Adidas Taps Punch-Bag Art, Muhammad Ali to Spread Olympic Fever , Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

According to Bloomberg News, the 2008 Beijing Olympics are fast approaching, yet aside from the host city, there is little sign of fever for the games elsewhere in China. Official partner Adidas AG, trailing Nike Inc. in the country, is trying to remedy that by tapping one of China's hottest markets: art.

Adidas, the world's second-largest maker of sporting goods, has teamed up with Singapore-based Opera Gallery and museums in China to produce the exhibition ``Gong Zhen: Sport in Art.'' The marathon show of works by 70 artists from around the world includes Wang Guangyi and Yue Minjun, darlings of China's contemporary art market.

``Gong Zhen,'' which means resonance or collective exhilaration, opened in Shanghai this month and will travel to four more cities to help drum up enthusiasm around the country. It will roll into Beijing in time for the games in August.

Wang's diptych ``Olympic'' regurgitates his weary formula of slapping present-day images -- in this case, the word ``Olympic'' -- above brawny socialist peasants and soldiers. Ebullience and zing erupt from the colorful ``Free,'' ``Hope'' and ``Victory'' by Zhong Biao, with sprinters, swirling Shaolin monks and fiery backdrops. Yue, whose ``Execution'' sold for $5.9 million in London in October, depicts a bubblegum-pink centaur atop Yellow Mountain, a linking of traditional Greek and Chinese motifs. The centaur, of course, has Yue's signature laughing face.

Track Star

French sculptor Pierre Matter offers a flat, metal cut-out crouching within an industrial frame that metamorphoses into a detailed, three-dimensional sculpture of U.S. track star Wilma Rudolph, who won three gold medals in the 1960 Summer Olympics. Two portraits of Muhammad Ali, by Brazilian Romero Britto and French painter Paul Alexis, show extremes in the life of ``The Greatest'' -- one youthful, unstoppable and jubilant, the other aging, strenuous and pained.

The exhibition also highlights the dynamism and aesthetics of athletics. ``Knees and Arms,'' by Maki Umehara, is composed of triangles bobbing like waves or a flock of seagulls. Photographer Hans Gissinger, whose book ``Salami'' magnifies sausages into works of art, takes a similar look at meat in his ``Muscle'' series. The steak and other cuts, presented close-up and in black and white, resemble nature scenes of cliff-faces and rapids gushing over boulders.

A video by Addictive TV (London audiovisual artist-remixers Graham Daniels and Tolly) begins with a heartbeat and a runner and crescendos with sounds, actions and muscles. It's so effective it makes you want to dash out and smack a ball.

Three Stripes

German artist Marcel Odenbach, known for being socially and politically provocative, uses the Adidas logo in his somewhat cryptic collages ``Reduced to Three Stripes.'' Three strips of essays about race overlay dark backgrounds of photos of Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Toni Morrison and lesser-known Africans and African-Americans. (Art critics have suggested the message is about the cache of the trademark in 1980s hip-hop circles and its identification with African-American politics and street culture.)

The photography on display is easier to read. Thierry Bouet, who shoots for Vogue and Vanity Fair, captures yuppies weight- lifting (Louis Vuitton luggage), wrestling (with a stubborn door), practicing badminton (with a fly-swatter) and doing other sweat- breaking sports in their daily routines: Even a couch potato can be an athlete of sorts.

As if to amplify the point, there's an interactive boxing ring by Germany's Tilman Reiff and Volker Morawe. By pounding the SoundSlam punching bag, you activate loudspeakers that blare out the theme song from the movie ``Rocky.'' (Samuel Kung, director of Shanghai's Museum of Contemporary Art, was doing so during my visit). That's bound to stir up some adrenalin, even if it fails to rouse enthusiasm for the Olympics.

``Gong Zhen: Sport in Art'' is at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai, Gate 7 of People's Park, 231 Nanjing West Road, until Dec. 9. For details, go to http://www.mocashanghai.org . The exhibition moves to Guangzhou, Nanjing, Shenyang and Chengdu before heading to Beijing. After the Olympics' closing ceremony, the works will be sold at a charity auction in Hong Kong.