The Banquet

Contemporary art in Beijing can be very interesting, but is more often than not a bit of a hit-and-miss affair. Too many people wanting to jump onto the bandwagon of 'lifestyle' living, and not content with their coffee shop/hotel/bookshop being simply just another coffee shop/hotel/bookshop want to throw some art into the mix. With the Today Art Museum it's a bit of the opposite situation - already one of the leading galleries in the city, they've developed the street behind their building and rented it out to coffee houses and smaller art galleries. Wandering there for a coffee the other afternoon, my low expectations for the quality of art in galleries there largely justified, I was pleased to find one interesting sculpture placed just in front of an arts-and-crafts store.

The Banquet (盛宴) by Lü Shun (吕顺), as I later discovered, was a sculpture originally exhibited in 2009 inside the Today Art Museum, but has benefited I think from being exposed to the outside elements. It draws upon obvious parallels to traditions of the Last Supper in Western art, but as the artist points out, two important figures are conspicuously absent - Jesus and Judas. That, combined with the fact that the subjects are all pigs, is meant to reflect the lack of ideology and contemporaneous crises within society. The subject of eating/banquet is also given importance; such an integral part of Chinese culture is made to seem primeval, quite literally 'piggish'.

This type of straightforward symbolism is very representative of the way a lot of contemporary Chinese art can be read and at its root can always be found a deep discontent with society and its values. What made this more engaging was the consideration with which the pieces are executed. More often than not, a lot of projects are conceived with very simplistic symbolism which is then portrayed very poorly. Here, the emotions and figures of the pigs were in equal parts mournful, grasping and exhausted whilst their rotund shapes seen from the back were in an odd way strangely endearing.