Sun Yuan and Peng Yu Can’t Help Myself (2016) in Tales of Our Time at the Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York.

Launched by the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative at the Guggenheim, Tales of Our Time aims to challenge traditional notions of place and history through diverse forms of storytelling. In preparation for the show, curators Xiaoyu Weng and Hou Hanru traveled across China in search of avant-garde artists outside of the mainstream who actively engage with social issues. Eight selected artists from a wide range of backgrounds examine and interrogate social-political realities in contemporary Greater China. Despite the vast differences in media, style, and perspective of the works, the exhibition engages its audience in an effortless flow of narratives like a collection of exhilarating short stories, offering gripping plots, surprising twists, and satisfying climaxes.

Known for creating spectacles, Hou deploys his trademark style. When entering the exhibition, the viewer immediately encounters Can’t Help Myself (2016) by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, a gigantic, frenetic robot violently splashing thick crimson liquid all over the space. The headlights are white and luminous, reminiscent of operating tables. The glass walls that contain the monster look like ceiling windows in a downpour of blood. The passage, uncomfortably narrow to walk through, forces a confrontation between the beholder and the spectacle.  Tsang Kin-Wah’s video installation, In the End Is the Word (2016), features edited online footage of sea battles over Diaoyu Islands, the subject of a perpetual territorial dispute between China and Japan. The lights in the room strangely point downward. A conspicuous space lies between the screen and the back of the chamber. The design, however, delivers a pleasant surprise when white words begin flowing over the ground like waves washing up on shore.

More sprawling texts lead one downstairs, where further theatrics unfold. Dimly lit by a wide screen and with walls covered in ink drawings, the cinematic space evokes Plato’s cave. The allegorical animation of Sun Xun’s Mythological Time (2016), screened at the center, merges seamlessly with the stunning mythical visuals of the mural-like background. In the adjacent room that showcases Zhuo Tao’s Land of the Throat (2016), two face-to-face screens operate simultaneously, while the viewer sits awkwardly on the tilted, skateboard-shaped ground, experiencing a disoriented reality with the characters. After a breathtaking flag made of seventy-five types of fabric, a couple of secretive taxi conversations, and a series of identically twisted nails, the audience is invited join a relaxing traditional Chinese tea party that is part of an activist work titled Unwritten Rules Cannot Be Broken (2016) by Yangjiang Group. The activity intends to soothe the anxieties evoked by the other artworks while constructing a harmonious, utopian social environment. One may even test its result with a blood pressure meter, finishing the otherwise intense series of narratives on a humorous note.

The complex composition of some pieces makes it difficult to identify the artists without additional notation, and the labels could be difficult to find. Nonetheless, the connections among the works, the space, and the viewer create a coherent, immersive, and emotionally engaging art experience.

Tales of Our Time is on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York through March 10, 2017.

Lux Yuting Bai is an independent curator and writer. She is also a Curatorial Fellow at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

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Chen Zhen. Purification Room, 2000-2015; found objects, clay; approx. 850 x 1100 x 450 cm. Courtesy of Rockbund Art Museum and Galleria Continua, San Gimignano/Beijing/Les Moulins.

Entering the Art Deco spaces of the Rockbund Museum, visitors encounter the rather spectacular Purification Room (2000–2015), a large space filled with everyday objects—sofas, TVs, chairs and tables, bicycles and shopping trolleys—all entirely coated with mud, as are the walls and floor. Traditionally, Chinese medicine used mud to cleanse and detoxify, and Chen Zhen thought of it as representing purity, simplicity, the natural world, and the peace of being laid to rest. The experience is one of stillness and silence, as if we have entered a mysterious unknown civilization revealed by an archaeological excavation. The quotidian artifacts of our modern daily lives seem to have a greater significance, becoming unfamiliar and strange.

The next level presents Le Bureau de Change (1996–2004), which is constructed from a traditional Shanghai communal public toilet, very common in the past when few people had their own bathrooms. Inside the darkened wooden structure, the pit toilet is full of money, gold and silver coins glinting in the dim light. The noise of constant flushing fills the space. This savagely witty work possesses even greater resonance today, when so many Chinese citizens are experiencing the shock of losing their money in an unprecedented economic downturn. The boom times may be over, and some fear their newfound prosperity could be simply flushed away.

Chen Zhen. Crystal Landscape of Inner Body, 2000; crystal, iron, glass; 95 x 70 x 190 cm. Courtesy of Rockbund Art Museum and Galleria Continua San Gimignano/Beijing/Les Moulins.

For me, the most important work in the exhibition is Crystal Landscape of the Inner Body. The major internal organs (heart, lung, spleen, liver, kidney, gall bladder, stomach, intestines, spinal column, and so forth) were created from blown glass, displayed on a glass medical-examination table, in a darkened space. There are twelve versions of this work, corresponding to signs of the Chinese Zodiac; this one is the Rooster. The crystal organs cast beautiful shadows on the floor below the table, representing the ephemerality and fragility of life, and the reflection of the inner reality in the physical manifestation of the body’s health. Both of the artist’s parents were doctors, and he himself began to study medicine, before being diagnosed with a rare, and ultimately fatal, form of anemia at the age of 25. His philosophical approach to life, and to his art practice, was profoundly influenced by the time that he spent in Tibet living with Buddhist monks. Chen Zhen’s landscape of the body is created by the reflections and refractions of the blown glass and the glass table, with a suggestion that all physical reality is illusory—and entirely temporary.

