Thursday, January 31, 2008

PEOPLE'S NEWSLETTER ARCHIVE

PEOPLE'S NEWSLETTER ARCHIVE

And now for those who cannot get enough of our semi-monthly newsletter, we are pleased to announce our People's Architecture Newsletter Archive, hosted forever on our servers for your nonstop viewing enjoyment!


BUILDING ASIA BRICK BY BRICK
2007 SHENZHEN & HONG KONG BI-CITY BIENNALE OF URBANISM | ARCHITECTURE
CITY OF EXPIRATION AND REGENERATION - "CoER"
NORTHERN PARK OF OCT-LOFT | NANSHAN DISTRICT | SHENZHEN
DECEMBER 8, 2007 - MARCH 9, 2008

people's architecture and ArtAsiaPacific will present Building Asia Brick by Brick at the 2007 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism | Architecture.

During the Shenzhen Biennale, "Building Asia Brick by Brick | Teach Through Play" will invite Shenzhen youngsters and architects to first build an oversized Map of China. The subsequent construction of cities on this map is based on the French salon game of "Rotating Corpse," where a group of players collectively assemble a story or image. Here, each collaborator adds to the composition without being allowed to see the previous contribution. Each team of architects and children will contribute a section to an imaginary city that represents both diverse aesthetic sensibilities and principals of community. The final product is both a vision of China and the act of modeling the inter-generational teamwork necessary to create tomorrow's community.

For more information, please see our video >>

_____________________________________ CHINA GLOBAL


SYMPOSIUM | EXPORTING CHINA
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY | NEW YORK CITY

FEBRUARY 16, 2008

For the past two decades China's economic growth has created seemingly endless opportunities for international architects to impose their vision on China's built environment. What has yet to be fully experienced is the reciprocating effect of Chinese contemporary culture on the spatial production worldwide. EXPORTING CHINA will discuss the future potential of exporting China's contemporary culture. More info >>

Participants include:

YUNG HO CHANG : Principal Architect, Atelier Feichang Jianzhu, Professor and Head, Architecture Department, MIT Professor and Founding Head, Graduate Center of Architecture, Peking University

QINGYUN MA : Dean of the USC School of Architecture and holder of the Della and Harry MacDonald Dean's Chair in Architecture, Principal Architect, MADA s.p.a.m. (strategy, planning, architecture, media), Shanghai, China

ACKBAR ABBAS : Professor, Comparative Literature, UC Irvine

DOREEN HENG LIU : Principal and Founding Architect, NODE Architecture, Guangzhou and Hong Kong

________________________________________ CHINA CURRENT


EVERYONE LOVES CCTV

Reporting on the OMA designed China Central Television headquarters building in Beijing, Arup presents an easily digestible diagram of CCTV's major construction process. USA Today profiles the tower, compares it to the Pentagon, and paints a portrait of the backstage accolades and dissentions from Chinese and Europeans- at whatever role their involvement lies.


EVERYONE LOVES THE WFC, TOO

To segue from the article above, Shanghaiist brings us the tale of several urban adventurists who scaled the Kohn Pederson Fox-designed and still-under-construction Shanghai World Financial Center to bring us amazing photos of Shanghai views, tower construction, and their crazy selves.


INTERVIEW WITH QINGYUN MA

Ali Jeevanjee, via Archinect, interviews Qingyun Ma in three parts. From the author: "In Part 1 we focus on his practice, and his observations from operating first in the East and now in the West. In Part 2 we discuss the future of the urban condition, both in China and in Los Angeles. In Part 3, Ma addresses architectural education, how architects need to recalibrate their role in society, and his vision for USC."


CHINA'S EMERGING STREETSCAPE

China Digital Times, via MSNBC, features a video clip profiling China's overcrowding streets due to the exponential growth in auto ownership and the government practices going into effect in order to mediate this condition. Outside of the infrastructural analysis, the Washington Post features an article describing an emerging shift as more urban Chinese adopt car culture with a sense of increased mobility and connectedness.



Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Rewriting Asia: The Global Identity of Contemporary Asian Art

Finally someone gets it!

