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:

Vanna Bowles / Robert Johansson (Sweden), “The Body’s Thin Shell”

 

Zhu Licun, “Way Home”

 

Xin Dongwang, “Peasant Worker”

 

Students of the Chinese Central Academy of Fine Arts, “Gone with Wind”

Xu Weixin, “Portrait of Samaranch”, “Portrait of Liu Changchun"

 

Wang Ziqi, “Harmony and Olympics in China"

Shao Yachuan et al, “Light under Ruins”

Kong Weike et al, “Never Give Up”

Lu Zhiqiang, “Crossing Hurdle”

Leng Jun, “A Girl Named Xiao Tang”

Liu Qingle, “Swimming Pool”

 

Zhang Ming, “Swing No. 2”

 

Jerome Fortin (Canada), “Seascapes”