Fake magazines tackle real issues

Besides Vowei, Carrasco has published other magazines, including iAhlan! and Kalas – also on show in Beijing – to draw people's attention to two disadvantaged groups.

Her first project, iAhlan! created in 2013 at the invitation of a human rights art festival in Sevilla, was modeled on iHola!, a trendy magazine in the Spanish-speaking world but presented the lives of those in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Tindouf, Algeria.

Kalas, her 2014 project, appropriated the format of Caras, a popular weekly celebrity and women's magazine in Columbia, and featured the children of the African slaves in the country.

Asked what the message is behind her work, the artist from Ronda said she doesn't try to communicate a singular and clear message.

"When I was working on those magazines, what I wanted to do was merely expose the problems the way they are," she said.

"Carrasco uses falsification as a technique to attract attention, which has proved to be effective," said Xia Yanguo, a Beijing-based art critic and curator of the show.

Carrasco's fake magazines urge readers to question the value of the high-brow magazines with which they are familiar, said Xia.

Readers of the fake magazines, "who are accustomed to the homogenous patterns of popular magazines, would be confronted with contents that are alien to their past reading experiences, and in doing so, readers would be shocked and compelled to concern about thorny social issues and lives of the struggling groups that are distant from their daily living," added Xia.

The exhibition, running through Dec 8, is coupled with another project, Chinese patterns: the authenticity of the fake, by Spanish artist Carlos Arroyo Galaxia.

If you go:

Free admission, 10 am-9 pm, Monday-Sunday.

The Cervantes Institute in Beijing, A1 Gongti Nanlu (South Road), Chaoyang district, Beijing. 010-5879-9666

Yang Xiaoyu contributed to this story.