Depends on whom you ask. On
the one hand, we’ve been presented in recent days with the work of ad makers
TBWA Worldwide, who have ruffled feathers in China with an abortive
series of sports ads. Or perhaps the word is bloodsports. Ordered
up by Amnesty International in preparation for the Beijing Games, they show Chinese
security forces making sadistic use of sports facilities to torture prisoners. For example:
Amnesty commissioned TBWA’s Paris office to do the series as part of a campaign
to spotlight China’s human rights abuses. Amnesty later jettisoned the ads for
going too negative, the Wall Street Journal reports, but did permit the ads to run once, which enabled TBWA to enter a competition in
Cannes where it won a prize.
The
Chinese Foreign Ministry skewered Amnesty for the ads four weeks ago, but Chinese Web users soon took up the fight on emergent foreign media sites like anti-CNN (which has more images). Now a Chinese newspaper report from last week
(translation by ESWN) has prompted
some Netizens to call for a boycott against the agency, who also happened to be behind a somewhat more positive Olympic campaign in China for Adidas.
Now contrast the spot of bloodsport images with this feat of Olympic inspiration from a
pair of Swedes, a prize-winning submission to the Third Beijing International
Art Biennale (BIAB):
The
BIAB opened last week at the National Art Museum, the Great Leap Forward-era
edifice in the heart of the capital. Its chosen theme: “Colors and Olympics”. This
year’s Biennale was delayed a year to piggyback on the Games, in the hope it
would boost the event’s mediocre profile. (Yes, the post-Maoist art
spaces have become tour-bus stops, its pioneers of political pop millionaires
at auction, and its avant-garde stars serious forces in the nation’s academic,
intellectual and building scenes. Still, the state-sponsored brand of exhibits continue
to receive a rather cool, conservative reception.)
The
show got only a ripple in the press, in fact, because of a nude sculpture of a Qing
Dynasty consort meant to represent the Empress Dowager Cixi. On opening day, The Beijing News reports, an exhibition goer
complained because the genitalia were in plain-view, organizers said, forcing
them to slip a white towel between the legs:
On
the banner hanging outside the museum, the name of the show was translated liberally as “Colors and Olympism”. Olympism?
Way back when, state-sponsored school was founded on Mao’s
mandate that all art and literature serve the Revolution. What is the Chinese ideal of Olympism in art today?
The introduction to the show announces: “’Colors and the
Olympics’, the theme of the Third Beijing Biennale, echoes with ‘One World, One
Dream’, the slogan of the Beijing Olympic Games, enhancing the inner connection
between contemporary art and the Olympic spirit, thus further reflecting the
idea of building up a harmonious world.”
The statement pays homage to Chinese leader Hu Jintao's calls for a
"harmonious world", an outgrowth of his retro-Chinese political
vision of a "harmonious society".
"Colors
are just like the beautiful rainbow connecting our dreams with reality, as well
as art with the Olympics," Feng Yuan, deputy chair of the China
Federation of the Literary and Arts Circles, one of the show’s organizers, explains in
this report
carried on a Ministry of Culture-sponsored Web site. From the more than 10,000
works submitted, an international panel of critics, curators and artist
selected 747 by 701 artists from 81 countries, it says. "All their works
express man's dreams of peace and harmony, aspirations to beauty, extolment of
youth and admiration of strength," observes Wang Mingming, a panel judge
and ink artist
Included
in the mix was a Socialist Realist send-up to the
Sichuan earthquake and ensuing rescue. The walls of the show were crammed. But attendance was relatively thin on Saturday, which is just a way of saying there’s no excuse for
some of the crooked images posted below. The
Biennale ends the same day as the Beijing Games, August 24. Since it’s doubtful anyone reading here will make
it down to the exhibit, here are a
few specimens of "Olympism" selections that sort of itched our curiosity, beginning with another
shot of the Swedish installation:
Xu
Weixin, “Portrait of Samaranch”, “Portrait of Liu Changchun"