Chen Zhen. Daily Incantations, 1996; wood, metal, Chinese chamber pots, electric wires, parts of electronic objects, sound system; 230 x 700 x 350 cm. Courtesy of Rockbund Art Museum and Galleria Continua, San Gimignano/Beijing/Les Moulins.

Daily Incantations is a monumental installation that appears at first sight to be a structure of traditional Buddhist temple bells. A closer inspection reveals it is created from 101 traditional Shanghainese barrel-shaped wooden chamber pots, some of which have been fitted with speakers broadcasting the sound of the chamber pots being washed, and other noises. At the center of the installation a sphere is filled with a jumble of TV sets, cassette players, video recorders, telephones, and tangled skeins of electrical wires. For Hou Hanru, these mundane, even ugly and unclean objects, fast disappearing as a result of modernization and Westernization, are “sacrificial objects in cultural conflict.” Like the artist’s painstaking documentation of the destruction and demolition that forever changed the face of his city, they represent change, and the loss of tradition. Like Nam June Paik’s iconic 1970s TV Buddha, Chen Zhen’s work of the 1990s explores postcolonialism through the use of  found objects: traditional Chinese wooden furniture and 20th-century electrical or electronic devices. The artist’s intended juxtaposition of past and present, East and West, today has a more elegiac quality of obsolescence, as his TV sets and tape recorders are themselves now artifacts of history.

Chen Zhen: Without Going to New York and Paris, Life Could Be Internationalised is on view at Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai through October 7, 2015.

Teresa Margolles, Las Llaves de la Ciudad (detail), 2011. Performance and installation. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Rafael Burillo.

There have been several recent shows considering how art is affected by nationality. Maybe it’s a response to the generic aura found on the floors of art fairs. Disponible at the School of the Museum of the Fine Arts, Boston is a good example that asks what it means to be a Mexican artist. It’s an incomplete exhibition that deserves a books worth of supporting texts, but as a rough exploration of Mexico’s current potential, it’s lucid and descriptive.

The title is taken from Mexico’s empty billboards, advertising that they are not currently taken. Disponible is an ambiguous word, translating to available or changeable. Disponible partially functions as a metaphor for Mexico’s adjustable, compelling, and dynamic contemporary art scene. The title also slyly points to the sizable share of international art sales Mexican artists and galleries are generating (See: Kurimanzutto). After all, the billboards in question are a constant reminder to “the job creators” that they could be enhancing their brands right now.

The most interesting pieces included in Disponible display Mexico as more than a place for drug dealers and low-wage workers. Marcela Armas‘s video Ocupación shows her 2009 performance where she walks like she’s a car in the flow of traffic. She wears a backpack that has an air horn like a car would and she uses it when she has to wait in the string of traffic. The crush of congestion is something we all have insights into, yet can’t keep from happening. It’s a material reality for all seven billion of us.

Hector Zamora, White Noise – Shed 6 Installation (detail), 2011. Installation originally developed for the Auckland Arts Festival, New Zealand. Courtesy of the artist.

Hector Zamora‘s White Noise- Shed 6 is an installation about the relationship between land and colonial rights in New Zealand. After England made New Zealand a colony, land rights were delineated by planting white flags on the borders of private property. Zamora planted 500 flags on a Aukland beach to begin a conversation on this issue and after one day was relegated by the Mayor to exhibiting his work on private property. There was no physical connection to public space after that. This public question was exiled to a private location, transforming his artwork from a sociable interaction into a private sculptural territory. The Mayor tried to exclude the public policy issues and transformed the work from an investigation of a very local, esoteric law to a universal and emblematic colonial critique. Exhibiting it in Boston reflects how it will be a displaced art piece, deported from its appropriate venue no matter where it’s displayed now.

Manuel Rocha Iturbide, I Play The Drums With Frequency (detail), 2007–11. Drum set, sound installation. Courtesy of the artist.

Manuel Rocha Iturbide‘s I Play Drums with Frequency, is the stand out work in Disponible. It’s the least politically formulaic, the most seductively mysterious, and best example of the ambiguity in the title of the show. Is begs the audience to confront their stereotypes about Mexican art. This inventive sound sculpture plays a drum set not with sticks, but with small speakers. A electronic soundtrack composed by Itrubide vibrates the set, and in turn the room. I want to be able to play with this sculpture. I want to put my own soundtracks into the speakers and hear the results. It is a discrete and a most salable object that would look great in an art fair. The noise would draw as much attention as the empty billboards do in a city. “Come buy me! I’m available!”

Disponible, on view at SMFA from September 13- November 19, 2011, was co-curated by Hou Hanru and Guillermo Santamarina for the San Francisco Art Institute. In includes Natalia Almada, Arturo Hernández Alcázar, Edgardo Aragón, Marcela Armas, Manuel Rocha Itrubide, Mauricio Limón, Teresa Margolles, and Hector Zamora