Relics of Past Greatness
Paintings by Cui Guotai ( de )
Alexander Ochs Galleries Berlin|Beijing, 2006
Even years after having been shut down, and more or less marked by dereliction, the industrial plants from China’s years of planned economy still attest to their former greatness. With expressive brush strokes, Cui Guotai (born 1964) portrays these architectural and technological giants, which - though abandoned - are nonetheless monuments to humanity’s creative power, as well as to our vulnerability.
Cui Guotai was born and grew up in Shenyang, a city in Northeastern China that made a name for itself from the 1930s to the 1990s as a center of the steel industry. What it means if one considers human beings merely as productive forces was shown by film director Wang Bing in his brutal, five-hour documentary about Shenyang Tiexi District, which caused a stir at the Berlinale in 2002. From 1999 to 2001, Wang accompanied the downfall of what was once considered a model factory. Slaving away under the most miserable conditions, the workers were even cheated out of their settlements. An entire district stood on the edge of ruin.
Cui himself directly experienced the rise and fall of this industrial area, the Tiexi District, which was founded by the Japanese in 1934, and supported with material from the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Between 2003 and 2005, the series of large format acrylic paintings Portraits of Industry emerged. The scenes shown in Wang Bing’s movie, images of fiery furnaces and of locomotives moving along four tracks across huge factory grounds, now seem to lie far back in time. In Cui’s paintings, nature is already reclaiming the area that had once been wrested from her.
By showing facades, factory halls, airplanes, locomotives, bridges, smokestacks, and electricity pylons almost exclusively from a frog’s eye perspective, Cui treats them with a reverence that they in fact no longer deserve. Despite all the atmosphere of dereliction, in Cui’s gray palette the blood red of China’s Cultural Revolution, the evening sun, and the green of the overgrowth dazzle. Now, because no more human sweat is shed here, only these relics attest to the former delirium of progress that held sway over this area, where thousands invested all their energy to feed their families. In Tiexi, there were hardly any alternatives.
While Cui’s outdoor views of functional architecture with its strict and reduced formal language still seem modern, not unlike a Bauhaus aesthetic, the interiors, in spite of their ruinous condition, still reflect the barbaric conditions under which people were forced to work here. Accordingly, Cui uses much more controlled brushstrokes and smoother surfaces for outdoor views like Big Chimneys of the Smelt Factory (2004) and The Big Roof of Work (2004) than for his depictions of factory-interiors, as can be seen in Slogan – Like Factory (2005) or Workshop with a Railway (2003). With graceful elegance, the slender smokestacks seem to defy decay, while the working sites seem to dissolve. Correspondingly, Cui’s lush use of paint allows for thick smears that freely flow through the represented scene. Like the natural process of decay itself, chance seems to determine the aesthetic here.
In his Portraits of Industry, Cui goes beyond the status of architecture as bearer of memory. After the buildings were abandoned, their remains take on an autonomous meaning as architectural objects - freed of their earlier function and purely reflecting an aesthetic value. Without any perceptible pattern, plants and ruins merge to form a harmonical unity. In Bulrush on Industry Wasteland (2004) the beholder looks through bulrushes blowing in the wind onto a bridge that leads nowhere. Former train tracks, painted with broad, smeared brushstrokes, no longer carry a technical function: they seem to echo the curves of the stalks of grass, despite their different materiality.
Translation: Dr. Brian Currid
First published by: Alexander Ochs Galleries Berlin/Beijing
