Witness to the remains

Rhana Devenport and Jin Jiangbo in front of Jin's Product examination workshop of a foreign capital television manufacturer 2008. Photo / Bryan James

One frosty morning last week I met Govett-Brewster Art Gallery director Rhana Devenport in a warm Grey Lynn cafe. At the same time Jin Jiangbo, a photographer Devenport has brought over from China for a residency, was in Taranaki, chilling his extremities inside the abandoned freezing works at Patea. If it was cold in Auckland it would have been like Antarctica in Patea where Jin was taking photos for his exhibition opening at the Govett-Brewster tonight.

The Patea freezing works is on the coast about an hour's drive south of New Plymouth. Now derelict and collapsing from the elements and encroaching nature, it was once an important slaughterhouse that fed the nation. The factory - and the township that depended on it - was a casualty of Britain's entry into the European Economic Community. Jin Jiangbo is interested in such sites of industry, where the after-effects of global economic forces can be witnessed in architectural remnants.

Everything about the new China seems to be big: the Three Gorges Dam, the renewal of its cities, said to be expanding at more than a million hectares a year. In the last 10 years, the number of new factories in the east of the country alone reached six-figure levels. The art sector is booming with thousands of commercial art galleries opening since 1990 when previously there were none. The Govett-Brewster tells us that the number of museums in China has increased nearly eight times, from 300 to 2300.

The recession has yielded equally big numbers. I read recently that in the Pearl River Delta industrial zone 60,000 factories have closed over the past year. Jin's recent photography records this side of the economy.

As with much of the new Chinese art, the word "maximal" is used to describe it. Jin's photographs are breathtakingly large, some of them 3m long. They are produced from real film and large format negatives, then converted into digital panoramas. Like German photographer Andreas Gursky's work, the level of detail is so impressive you can look deeply into the image's space - penetrate it, as Devenport says.

The comparison with Gursky is relevant. Both photographers record sites of economic exchange, but unlike Gursky's postmodern economies, Jin shows the negative effects of expansion, and brings it right back to ground level, the eye of the viewer in front of the site. This is where it will be fascinating to see his images of Patea.

Jin's work should have resonances for New Zealand photographers such as David Cook, Fiona Amundsen and Allan MacDonald, all of whom have also recorded our economic transformation through habitat and buildings. Amundsen produced a photographic series last year of empty civic squares in forestry towns in the central North Island.

MacDonald's exhibition of decaying shop exteriors, which has its last day today at the Anna Miles Gallery, shows vividly the effects of economic decline. Patrick Reynolds, too, has produced a suite of images of industry, large black-and-white, quasi-expressionist photographs of power stations, which have a similar sense of monumentality as Jin's photographs.

Jin is in New Plymouth as the first of four Chinese artists-in-residency. Called China in Four Seasons, the series is curated by Devenport, something of an expert in new art from the region.

She has maintained an active interest in new Chinese art since her time at the Queensland Art Gallery, showed some key Chinese video art when she was director of Artspace in Auckland, and she is now expanding the Govett-Brewster's international art programme with a focus on China.

Of the three further residencies, Guo Fengyi, who is the eldest, will be here in September. Her work seems more traditional, a mode of large abstract paintings, very large according to Devenport. It is not work I know, but from my internet browsing, it looks like it draws on traditional Chinese scroll painting.

For me, the highlight will be in December with the third residency, when pioneer video artist Zhang Peili arrives. Unlike some other prominent artists in new Chinese art, Zhang has remained in China, teaching locally, while still able to exhibit widely around the world.

My first encounter with Zhang's work was at the 1999 Sydney Biennale, when he had several monitors stacked in a tower, each showing video of someone eating, but from the mouth's point of view. It was a great work that has since established itself in the canon of Chinese art. I'm hoping for a comprehensive survey of his video art at the Govett-Brewster.

It is timely to see new Chinese art. It is hard to ignore a country that has become so dominant in our economy. Yet New Zealand hasn't had a look at contemporary art from China for several years, since 2004 with Concrete Horizons at the Adam Art Gallery, which also addressed the new urban expansion in China.

The last Govett-Brewster residency next March will be taken by husband and wife artists Song Dong and Yin Xiuzhen, on their second visit to New Zealand since appearing in Concrete Horizons. They work separately and cover a wide range of materials and practices including sculpture, performance and video art.

One of Song's works could easily be the ideal artwork for some of my friends - art you can eat. Song constructed a model of the Great Wall out of hundreds of wafer biscuits. By the end of the show the model, broken up and crumbling over the floor, resembled the relic that is its famous architectural referent. This was like much of Song's work, a clever and mordant comment on China's new society of consumption.

Xin, one of the most significant women artists working in China, is equally clever in the work she makes, not the least being the fighter jet she and her studio produced out of recycled clothing, something of an iconic sculpture for new Chinese art.

I like the idea that this series not only gives us a chance to get insiders' views about their own society with clear and independent voices, but also that these artists are engaging with New Zealand society and culture, where, to a certain extent, we are experiencing some of the same economic and cultural shocks.

EXHIBITION
What: China in Four Seasons, by Jin Jiangbo
Where and when: Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, July 4-Sept 6