City of Gold
One of Chris Gill’s key accomplishment in China being the only living foreigner to have a solo exhibition at Shanghai Art Museum (2007). This show had 36,000 visitors.
The New City An excerpt from a review written by Melanie McGanney for SmartShanghai.
Gill refers to Shanghai as a ‘City of Gold’ in his show at the Shanghai Art Museum. Trained as a printmaker Gill has spent 18 years developing his art in China, watching the country transform from a populace donning ‘ Mao Suits’ to a place where individual worth is measured by money and through comparisons with the highest tiers of capitalist society.
Gill’s exhibit features enormous oil on canvas depictions of the rapidly changing city, marked by the artist’s perceived relationship between Shanghai’s recent evolution and the female figure. Shanghai’s sprouting skyscrapers parallel the society’s demand for its female inhabitants to embody what Gill calls “a new shape”. Gill believes this ideal is being “forced upon women” and is a “largely local phenomenon that may have some origins in Korean culture”.
Entrance to Gill’s show at the Shanghai Art Museum in 2007
City of Gold – Excerpt from the Artist’s Statement in the official catalogue
Arriving in Shanghai, I had exactly 100 yuan and a portfolio of paintings. My first job was as a teacher, then I moved into media and advertising. In the years since, I have written at least a thousand articles, which have helped me gain a deeper understanding of Chinese culture and society. No matter how I have earned my income over the years, I have never stopped painting. Nor have I stopped exploring China. Travelling extensively, I have visited farms, factories, and workshops, met officials in numerous provinces and interviewed people from all walks of life. A recorder by habit as well as profession, I keep diaries, take photographs, and make sound files of much of what I see, hear, and experience.
Why gold? If you need to ask, you know little about China and nothing about Shanghai. This is a country obsessed by wealth and nowhere is hunger for riches greater than in the commercial capital. From the gold ingots sold on the streets of Shanghai to the government’s Golden Shield project, there is only one colour that counts. Forget red, these days it is gold that symbolises success, luck, and power. And it is gold that draws countless millions to this great city, where they hope to achieve the modern Chinese dream best expressed by former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping: “To be rich is glorious.”
This series of paintings shows how gold is colouring and shaping social change. It explores several issues that have recently drawn my attention. People prefer to mould themselves to fit the “norms” of the new society as they are projected in fashion magazines, on the internet and in popular TV shows. Some go so far as to change themselves physically so they can conform. Plastic surgeons have never been in greater demand.
Personal aspirations take precedence over all else. Individual worth is measured by money and thought comparisons with the highest tiers of capitalist society. The message we see everywhere is “Fit in or Fail”. But the trends are not all in one direction. Society is constantly changing, reinventing itself and forcing people to redefine their concept of a successful image. On one side, this leads to the mass adoption of fashionable clothes; on the other, it has produced a more uniquely defined self-image.
In this work, I want to reflect the changing and multi-faceted nature of the modern self-image as I see it in everyday life. From the celebrities presenting TV programs to the village entrepreneurs who become overnight economic superstars, there are an increasing number of alternative models of success. Consumers pick-and-mix, creating identities for themselves by cutting and pasting ideas and images from what they read and watch. It is fascinating to observe these changes and I am constantly thrilled and surprised by the variety pf new themes ad concepts I encounter in daily life, walking on the street, gazing from the window of taxis, watching TV, or riding on the subway.
Some of the works shown at the Shanghai Art Museum is now available to buy as prints.
New city construction
3 Figures
Flag of Shanghai
Contemplation, growth
Foreigners Calligraphy
Three Figures 2