Rewriting Asia
The Global Identity of Contemporary Asian Art

Ou Ning

Commissioned by Michelle Nicol, Zurich
Translated from Chinese by Yu Hsiao Hwei, Paris

Standing at Antrepo no.3, the main venue of the 10th Istanbul Biennial, looking across the Bosporus Strait forming the boundary between Europe and Asia, I was able to look at Asia for the first time from a European standpoint. My line of sight moved quickly beyond the rows upon rows of buildings on the Asian side of Istanbul, and went onto the map in my mind. It flew rapidly over the territory of Turkey, past Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, got to China where I am from, and finally reached the Korean Peninsula and Japan. All this vast expanse of land that unfolded in my mind’s eye is the so-called “East” for Westerners. It can be subdivided further into the Near East, Middle East and Far East, according to its distance from Europe. For Chinese people like me, even though we are familiar with modern geographical knowledge that has been built up by Europeans through navigation and mapping, we still tend to consider the concept of “the East” as a synonym for China only, while ignoring other Asian countries. It is related to the fact that China has always regarded itself as a great power, the center of the world, but it is also because we haven’t had many opportunities to leave our own land, and to travel to other countries. It is interesting that, for many Europeans, “the East” often means Turkey, the country that is nearest to them; in particular, a city with unique cultures like Istanbul represents the perfect embodiment of “the East” in their imagination. From Gustave Flaubert, Alphonse de Lamartine, Gerard de Nerval to Le Corbusier, they all shared the same fascination (1).

This experiential and cognitive blind spot is due to the limitations of the times. In pre-modern societies, the high costs of and the social standing necessary for long-distance trips made traveling accessible only to a select few; therefore, we were unable to send ourselves to far-flung countries to experience the cultures of Others. In addition to the geographical barriers, obstacles in the form of political systems, languages, cultures and living habits also confined our experiences and knowledge to a rather narrow scope. We have all been tightly stuck in the finite space-time of the local, and have suffered the distances between one another; fortunately, these distances have also safeguarded the differences between countries and regions. Yet now, “all that is solid melts into air” (2), physical distances that were originally thought to be objective and unshakable have been surmounted by the astonishing speed invented in our era (high costs are no longer necessary to attain this speed), new technologies and the internet have started to offer the magic of high-speed compression of time and space, and geographical frontiers have started to disappear. An enormous amount of floating capital has broken through every political rampart and cultural barrier, in search of new places to increase profit in different regions around the world. In the name of eradicating poverty, it tries to get rid of all differences, and is even starting to shake the foundation of national governance, by reducing the political power of a country to “a mere security apparatus” (3). The sense of belonging to a nation-state that people used to have is becoming increasingly weaker as transnational travel and economic and cultural exchanges become more frequent. Nationalism is regarded as a feeling that doesn’t fit the time, while people are starting to construct a new identity based on the city (or more precisely, the district in the city) where they live. This is the era of so-called “globalization”, which we are living in today.

In an era like this, “mobility climbs to the rank of the uppermost of coveted values-and the freedom to move, perpetually a scarce and unequally distributed commodity, fast becomes the main stratifying factor of our late modern or postmodern times”.(4) This new value and stratifying criterion has been determined by transnational capital which, by nature, tends to be nomadic, because it is the real ruler of this world; it has stirred up the world, and turned its own characteristic (mobility) into a universal principle. Artists are undoubtedly one of the social classes that possess more freedom to move in this era. After the end of the Cold War, the former pattern of competition between groups of nations started to make place for competition between cities. Cities not only compete to host top international events such as the Olympic Games and the World Exposition, but also vie with each other for international capital and tourism with the organization of all sorts of cultural and artistic festivals and exhibitions, and by these, seek to further enhance the economic power of and people’s identification with the city. The proliferation of international art biennials is the epitome of this competition. It has created a great deal of opportunities for transnational travel, and has enabled different cultures to look at each other and to change. For instance, it is because I had been invited to participate in the Istanbul Biennial that, as a result of geographical and cultural displacements, I had the opportunity to get a different viewpoint of, to contemplate Asia in a new light, the place where I am from, the so-called “East” for Westerners.

Undoubtedly, all modern experiences and pedigrees of knowledge that we share today are mainly Western (in particular, European); Asia and other regions haven’t yet played much of a role in the historical process of the construction of global modernity. In the Western-centric eyes, Asia (the East) has always been the far-flung Other, the object of colonization, the cultural imagination of the West at the other end of the earth, and a reference that the West from time to time has recourse to based on its own discursive need. This long-standing attribute of the Other has resulted in Asian anxiety; it was present throughout nearly a century of Asian history, as Asia lived through changes and turbulences from the end of the nineteenth century onwards –the successive collapse of feudal monarchies, the continuous expansion of colonialism, the arduous establishment of modern nation-states, etc. Take the two Eastern empires, China and Turkey, for example, they almost coincided and shared astonishing similarities in the process of looking for their own modernity: the Chinese Qing dynasty and the Turkish Ottoman dynasty fell at about the same time, and Sun Yat-sen and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk emerged at roughly the same moment; both people were firm advocates of westernization, were deeply worried for their chronically weak countries, and in order to learn from the West and to catch up with it, they established a republican regime in their own country. The difference between these two countries is that, in the wave of globalization of today, Turkey is still eager to “leave Asia and join Europe” (5), to throw itself into the embrace of the European Union; on the other hand, after having experienced the collapse of the communist value system around the world, China still adheres to centralization, and is becoming stronger and stronger in the global economic framework with authoritarian capitalism that is proper to Asia.

