SmartShanghai | Exquisite / Corpse

Exquisite / Corpse

By Sarah Hammer, Jan 20th, 2009 | In Art

The "Exquisite Corpse" photography exhibition has been going on at m97 for some months now, but despite the good things I heard and read about the show, I hadn't found the time to get down there, mostly because I find surrealism a too often-abused genre and contemporary art pertaining to surrealist ideals pretty clich��d.

When an email landed in my inbox that they'd extended it another month until Feb. 4, curiosity finally won out and I went.

"Exquisite Corpse" takes its name from a surrealist language game wherein participants in a group write down various words or images without prior knowledge to what the other participants are doing. Each collaborator adds to the assemblage, and in the end the group is left with (allegedly) an imprint of their collective subconscious. Although much exaltation is given to the creative force of chance in this game, as did many of the surrealists in general, it's more the shared elements of the "group subconscious" of the participants that is the real revelation. Here is the most famous result of the game (trans. from French):

"The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine."

In addition to being an interesting collection of words, the phrase also speaks to the shared impulses (or subconscious) of a bunch of then-edgy young, French artists sitting around a caf�� thinking devious things.

The creation of an "Exquisite Corpse" with photographic works from twenty artists is the ambition of m97's curators (with Mathieu Borysevicz), and each image is arranged in dialogue with the antecedent and successor image. Joined in mutual unawareness of each other, the exhibition as a whole pertains to unveil the collective subconscious of the participating artists as representatives of their age and era -- points of contact and conflict, differing perspectives and outlooks, shared fantasies, shared anguish. Common conceptual themes, motifs, and threads are exploited and followed from each image to the next.

The top image with this article shows three works: Mao Yu's "Tree of Man," Sheng Qi's "My Left Hand, Skeleton," and Bai Yiluo's "Destiny No.2" -- a middle section in this sentence of images. Drawing on Confucian teachings and the tenets of Buddhist, the "Tree of Man" is an allegory of birth, life, death, and rebirth. The red is symbolic of the 'universal human blood line' and the tree itself sprouts from the artist's loins.

In "My Left Hand, Skeleton," the 'tree of life' is recast as a disfigured human hand. Sheng Qi also participates in his work, but it to offer up his pinkless-hand as a "symbol of the Tiananmen massacre" (according to the accompanying documentation). Against a domineering red backdrop it's an image that invokes "Tree of Man," but instead of symbolically depicting the universal cycle of life, an image of personal, singular anguish and death is depicted.

And then on to Bai Yilou's "Destiny Number 2," which brings death and decay back to a universal scale...

The application of reason and perspective by the curators themselves in putting the thing together -- the images are matched up according to certain criteria and uncanny similarities -- make it not strictly an "exquisite corpse" (or maybe it is of the curators themselves), but the exercise nonetheless shows a certain depth of thought and deliberation rare in most group exhibitions.

It's a massive, sprawling, and hypnotic sentence of images they've created, drawing the thread between the disperse urban interventionism of Zhang Dali with the fantastical tableau's of Zeng Han. It's definitely worth the time to go down there and see for yourself. Don't be surprised if you take a few trips around the room to read, reread, and reread the thing.