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Fact and Fiction: Recent works from The UBS Art Collection, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, 21 February - 22 March 2009

Fact and Fiction brings together the work of twelve international artists recently acquired by UBS, one of the world’s leading financial firms, whose collection of paintings, drawings, photographs, videos and sculptures is displayed in museums and UBS offices across the globe.

In this exhibition the works can initially be divided into two groups; those that are based on fact – real events – and those that draw on imagination, that are fiction.

However, fact and fiction also conflate. As events recede into the past they are reinterpreted and recast, and imagination is fed by real life. Photographs can be manipulated, and fantasies become so familiar that they are subsumed into lived experience. Artists are aware of this slippage and of the pitfalls in automatically accepting one as more real than the other.

Facts can be proved by photographs and films taken as events unfold, although images can never tell the whole story. Moreover, the media is so saturated by news images that their impact is diminished; we are desensitized to the horror they depict.

To counter this effect, artists insert distance between events and their representation.

Susan Hiller’s subject is the Holocaust of World War II; Oscar Muñoz’s the victims of conflict in Colombia; Regina José Galindo’s day-to-day violence in Guatemala and Qin Ga’s the magnitude of Mao Zedong’s Long March. But rather than show these subjects themselves, the artists employ a conceptual, symbolic or poetic strategy to bring them alive with more potency and space for reflection than most documentary material would allow.

Only Chen Chieh-jen shows us the subject itself, retired factory workers in Taiwan. But unlike documentary films, Chen’s is silent and his camera movement so slow that time is drawn out to create a powerfully meditative pace.

Daniel Guzmán and Qiu Anxiong have vivid imaginations, but Guzmán’s satirical cartoons and Qiu’s hybrid animals and devastated landscapes have a closer relationship to reality than is immediately apparent. Haraki Sawa’s book of moving airplanes is magical, but the degree to which the work triggers enjoyment or alarm is dependant upon the viewer’s lived experience.

The works in the final gallery are all humorous and seemingly far-fetched. We cannot fail to laugh when we watch Yang Zhenzhong balancing the Shanghai Telecom Tower on his finger, clearly a trick of digital editing, but a metaphor for the precariousness of unhindered development. Beneath the humour in Daniel Guzmán’s tongue-in-cheek pop video is the very real socio-economic relationship between Mexico and the US. Navin Rawanchaikul’s exuberant video depicts his fictional search for fellow Navins. Yet his Navin Party performances and website cross into reality so that irony and sincerity are no longer neatly separate. Tsuyoshi Ozawa’s pacifism is conveyed in his photographs of women holding harmless vegetable weapons. Yet his idealism is transformed into action when these women across the world host meals to celebrate global unity.

And finally the 22 photographs by Xu Zhen, which apparently record his expedition to remove 1.86 metres from the top of Mount Everest, wilfully play with the verisimilitude of photography. What appears as fact reveals itself as fiction; a mischievous warning to scrutinize and question all that we see.

Joanne Bernstein

Curator, The UBS Art Collection, December 2008

	© Courtesy of Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou