More about 798

(From an email to my brother. This is more here as a journal entry for me than for anyone else, but feel free to read about it)

Well, I'm not sure where the line to non-representational is. There was a gallery of one guy trying to paint the universe. They were brightly-colored splatter paintings and looked to me sort of like clouds with angels (sort of wispy shapes, not actual angel shapes) falling out of them. I didn't think they were particularly interesting.

The one installation piece I saw, besides this one gallery that had a bunch of props from a performance artist set up as a bedroom and such, sort of reminded me of the Dan Flavin exhibit at the LACMA. It was big, empty rooms with sort of metal arches of diminishing size (looks like mmmmm with the first peak tall and the last peak short) arranged in different ways. Some of them were really simple, like a pair of arches in the corner.

Well, I guess depending on what's included in 'installation pieces' there was some other stuff. There was a hole in the floor of one of the galleries, maybe a 6 foot square in one corner of the room, that was about 4 feet deep and had old, rusty metal tracks running in parallel. There were a couple of big mirrors set up to reflect each other and the tracks on the ground in geometrical patterns. The artist's exhibit was all about reflections, big Warholesque screens on lexan or some kind of plastic sheet. Somewhere in each piece there was a line drawn, and across that line was a reflection of the other side. Anyway, I thought that it was neat that the artist had seen the hole and incorporated it into the exhibit in a way that matched up with the pieces on the wall.

There were a TON of propaganda and Cultural Revolution era images. I expected a lot, but almost every exhibit was influenced by them. I'm going to try to go to an army surplus store soon to buy myself a new hat and a jacket. Only the construction workers wear them, I guess they either haven't become trendy here yet or the trend's already over.