Artist：Song Yongping and Jon Tsoi
Curator： Lan Zhang and Anthony Haden-Guest
Time: 8/16-9/2 2018
Opening & performance：8月16日6-8pm
Address: Whitebox, 329 Broome St, NY
Money Hostage
By Anthony Haden-Guest
Money naturally plays as important a role in the functioning of the art world as it does in any other activity in which goods and/or services are exchanged. Often the process is straightforward – art is made, it is sold – but the higher you climb in the money tree, the more slippery it becomes. No accident. If the ways in which art moves money - and vice versa – can seem opaque and elusive, these are the characteristics that help keep the art economy afloat.
So it’s no surprise that money is sometimes the actual subject matter of art. But artists don’t often use financial instruments – coins, banknotes, checks – just as handy borrowings from real life, the way Chardin laid a table with jugs, Cezanne used apples or Picasso his guitars, because money always implies story. As with Rembrandt’s early masterwork, Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver, images of the currency almost always bear a load of meaning. Many meanings, in fact, and often dark ones.
This is an area in which, as one might expect, the US currency rules. Warhol’s Dollar Bill series of 1961, which was part of the evolution of his silkscreen process, was a cool blast of Pop, being at once deadpan and exultant. Both within and outside the US the dollar sign is seen as a brand and the image of the bill is a flag. Usually a weaponized flag. Just as when Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and their crew showered the traders in the New York Stock Exchange with dollar bills in the guerrilla theater action that launched the Yippie movement on August 24, 1967. And Richard Prince has used dollar checks in paintings, one of which the Gagosian Gallery turned into a billboard on the Sunset Strip, Los Angeles. But no artists, whether within or outside the US, have been as single-mindedly in the culture’s face, in their use of the dollar as Song Yongping.
Song was born in 1961 in Shanxi Province, Northern China. He graduated from the Tianjin Academy in 1983. Set up as a painter, he joined a Beijing group, New Pictures of the Floating World. Through his own works, he was critiquing the materialism of Post-Maoist China, rather as certain of their contemporaries in New York were mocking the commodification of the art world。
Song set out to make a career and by the end of the 90s he was doing well. It was then that both Song’s mother and father fell ill and he at once followed the directives of Chinese culture, which are humane, yes, but stern and demanding, setting aside brushes and paints, and dedicating himself to their care. He has stated that the weight was a heavy one, almost unbearable, but it was relieved by the purchase of a camera with which My Parents, unflinching portraiture of their failing lives.
The closest parallel in Western photography has to be the portraits Richard Avedon shot of his father Jacob Israel Avedon, in 1971. Avedon accepted that these portraits had an element of performance and Song’s parents likewise participated in the making of theirs. Avedon’s father died two years after the pictures were taken, Song’s parents died in 2001. So back to work.
The body of work you will experience in Money Hostage is direct, indeed as obvious as a slap in the face, but stinging and resonant, especially appropriate to our simmering contemporary climate of tariffs, trade wars and widening wealth gaps, in the art world at least as much as anywhere.
“Money is the eternal theme of human existence,” Ai W W has observed. “Money is the most accepted criterion of survival and competition today.” He added - and excuse my translation of a translation – “Song Yongping’s money pieces are loaded with aesthetic and psychological meaning. They are a political expression of the money system today”. So onwards to Money Hostage and Song Yonping’s collaboration with Jon Tsoi.
