State of the Arts: Liu Yujia’s Beach, Constellations and Experimental Films Revisited With an Audio Twist

State of the Arts is our regular arts column whereby we take a look at the newest moves in Beijing's creative scene and highlight art news as well as exhibitions, artists, and openings that you should seek out.

Officialdom is taking over the city given the proximity of the 19th National Party Plenum and although things generally tighten during this season in the Capital there’s still plenty to keep us engaged and almost impervious while the city gets ready for the impending political galore. State of the Arts takes its picks so you can make your art-related plans regardless of the direction that the current political winds blow.

Let’s start with Liu Yujia’s solo show at Tang Contemporary Art (798 Art District, Oct 7-Nov 7). Entitled "The Beach: A Fantasy," the show displays a variety of works (most of them video installations) in which the titular beach is the stage of multiple contending realities. The Sichuanese artist develops a narrative that tries to articulate the various realities and paradoxes that the polyvalent geographical spot has had historically, from point of intersection between cultures back in the days of world expeditions (i.e. colonization), to the stage of war and refugee crisis, to a space for relaxation, freedom, and blatant consumerism. The narrative employed is, in our opinion, successful and many of the video installations are decidedly engaging, particularly the pieces “Ko Larn Island” (2017, 14 minutes), in which the artist filmed a drifter who wanders in his hometown (an island near Pattaya in Thailand), personifying the most challenging scenes lying behind the visions of the beach as a paradise-like arena; and the diptych “Wave” (2017, two-channel video), in which aerial footage of beaches are turned into parallel abstract moving images.

Double the fun by crossing the road to Tang Contemporary’s adjacent space (yes, Tang has actually two locations within 798), in which Xinjiang-born artist Zhao Zhao, former assistant to Ai Weiwei and a significant figure among the young post-'80s generation of contemporary Chinese artists, holds his solo show. The exhibition is called “In the Desert Below a Constellation in the Sky” (Oct 7-Nov 8) and among the pieces exhibited, you’ll find embroidered versions of the series constellations that the artist worked on in collaboration with his mother, another rendition of the artist’s realistic series originally conceived in oil on canvas.

READ: European Film Fest Comes to Theaters Near You, Oct 14-31

To finish, we would like to point out the screenings bound to happen this Sunday at Temple Bar (Oct 15, 10pm, free) under the name “Invisible Cinema," a name that reminds us that these back-in-the-day groundbreaking experimental films might not be the most popular ones out there, but whether you’ve seen them already or not, it’s a good opportunity to see/revisit them. That's because this time they’ll be accompanied by a haunting and ethereal live soundtrack provided by the ambient music project “Sound Sculpture." The films to be screened are Anemic Cinema (dir. Marcel Duchamp, 1926), Un Chien Andalou (dir. Luis Buñuel, 1928), Ballet Mechanique (dir. Fernand Léger, 1924), Entr’acte (dir. René Clair, 1924) and Love Song (dir. Stan Brakhage, 2001).

Photos: GJ Cabrera, YouTube