Mu Chen gets her hands dirty at Shanghai Gallery of Art

Mu Chen is perhaps best known for her “Assembly Hall” series of photographs, which she worked on with her husband, painter Shao Yinong. These photos chronicle the decline of public halls requisitioned for use during the Cultural Revolution. 

In her new show at Shanghai Gallery of Art, Mu is continuing to chart the ways in which people are, as she says, “Pushed by the will of history.”  

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The “Forever and Ever” exhibition takes its name from a perfume by Christian Dior. Its themes follow the Kanye West rhyme, effectively asking, “Does anybody make real sh!t any more?”

The geology of culture

In her “Color” series, Mu uses steel molds and the ancient Chinese building process of tamping earth (夯土) to create durable cut-outs of layered dirt in the shape of the Apple, Nike, Sony Walkman, Louis Vuitton, McDonald’s and Chanel logos.

The tamped earth sculptures are made with five different colors of soil, representing five different regions of China. 

Mu says the earth works were inspired by a visit to a fossil museum in Gansu province. “I had to think the old questions -- what am I, where am I from, and where will I go -- when standing before so much history.”

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Each earth sculpture is topped with a thin layer of lurid, colored powder, which Mu says represents contemporary fashions.

In the geology of her work, corporate logos are but a blip, a thin veneer on top of the thousands of years of history that preceded them.

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“Dirt is actually a very interesting and elusive commodity, I mean compared to the multinational brands that were being shaped out of it,” says Mathieu Borysevicz, director of Shanghai Gallery of Art. “We did quite a lot of research and toiled quite a long time with locating the right dirt. It had to be dry, a certain color and texture -- artists are very particular about their dirt.”

The scent of sentiment

In another series of work, “Pride and Prejudice,” Mu fills the central space at the gallery with human-sized, stainless steel outlines of 15 well-known perfume bottles, which she has had painted in glossy, automotive-style finishes.

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Emptied of their physical contents, the bottles are mere signifiers.

To Mu, the fragrances they hold are less interesting than the gestures they represent.

“Six years ago I didn’t use perfume, and I didn’t really know about it,” Mu says. “But later a lot of people suddenly started to wear it. We fly from one airport to another and buy perfume for friends and lovers, or even parents.”

Duty free fragrances have thus taken over a function once filled by Tang Dynasty poems.

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“I’m a person of very classical emotion,” Mu says. “I like very old poems, tang shi (唐诗), and many of them describe seeing friends off.”

Mu makes the connection between poems and perfumes even more explicit in her sound work “Poetry," where a list of breathless perfume names are read out in alphabetical order.

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“Not only can one identify the brand of the perfume [in the bottle shapes] but also the prepackaged narrative that marketers have composed for these scents,” says Borysevicz.

“'Pride and Prejudice' points to a malaise in contemporary society -- a condition in which prescribed emotions have now become surrogates for our own personal expression.”

Mu Chen's relentless resistance

Mu is also exhibiting a photo series called “Indistinct” as part of “Forever and Ever." It shows beautiful, low contrast works in narrow bands of pale gray (snowscapes and a white sky) and near black (pine trees against a dark night).

Mu describes it as offering a rest from the politics of the other work. 

Some might say that when it comes to Chinese fine artists appropriating corporate symbols, audiences are overdue for a break. In Mu’s defense, there’s clearly still a place for critiquing the rising influence of shallow corporate culture in China. 

The same night as “Forever and Ever” opened, MoCA hosted its own opening for an ‘art’ show that charts the brand history of Chanel.

“Forever and Ever," until March 7, Shanghai Gallery of Art, 3 on the Bund, 3 Zhongshan Dong Yi Lu, near Guangdong Lu 中山东一路3号近广东路, +86 21 6321 5757