I wandered up the candlelit concrete stairs of the once opium den of
the 696 Weihai
Lu artists studio complex to the StageBack art space. On entering the
space I was relieved to discover no paintings overly tastefully framed on the
walls, no flowers arranged in a vase, no guilt, or glitter. Thomas Palme
Madness, Booze and Social Phobia is what art exhibitions are supposed to
be – energetic and stimulating, and NOT about the transaction of
goods.
The white walled gallery space is strewn with drawings pinned to the wall,
or pegged to string criss-crossing the space. The packing materials that the
artist, Thomas Palme, had used to transport his drawings to Shanghai in are
also used in the installation. All the works are on white paper, done with
pencil, hard black lines – none of this soft delicate pussing around drawing
stuff, hard in your face ‘this is what I’m about and deal with it’ kind of
stuff.

Apparently he draws with both hands though I doubt he limits himself to
using just hands to draw with. His work is body but a body drowned in history.
I spotted Van Gogh with a female nude body. Animal bones, animal heads, and
Christian crucifixes a primordial art man alone in the Bavarian mountains draws
out his cultural history.

When I spoke to the artist, Thomas Palme, we discussed the privacy needed
for drawing, something that isn’t needed for painting. Internal secrecy that is
spewed out onto the page, then in the case of this exhibition the drawings in
the travel tube were exploded around the gallery by the artist, the resultant
curation being the trace of a performance. The artist also makes books (books
this soon to be redundant object) to share his work with others.
Palme shows one of his videos too. It is a TV screen attached to the fence
that is on the Stage Back Shanghai terrace that is at the back of the space. I
watched the video of Palme doing odd things in the snow clad Bavarian woods
with bone like penis coverings (and a BMWs having an appearance too) with the
fast paced Shanghai skyline in the background. A personally moving conjunction
the bright fast paced densely populated Shanghai with the snowy solitary wooded
mountain in Bavaria. Where would I rather be?

Exhibition kindly supported by the Goethe Institute
展覽會是Goethe
Institute來支援
Click
here to find the source of this article.
情安 這裡 查找源的這篇文章.
Thanks Lucinda!