黑料不打烊

The name of the Simulacra gallery at the 798 Art Zone in Beijing nods to the important postmodern commentator Jean Baudrillard, whose Simulacres et Simulation questioned the sincerity of experiences within the spectacle of contemporary capitalism; how everything felt and thought was an imitation of something else; how cultural events were experienced as fakes performed to fulfil behavioral expectations, with their meanings replaced by signs and symbols.

Baudrillard began his account of observations of late twentieth century media with an intriguing surrealist fantasy of Jorge Luis Borges’ invention – an empire whose cartographers developed their art to absurd excess, first making a map of a province that was the size of a city, then a one of a country that was the size of a province, and finally a map of the empire so detailed and so thorough that it was a to-scale replication of the actual empire. This perfected point-to-point but pointless map was abandoned to entropy and the elements as a ridiculous excess, but animals and beggars still lived upon the tatters and remnants of it in the deserts of the West.

Bao Rui, Fantasy City, 2025, Acrylic, latex adhesive, gel, water-soluble pigment and alcohol on canvas, 200 x450 cm

Simulacra’s present exhibit of paintings by Bao Rui are a perfect match to the name of the gallery. The cut-outs and stencils and sprayed paint that make their bones shape the largest, and most impressive of the pictures, Fantasy City, into a fragile landscape of jagged grey maybe-freeway stripes bridging flat granite fields and gravelly textures with rough edges snipped and clipped like the artefact-edged fractures of over-reaching digital panorama photos scanned into iPhone cameras, with ragged intersections and off-ramps turning through a landscape spotted with Minecraft icon trees and mountains. It is the landscape of the new China; a landscape of managed plantations, irrigated fields, tidy freeways; a controlled landscape split by shining and streamlined bullet trains, planted with a billion trees arranged in orderly rows. Fantasy City is a landscape perceived from a gamer’s eye, which is the eye of a god floating over a digital invention. As gamers playing at life in this video version of the map, Bao – and his interested audience floating with him – are co-inventors of this new world, within the confines of the state-sized map which provides acceptable limits to the re-invention. Even the weather is subject to the simulacrum in Clouds Transpired and Rising from the Reservoir.

Bao Rui, Clouds Transpired and Rising from the Reservoir, 2025, acrylic, latex adhesive, gel, water-soluble pigment and alcohol on canvas, 150 x 120 cm

Like the gamer’s view of Bao’s Fantasy City, Borges’ map is spread over China, which has become a simulacrum of itself; a gigantic representation of itself; a lovely, if strangely inaccurate facsimile of itself. In the twentieth century, Baudrillard winced at the brash fiberglass and bright plastic of America’s Disneyland, which permeated that country’s enduring culture of endless disposability, novel brevity, and short-lived fakery matched in its pervasiveness only by the persistent extension of its people’s childhood into adulthood, but China’s new landscape of concrete, glass, and steel has been designed to stand as permanent infrastructure.

Almost half a century has passed since Simulacres et Simulation, but the fantasy of harmonious globalization that seemed possible as the ending Cold War promised the victory of liberal capitalism over the broken meta-narrative of Soviet communism deteriorated into the clash of civilizations predicted by Samuel Huntington. Then, Baudrillard was fascinated by America and its vassal Japan, but it was in China, where the simulacra reached its fullest contemporary form as a post-modern map completely enveloping the country’s own past.

Bao Rui, Depressed Cross in the Plain, 2025, Acrylic and plaster on wood block, 20 x 30 cm

In Bao’s work, the overlap of Borges’ map over the territory is clearest under the cerulean sky topping two panoramas – Depressed Cross in the Plain and Overpass in the Plain, where the ripped edges of structure cast dark black shadows of the crude splatter and spray of rattling aerosol paint onto the flattened void that lies beneath the weight of the new landscape. History and geography have been erased and reinvented beneath the map. The Great Wall itself, icon of modern China, has been revised – in Huairou sections of the Ming Dynasty Huanghuacheng wall were partially submerged beneath the waters of a reservoir, creating a picturesque new landscape.

Bao Rui, Overpass in the Plain, 2025, Acrylic and plaster on wood block, 20 x 30 cm

In Miyun, an imitation of an ancient water town was built at the foot of the Simatai wall, as a convenient tourist destination laid out like Disneyland but built of concrete, tile, and stone. Ten years ago, I witnessed the disappearance of one of the last corners of the old city of Taizhou, the happiest city in China, where tiny streets overhung by undulating ceramic tiles decorated with dragons were raised onto upward swooping eaves of hand-carved interlaces of hard-woods over low walls and solid doors, and narrow alleys squeezed into intimate courtyards surrounded by multi-family dwellings. Now forever vanished under the press and need of high-rise flats, the memory of old Taizhou’s architecture has been re-imagined for tourists as a series of broad plazas and a wide flagstone paved pedestrian road with well-spaced stores selling traditional dishes – and gelato – in a synthesis of tradition, both preserved and destroyed by the replicatory map that must necessarily replace the old with the new for the benefit of the people. The scale and success of the representation is awesome. The state has successfully raised millions of people from poverty into bourgeois comfort, and they seem to be happy with life in the map, and if the price is that cultural performances become synthetic imitations, then they are accepted as the new rituals of the age.

