Aspiring superpowers—whether countries or artists—share grandiose ambitions that betray hubris rather than serve as an actual measure of accomplishment. The young Shanghai artist Xu Zhen (see AAP 54) satirizes such follies in his conceptual practice which, typical for a young artist, isn’t medium-based but often ends up taking form as a video. Politically astute, Xu doesn’t miss the opportunity to mock the Chinese government’s macho posturing, and recently he’s taken on the growing rivalry between the US and China, which belies their deep but often unacknowledged interdependence. With a deft hand, Xu evokes the neurotic over-compensation common to all propaganda, while toying with the notion of truth.

In “Just Did It” at New York’s James Cohan Gallery, Xu capitalizes on the opportunity to show in the US by dissecting the Sino-American rivalry, doling out equal measures of skepticism to each superpower for its nationalist posturing. Riffing on Nike’s aspirational slogan (“just do it”), Xu impressed New York audiences with his own Herculean adventurism in “Just Did It.” Note the triumphant past tense in the exhibition title, as Xu assumes the mantle of a superpower and scales the world’s tallest peak, leaves a mark on the moon and invades neighboring countries.

Near the gallery entrance, Xu screened his notorious video, 8848-1.86, first presented at the 2005 Yokohama International Triennale. The grainy video purports to show Xu and a team of friends sawing off 1.86 meters—the artist’s height—from the top of Chinese Mount Everest. The perfunctory narration (with English subtitles) explains what’s happening and remind viewers of the extreme climatic conditions, which supposedly account for the poor image quality. Xu manipulates tropes of gritty documentary realism as he strings viewers along, at least long enough to make one smile at being manipulated into believing something so obviously staged. Knowing that when it was first shown in Yokohama—by pure chance—the Chinese government announced the first accurate calculation of Everest’s height, four meters shorter than Western estimates, amplifies the validity of Xu’s satire.

The centerpiece of the exhibition was It (2007), consisting of a metal table with a microscope on it. Peering into the microscope, one can make out the familiar image of American astronaut Neil Armstrong’s footprint on the surface of the moon—a shockingly banal image when extracted from its historic context—here recreated on a miniscule spec of dirt and basked in soft, warm light. Xu’s absurdist reduction in physical size of Armstrong’s footprint and subsequent re-enlargement of it reveals the malleability of images. And if images of physical evidence are all one has to corroborate historical events, as Xu implies, then the suspicions of conspiracy theorists—that the moon landing was staged in Hollywood—are warranted. There’s also a humorous sense of belittlement in It. Xu appropriates a defining image of America’s Cold War-era pride and knocks it down to a millimeter-sized footprint, etched in dirt.

Xu performs a similar emasculation of China’s military prowess in 18 Days (2006), screened in the gallery’s back room. Xu and friends travel to China’s borders and threaten neighboring countries—Myanmar, Mongolia and Russia—with an army of remote-controlled warships, tanks and planes. Mechanical problems plague the operations: bombers fail to get airborne, the warship careens back onto the Chinese shore, General Xu’s tank gets stuck in the grass. Despite his attempts at territorial infringement, the enemy remains impassive to Xu’s agression.

Though the world’s political and physical landscape remains unchanged by Xu’s provocations, as an anti-propagandist, he works to undermine the kind of confidence governments try to inspire.

- HG Masters