Dali House

“What is it about Asians and smiling?” asks the stranger in the Land of Smiles. The famed Thai welcome gets some decent (though not definitive) scrutiny from both sides of the International Date Line in the inaugural exhibition at the new Bangkok Arts Centre, “Traces of the Siamese Smile: Art + Faith + Politics + Love”.

That impressively big show, continuing through November 26, has Chatchai Puipia’s “Siamese Smile” both on the wall and at its heart. It’s certainly a favourite at Dali House, also on view here.

This one’s not a smile at all, of course, but a grimace. Chatchai isn’t too keen on his fellow Thais kowtowing to foreigners. Thailand is so hospitable, however, that its new health minister, a well-connected but completely unhealthy thug named Chalerm Yoobamrung, last week asked the press not to say anything about tainted milk products that might upset the Chinese.

When the Chinese get upset, they tend to keep smiling, or at least they bare their teeth, much like Chatchai. It’s difficult for many Westerners to tell whether Asians are happy or in the throes of indigestion, which is why they used to refer to Orientals using the politically incorrect term “inscrutable”.

At the top of the post, side by leering side, are two paintings on sale on October 20 at Sotheby’s London. Ravinder Reddy’s untitled, undated oil can’t beat Yue Minjun’s “Hat No 2″ in terms of grinsmanship, which is perhaps why the young Indian’s work is expected to fetch no more than 100,000, which is 50,000 less than the even younger Chinese artist’s four-year-old hat.

In fact the hat guy seems to like Reddy’s piece better. He’s having a good belly laugh at seeing the very surprised look on a gilded idol’s face. Together they look like an excellent stand-up comedy team.
See the rest.

The seemingly obvious interpretation of Tang Zhigang’s paintings of children in adult roles is that adults — and especially politicians and military types — behave like children. But in a great 2004 essay at the Han Art website, Monica Dematte offers an interesting alternative.

She’d visited the Yunnanese artist in his barracks (the army was his primary career until not long ago) and watched him teaching art to kids. The classes, she wrote, “are actually situations where human relationships are subject to authority and are governed by strict regulations.

“I believe that the painter has found in the children many of the shortcomings which grow more evident when one becomes adult, while some infantile anti-social traits seem to have been disguised in the grown-ups behind a diplomatic curtain of politeness … The children are for him the ’successors of socialism’.

“It is also true that, switching from adults to children, he is somehow playing it safer: humour is greatly accepted and practised in China, but some subjects are still taboo.”

In 1999 Tang — who’s about 49 now and earning half a million dollars for his paintings — started placing youngsters in adult-style meetings, typified by the work above, “Children in Meeting, Hong Kong No 3″. They wear official dress, usually the Mao jackets of the autocracy, and tap at their tea cups, but close by are their toys.

“Every single element is chosen for its symbolic value,” Dematte says. “Subverting the principles of Chinese and Soviet socialist realism, which Tang absorbed during his artistic education in Nanjing and Beijing, he is now forging a breed of anti-hero baby cadres that satirises a whole era.”

It’s all a bit too pat for me, slim in thoughtfulness, but it certainly beats calling Tang’s pieces “cute”.

Mark Ryden has got some serious competition coming from Zhang Peng of Beijing. Above is a close-up of “Goldfish”, painted last year, and below the full image.

This is good art — in the sense that deeply disturbing pictures put a knife in your head and keep the synapses on their synapse toes. You should see his photography: many samples on his website.

Despite the smog, red tide, cheating at fireworks, fake ethnic minorities, a perfect child lip-synching, Spielberg’s absence and the blood of millions of Burmese and Africans on the wrong side of the Chinese payroll, Beijing put on a pretty good show with the Olympics, I thought.

The one Chinese out of three billion who may not have enjoyed the fortnight is Zhang Hongtu, whose painting “Bird’s Nest, in the Cubist Style” was blocked from exhibition at the German Embassy in the Chinese capital and from its planned reproduction in Chinese Vogue. It was “too political”, as opposed to “not pretty enough”, like the little girl who really did sing the anthem at the Games’ opening ceremony.

Zhang’s depiction of the National Stadium includes bits of the Bird’s Nest structure, the words “Sacred Olympic Torch”, “One World, One Dream” and “Family, Joy, Happiness” in Chinese, the numeral “8″ and, uh-oh, the words “Tibet” and “human right” in English.

Well, I mean, no wonder.

So Zhang and his painting sat out the Games back home in New York, where the Gansu native has lived since 1982. By way of compensation he’s got Sotheby’s “Contemporary Art Asia” auction coming up in the Big Apple on September 17, and a pair of his “traditional Chinese landscapes” rendered in the styles of Van Gogh and Cézanne are expected to bring as much as $60,000 each. See the rest.

There’s a whole lot of people in Beijing at the moment, even more than usual, and, while Hu’s definitely on first, it’s still Mao at bat in the minds of millions. So here’s the Graceless Helmsman as recast by Shi Xinning in 2005.

“Mona Lisa” (yes, that’s the title, and evidently it is black and white) was up for sale at Sotheby’s London last month for a mere £50,000 or thereabouts. Shi was looking to get twice that for five times the celebrities with his “The Beatles”, shown below, from the same year.

These were part of the 39-year-old’s “Utopian Stories” series begun in 2000, Western icons colonising the once-shy China.

“I almost always work with a staging of completely incompatible props and scenery,” Shi has said. “I am not interested in Mao Tse-tung as a real person. Today, Mao is still an icon in China. He is omnipresent.”

In London too. Right about the same time in the same city, Sotheby’s was flogging a posh bonfire’s worth of Andy Warhol collectibles. There was yer Michael Jackson and yer Ted Turner, yer Judy Garland, yer Skull and even an “oxydation painting” — piss and acrylic on canvas, £70,000 please. See the rest.