The Cass Sculpture Foundation goes international
Every year, the Cass Sculpture Foundation showcases monumental works of art at its 26-acre woodland park in Sussex, UK, displayed in all their glory among a maze of trees and verdant lawns. By tradition, these works are usually by British artists, but this year, the foundation is breaking rules and embracing globalisation, showcasing the work of 16 contemporary Chinese artists in a display titled ‘A Beautiful Disorder’. And not just any Chinese artists, but ones that are unafraid of making daring political statements.
Take, for example, Zheng Bo’s Socialism Good – recreating the popular Chinese propaganda slogan of the 1950s ‘Socialism in Good’ in primary colours of red, yellow and green plants. It first appears to be a literal recreation of the slogan that Mao’s army would march past, but placing it in a natural copse of trees subverts it: nature is reclaiming a message that has lost its time in the spotlight
Elsewhere, disarray and conformity lock horns, like in Li Jinghu’s Escape (My Family History) where the docility of two unassuming fences is disrupted by a roving spotlight that simulates the tension of border controls and illegal immigration, which Li’s own family faced in Dongguan, the border city between Mainland China and Hong Kong. Then there is Xu Zhen’s Movement Field, a maze formed by replicas of protest and demonstration routes, pushing visitors along a peaceful path that actually simulates historical political marches.
The clash of charged messages in a tranquil setting sums up the exhibition, which takes its title from a letter written in 1743 by Jean-Denis Attiret, a French Jesuit missionary sent to China, who commented about the organic gardens of Yuanming Yuan in Beijing, that ‘unlike the geometric and structured gardens of Europe, they would rather choose a beautiful disorder… there reigns almost everywhere a sense of anti-symmetry.’ The Cass Sculpture Foundation now transposes that dichotomy of 20th century Chinese history into a natural grove in Europe. A beautiful disarray indeed.
The exhibition will run from 3 July to 6 November, 2016.
