Gallery Exhibition: 'The Jackie Chan Film Museum' in Shanghai

Morgan Short | Mar 11, 2016 4:00 pm | Add a comment | 4713 reads

Your the Beijinger correspondent was recently embedded in Shanghai – boots on the ground, people, boots on the ground – to attend action movie star and conceptual artist provocateur Jackie Chan’s latest exhibition, The Jackie Chan Film Museum, now currently showing, indefinitely, in one of the southern metropolis’ most respected gallery spaces, The Jackie Chan Film Museum.

Here, the Police Story and Rumble in the Bronx star is working in a variety of mediums, including traditional painting, sculpting, decoupage, and mural works, as well as more contemporary forms like video, sound, and photography instillation, his costumes from movies, architectural installation pieces, and, of course, film manipulation. A truly sprawling experience, at the risk of simplifying the heady and provocative themes of the exhibition, the artist wrestles with issues of self, identity, personal and shared histories, as well as more effusive, almost Baudrillardian-tinged, quandaries of representation, reproduction, simulation, and simulacra.

The senses reel. The Jackie Chan Film Museum follows the narrative of the star’s evolution – a sort of mixed media bildungsroman if you will – that charts its subject’s life from the moment of his (immaculate, possibly) conception to his current status as eminent Hollywood action star and one of the most renowned, collected, and celebrated conceptual artist of his generation. It is a coming-of-age story, yes – a coming-into-one’s-own story, to be sure – but Chan refutes the teleological drive to static conclusions and conclusive terminals. There are no uncontested narratives here.

It is, in a word, a triumph. Chan is marvelous. Chan is irrefutable. Chan, here, is razor-sharp, melding an unflinching inward gaze into his own contested role as “artist in society/artist of society” with provocative, ambivalent, and wrenching examinations of consumer culture, cult of celebrity, the socio-political quagmires of late-stage global capitalism, ethnic diaspora, and post-digital, supra-technological utopian ideals.

This is Jackie Chan’s life, scraped bare and stretched across an axis of ascribed meaning; the artist is prostrate before us, the viewer(s), as if to say: “I am driving a motorcycle through a solid brick wall – through a hail of cannon shot issuing forth from a cannon from the middle ages, of all things – into the sky, into the future, into history, into the ether. Eat of me, drink of me. I am artist, I am action star. Or ... are you?”

It is an arresting composition that bears some unpacking. In the piece, Untitled (2016), like much of Chan’s oeuvre, the viewer is always implicated in the very act of viewing. Here, Chan (re)casts his audience as performer, or are we his props? Are we the motorcycle? The cannonballs, slamming into the brick walls with such velocity? Are we the cannon? Nay, are we ... Chan himself? Difficult questions, indeed, and maybe the answers are not universal.

Behold, another instillation piece, Untitled (2016), depicting the artist-as-race-car-driver-as-artist suspended upside-down from the ceiling, he emerges from the car’s window into the void as the vehicle hurtles and twists through space and distance, locked in a permanently static state of flux. The implications of the piece on contemporary Chinese society are profound and exacting. No power systems and structures are safe from the uncorrupted conscious of the artist as social voice.

Think this is his costume from Shanghai Noon, that one with Owen Wilson.

An interactive piece, this huge mounted shark’s head, also entitled Untitled (2016), is ostensibly included to depict Jackie Chan’s purported philanthropic endeavors to stem the Chinese trade in shark’s fin in traditional medicines and cuisines. In this piece, the viewer feels compelled to enact the performative gesture of sticking one’s head in the thing – (him)self (re)envisioned as participant, of course – in the undertaking of creating a new Facebook profile photo. The results recall an almost Derridian, or maybe even Foucauldian – or maybe even Deleuzian and Guattarian – double-bind of deference of artist and author to audience and actor, and the shifting, cascading, and colluding categories of each. It’s enough to make Judith Butler’s head spin.

The exhibition culminates in the only way it can: a panopticon hallway of celebrity autographs to Chan attributing and solidifying his position amongst the galaxy of international celebrity – a celestial voice in the great choir of international filmdom superstardom.

The “Chan-Tastic One” indeed. A deft little piece of wordplay from Mr. Tom Hanks here. To that I would also add “en-Chan-ting”, “in-Chan-descent” and “Chan-aptivating”. Or some shit like that, whatever.

The Jackie Chan Film Museum at The Jacky Chan Film Museum is an early frontrunner for art exhibition of the year and well worth the trip – nay, several trips – to Shanghai to enjoy firsthand. Roaming the corridors of the space and, thereby, metaphorically the fractured metal corridors of the artists’ shattered psyche, the question arrises again and again:

What’s it all for? What’s it all about? Why are we here, Jackie?