Modern Painters | February 2008
Liu Jianhua
Shanghai Gallery of Art at Three on the Bund
For some years, Britain, Australia, and the US have been exporting their nonrecyclable waste—namely electronic parts that emit odious gases into the air—to China, which gladly accepts the toxic junk in exchange for a hefty fee. One doesn’t have to search hard for the colonialist implications. Now this discouraging subject matter has been powerfully adapted in a new piece by Chinese artist Liu Jianhua. In an expansive gallery, with immense windows overlooking Shanghai’s elegant skyline, waves of trash rose from the floor and swept toward the view. Three stages of disposal were represented in Liu’s installation: loose, scattered trash; trash collected in tidy bales; and, finally, trash in clear Plexiglas boxes with the words "art export" stamped on one side. In the spirit of Piero Manzoni, who canned and packaged his own feces 40 years ago, Liu repurposed the unwanted material as a work of art, sending the garbage back into the system. After all, with its Western values and standards of aesthetic judgment, the art market is yet another form of colonial intrusion.
—Claire Barliant