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Artists Reflect on Putin’s Russia in Shanghai

In a Shanghai gallery over the weekend, Russian artist Julia Winter sat on a tall chair wearing black rubber boots. As Ms. Winter read a short passage, a gallery assistant funneled a pail of milk into the knee-high boots. The white liquid soon began leaking through holes in the boots and onto a bed of sand...

 

March 6, 2012, 10:49 AM HKT

By James T. Areddy

Other Gallery
Julia Winter’s oil on canvas “March 5th 2012 (Day After)”

In a Shanghai gallery over the weekend, Russian artist Julia Winter sat on a tall chair wearing black rubber boots. As Ms. Winter read a short passage, a gallery assistant funneled a pail of milk into the knee-high boots. The white liquid soon began leaking through holes in the boots and onto a bed of sand.

Ms. Winter’s brief performance kicked off “Made In Russia,” a show of nine Russian artists at Shanghai’s Other Gallery. The show’s opening was timed to coincide with Sunday’s Russian presidential election, which is returning Vladimir Putin to the post, presenting an opportune backdrop for artists to comment on the Russia’s contemporary affairs – and sell into one of the world’s hottest art markets.
How Mr. Putin, milk, Russia and China might intersect isn’t exactly clear, and Ms. Winter didn’t offer much insight after her performance. Yet judging from the painting and photography hanging on Other Gallery walls, Mr. Putin’s Russia is also a cloudy environment where it can be difficult to understand what’s happening.
The Shanghai show’s title, in addition to being a take-off on the labels affixed to products that exit China’s ports, is a response to a project by the same name held at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art last October in which a small group of Chinese artists commented on their own nation.
Other Gallery
Valery Schekoldin’s photo “Dubosekovo May 8 1984″
Where the Chinese artists conveyed playfulness and irony about their country’s pursuit of money with depictions of big label fashion, their Russian counterparts, judging from this show, feel a weight of time, portraying the individual as small, bound-up and shadowed by a Soviet history that follows them with every step they take into the future.
“The Russian artistic community is trying to find the tools to attack the widespread practice of twisting and corrupting information to control public opinion,” Maarten Bertheux, the show’s Dutch curator says in the gallery catalog. He opened the show commenting that, “There are many parallels between Russia and China.”
The painting team Ivan Kolesnikov and Sergey Denisov created large realistic works for the Shanghai show of what they consider the USSR’s most well-known brands: the RPG-7 and the AK-47,with a reminder of “Soviet history as an organic part of Russian history.”
In photos from his “Pastoral Series,” Alexander Gronsky shows housing blocks of the new Russia that crowd out nature, the tip of one higher than the greenery that surrounds a bikinied sunbather. Brezhnev-era photos from Valery Schekoldin are contemporary only because they weren’t the kind of pictures displayed when they were taken: black and whites of ordinary minions shot during grand displays of USSR might, such as on a windy Victory Day in 1984. China Real Time has more.
 

 

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