Asian politicians have also made similar alliance-forming attempts. The ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), founded in 1967, implemented the ASEAN Free Trade Area in 2003, with the hope of creating the ASEAN economic community, so as to enhance the competitiveness of the region; the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation), founded in 1989, is an economic cooperation project that involves even more Asian countries and regions. These alliance-forming efforts reflect the enthusiastic embracing of global economic integration by Asian countries. However, it is a pity that they remain content simply with collaborations in the economic realm, and haven’t gone beyond that to form common “Asian values” on political and cultural levels. Singapore’s former leader Lee Kwan Yew, who is familiar with Western culture, fervently pleaded in favor of the construction of “Asian values”. He believed that this was the only effective way for Asian countries to avoid and resist the risks arising from their integration into the globalization process. However, the “Asian values” formulated by Mr. Lee only concerned such Confucian values as blood relations, family ties, fair hierarchy, the importance of authority, frugality, manners and protocol, etc. Although these values are shared by countries within the Confucian cultural circle, such as China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, etc, they fail to embrace Islamic and Hindu values. Due to the fact that Asia represents a rich diversity of races, cultures and religions, that each country is at a different stage of development, and that some countries still hold profound historical grudges against others, Asia has not been able to contend with the West by forming a highly integrated political, economic and cultural community that goes beyond national forms, like the European Union.

In the cultural realm, contemporary Asian art has gradually emerged over the past twenty years, but has largely relied on the predominance of the West, and to a great extent, it has benefited from the prevalence of globalization and multiculturalism in the Western world. In the late eighties and the early nineties of last century, along with the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the USSR, the ideological opposition between the two camps came to an end; after having won its final victory, capitalism went further in its advance across the world by speeding up its pace and increasing its intensity, thereby inaugurating the movement of globalization. The political iron curtain having been torn open, not only could Western capital enter the once antagonistic third world countries, but the art of third world countries could also be brought to the West. In 1993, in an article entitled “Clash of Civilizations” published in the American Foreign Affairs quarterly, Samuel P. Huntington argued that in the post-Cold War world, the principal conflicts of global politics would occur between different civilizations, that the Confucian civilization in Asia and the Islamic civilization, in particular, would represent the most serious challenges to Western civilization. This argument has sparked a sense of crisis in Western civilization, and has further helped to turn multiculturalism into the widespread “political correctness” in the West, and the adoption of the cultures of the Other a key strategy for the reconciliation of conflicts between civilizations. France is the first Western country to bring in contemporary Asian art: after the large-scale Le Japon des avant gardes: 1910-1970 show in 1986, the Pompidou Center organized Les magiciens de la terre in 1989 which, other than showing a great number of contemporary African artists, presented works of contemporary Chinese artists for the first time in Europe. From then on, contemporary Asian art has frequently appeared in various important museums and biennials in the West.

In the course of the first post-Cold War decade, the exhibition of contemporary Asian art by the West still followed, to a certain extent, cold war thinking, that is, it preferred works that were ironic about local politics and identified with capitalism and global values, using them as evidence of the victory of the West. After 9/11, when it experienced a lasting sense of shock and fear, the Western world has further adhered to Huntington’s prophetic theory of a clash of civilizations. The strong sense of defeat has magnified the image of the Other coming from the other side of the world; it has never been this clear and near, and is ever-present in all aspects of everyday life. With his Enemy Kitchen project (2006), the Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz, who was born in New York and currently lives and works in Chicago, offered the young generation of America an opportunity to learn Iraqi cooking in a kitchen as a way of making sense of the “enemy” of the country. This work shows that the desire of people to understand other civilizations on the planet is becoming increasingly concrete. In the new millennium, the argument that globalization will inevitably result in cultural convergence is being reconsidered; the concept of “the other” that smacks of egocentrism is greatly losing effectiveness. In the meantime, as the economies of many Asian countries continue to grow, cultural coherence is being strengthened; regional group shows, exchanges and collaborations in contemporary art are becoming more and more frequent; artists of new generations are constantly emerging, and their psychological distance with the West is continually being reduced. All this results in a drastic change in the global art scene.

