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Gu Dexin, Installation view.

Meditations on Alien Space in Shanghai

Shanghai Gallery of Art
3rd Floor, No.3, the Bund
Shanghai
86-21-63215757
Solo exhibition by Gu Dexin
April 14-May 26

By CAO WEIJUN

In this installation the artist has created a visual rendition of Untimely Meditations (Unzeitgemässe Betrachungen, 1873-6, F. Nietzsche). Specifically, the whole gallery has been transformed into an alien space by Gu Dexin. The smooth section of painted floors-pace in the interior of the gallery has been completely covered with old-fashioned sidewalk tiles, which run away from the door of gallery at a 25-degree angle, perfectly paralleling the base of the river-facing windows. Beneath the viewer’s feet, the floor, more than 600 square meters in area, has been covered with paving stones characteristic of the 1970s. We see the skyline of the opposite bank of the river. But to speak precisely, it is the rays of light bestowed by heaven that lead viewers as they walk toward the end of the gallery space. For visitors who are familiar with the Shanghai Art Gallery, the relationship between the gallery and Pudong — that symbol of China’s urban culture glimpsed through the windows — is suddenly and miraculously transformed. This extraordinary transformation deals with a desperately urgent issue. It is this that Gu Dexin kindly indicates to us.

Looking back from the windows toward the exhibition space, we see that on this floor filled with tension and suspense are distributed 27 manholes, the covers for which are made of cast iron or cement. Their forms are all different, yet they all are forms that can be seen anywhere in the streets. Such a setting gives one the distinct feeling of walking outside on a sidewalk. Now, the gallery is no longer a place for exhibiting works that bear ordinary meanings; instead, Gu Dexin uses it to create a pathway whose direction is unknown. In comparison to the man-hole covers, most of which are rather small, the cast iron gutter, which extends more than 20 meters along the base of the gallery’s northern wall, and the corresponding cast cement gutter that lies by marble pillars of the atrium space, give the visitor an even stronger feeling of walking down a street. As seen looking backward from the windows, the whole space of the gallery--with its floor that looks exactly like a sidewalk, with its dusky lighting and dozen pillars--appears very much like an old-fashioned waiting room in a train station; but all passengers have left, leaving the building desolate.

In this life-like, yet rather surreal, site-specific artwork, the evocation of the street is actually only one part of the messages, suffused with a certain realist sensibility, that Gu Dexin conveys to the spectator. After entering the gallery, we note, one by one, five elements of the work other than the floor that fill us with a sense of devilish fantasy.

1. The many types of manhole covers used on the streets are very familiar objects to people who live in towns and cities; indeed, strictly speaking, they are one of life’s necessary things. However, one would never imagine that in the space beneath the manhole covers flows and drips a viscous, blood-like substance; such a thought fills one with great anxiety, tightening one’s veins.

2. Moreover, through the hole in manhole cover can be seen 60,000 milky-white, life-size, imitation maggots, which are immersed in the blood-red, viscous silica gel, spreading over almost the entirety of the sewer’s interior. Already tense, we suddenly fill with even greater astonishment. Is this a scene from a horror film?

3. Now the gallery’s atrium appears like an open-work tracery. This space of bubbling undercurrents that appears among the floor boards and that seems at once illusory and real does not imitate the surrounding floor-panels in spreading at a 25-degree angle toward the window, but instead it morphs into a lake-blue-colored pool. The installation of this pool gives this whole space a greater, more diverse sense of dimensionality, creating a strong contrast in color, material, and texture with the solid, tough floor that surrounds it. Moreover, a compact mass of houseflies shuttles atop the silica gel pond and the refracted image of the space of the central chamber that pierces through the fourth through seventh stories of Three on the Bund; the inverted image of this central chamber, when seen in the semitransparent pool of silica gel, creates the illusion of a reversed space plunging downward, filling one’s heart with the fear of a nightmarish descent into hell.

4. Atop the "lake-blue,colored water surface" quietyly floats a dense, though fragmented, black mass of 100,000 imitation houseflies, creating a complex play of illusions with the inverted image of the central chamber reflected in the brightly glistening silica gel pool. House flies are a sickening species; and it is probably self-evident what the meaning of the presence of 100,000 artificial flies is, as well as what they signify within the context of this work. The correlative relationship that exists between the “lake-blue-colored water surface” of the silica gel pond and the red, blood-like liquid pooled within the gutters, as well as that relationship which exists between the maggots and the house flies, all cause the viewer to shiver constantly at those recessive existences present at the earth’s surface and below. Gu Dexin’s exploration is not of the so-called “forerunner” type; he has but modestly ripped open life’s surface layer, displaying to us all that he sees. In truth, he had already begun to develop such ideas in his two-dimensional works of the late 1970s.

5. The walls that separate the windows facing the skyline of Pudong are no longer their original white color; having been remodeled, they now have a modeled form and a surface texture like that of the building’s exterior. Looking through the bright glass, one can see the inner and outer walls as identical “twin brothers”; if the viewer then looks at the pavement stones beneath his feet and at the sidewalk outside of the window, he will experience a complete reversal of the interior and exterior of the space. Gu Dexin’s intention is not only to point to the cultural function of the gallery but also to call into question the gallery’s status within culture; at the same time, he seeks more generally to propose some challenges to the limits of art spaces.

Some thoughts that have seeped out from the site
This is a plain yet perverse work. It presents simply that in which the spectator resides. It is surrounded on three sides by white walls; in the center is a charcoal gray floor, or rather, let us call it an expansive road. Gu Dexin dispenses with those confused scenes so often heard and seen on both sides of metropolitan streets. He has left us with only a great pathway “to heaven” that stimulates spectators’ thoughts, a pathway that appears almost flat, yet beneath which an undercurrent roils. Like a person’s life, it leads from an unconscious beginning to a conclusion that represents the union of the joyous and the tragic. In front of the gallery’s windows, all emits its final sound, dying. If we rush hurriedly through this space and time that is so incredibly limited, standing in front of the window we still have an opportunity to think a final thought, to become reacquainted again; if we let go or abandon even the opportunity for this last thought, I fear that we will only be able to become a fly or worm that merges into the beautiful blue sky, finally returning to the gutters or to the pond of lake-blue water that the artist depicts. Perhaps it is this that is Gu Dexin’s meditation, which, especially under the conditions of today’s society, appears to be so out of step with time. Yet in calming contemplating, he generously shares with us…

As one stands near the entrance, looking at the gloomy light that radiates from the ceiling of the gallery and that falls to the floor, mixing with the speckled light of hope that filters through the window, there is made manifest a sort of contest between the will of the individual and the tragic majesty of reality. This is Gu Dexin’s work, the voice of a thinker.

— Translated by Phillip Bloom

Gu Dexin, Installation view.