What a waste

Tons of sterilised domestic and industrial waste lay strewn across the gallery floor. Against one wall mounds of unidentifiable detritus are shrouded with ribbons of black tape like seaweed on rocks. Beyond, the work of sifting and sorting and baling recyclable material has begun. Despite the sanitisation, the place reeks. All around are the sounds of Guangdong — of the ships, the trucks, the machines and the people involved in processing the rubbish that the developed world has dumped in China. On the walls, in both Mandarin and English, a litany of statistics and quotations offers a damning indictment of the environmental and public health disaster of this ugly new China Trade.

The irony of the venue is not lost on artist Liu Jianhua. We are in the Shanghai Gallery of Art, a handsome new commercial space opened in 2004 at Three on the Bund, one of the grandest of the old colonial commercial buildings that line one side of the Huangpu River. Below us is the flagship Armani shop; above the Evian Spa and the best and most expensive restaurants in town. Gaze out of the windows of this symbol of imperial power and you see the futuristic skyline of Pudong and the ‘economic miracle’ of 21st-century China. It is a good place from which to contemplate the real cost of the country’s rapidly growing economy.

Liu Jianhua is also posing the question of whether foreign rubbish can be transmogrified into ‘art’ and re-exported. Classified according to material and colour, he has repackaged some of it in plexiglass wall vitrines and crates labelled ‘Art Export’. At this point it also seems to pose a question about the nature of some of China’s other art exports. Few would deny that contemporary Chinese painting has become the hottest and fastest-growing art market since it exploded on the international auction scene just three years ago.