If “Asian values” remain hung in the balance under the efforts of politicians, what about the attempts made by the artists? In the era of globalization, are they also trying to create an Asian identity in the artistic landscape? Wong Hoy Cheong is a Chinese-Malaysian artist with a strong Asian consciousness. Since 1993, he has created a whole series of works to focus on issues of colonial history, political conflicts, immigrant identity and family traditions in Asian regions. As a fifth-generation Chinese immigrant in Malaysia, Wong Hoy Cheong was born in George Town; his mother tongue is Hokkien, but he received a British colonial education and then went to study in the United States. He speaks Chinese, Malay and English: he is himself a product of Asia’s diverse histories and cultures. Consequently, his early works showed typical traits of “Asian-ness” through the exploration of personal memories and family histories. For the Kwangju Biennale in 2000, his project consisted in collecting a great number of books on Asian history, and after burning them, reforming the pulp into paper tiles to pave the floor in the exhibition space, thus allowing the audience to step on different versions of Asian history and to discern blurred images of those political figures who had once influenced the fate of Asia. The construction of all identities has to rely on history; only history can define who you are, where you are from, and where you are going. In terms of the exploitation and utilization of historical resources, artists are more effective than politicians, because they always speak from a personal position, and place great stress on experiences; consequently, they are more likely to make people identity with them.

For his participation in the 10th Istanbul Biennial, Wong Hoy Cheong focused on the historical district of Sulukule in the center of Istanbul. Sulukule is the oldest existent Romany district in the world, gypsies have come here since 1000 AD, and have offered entertainment to this city with music, circus, story-telling, fortune-telling, etc; however, the Romany are now being confronted with the destruction of the district and are being asked to move out. Wong Hoy Cheong gave cameras and camcorders to children of Sulukule and taught them the basics of filming and animation, allowing them to express their memories, knowledge and imagination of this district; by doing so, he has tried to make an appeal for the protection of this district. Sulukule resembles a great deal the Dazhalan district near the Tiananmen Square in Beijing(6): they both have a long history, but gradually fell into oblivion during the process of searching for and development of new spaces of the city, and plunged into decline before turning into slums in the end; now they are going to be entirely wiped off from the landscape. The fate of these historical districts is intertwined with the fight of different interest groups for space to survive in the era of globalization, and implies the clashes between the two cultural forces of convergence and differentiation. The disadvantaged slum population is not only the manifestation of social stratification caused by floating capital, but also a metaphor for the desperate conditions of local cultures in their confrontation with strong global cultures. For those artists who refuse to be reduced to a component of the homogeneous culture of globalization, to stand up for history is the key to the preservation of local differences and the construction of local identities.

Similar efforts are also seen in the works by the Vietnamese artist Jun Nguyen Hatsushiba. For the Yokohama Triennial in 2001, after his original intention to create a cyclo (cycle rickshaw) museum, had been compromised due to a shortage of space, he invited Vietnamese fishermen from Nha Trang to pull cyclos in the water, and made a video film of it for the exhibition. As the oldest and principal means of transport in Vietnam, cyclos embody the life memories of the Vietnamese people. However, they now may have to fight for the right to survive against the global city transportation system that is synonymous with efficiency and order—the image of cyclos moving forward with difficulty under the sea, is “a striking metaphor for struggle and survival” (7). In comparison with the convergence of imagination, the impulse for differentiation they have aroused seems to become reality in a more widespread manner. Objectively speaking, homogeneity is a partial concept of globalization, whereas difference is its essentially profound characteristic. We have already seen that, with the progress of globalization, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, “signaling a new freedom for some, upon many others it descends as an uninvited and cruel fate” (8), and that instead of being rejected with contempt and disappearing from the world, nationalism is gaining ground day by day. Although most artists are reluctant to attach a national label to their identity or works, it is hard for them to go beyond their personal growth experiences, historical imprints, and linguistic and thinking sets. Difference is the essence of this world, and cannot be obliterated or altered by any capital-related, political or other man-made force.

Consequently, regardless of its content or subject matter, or the medium it uses, we can always perceive a distinguishable trait of “Asian-ness” in a work by a contemporary Asian artist — this characteristic is sometimes consciously performed by the artist, but sometimes goes beyond his or her intentios. Recently, Jun Nguyen Hatsushiba started a project series entitled “Breathing is Free: 12756.3”. The artist intends to run the physical distance of 12756.3 km, the diameter of the earth, in different parts of the world within a certain period of time, and have the whole process filmed by others. This time, he won’t hire any actors, but “will be the one to move and struggle” (9) himself, to measure and experience the distance of the earth with his own body. In this project, the idea of using the body as an artistic medium is different from that of many Western artists: here, the body is not to be stripped bare or to be displayed, it is not used to challenge taboos, either; instead, it is the vehicle through which the artist aims to train his will, it is the arena where spirit confronts material. This penance-like artistic practice has also been undertaken by other Asian artists: The US-based Taiwan artist Teh-ching Hsieh carried out a series of one-year performances in New York in the seventies and the eighties, for instance, living in a cage for one year, punching a time clock every hour for one year, living outdoors for one year, etc. Chinese artist He Yunchang picked up a rock in a small town called Boulmer on the Northumberland coast in northern England, and carried it all the way around the coast of Great Britain and finally went back to Boulmer to put the rock back in the same place. Besides using the body as a medium, the biggest characteristic of these works is to show meaning through meaningless behavior, showing typical Asian thinking.

