6 - Urban Insertion as Artistic Strategy: The Big Tail Elephant Working Group in 1990s Guangzhou
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2021
Summary
Abstract
The Guangzhou-based urban artworks of Big Tail Elephant Working Group (大尾象工作组), comprised of the artists Lin Yilin, Chen Shaoxiong, Liang Juhui, and Xu Tan, represents one of the earliest sustained site-specific art practices in China in the 1990s. Examining their works in relation to the changing socio-economic and physical terrain of Guangzhou, this chapter develops the term ‘urban insertion’ to describe their unique engagement with the urban environment. A method of working that appropriates rather than intervenes confrontationally in the structures of the city, their ‘urban insertions’ embedded themselves within the city to critically probe its material conditions. This distinct site-based urban practice opened up new possibilities for Chinese contemporary art and revises our current understanding of site-specific urban interventions.
Keywords: The Big Tail Elephant Working Group, Lin Yilin, Chen Shaoxiong, Liang Juhui, Xu Tan, site-oriented urban practice, Guangzhou.
In 1995, on a widened street alongside the construction site of Guangzhou's soon-to-be tallest skyscraper, a nondescript man moves a wall of stacked breezeblocks across the street, methodically stacking and unstacking each one by one amidst oncoming vehicular traffic. This performance, Safely Maneuvering Across Lin He Road, by the artist Lin Yilin (林一林, b. 1964), a member of the Guangzhou-based Big Tail Elephant Working Group (大 尾象工作组), would later be noted in various art historical accounts as illustrative of Chinese contemporary artists’ new interest in the country's rapid urbanization during the 1990s. Indeed the piece engages with the urban environment in highly specific ways. The artist chose to locate the work on the street abutting the CITIC Plaza construction site in the rapidly developing new district of Tianhe (Heavenly River) in Guangzhou, China. The breezeblocks Lin used are taken from the site and therefore intimately connected to the material realities of the destruction and reconstruction of the city. Lin's performance, a form of bodily engagement with the physical environment, registers an exchange between the artist's body and the urban site that can be understood in literal terms as an art work.
This piece is representative of the thematic concerns and strategies of Big Tail Elephant, comprised of artists Lin Yilin, Chen Shaoxiong (陈劭雄, 1962-2016), Liang Juhui (梁钜辉, 1959-2006), and Xu Tan (徐坦, b. 1957).
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- Information
- Visual Arts, Representations and Interventions in Contemporary ChinaUrbanized Interface, pp. 181 - 208Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018