Chinese Contemporary gallery

By Julia Colman

Sheng Qi's photographic series called Memory takes images from newspaper reports and old family photos, reduces them in size and shows them in front of his mutilated hand. Thus presented, the image becomes vulnerable and subject to the pain projected by the hand. The ensemble acquires a new and powerful force.

FOR THE TIME BEING
Chinese Artists Contemplate the Gap of the Present
by Nate Lippens

The most disturbing example of an artist using their body as a form of artistic protest may be Sheng Qi, who fled to Europe after the Tiananmen Square uprising. But before he did he cut off his left pinkie finger and buried it in a flowerpot to leave part of himself behind in China. Three photographs show his mutilated hand with small snapshots of himself as a boy, of his mother, and of Mao lying in its palm. It's such a disturbing image, with its suggestion of Cultural Revolution-era torture. But once you learn the maiming was self-inflicted a sense of disgust and sadness overwhelms. What does it mean to love a place so much you want to physically leave a part of yourself there? What does it mean to have to leave a place you love that much? What is national pride? What does it mean to make art of disfigurement? The work is open-ended and raw in a way that haunted me for days after I saw it.

From the June 28, 2004 issue of New York Magazine

Art Review
60 Flowers Bloom
At the Asia Society and ICP, 60 photographers and video artists offer telling glimpses of a changing, post-Maoist China.
By Mark Stevens

Some Chinese work (like so much art in general) merely illustrates obvious moral or social points. But the strongest images in Between Past and Future? Are emotionally complex and provocative, mysteriously crystallizing the mood of the culture. When Sheng Qi moved abroad for political reasons, for example, he cut off one finger and left it behind梐 pointed symbol of exile.

Later, in some photographs called Memories .He placed a series of family photographs in the palm of his hand, as if to replace the finger with another piece of the disfigured past. His memories? seem both personal and historical. China抯 open palm awaits, in his work, its fortune teller

The Self
“Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China”
Reviewed by Nizhen Hsieh

The posture of the body or body part in every photographic and video installation is an overshadowing metaphor for China’s obsession with the larger body politic. Technology sets the stage for theatrical vignettes by which the artists re-invent the self by ironicising legendary works of art, i.e. inscribing one’s self-portrait onto a historically symbolic one.

To an even more intense degree, some artists resorted to self-mutilation and sadomasochism, using their bodies as metaphors to draw parallels between self-infliction and social infliction. One such picture, by artist, Sheng Qi, was used as the cover photograph for the event, which portrays his injured hand long healed, holding within his palm a small black and white passport photograph of himself as a boy. He had cut his little finger in protest to the ending of the democracy movement in 1989. But what the photograph shows is not so much the missing absence of a body element. It does not detract from what has remained living and intact, which is what this particular exhibition aims to bring across, a breathing testament to what cannot be repressed or effaced, let alone erased.

New York, July 26th, 2004