Nevertheless, just like the way that political practices have failed to reach unified “Asian values,” the global identity that contemporary Asian art has tried to construct is also fragmentary; even the most brilliant observer is unable to sum up a complete attribute suitable for every Asian country. Maybe we can say that fragmentation is in itself an appropriate image for Asia (like its geography), because as a matter of fact, its diversity fits in with the formula of energy production in the globalization era. No matter which description we use, today’s Asia has certainly opened up a road of modernity that is different from that of the West, and on the negotiating table among global powers, it is no longer an irrelevant other; and people can no longer neglect the voice it has. Asia is no longer the orphan of the world, the progress it has accomplished today cannot be compared with the past: it is the moment to rewrite history.

December 5, 2007

Notes:

(1) In his Istanbul: Memories of a City, Orhan Pamuk quotes a great deal of the travel notes on Istanbul of these French writers and poets and their impressions of “the East”. Le Corbusier is the author of Le Voyage d’Orient.

(2) Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto.

(3) Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of Mexico’s Zapatista rebels, wrote in the French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique (p4-5, August, 1997): “In the cabaret of globalization, the state performs a striptease, at the end of which it is left wearing the minimum necessary: its powers of repression. With its material base destroyed, its sovereignty and independence abolished, and its political class eradicated, the nation state increasingly becomes a mere security apparatus in the service of the mega-enterprises…”

(4) Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: the Human Consequences, Chinese translation “quanqiuhua: renlei de houguo”, the Commercial Press, 2001, page 3.

(5) Turkey has submitted an application to join European Union since 1987, but up to today, its candidacy has still not been accepted. The idea of “leaving Asia and joining Europe” had already been put forward by the Japanese Fukuzawa Yukichi during the Meiji period.

(6) The Dazhalan project that Cao Fei and I collaborated on also took part in this Istanbul Biennial. For more on this project, please visit: www.dazhalan-project.org

(7) Jonathan Napack: Vietnam’s Artists Try to Break Free of Their “Velvet Prison”, The International Herald Tribune, June 9, 2005.

(8) Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences, Chinese translation, the Commercial Press, 2001, page 71.

(9) Uda Motoko: Interview with Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, ARTiT, Summer/Fall, 2007

The lil mouse by Stephan Reusse hiding in Shanghai in the Year of Rat!

Translocalmotion- is the theme of the SHanghai Biennial

Henk Slager, who was plagiarized last Shanghai biennial, is one of this year's curators...


The First Press Conference Of The Seventh Shanghai Biennale 2008
From:Biennale Office Date:2008.1.21
TRANSLOCALMOTION

Since its inauguration, the Shanghai Biennale has repeatedly taken the city itself and its urban conditions as a starting point for its artistic explorations. In line with this inner logic, the curatorial team of the 2008 edition proposes to focus on one of the most import cornerstones of urban design: the public square which is a prime location of transfer, connection, connectivity, meeting, social and economic exchange.

As a concrete starting point for the seventh Shanghai Biennale the curatorial team suggests to take the People’s Square, the environment that the Shanghai Art Museum is actually part of. This public square seems to contain on a small-scale level a lot of crucial issues that the current Chinese society faces. One of the most significant aspects of these is population movement from underdeveloped rural areas to developed urban spaces in search for opportunities that happens against the background of drastic social and economic change in China. The nation is rapidly developing from an agricultural society to an industrialized information society, and from a command economy to a market economy (cf. the analysis of the current migration problematics by Xiang Liping: Cheng Shi Kuai ke). On the People’s Square we find many of these issues of transition, such as the topical rhetorics of capitalism, the ultramodernist architecture that expresses a spirit of optimism, the desire for a better life envisioned by the Grand Theater and the Urban Planning Exhibition Hall, but also by the numerous small stands that house the economic activities of migrants.

For the 2008 Biennale, the curatorial team proposes to connect the Shanghai Art Museum more directly with the square itself. For that reason, as the first section of the exhibition, they intend to invite around 20 emerging and mature artists to take the example of the People’s Square as a starting point for their research and artistic work. The outcome of this research can be pluriform: it could be either works in different media, outside or inside the museum.

As possible outside works the curatorial team can imagine urban proposals, site-specific activities, interventions in the public space, interventions in the public media, performances, et cetera. However, each artist in this section should create – as an outcome of their research – an additional work to be shown on the ground floor of the museum. The exhibition on the ground floor should have a strong visual attraction to introduce the visitors to the theme of the People’s Square as a metaphor for the complex dynamics of the mobility of people in China today.

