Wang Bin Torture in Commercial Quality, High Quality, and Museum Quality
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Chinese painter at work on the series Painting China Now (2007) by Ondrej Brody & Kristofer Paetau |
Wang Bin Torture in Commercial Quality, High Quality, and Museum Quality
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Info
Open Source is a participant-driven art initiative in Brooklyn, NY that provides space, community and conceptual context for creative play and critical commentary. Exhibition: March 13th -April 6th Opening: March 20th: 7-10pm Tue, Wed, Thur: 11am-2pm; Sat: 2-6pm
Contact
info@open-source-gallery.org
Monika Wuhrer & Gary Baldwin
+1 646 279 3969
Address
http://www.open-source-gallery.org
Open Source Gallery
255 17th Street
Brooklyn, NY 11215
USA
Wang Bin Torture in Commercial Quality, High Quality, and Museum Quality
Ondrej Brody (CZ) & Kristofer Paetau's (FIN) work: Painting China Now (2007), is the starting point for their new work on display at Open Source Gallery. Painting China Now is a collection of 30 oil paintings depicting violence inflicted by the Chinese government on Falun Dafa members. The paintings were rendered with varying degrees of realism by Chinese craftsmen* specializing in copying pictures sent via e-mail. These pictures, censored and forbidden in China, were painted with oil on canvas in China and then exported to Europe for exhibition display: http://brodypaetau.com/?page_id=79
For their first Brooklyn exhibition at Open Source Gallery: Wang Bin Torture in Commercial Quality, High Quality, and Museum Quality, the artists chose an explicit photograph of the massacred torso of Falun Dafa member Wang Bin**. Although the original photograph is unsharp, there is no doubt about what it is depicting. Using the Chinese painting companies' own product quality grade system, Brody & Paetau commisioned the image to be painted in three grades: Commercial Quality, High Quality and Museum Quality. To compound the political with the aesthetic, these will be shown side by side, as a triptych.
What at the first glance appears as cynical artistic exploitation can also be seen as a shock of realities revealed through a conceptual artistic process. On one hand, most civilized countries condemn torture and censorship, on the other, they are eager to profit from Chinas' cheap production forces and ruthless commercialism. The marketing of art in 'Commercial Quality, High Quality, and Museum Quality' is alien to general gallery practice as the artistic and monetary value of a painting is usually not relative to labor time or technical skill.
*This company and its details will be not named at their own request for fear of reprisals.
**Wang Bin, born on August 2, 1956, was a computer software engineer at the Institute of Exploration and Development in the Daqing Petroleum Field. He had received science and technology awards on many occasions, and for three sessions in a row, he had been a representative of the employee's assembly at the institute.
http://www.clearwisdom.net/html/articles/2000/11/16/6164.html
