It's hard to know which is scariest the tattered horde of
headless zombies or the creepy white women floating over the
overgrown field.
The latest exhibition at Beijing's Today Art Museum may be named
after a Henrik Ibsen play, but the atmosphere in the main gallery
is more reminiscent of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre or the Village
of the Damned.
A work created by Hu Liu featuring a thick field of weeds fills
most of the space with a stark white female figure levitating over
it. At the far end of the entrance stands Sun Furong's "Western
Style Clothes," a group of scarecrows in garish pockmarked outfits.
On the wall opposite is a freeze of identical young girls
precociously preening over their pregnant friends.
"Post Nora" refers to the family-smashing heroine of Ibsen's
proto-feminist play "A Doll's House." And many of the 15 Chinese
and Norwegian female artists here articulate women's unsure
position in a world where they are independent, yet tied to their
femininity.
In Siri Hermansen's blunt "Personal Geography" installation the
viewer tiptoes amongst tiny babies under a forest of flags
emblazoned with contemporary brand names.
While Gillian Carson presents us with an unwieldy formless mass,
precariously balanced on a pushchair.
Yet it seems somehow churlish to restrict the agoraphobia of the
21st century to women alone, and the terror of anonymous crowds,
towering buildings packed with identical people or painted faces
all shown here is something most Beijingers, or residents of any
city for that matter, will be familiar with.
In a more subtle mode Ingrid Book and Carina Heden provide a
series of pictures documenting army recruits training in the
Scandinavian wilderness. In the final picture we look out of the
window of a freshly vacated briefing room over desolate windswept
tundra.
Somewhere out there our young scouts are lost in the snow.
The show will run until December 3.
(China Daily November 8, 2006)