In recent years, San Francisco has experienced an influx of internationally-respected curators, whose work here challenges the often-criticized provincialism of our city. Most palpably, the healthy rivalry between SFAI and CCA to bring in top names in the field has had a galvanizing effect on the Bay Area scene, as newcomers and locals alike compete to heighten our awareness of global issues and artists. Hou Hanru—famous for exhibitions such as Z.O.U.—Zone of Urgency at the 2003 Venice Biennale and the touring exhibition Cities on the Move, and now SFAI’s Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs—launched an ante-upping volley this spring with his epic three-part exhibition World Factory.

World Factory was a kind of trial run for the 2007 Istanbul Biennial, for which Hou is also Artistic Director. The title tells you everything about the show’s content and presentation—loud, complex, intense, full of industrial imagery and class critique. The curatorial approach was equal parts textbook and night bazaar. Operatic in scope, each installment of the show wrestled with its ambitious ideas in a different way. Part Two, Resistance and Dreams, had the most emotional resonance, while part Three, Making our Places, was the easiest to digest. Part One, Active Witness, was unrelentingly dense, setting up the grand themes to be revisited in each successive installment. All three shows benefited from repeat visits, and so were ideally suited to a school environment where students and faculty could return to individual works again and again. Repeated visits were not so easy for a non-student, and so this review will address only a few works from each iteration of the show.

Tackling global concerns about immigration, labor rights, mass production, economic inequality and environmental devastation is a tall order, and Active Witness (January 26-February 27) had moments suggesting a runaway steam engine packed with angry Marxists. Upon entering, several videos by Map Office (Laurent Gutierrez & Valérie Portefaix), Raqs Media Collective (Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Monica Narula & Jeebesh Bagchi) and Sergio de la Torre & Vicky Funari competed for attention. Played on televisions strewn across the floor, they were interspersed with benches whose printed cushions bore definitions of critical terms in socioeconomic discourse—a literal way of making us comfortable with these ideas.

The plenitude of videos, both on monitors and projected on every wall, was overwhelming to absorb in a single visit, but Murat and Ismail (2005) stood apart. This touching work by Mario Rizzi examined intergenerational conflict in a family-owned business. The contention between the Turkish father and son is based in the younger man’s desire for the material comforts he sees afforded to others, while his father articulates what we in the United States would call a “Depression mentality,” fearful that his son will put trust in fickle promises of wealth rather than build a solid foundation of hard work. We viewers have an up-close view of this family, and can see our own relationships reflected in theirs despite the differences in language and economic circumstance.

Mario Rizzi, Murat and Ismail, 2005. DVCAM film, Dolby stereo sound

In The Three Failures (2006), Michael Blum’s large projection installed above the stairs to the mezzanine, the artist walked through streets in Riga, Latvia (formerly communist), Malmö, Sweden (currently socialist) and New York, New York (thoroughly capitalist), reciting an absurdist riff on the genesis and ramifications of Karl Marx’s thinking in settings that gave form to his critique. A dummy dressed in the artist’s white parka and orange pants took shelter below. Upstairs, the throbbing soundtrack and pulsing colors of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ So, So Soulful (2006) lent the show a welcome lightness. Funny and hip, its deceptively simple story of the salaryman who envies his friend’s penchant for adventure and craves authenticity articulated its socioeconomic points as adeptly and elegantly as any work here.

Happily, Resistance and Dreams (March 1-27) continued in the direction of mixing critique with humor. Tadej Pogačar’s installation CODE:RED Brasil, Daspu (2005) chronicled the empowerment of Brazilian sex workers through job training, as they created and marketed a line of clothing for their own economic betterment with both support and resistance from the São Paulo fashion industry. The stories of their hardships were heart-rending, but the centerpiece, a bridal gown constructed from grimy sex hotel bedsheets complete with a veil of condoms, elicited genuine laughter.

Tadej Pogačar, CODE:RED Brasil, Daspu, 2005. Video, t-shirts, and bridal gown made from sheets and cloth from “love hotels” in Rio de Janeiro

A merchant’s tent, where one might buy candy or cigarettes in the bazaars of any Asian city, dominated the main gallery. It reiterated that while Part Two would directly engage with the marketplace, there would be some pleasures amidst the criticism. Among them, Drifting Producers (2006), composite photographs by flyingCity (Yong-Seok Jeon and Jang-Jong Kwan), traced the psychological and geographic impacts of global manufacturing on Seoul and foregrounded the unexpected beauty of that city’s more barren industrialized areas. Cao Fei’s installation What Are You Doing Here? (2006) looked at outsourced Chinese labor as both a global commodity and, perhaps, a creative enterprise imbued with joy.

Julien Prévieux contributed Lettres de non-motivation (ongoing project), a series of applications he wrote in response to employment ads in his native France and in San Francisco, in which he expressed his apologies for rejecting each potential job in advance because he doesn’t like to travel crosstown, he isn’t legal to work or he just can’t get up that early. Even better were the canned rejection letters he received, in which each employer cited his obvious qualifications along with his or her regrets. Filling the main gallery’s back wall was The Illustrated Capital (1998-2003), 40 of a series of 48 photographs by Jean-Baptiste Ganne that he likened to the 48 chapters of Marx’s Das Kapital. The political intent of the chosen images was not clear, resulting in a critique of meaning and certainty that foregrounded aesthetics over rhetoric. This was one of a handful of works which remained on view from Active Witness.

Making our Place (March 28-April 21) made its first impression with a large-scale mural by Julio César Morales from his series Informal Economy Vendors (2007). Like his adjacent animated video Tactics of Reassembly (2004-07), the mural visually took apart and rebuilt the apparatus of the black and gray markets that thrive on the fringes of “first world” economies. San Francisco-based Morales hails from Tijuana, and observes how the detritus of San Diego’s neverending newness is recycled as the building blocks of Mexican small businesses. Morales also teaches at SFAI, and worked with student assistants to realize the mural.

The Sugarland Effect (2007) by Lordy Rodriguez made the interdependencies of “developed” and “developing” world apparent in a different way. The United States’ history of conquest in Latin America has resulted in a global sugar trade that keeps some participants destitute and others obese. Rodriguez mapped the key sites of this trade and abstracted them into paintings, again underscoring the pleasure principle that drives some of globalism’s worst excesses.

The prominences of these two Bay Area artists in Part Three of World Factory brings us right back home to the point that while San Francisco is one of the most globally engaged, socially and economically conscious parts of the United States, our local art community has in recent years seemed isolated and stifled. We can only hope that this series of exhibitions marks the beginning of a trend, and that our regional artists will be considered as equal participants in a global dialogue that becomes more streamlined, coherent and productive as time goes on. We are again a city to be reckoned with, our local politicians promoting environmentalism and diplomacy on the national and international stages. So should we encourage a global conversation in art, which neither prioritizes nor excludes our own.

Image on homepage: Cao Fei, What Are You Doing Here?, 2006. Multimedia installation