Those with a long attention span will remember the recent series of shows at OV Gallery which critiqued everything from the destruction wrought by the Expo to historical revisionism and gender politics. As expected, the gallery was shut down repeatedly until last fall, when it fled Shaoxing Lu altogether.

The first exhibition at their new space in M50, “Refracted Realities,” invites artists to question or escape the status quo via works both utopian and frivolous. It isn’t subversive enough to require immediate padlocking, but still possesses wit and candor.

Particularly striking is Leung Chi Wo’s The Great Development of Smythe Kangaroo Island. The video installation–a comment on immigration and cultural diaspora–shows the artist shaving suburban streets and housing plots into a kangaroo pelt. By using a culturally charged animal’s skin as the basis for his suburb, Leung highlights the flux of natural and cultural worth that occurs when people move around the globe.

This is furthered in Chen Hangfeng’s installation, Invasive Species: Vegetables. It is illegal for residents of Shanghai’s housing compounds to turn green space into their personal gardens, and so, many residents have started sneaking out under cloak of darkness and planting eggplant, bok choy, and the like. Chen photographed these illicit vegetables and displays them in lightboxes. He then invented a narrative that plays on an adjacent dialogue screen.

The piece, humorous and bizarre, speaks to several alternate situations. In one, official space can be reappropriated by talking vegetables that will ultimately nourish the human population. In another, one subset of a population (flora or otherwise) is deemed inappropriate, and is thus restricted to living in state-sanctioned zones.

Some of the pieces aren’t as quite as successful. Monika Lin’s Bloom, a large installation of jellyfish and intestinal-polyps, looks like the art camp version of Eva Hesse. The work is about invasive species (expats) changing an ecosystem (Anfu Lu), but it’s so formally gigantic that to simply identify the sculptures as sea life is to deny the obvious link to post-minimalism.

While “Refracted Realities” is not as politically barbed as previous exhibitions, it should not be read as a retreat. All of the works question the necessity of the current situation and present alternatives. While some of these are laughable, embedded in this absurdity is a call for criticism.

DETAILS

What: “Refracted Realities”

Where: OV Gallery | Rm. 207, Bldg. 4, 50 Moganshan Lu 4号楼207室50莫干山路

When: Now through May 21, 2011