Articles Available Online

The ‘beautiful disorder’ of the Forbidden City and the Yuanmingyuan (Garden of Perfection and Light) was first noted by the Jesuit painter Jean Denis Attiret in his 1749 account of Chinese architecture Confessing that ‘since my residence in China, my eyes and taste are grown a little Chinese’, the missionary admired the pleasure gardens’ ability to provoke violently opposing sensations in the viewer: the calm of beauty and the energy of chaos It was an observation that would influence the design of ornamental English gardens such as that which now hosts an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art at CASS Sculpture Foundation, in leafy Sussex   Landscape aesthetics seem like an oddly anachronistic starting point for a survey of emerging art from China: deploying an Old World commentary on the Oriental garden that salutes its follies and theatrical framings of nature, Attiret’s report positioned the garden as microcosm for the society on which he was, obliquely, reporting More pertinent, perhaps, is the relationship between the garden and expressions of heroic nationalism implied by his appraisal of the Emperor’s palace and pleasure gardens To make outdoor public sculpture is to monumentalise, or to comment on monumentalism We associate the form with memorials to war, heroic individuals, or national leadership   Much of the work on show at CASS addresses this tendency Song Ta, an artist from the factory city of Guangzhou in southern China, has transported a vast bust of Mao to the English woodlands It shows a boyish leader with windswept hair and pouting lips, a version of a sculpture which is widely found in China but looks strange to those of us familiar only with Mao’s later portraits (such as that appropriated for Warhol’s screenprinted Mao, 1972) Ta has painted the surrounding trees stone grey to match the colour of his Mao, creating an antic photo opportunity for onlookers Likewise, sisters Cao Fei (interviewed in the June 2016 online issue of The White Review) and Cao Dan reflect upon the history of monumental sculpture in two video works about their father, the social realist sculptor Cao Chong’en His bronze statues of