The idea for the exhibit was pitched to Arsenal by Margot Ross, a Montreal-based art consultant and curator. Ross felt that while contemporary Chinese artists had become a popular phenomenon both in China and in many big cities in the West, they remained barely visible in Canada. Pia Camilla Copper, a Montreal-based freelance curator and expert on Chinese and Iranian contemporary art, handpicked the artists. Her selection aimed to provide a broad range of artists whom she felt “were speaking about their country’s issues: urbanization, [the] one-child policy, spirituality, the burden of the past, the Cultural Revolution, and propaganda.”

The work is often highly critical of particular government policies. Lu Fei Fei’s The Story of Zhuyuan addresses the issue of unregistered children, an unfortunate consequence of China’s long-running one-child policy. Lu produced a series of photographs of two girls, who are either depicted in the countryside, holding up their nation’s flag, or in front of a government slogan that reads “a girl is always good.” The girls depicted in the pictures – elder sisters in two-child families – cannot receive basic services, such as education, because their births were unregistered. Their parents, disappointed that their first child was a girl, decided to avoid fines by leaving their daughters’ births off of official records, while trying to have another child who would hopefully be male. In China, families often face large fines or other serious consequences for trying to register more than one birth.

Lu uses the symbol of the nation’s flag and the government’s stern propaganda as a powerful element in her visual critique. In an interview with Copper, Lu explained that “in democratic countries, the flag is a symbol of glory and dignity, the symbol of the nation. In a country where people do not have the right to vote, the national flag represents the government’s will and power. The flag as well as the ‘One Child in Zhuyuan’ slogan signify the same thing […] Like the girl, the situation of women remains unnoticed. The situation of the girl child is similar to that of the Chinese people, helpless, coerced by power, without freedom or power to choose.”

The Gao Brothers’ irreverent sculpture of the former Chairman, Miss Mao, makes a caricature of the founder of communist China. Mao is presented in stainless steel with the absurd additions of prominent Betty Boop breasts, a Disney-like button nose, and a vampire’s mouth. Like Lu, the Gao Brothers are direct and unflinching in their political aims. As they told Copper during their interview for the exhibit, “this work exposes the truth that Mao’s politics are a lie […] Miss Mao is the irony of Mao and his system and the people fooled by Mao’s politics.” The Gao Brothers’ father died at the hand of the Red Guards during the tumultuous and violent Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s. Miss Mao has been exhibited all over the world and has attracted the ire of the Chinese authorities, who have blocked and confiscated it several times at customs, and even destroyed one version of the piece.

Many of the works, including those by Zhang Huan, Han Bing, Cang Xin, and He Yunchang, can be classified as performance art. Most notable are the photos documenting He’s performance, One Meter Democracy, in which a 0.5-1 centimetre deep cut was made on the right side of He’s body, from his clavicle down to below his knee. The whole process is said to be executed under the assistance of a medical doctor, without anaesthesia. Before the cut was made, He held a pseudo-democratic vote to determine whether or not the procedure would take place. According to Copper, “many of the artists [such as] Cang Xin, He Yunchang, [and] Zhang Huan had a classical painting background, (often at China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts) and wanted to break away from that. They also wanted to use their bodies to signal that they lived in a repressive dictatorship that could control those bodies.”

Contrary to what one might expect to find in a representative selection of dissident artists critiquing the current order, Lu FeiFei was the only female artist featured. Copper explained that “there are many Chinese female artists. In fact, China [has been a] a very egalitarian country since the advent of Communism. However, I just decided to include one because, often women artists are less political, more interested in the private sphere.”

That, unfortunately, is a fault in an otherwise exceptional exhibition. The artists represented are overwhelmingly male, and much of the work has strong anti-establishment overtones. While it’s great to present that narrative, it fits uncomfortably well with the way that China is typically understood in Western consciousness. If Arsenal’s main goal was to present the antipathy that Chinese artists feel towards their government, then it certainly succeeded. The works did not, however, represent other aspects of life in China, by choice, it seems. Given the way that Western media tend to represent only the worst aspects of China – pollution, corruption, and the trampling of human rights – it seems a missed opportunity not to represent the more human, every day side of life; the side that is rarely portrayed in North America or Europe. That said, we should be grateful to Arsenal for bringing such an arresting selection of Chinese contemporary works to Montreal.