In this respect, special attention should also be paid to the direct environment of the museum building, such as the gate to the street, the fa.ade and the parking lot opposite the entrance.

As a first insert into the general exhibition the curatorial team proposes to use the galleries on the mezzanine floor to host an exhibition of the history of the People’s Square since the beginning of the 20th century, including photographs, plans and other relevant documents, but also possibly films in which the square plays a significant role. This part of the Biennale has to be curated by a local specialist.

As a second section of the main exhibition the curatorial team proposes to create a special focus on the theme in the shape of three solo-exhibitions of mid-career artists. This rather unusual proposal was conceived in reaction to a tendency among many Biennales to present a vast number of hardly distinguishable artistic positions. As a guideline for the choice of artists in this section a more reflective and general attitude towards the issue of mobility related to the urban, economical and social development should be apparent in their artistic production.

As a second insert, using the variety of given spaces of the Shanghai Art Museum, the curatorial team proposes to use one of the VIP rooms on the second floor for the installment of a soundpiece by another artist.

The last section of the main exhibition, on the third floor, might consist of (existing) works of about 20 artists, which reflect on the theme of the exhibition, but in this case using non-Shanghai sources and contexts as a starting point. They could explore issues such as migration and integration for example in South-Asian, European or American countries.

As a third insert, the curatorial team proposes a temporary FM radio station operating from the VIP room on the ground floor, playing music selected by the participating artist, and conducting interviews with artists, visitors and people from the cultural scene.
MISE-EN-SCENE

According to the chosen starting point of the seventh Shanghai Biennale, the People’s Square, its history and phenomenological characteristics, the curatorial team proposes to expose as much as possible of the original structure and features of the museum’s building.

As an extension to the exhibition in the Shanghai Art Museum, the curatorial team proposes to place art works in the public spaces of the Pudong International airport and the Shanghai Central Railway station, as these are focusing points of transition and migration.

Opening Ceremony: Sep 8, 2008
Duration: 9 Sep-16 Nov, 2008
Hosted by the Organizing Committee of the Shanghai Biennale
Address: Shanghai Art Museum(325, Nanjing Road West)

Art is popping up all over town, says the article. Himm...

http://www.china.org.cn/english/culture/241338.htm

Many people find that art is distant and irrelevant to their daily lives. So every single day this year, a people-friendly art and cultural event will pop up somewhere in the city.

The Chinese contemporary art market booms, but art is still far away from most people's daily lives. This is where "Intrude: Art and Life 366" comes in, or intrudes: 366 days of this leap year and often right in front of you.

You will see surprising events. An ordinary house is turned into a museum one day a month; doves connected with strings are tossed into the air; a pretty dress will be hung on every tree on a certain street.

One the one hand, some artists believe that art is loftier than life, rather than springing from life. Their works are often considered irrelevant to daily life and not worth understanding.

And it is still uncommon to see art events in public venues other than galleries or museums. Most galleries care more about professional art buyers or agents, and museums open their doors to the public while keeping them at homage-paying distance.

On the other hand, the public is not very interested in contemporary art either, unless it's related to entertainment industry or celebrities.

Many artists are grappling with this problem. Some have merged all kinds of daily essentials like clothes, cosmetics, snacks, or dishes into artistic creations. Open studios in art centers like Moganshan Road in Shanghai or 798 in Beijing have also attracted crowds.

Enter "Intrude." Organized by the Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, it began January 1 and will last through December 31-with an event every day in every creative field.

Throughout the year, 366 cultural events will be presented in public and private venues likes parks, gardens, squares, shopping areas, ordinary homes and other sites. Around 100 Chinese and 266 international artists will take part in exhibitions, site-specific installations, performances, concerts, film screenings, debates, and other events.

"The project aims to intervene in people's daily life, draw their attention to art happenings and stimulate the public debate on art," says Shen Qibin, director of MoMA.

"To intrude in culture is to infiltrate and influence the daily scenes or situations within a certain time and place. We hope to narrow the gap between culture and everyday life, making art more accessible to a broader public."

In order to narrow the gap, the art group Utopia merges public and private space and created the ninth and ongoing event of the project on January 9-"Family Art Museum." It will take place every month in 12 private homes.

The group found ordinary citizens who were interested in art and willing to open their homes for one day. Then Utopia turned it into an art museum to display art works from Utopia.

The group uses all existing facilities and spaces like television, computers, balconies, kitchens and bathrooms to accommodate the art.

While Utopia takes art to the public, others like American artist and art writer Mathieu Borysevicz try to turn the public into art.

