Underground Parking
Feng Mengbo
冯梦波
Production date
2017
Object Detail
Media
found objects, plastic, wood, glass, metal, lights
Measurements
51 x 90 x 70 cm
Notes
Feng Mengbo’s continuing interest in how history is represented, popularised –– and, too often, falsified –– was revealed in ‘Feng Mengbo: Museum’, a 2017 exhibition in Shanghai. He had become fascinated by the reconstructed dioramas of animals and their imagined habitats in Shanghai’s rundown Natural History Museum. After the museum closed down, Feng Mengbo continued to visit clandestinely, in 2012 producing a series of lenticular photographs of its strange displays. For the 2017 exhibition he produced his own dioramas, absurd scenes constructed with toys and models. They are designed to resemble arcade game consoles rather than museum vitrines — but these games are not for playing. In Underground Parking (2017), for example, we peer into a scene of toy police cars lined up neatly under fluorescent strip lighting. Bizarrely, grouped in front of them, is a motley cast of animal figurines engaged in various activities: dogs raise beer glasses; a group of cats examine a vehicle stripped down to its axles; a track-suited panda confronts an angry gorilla, and kangaroos face off with boxing gloves.In this work, as with the seductive and engaging Long March Restart, and the duelling calligraphers in Not Too Late, Feng Mengbo examines how political propaganda, popular culture, social media, and the museum all, in their different ways, construct a controlled ‘reality’ that provides entertainment and consolation in equal measure. Overlaying the history of video games with political history, and propaganda with references to Chinese art history, Feng Mengbo reflects on his personal ‘Long March’ to become a pioneer of computer-generated art in China. He has described the world of his Cultural Revolution boyhood as like a vivid stage set, in which every person was an actor playing a part. Now, that sense of heightened reality is brought into works in which audience members can be actors, too.
Accession number
2017.093