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Rake&Co. originally started off as the agency blog for the staff of CloudRaker, a digital marketing agency established in 2000. Over time, the blog evolved into an online magazine. The online magazine originally served as a low-risk testing ground for the CloudRaker employees to experiment with new media and hone their ‘creative’ skills in filmmaking, editing, photography, and storytelling.

The magazine puts forward what Brown calls “a new world order of consumption.” It does this by focusing on independent stores and third wave cafes that are not geared toward the mass consumption of characterless goods. The stores featured in the magazine include a diner with a bowling alley called Notre Dame des Quilles, tiny clothing boutiques with rare merchandise and organic cotton shirts, and a furniture shop with re-purposed goods and food offerings.

The magazine’s business model is conspicuously experimental. The ‘Rakers’ aim to find new ways of brand sponsorship that will allow them to survive – magazines need revenue from advertisements – but that will also keep the magazine ad-free. The result is a new form of publication that is a “hybrid between a nice photo album/book and a magazine.” Ultimately, the people at Rake&Co want to create a keepsake, something that you can display on your coffee table for a long time.

Although the magazine is meant to be an “archive of Montreal today” seen through the “professionally creative” eyes of the Rake&Co. team, it would be better off claiming to be an archive of the city’s Plateau, Mile End, St. Henri, and Griffintown neighbourhoods. It rarely ventures beyond these districts into the less “creative” areas. This is due to the fact that Rake&Co. “is a private project” that has “no lofty ambition to contribute to the discourse of the city at all.” That means that they pick their stories according to their interests and what they deem important to include, which reflects the social and economic profile of the writers more than it represents an ‘archive’ of Montreal as a whole.

Rake&Co.’s target audience is “a younger creative community interested in what is new and upcoming in the city.” This doesn’t mean that the less-young community won’t enjoy it as well, for Rake&Co. “seems to be resonating with all people interested in what’s coming up in the creative community.” However, it would be quite a stretch to claim that this magazine is for everyone. This is natural, Brown claims, as it is hard to cater to everybody’s needs and still be coherent. As she so charmingly put it, “are we looking to find deals for McGill students? Maybe not. It’s not about finding the cheap sandwich. This is really about looking at our city through our eyes.” Perhaps a little diversity in the people that Rake&Co. interests itself with would provide a more interesting publication.

Even though the magazine aims at nailing down a cohesive portrait of the city, it makes no mention of musical events or venues, theatre performances, or the visual arts scene. Instead, it places strong emphasis on the commercial goings-on of the city, such as new restaurants and boutiques. In defence of the magazine, Brown claims that “it was our first edition, and we all completely agree that certainly the music scene is something lacking. In fact, we had a story [about local music] we wanted to include, but instead opted to hit the press quicker, just to get the magazine out there.” This doesn’t mean that future issues of Rake will always have a dossier on food or music; “it’s really going to be what interests us at the time, for we don’t want to restrict ourselves into having to hit each category […] to be a viable and complete read,” Brown explained.

The greatest disappointment of Rake&Co. is the poor quality of the words that accompany the photos. The text is at worst, irrelevant, and at best, superficial. For instance, the PHI Centre is heralded as a “game-changing addition to the Montreal arts scene,” yet in the scanty three paragraphs devoted to describing it, only one makes a lame stab at explaining why it might be a “game changer,” while the other two discuss the centre’s restaurant ,and the ecological certification of the building. Perhaps I missed the entire point of the coverage, but I was certainly left clueless as to what the significance was of PHI to the Montreal arts scene. At least Rake &Co.is conscious of this issue: Brown says that they sacrificed the quality and depth of the analysis in order to quickly “nail a cohesive portrait of the city right then in that moment. For the next issue, we want to go deeper in the writing.” Even Rake&Co.’s supposed up-to-the-minute-ness is suspect, however, as most of their photos have a conspicuous lack of snow, implying they might have been taken several months ago.

So, should we all go out and buy a copy of Rake&Co.? I would recommend checking out their website to look at their well-executed photographs and watch their short documentaries, the latter of which are unfortunately only available on your smartphone. You may be less inclined to spend $20 on a magazine filled with pictures of districts and people that all end up looking as if they shop at the same stores and live in the same neighbourhoods, even though they go to independent boutiques and live in elegant apartments. Perhaps the second issue will provide a more holistic look at Montreal culture.

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