Borysevicz's project began on January 17. He takes photos of the workers in a construction site in Shanghai every day and will use the photos to decorate the wall of the construction site, usually covered with advertisements.

Moreover, Borysevicz will also lend digital cameras to some workers so they can record their work and life. The workers' photos will be compiled into a journal.

And to Chinese artist Wu Junyong, the Internet is a faster and more convenient way to reach the public.

For his project "Dictionary of Slams," Wu collects frequently used slams online and selects the most interesting to interpret visually.

At the end of the year, Wu plans to compile a dictionary to upload online.

In February, artistic intruders include Australian artist Annabelle Collett who will hang a dress she made on every tree of a selected street. Chinese artist Ye Nan will release 500 pigeons on a selected plaza. All the birds will be connected to each other by threads to create a large image through their movements. All these art events will be methodically archived and will be presented later as international touring exhibitions. Catalogues will be published regularly on the projects and their issues.

Intrude: Art and Life 366:
Date: through December 31
Tel: 8621-5033-9801

(Shanghai Daily January 30, 2008)

Glossy Book by Tinari out

with a review in FT.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/18696e54-cbb2-11dc-97ff-000077b07658.html

The coffee-table revolution

By Susan Moore

Published: January 26 2008 02:00 | Last updated: January 26 2008 02:00

No contemporary art collector likes to think of themselves as a mere tourist. They prefer to negotiate the travelling circus that is the international art market by way of the concierge service, the museum group and the VIP programme. Theirs is a world of museum private views and private house visits, of well-connected professionals opening all the doors. They are used to being on the inside.

In China, however, the westerner is very much on the outside. Buying art offers a glimpse in. It is probably true to say that the west's new-found passion for contemporary Chinese art - which, for the most favoured, has driven prices up from next to nothing to millions in the past few years - has been fanned by a kind of modish cultural tourism. It is partly to do with how art is bought in China. If anyone wanted to acquire - or even see - the work of avant-garde artists who demonstrated for political democracy and freedom of expression in 1979, they had to visit them at home, where they worked.

Even now, with growing numbers of dealers operating in the country, the Chinese dislike of the middleman has ensured that much of the business of selling has remained in the control of the artist and in the home or, latterly, the studio. Deals tend to be concluded traditionally by an invitation to share a meal. For many of the early western collectors, and for plenty of those buying now, part of the pleasure was forging a relationship with the artists (and coming away with a wealth of anecdotes to impress their friends). The generation of idealistic young artists who challenged the system seemed infinitely romantic. They might not be starving in garrets (the long-handled rice bowl of the state ensured that) but life was tough with food and materials in short supply. So, as prices for Chinese contemporary art have soared, so has interest in those who make it. A perfect record of the phenomenon is the recently published, large-format book Artists in China: Inside the Contemporary Studio (Thames & Hudson) , which features 500 photographs of 50 or so artists in their homes and studios. There is a glossary of informed thumbnail biographies by Philip Tinari. Chinese artists have hit the coffee table.

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this book is that it should exist at all. A decade ago most of these artists were obliged to work at home and the industrial-scale studios and chic interiors photographed here would have been unimaginable. None is more exquisite than the airy, well-proportioned working and living space of Ai Weiwei, one of the most significant conceptual and performance artists to have emerged in China. Designed by him in 1998 and built in what was then a rural village on the periphery of Beijing, it has became the basis for a booming architectural practice, Fake Design. Here and elsewhere, the combination of old and new China seems entirely natural.

There is no doubting the new wealth of market darlings such as Yue Minjun - he of the ubiquitous "shark's smile" self-portraits - whose "Execution" was sold at Sotheby's London last October for £2.9m, a record for any work of Chinese contemporary art sold at auction. His eerily empty new house is huge and sprawling in its walled-off suburban Beijing compound.

The great strength of Tinari's book, however, is that it reflects the huge diversity of creative output in China, not least among conceptual, performance, film and video artists - encouragement for us all to look beyond the formulaic productions favoured by the market.

There is no sign of China-mania abating, especially since the Chinese government has come to recognise the potential of its cultural heritage. Events such as this year's British "China Now" festival will play their part. And, these days, visits to Beijing's famous 798 art district have become as much a part of the tourist trail as the Forbidden Palace and the Great Wall.

No doubt some collectors will continue to rush blindly to China to buy specifically Chinese contemporary (one French artist working in Beijing only started selling his work when he began signing his name in Chinese characters).

Perhaps only when China begins to lose its exoticism in the eyes of the west will its art be appreciated precisely for what it is.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

Singapore Art Museum to promote Southeast Asian art in China

By Adam Majendie

Jan. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Indonesian art collector Budiardjo Tek plans to set up private galleries in Jakarta and Bali and to fund a contemporary art center near Beijing to promote Southeast Asian artists such as Putu Suta Wijaya and Agus Suwage.