Questioning representation is an ancient philosophical interest, at least as old as Plato’s Republic, which condemned artists to exile for expressing ideas three steps removed from the truth, which originated in God. The further the idea was away from God, the more corrupt it would be. In Simulacres et Simulation Baudrillard’s cultural commentary was colored by a darkness which tinted his appreciation of the virtues of transformation, of improvement, of progress. Recognizing the change that was upon the world, he was nevertheless a reactionary, fearing novelty and frightened by the prospect of living under an ethical system less ambiguously attached to duality than that once governed by God. But we live in an age after the death of God, when states present facsimiles of devotion and ethics, building maps and dreams of their leaders’ versions of the world overlaid upon reality, like Borges’ surreal imperial cartographers. Old China has gone. In its postmodern simulacrum the state – which represents the people – defines good and evil, and the goodness of modern China is a petit-bourgeois dream of parks and pleasant living, a reinvention unimagined since the demolition of medieval Paris in the nineteenth century under Emperor Louis Napoleon, who built the broad boulevards and balustrades of the beautiful city of light.

A re-imagined cartography of culture is not novelty, and this phenomenon is not unique to China, or to our time. Out with the old, and in with the revision. When 20^th century Irish modernists reimagined magnificent neolithic Newgrange they raised an unlikely spectacle and anachronism of a vertical retaining wall of white quartz supported by reinforced concrete and imposed a scalloped entrance for the convenience of modern tourists, concerned with creating a seamless merging of ancient architecture with culture – destroying and preserving this architectural wonder of Ireland’s great heritage. Old Ireland was reinvented. Old Ireland is gone, part of the global simulation of the cultural heritage industry. But the map replacing old China was on a gigantic scale, equaling the cartography of Borges’ imaginary empire. Bao’s paintings are portraits of the success of new China’s spectacular erasure of the medievalism of its past.

Bao Rui, World Fragments, 2025, Acrylic, plaster, alcohol, gel, latex adhesive and charcoal on canvas, 120 x 180 cm

Baudrillard’s obsession with media imagined a map concealing nature, but the fantasy of its universality is illusory. Bao’s World Fragments suggests the shattering of the material of the map itself, debris abandoned in the process of its manufacture. Five pulses of light rise over a carriage parked in front of a break under trees on the horizon, fringed by target acquisition scope notations – there is old life left in these vestiges, within these breaks in the imperfect veneer of the simulation. And The Sinking Sun and the Shrubs Across Three Time Dimensions claims a place for the sacred geometry of the sunset, which surely transcends the capacity of man for reinvention of the map – we may lay new versions of culture, and new bounds of ethics over the old orders of human civilization, but the sacred structures of the universe transcend them.

Bao Rui, The Sinking Sun and the Shrubs Across Three Time Dimensions, 2025, Acrylic, latex adhesive, gel, water-soluble pigment and alcohol on canvas, 160 x 100 cm

Are the pleasures of enjoying a glass of wine in a brasserie on a boulevard in Paris less real because the experience is enjoyed in an imaginary city born of an emperor’s enthusiasm? Enjoying the rituals of lavish Chinese hospitality with a loving family around mountains of delicious food on a traditional revolving lazy Susan, endlessly replenished by discrete and modest staff is as sincere a pleasure in a shiny high-rise restaurant as it was in a tiny house in old Taizhou. These human moments of tenderness and affection are the cracks in the cartography, and though the overwhelming spectacles of the simulacra dominate whenever they emerge in time to reinvent the present as revisions of the past, it is within the fragile interactions of people where the universal truth of all cultures lies.

Bao Rui, Bird’s Nest, 2025, Acrylic and plaster on wood block, 30 x 20 cm (Left) Bao Rui, Bird's Eggs, 2025, Acrylic and plaster on wood block, 30 x 20 cm (Right)

This innocence is in Bau’s Bird's Nest, and Bird's Eggs and it gives the lie to Baudrillard, in these delicate and artificial representations of sprayed shadows and fragile shells, in a simulation where eggs are still hatched, and fledglings still crack their way to find the light.

For more on auctions, exhibitions, and current trends, visit our Magazine Page