Paletten #3, November 1991, Stockholm, Sweden, Annie Markovich

CHINESE APOCALYPSE

"In Haidan, the district in northwestern Beijing where universities and institutes are concentrated, housing students by the thousand in squalid dormitories, the whitewashed walls are black with fingerprints, cement floors are constantly dirty, trash piles up along the rows of thin doors, all numbered. In austere cellar like rooms Chinese students live, often five to six in one small room, where they share a table. Laundry dries on zigzag wires strung between the beds. The squalor stands in sharp contrast to the postmodern architectural masterpiece along the road to Beijing University: in black and white, luxury apartments are built for retiring army officers."

In New York City in Stefan Umaerus apartment two years later, the artist and collaborator, Chely Depablos, designed an installation composed of 14 paintings, wall hangings, and music. That quote at the beginning of this review reflects the story Umaerus is telling in his paintings. While a scholarship student of Chinese at Beijing University he witnessed poverty, the massacre at Tienanmen in June 1989, and as he says, “the euphoria” of that revolution.

As an outsider, Umaerus looked at another culture with the “objectiveness” of a stranger searching for clues. These paintings are about the lives of a people in turmoil. Blue sky rests above; The press release says, “2388 is that point in time 400 years in the future. It is intended to connect different spaces in time and space — to set pictures and poetry documenting and interpreting a contemporary period in time in relation to epochs of the past."

The China paintings are beautiful. Copper foil carefully layered over canvas, acrylics, oil and gouache creates a textural richness of Oriental scroll paintings. They stand 170x51 cm high, about one and one half times human size. Each canvas is sectioned into grids designed by the artist’s calculations to represent celestial proportions. Stenciled on each grid are images of soldiers, citizens, lorry trucks, telephone poles and street scenes. Background colors range from sky blue to a sooty gray black. In La Musique the copperleaf foil rests on a dark Chinese blue abstract sky. The layers of foil correspond to strata of the earth and this image evokes a deeper examination for underlying messages or symbols.

La Geometrie is divided into mathematical sequences so that the desk which falls off to the right is easily visible, other passages are not as easily identifiable. The newspaper on the bottom half may be the discarded student newspaper. In another, a parked lorry truck signals that something is about to happen. A sense of looming danger is present from the armed military.

In all these works the beauty of the appearance is not what the reality is, the political chaos and confusion of China today. Like the film Apocalypse Now by Francis Coppola 1979, which depicts the horrors and absurdities of the Vietnam War, Umaerus paintings remind that evil can seduce with its beauty. Coppola’s film tells on a variety of levels of the absurdity of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Yet in viewing the film this reviewer found the combination of imagery, music and rhythm of the film absolutely seductive in visual richness. This is not a new story however, as art history is full of examples of beautifully paintings which depict man’s inhumanity to man. Look at the masterpieces of Goya, Picasso, Titian, Kollwitz, Delacroix.

The development of an idea and experience into a technical exhibition of this quality is a tour de force today not only in terms of its social and political significance — something Americans are too naive about — but also in view of art history and aesthetic concerns.

Too bad it was not open to the public at large which a commercial gallery suggests.

- Annie Markovich