Falling flatly into this genre of contrived coyness was Yan Xing’s exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel, curated by Elena Filivopic (herself a Duchamp scholar). The show has the pulpy title of “Dangerous Afternoon,” and possessed all the intrigue of a daytime drama. Similar to Hirst’s display, it was “parafiction” where only the creators themselves seem to believe there was any potential for the fictional being mistaken for the real. As visitors to the show, we were meant to believe that the sculptures and photographs on view are not Yan Xing’s—despite visual similarities to his previous works—but instead derive from an unnamed artist, placed in the larger clichéd story of a fictive, middle-aged male curator. The curator, as the story goes, develops an obsession with a stranger’s feet and trades his wife’s body for a chance to satisfy his kink. Even more stereotypically, the wife has no name, no voice and no agency of her own, and appears only in a surveillance-like video looking helpless and confused on the street, before being sent off to be raped by a man she does not appear to know—but that medieval bit of ethics is not presented as problematic in this chauvinistic scenario. The plot of “Dangerous Afternoon” recalls a certain Hollywood movie starring Demi Moore and Woody Harrelson, but at the bare minimum, the woman being traded for sex between men in that film has a face, a name and thoughts on her own fate.

In the upstairs galleries of the Kunsthalle Basel were carefully arrayed objects that only generated more narrative confusion. There was a steel-framed, pebble-filled box meant to resemble a large ashtray, as demonstrated by the few cigarette butts artfully arranged in a corner (its relevance to the story was entirely unclear). Two horizontal slabs of roughly cut granite serve as very low plinths for copper rods with quail-feather tips. Another of the precious, Danh-Vō-esque arrangements was a set of three rounded granite rocks with a folded handkerchief bearing a navy-blue Chinese monogram that translates as “longevity”; there was also a black leather belt, a long shoehorn and a carved jade ring placed on a folded tablecloth on the ground. The walls were sparsely arrayed with photographs. In one pairing, a man is cleaning another’s ear, and next to it is an image of three hands: two holding a delicate potted plant and a third grasping one of those, suggesting the dynamics of this ruse. On the fourth wall were three typed pages, a rambling letter to an artist named Marcus whose installation at the Venice Biennale six years ago was where the curator supposedly developed his foot-fetish. The letter explained how the curator spilled beer on the lap of the man who would become his sexual dominant and at one point made him lick the floor, as primed by the blowing of a whistle—also shown nearby for illustrative affect. 

These foot-level sculptures and darkly printed photos—the latter are characteristically Yan Xing’s—remain erotically evocative like fashion photographs, but in narrative terms they are largely opaque. It is not clear who, if not Yan Xing, created them; the only clue is a “Chinese artist,” devoid of name or personality, who is referred to in the letter to Marcus. But that artist is also suggested to be a painter. The back gallery contains an inexplicable studio-like arrangement of a tabletop with pencil shavings, a coffee mug, an ashtray, an erased note and other ersatz signs of works in progress. On the walls were pencil scribbles and some Cézannesque black-and-white paintings, including one of a naked, dark-skinned servant-figure bringing a nude white couple a cake and fruit while they lie in bed. Blatant race-baiting is already an established element of Yan Xing’s practice, and a disturbingly facile way to give his images frisson. The final small room features black shoes in a plastic bag and a video monitor of the aforementioned woman who apparently goes along with her husband’s desired assignation for reasons not important enough to flesh out in this less-than-skin-deep mise-en-scène. 

For those with a penchant for tedium, there was also a three-hour-long video depicting a dinner party, during which a guest reveals that a “local curator” has propositioned him. The parts I saw, on two visits, were the inane, pretentious dinner conversation of an imagined European haute bourgeoisie—about classical music, Wagner and ideas of talent versus technique—too hackneyed to sit through to wait for the “big reveal.” It did not help that the video monitor was mounted high on one side of the Kunsthalle’s staircase, which is an absurd place to expect people to watch a video of that duration, not to mention that the acoustics of the space made much of the dialog inaudible. Sadism was apparently also an important component of the exhibition’s real-world components.

In the text for the exhibition, Filipovic claims “not knowing precisely what you are looking at . . . is the crucible around which the exhibition smolders”—which is nonsensical, since there’s no chance of any slippage between real and fictional given what Filipovic later describes, more accurately, as the “muddle” of Yan Xing’s practice. Another passage from the show’s text reads, “During the preparation of the exhibition, the stranger ordered the curator to crawl on his hands and knees along the edges of the space, and his shoes left the scuff marks. Regardless of this humiliation, the curator placed a guardrail in one area as if to elevate the markings to the status of art”—one of many moments that reduced the curator figure, in real life and in Yang’s narrative, to a paper-thin parody. Sure, the relationship between curators, artists and their objects is complicated by power dynamics and desires of various kinds, but this farce of an exhibition failed to create a potentially believable alternative world in which its events play out. Absent that fictional framework, and even ignoring the brutally misogynistic treatment of the wife in the story, “Dangerous Afternoon” was just sophomoric cynicism using art-world clichés and psychoanalytic tropes its creators seem to find profound. The experience suggested otherwise. 

Yan Xing’s “Dangerous Afternoon” is on view at Kunsthalle Basel until August 27, 2017.

To read more of ArtAsiaPacific’s articles, visit our Digital Library.