Chinese artists help Americans interpret their own past at festival in Cleveland about what it means to live in a city
Event in Ohio, with as its theme ‘the idea of an American city’, features Chinese artists who interpret urban living in ways that are both approachable and resonant for Cleveland, a place rich in industrial history
Chinese contemporary artists have traded ideology for accessibility to produce works that speak to Americans in new ways, says the artistic director of a new art festival.
Take Shanghai artist Cui Jie, one of eight Chinese artists and art groups represented in the inaugural Front International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, who draws inspiration from bland government buildings in China to make futuristic paintings that reflect the country’s obsession with becoming a technological paradise.
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Cleveland audiences easily get the point, says the triennial’s artistic director, Michelle Grabner. “Today, things can be made in China, and yet can be relevant in Cleveland. Cui is a painter, and audiences here can relate to that – they can relate to the way the artist handles the paint. The audience understand the … value system inherent in that process,” she says.
Then there are the Asian Dope Boys who, the festival catalogue says, “fuse hip-hop, queer futurity, and sexual hedonism in colourful and grotesque performances that unite Western and Eastern cultural references, merging vogueing, drug paraphernalia, and Hindu ritualism to form a cacophonous final product”.
They are very exciting,” says Grabner. “Their relationship with the things that move us all is really transnational – how they think about bodies, how they think about movement, how they think about music. They reinforce the idea of a common culture coming from different nations – although there are still very different stories being told to communicate that culture.”
She stresses that, though it may appear introspective, the theme of the festival, “An American City”, is anything but that. “It’s not a specific American city,” Grabner says of the show, which runs until September 30 around Cleveland and across northern Ohio. “We’re talking about the idea of an American city in general. We’re reflecting the way that a city has a local aspect, but also has a relationship with a region and beyond. These things are intertwined.”
