Humming silk worms, living statues & human fat - the Art of Change explores what it means to be alive.

Art of Change – New Directions from China

Hayward Gallery, until 9 December

A pillar of human fat. A life-sized triceratops. An Alice in Wonderland-esque rabbit hole through which you enter an eerie domain and receive a hoarsely whispered wish. The variety and impossible strangeness of this exhibition gives it an uncanny vitality, the like of which I have never before experienced in an art gallery.

I visited this exhibition expecting to have my slight scepticism about modern art confirmed by a collection that had moved so far from traditional mediums in its rebellion against the authoritarian censorship of the Chinese government that I would struggle to recognise it as art. But instead of the art being subsumed by politics, I found that most pieces had an aesthetic or artistic vision with which I could identify (or at least recognise as such). And often they provoked an unusually visceral engagement – the sound of live silk worms moving, the woman standing with their head protruding through a hole in a wall-mounted shelf, an impossibly suspended figure frozen in an impossible fallen motion who, with a jolt, you realise is a living person – all of these force you to connect with life, with humanity, with what it means to be human.

The introduction to the exhibition says that the works ‘not only reflect the energy and dynamism of present-day China, but also its extraordinary contrasts and contradictions’. Which I think is remarkably true; there is a sense of the apolitical, the inquisitive, even the entertaining, in conflict with a deep-rooted need to comment on the state of contemporary China. You are faced at one moment with MadeIn Company’s harrowing The Starving of Sudan, which forces the viewer to contemplate their own voyeuristic tendencies and also has implicit connotations for China’s own, potentially self-interested, involvement in Sudan and Africa as a whole. And yet this work is mounted in a room at whose centre lies a white cube from which apparently random objects are flung high into the air, distracting, amusing and perplexing the viewer simultaneously.

But because of the nature of these works of art, the effect is not necessarily jarring. Rather it forces you to contemplate the juxtaposition of diverse artworks and the disparate moods they create, and to wonder to what extent this is reflective of the need of the artists to express themselves in fluctuating, ephemeral and impersonal ways.  You do indeed recognise an Art of Change in these pieces, and that change, for me at least, is emphatically a positive one.

So I would fully recommend you catch the last weekend of this exhibition before it closes on Sunday. And don’t miss out on the wonky ping-pong table… I challenge anyone to achieve a rally of more than four hits!

Follow me on twitter @BetweentheReeds