events last week

Or specifically events on Thursday last week, being as I missed the if p then q launches. And yes, I had a good reason.

So on Thursday (25 June) I started out with the preview of Liberation at the Chinese Arts Centre. The exhibition is open until 14 August. It takes as its starting point the blocking of social-networking and self-publishing websites in China.

But as the exhibition information says this is part of an ongoing discussion. The four artists featured produce very different different works, which touch on a range of other themes. The two larger works in the exhibition in particular emphasise different aspects of human interaction, and remind us that while the technology may be new, the underlying human impulses, desires and interactions are much older.

I'll come to those shortly. Carrying much smaller physical presences, Yan Xing and Brendan Fan's works engage more directly with technology, issues of communication and surveillance, and the roles of the artist and audience.

Brendan Fan's presence consists of a piece of paper directing you to www.tinyurl.com/brendanfan - a Facebook page. While the preview took place in Manchester Brendan held his own preview in his living room in London. There continue to be regular status updates and new photos, and this will presumably continue for the duration of the exhibition. I think the best way to understand this work is to visit the Facebook page for yourself.

Although I said Yan Xing's work also engages more directly with technology I was also reminded perhaps superficially of older works, especially that of Sophie Calle. A sign that reads 'They Are Not Here' is placed on a hotel door. In the room designated actions are carried out and videoed. Once the filming is completed all traces of it are removed, and the sign left somewhere in the room and photographed. There are photos of the sign on a door and within a room in the exhibition. There was also a video, but that was not played during the preview.

The work is not only less explicitly voyeuristic than Calle's, but in some ways perhaps denies the narrative thrust, and the possibility of knowing anything about the subject of the work that seems to be so important in much of Calle's work.

Liu Ding, also a curator of the exhibition, is represented by Gravestone for Rumour Monger, which at first glance appears to be at least two or three distinct works. The three elements are what is described as a printed newspaper, a series of black acrylic speech bubbles mounted on the wall, and a series of steel forms in black on the floor. The work apparently grows from the artist's experience of being attacked on an art-related website.

The sculptural forms interested me in a number of ways. In the promotional material it seemed like they might simply represent censorship - speech erased in blackness. But in the flesh that isn't the case. The speech bubbles may be black but they are reflective. The steel forms on the floor are matte, but at the same time they are more abstract. What interested me about these was the process by which they had been designed. Because my visual poems sometimes seem to end up with similar shapes I wondered whether these forms had grown from a process of sketching, or whether they were first created as models. I suppose a combination of both drawings and models may be more likely.

I am still not sure that I quite understand how the different elements of the work fit together as a whole. But I intend to revisit the exhibition, and may begin to come to some sense of the piece as a unity then. I also intend to see the video accompanying the photos for Yan Xing's They Are Not Here, and to spend a great deal more time with the final piece, Lin Yilin's Big Family: Brothers Not Comrades.

For me this is the most compelling and complex piece in the exhibition. At the centre of the work is a large historical timeline presenting events in the lives of overseas Chinese artists divided by city, and interspersed with occasional mention of significant historical political figures. Accompanying this are video works by three of the artists mentioned on screens on the floor, with the soundtracks to be listened to through headphones. Clearly this is partly a practical consideration, but also has the effect of isolating the viewer with a single piece of the work, and at the same time making others wait to experience it. The final part of the work is a video projected on the wall behind of the opening of the first exhibition of the work.

For me this places the human right at the centre of the exhibition. Both those aspects of human relations that are fully under our own control and those that are contingent on external forces. It also addresses more directly than the other works in the exhibition notions of freedom of expression, whether artistic or political.

Following that there was an event at the Whitworth Gallery - the Midsummer House Party. To be honest I didn't see a great deal of it, and the music was certainly a bit dull, not at all the kind of thing I'd normally spend any time with. However I did spend some time in The Walls Are Talking wallpaper exhibition, which I thought had some fantastic and problematic work in. Again I need to return to to it at greater leisure and clarify some of my initial thoughts.