. Like much of the show’s works, two small oil paintings of partner dances by Cui Jie seemed to embody these songs. The canvases’ ambiguities, resulting from their weighty impastos, which belie the calculated rhythms of the depicted movements, allude to the nebulous history that the exhibition traces. As a counterpoint to Cui’s paintings, on the opposite wall were a series of photographs by the well-known recorder of life in reform and post-reform China, Li Xiaobin. The documentary- style images offer a potted history of the official status of chiefly ballroom dance in China. A photo showing groups dancing together in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People—with many same-sex couplings, as, evidently, the weariness of male and female contact had persisted even after the Cultural Revolution—attests to a moment in 1978 of changing governmental attitudes toward a leisure activity that had previously been considered bourgeois, and that was markedly not revolutionary opera. Not long after, dancing became a bugbear to some apparatchiks: an adjacent photograph from 1982 features a sign in a park’s restaurant explicitly forbidding dancing. Extending this undulating narrative were several images showing groups cavorting in public, signalling the subsequent restoration of dance’s reputation. It was within this unpredictable but nonetheless formative period of Western dancing in China that magazines, instructional books, movies and dance-related equipment were both created within and imported into the country. The exhibition included a well-selected assortment of such paraphernalia alongside archival documents tracing the localized historical and societal resonances of ballroom, breakdance and other forms of Western dance. Placed centrally in the first gallery were two photographs showing two of the first large-scale advertising billboards to be installed in China in 1979. One features a young woman wearing modern clothing—radical for the time—while the other pictures a woman selling electrical appliances from the Japanese company Sony. Positioning these materials as evidence, the exhibition argued that the freedom to move one’s body, to dance with the opposite sex and to listen to contemporary foreign music was a part of and a driver for wider epochal shifts. The second space was arranged like a dancefloor, with a glistening, rotating disco ball hanging overhead. A number of small screens arranged around the edges of the room showed dance- related Chinese movies from the 1980s and ’90s. Inserted among these were two idiosyncratic video works. Hao Jingban’s Off Takes (2016) is a mordant documentary-style film that uses the artist’s archival footage to illustrate the story of a protagonist who, according to the narrator, danced with Zhou Enlai, was officially investigated for dancing, and whose life is defined by dance. Dance! Dance! Bruce Ling! (2013) sees the artist Yao Qingmei enacting a purposefully scatty ballet while dressed in a Bruce-Lee-style yellow jump suit and holding the Communist scythe and hammer. Her movements are backed by a disjointed piano rendition of the music from the 1976 Bruce-Lee flick Fury of the Dragon. The video’s backdrop is a screen of painted bamboo trees and a traditional ding (ancient Chinese cauldron), the latter of which the artist eventually destroys using her two tools. The work addresses the constant rocky interrelationship of dance, politics and identity in China, in much the same way that “Dance With It” has fruitfully begun to do.