Hot Blood

* Trigger warning: self-harm, suicide

A giant chapel-like structure covered in a wallpaper of anime characters reached toward the ceiling and towered above the visitor on the ground floor at White Rabbit Gallery’s latest group exhibition, “Hot Blood.” The visitor began their pilgrimage by entering this temple covered in saturated polychrome graphics—part of Lu Yang’s installation Electromagnetic Brainology (2017). Inside, five screens depict Buddhist and Hindu deities who have been playfully transformed into video game characters reminiscent of Street Fighter and Tekken. Yang’s work reflects the post-human age, celebrating the internet’s ability to redefine the corporeal body and therefore the constraints of our identity. 

Indeed, the opening wall text of “Hot Blood” promised to showcase 23 Chinese artists who are “unrestricted by national borders or Western expectation” and “have cast off the markers of age, nationality and gender.” Marketed specifically as a gallery for contemporary Chinese art, as famous for its tea-house next door as its exhibitions, White Rabbit seems to fail in its purported aim to reconfigure “Chinese-ness,” however, as little is done to erase Essentialism. The artists were ostensibly selected due to their playful, irreverent and sometimes downright subversive work. Yet, such sensationalism echoes concerns raised by curator and critic Zhu Qi in his essay “Do Westerners Really Understand Chinese Avant-Garde Art?” (2000), in which he observes a superficial Western preference for “works that appear political, fashionable, subversive, psychopathic.”

Embodying the exhibition’s reliance on shock tactics was the insensitive display of Chen Zhe’s photographic series “Bees” (2010–12) and “The Bearable” (2007–10), which are infamous for their unflinching documentation of self-harm. While there is some merit in Chen’s confrontation of the stigma surrounding mental health issues, these works strike the precarious balance between healing from and aestheticizing self-harm. In one photograph, for example, the red lines across a young girl’s wrist are mirrored by her alluring red lipstick, while the bokeh effect emanates a warm glow and enticingly frames the glistening drops of blood. With approximately 70 photographs in total of bruised necks, cigarette burns on thighs, and scabs on scalps, the experience was acutely distressing. A gallery invigilator was present to issue warnings, but there were no labels providing advice on getting professional help. Without the appropriate environment, these works seemed self-indulgent, more concerned with eliciting horror than imparting the complexities of self-harm. Poignant excerpts from Chen’s diary revealing her psychological turmoil were also displayed. These words would be best presented in more poetic spaces of private interiority. However, her words were magnified and printed onto the walls, irresponsibly perpetuating the romanticized narrative of the tortured artist.  

Other works explored an overwhelming array of eclectic themes, ranging from Xiao Lu’s video installation Sperm (2006), which documents her controversial mission to be artificially inseminated, to Yin Xiuzhen’s Life (2007–11), featuring 3,000 cigarette butts stitched from cloth, displayed in a long, narrow vitrine in a macabre attempt to measure time. The works were densely packed alongside Nimuë’s installation of videos from the “Sex” series (2014–16), in which 12 monitors in a room painted entirely in bright yellow screen absurd animations, for example, of a pair of breasts that are lemons squeezing juice onto a bald head. The crowded works and lack of thematic continuity culminated in confusing sensory overload. 

It was Huang Hua-Chen’s quieter, more intimate work The Family Album – So See You Later (2009–12) that was the most captivating of the show. To process her father’s abandonment of her family when she was a child, Huang created 42 oil paintings, displayed on plinths of different levels against a wall resembling a mantelpiece. A number of smaller frames render, in soft, pastel colors, quotidian fragments of fragility, care and love in close-up shots of enclasped hands, an embrace, someone tying another’s shoelace. The installation offered a moment of respite and contemplation alongside works that operated mainly via aggressive confrontation.