Background Story 7 by Xu Bing

(Technical note: If you're one of the kind people who left a comment on my previous post, please know that I didn't delete it. It was Blogger's fault; you can read their explanation here. The post itself disappeared for a while and then returned, so I'm hoping the comments may eventually be restored too.)

Once again, the British Museum has a small but fascinating exhibition in Room 3. This time it's a lightbox installation by the contemporary Chinese artist Xu Bing. From the front, the work looks like a traditional landscape painting:



Go behind the box, though, and the graceful "brushstrokes" turn out to be the shadows of dead leaves and rubbish.



So far Mr Xu, unlike his fellow artist Ai Weiwei, has escaped persecution by the Chinese government, but the political overtones of this work are not hard to see. It must take a lot of courage to make art in China these days. It's disgraceful that Western artists, with their soft lives, have largely kept silent about the dangers their Chinese counterparts face.