While Prague may have lame contemporary museums, its friend Vienna is just 5 hours away with, in my opinion, some of the best museums on the planet. Vienna has a Museum Quarter. It’s a little museum campus of purely art exhibition spaces ranging from very sound Old Masters Collections to a nice selection of international Modern and Contemporary works.

My favorite space is the MOMUK. It’s a really interesting building designed by Jo Coenen, and the outside is covered with little rectangular slabs of molten rock.

I’ve been to this museum 5 or 6 times and the shows are always quality. They have a huge collection Actionism, of course Viennese, since Vienna was where it all started, but they also have a big spectrum from the States, Germany, Italy and others. Last summer I saw a Sigmar Polke retrospective and it was great too. But this year, they have a show of contemporary Chinese Art titled, China:Facing Reality.

This show was, of course, well curated and really did reflect the contemporary tastes, subjects and working style of Chinese artists. I thought the show was really well curated, all of the works were greatly relevant. The show took up 4 floors (which are pretty huge) and was hung according to a few different criteria….sometimes being group by region in which it was made, sometimes by medium, sometimes by subject matter, etc. My only qualm with the show was that I thought the upper middle floor was a little too crowded (it was every medium you can think of: video, painting works on paper, sculpture), as if they thought “these are the pieces that don’t group that well, so we’ll just put them all in this big hall and hope that nothing distorts the meaning of anything else.� Sometimes I think this grab bag set-up can work, but in this case I wasn’t pleased with the effect because most of the works were small or really visually complex, rather than being monumental and really eye-catching.

These photos courtesy of Meghan Steinman.

However the first floor was strategically good because it got people to keep going for two reasons, 1) they realized they recognized the work and 2) because all of these works were huge, bright and technically impressive. This floor had all the work that the Chinese have been paying huge million dollar prices for, so of these pieces the rest of the world is quite familiar.

These photos courtesy of Meghan Steinman.

Then, the exhibition got a bit quieter and showed some really great stuff.
On the final floor, looking at the Shanghainese work, which was mostly photo/video and new media, when I really started to get into the show. The work from Shanghai had a lot to do the lifestyle of being from Shanghai. All of the work was really easy and natural to look at and be with. I really loved being able to compare and contrast my life to those of some of these artists and other young people from a place across the world that I have always assumed to be so different. And while it is obviously very different, it’s the same in that the kids there are going day by day and picking through the traditions and societal demands and choosing what they’ll keep or trash in order to develop an open culture that they can live proudly and enjoyably within.

These photos courtesy of Meghan Steinman.

Also in the photo section of the Shanghai stuff, there was an installation of 3000 photos on the floor. Each photo came from a collection of 20,000 snapshots of random moments in the artist's life that he took over a year or so. I'd decided it was my favorite. It was really precious and sweet, but not at all cheesy. The piece was by Song Tao and titled, What a Wonderful World. So, I'm walking along just glancing through it and then I realized, "Wait, I know that guy." And what do you know, my friend Han Tao is everywhere. I got really excited and told Han Tao about it. He said that he and this artist are best friends and they hangout and work together all the time. Han Tao is getting his Masters in SAIC's Arts Administration program and he's my office buddy in the ECO/SUGs office. Our boss, Michael, told me a while ago that Han Tao is a pretty well known photo curator in Shanghai, but I didn't really think much about it after that. But seeing him in this I'm definitely very excited to see what Han Tao will be doing in the future. I carefully went through all 3000 photos and I counted, he is in 46 of the photos. Wow. I attached a few visuals for you all.