Tek will be chairman of the New Contemporary Art Centre in Songzhuang, Beijing, according to a release from the Singapore Art Museum, which is collaborating with the collector in the project. Kwok Kian Chow, director of the Singapore museum, will be deputy chairman of the center.

``Art gives special meaning and inspiration to life,'' said Tek in the release. ``Being an Indonesian educated in Singapore, I am passionate about Asian contemporary art.''

Songzhuang, about 23 kilometers (14 miles) east of Beijing, has become a focus of Chinese contemporary art, attracting some 1,500 artists, including Fang Lijun, Qi Zhilong, Yang Shaobin and Yue Minjun, the release said.

Singapore Art Museum and Yayasan YDY Nusantara, founded by Tek, will form a partnership to develop the center in China, including exchange programs for artists and research. The New Contemporary Art Centre, with 2,000 square meters of gallery space, is due to open in late 2008.

Tek is president director of Jakarta-based chicken processor PT Sierad Produce.

To contact the writer of this review: Adam Majendie in Singapore at adammajendie@bloomberg.net .
Last Updated: January 28, 2008 04:22 EST

www.hipic.org

ShanghART Gallery is pleased to present hipic – an innovative online project devoted to a hybrid and elusive form of expression, and a platform for potential endless visual flow.


hipic operates as a globally synchronized image archive that receives, collects, and diffuses pictures via the internet to a variety of visual poles, including public screens and exhibitions, at a pace of one picture per minute. The project was initiated in Shanghai in late 2007 by a group of artists, including Yang Zhenzhong, Xu Zhen and Huang Kui, to create scenarios in which boundaries are deliberately suspended and confused.

Mixing the real with the fictional, the near with the far, and the past with the present, hipic plays simultaneously in galleries and public spaces displaying constant and fluctuating elements. hipic captures imaginations worldwide, in which certain features are highlighted and strengthened, while other details lose their reality and become abstracted.

With its infinite number of possibilities, hipic produces a screen of the mediated reality we live in, and exploits contemporary communication, information and virtual technologies. At the same time, it remains part of the connected and globalized world that it maps, but one that offers material to test the boundaries on liberties offered by art institutions and society.

hipic creates a temporary autonomous zone where relationships and interconnections are reset, before slipping into the system of meanings. The itinerant locations of the screens are reflective of the fluid channels through which information spreads, a dynamic contest of codification and neutralization, where what appears as the everyday conditions of technological mediation and consumption is at stake. Technology is a critical player in this process but its role is essentially that of catalyst and intermediary: hipic enables image exchange and experiences between unlikely groups or individuals.

In this we find the essence of hipic’s nomadic response to the borders between the spaces we occupy and the ideas that occupy us. In a time characterized by information broadcast and exchange, hipic raises the question of what is and isn’t part of the network. With globalization and the world wide web, which is a misnomer in itself, hipic seeks out the reality of this assumed mapping and reach. For the audience the effect never fails to be entertaining and revealing.

Further information, please visit www.hipic.org

Monday, January 21, 2008

Building the Future - China's New Cities

The Shanghai Foreign Correspondents' Club Presents:

Building the Future - China's New Cities

Albert Speer, Managing Partner, AS & P
James Brearley, BAU
Sun Le & Yang Cai, Urban China magazine, Tongji University

Mesa/Manifesto
7p.m., Monday, January 21 (talk starts at 7.30 p.m.)

China is urbanizing at unprecedented pace - some estimates say the
urban population will grow by 300 million people in the next fifteen
- twenty years. But as cities around the country build vast new
areas, and redesign existing neighbourhoods, what kind of urban
environment is being created? Our panel of respected experts will
look at the future of the Chinese city - and whether there is any
alternative to the model of grandiose official buildings, vast
squares, car-focused CBDs, giant shopping centres and enormous
gated communities.

Venue details: Function room at Mesa/Manifesto,
748 Julu Lu, near Fumin Lu (6289 9108)

Admission: Members free; Non-members 50 RMB,

RSVP: fcc.sfcc@gmail.com by Friday January 18

About the Speaker:
Albert Speer Jnr heads one of Europe's leading architecture and urban
planning practices. Based in Frankfurt, Albert Speer and Partners has
designed urban areas around the world - the firm works widely in
Africa, and is currently involved in the regeneration of Frankfurt's
'Europa district'. It also devised the masterplan for the 2000
Hannover World Expo. In recent years AS & P has become increasingly
focused on China - it designed the original, environmentally
friendly, plans for Shanghai's Anting new town, and is currently
working on an 'auto city' project in Changchun. Professor Speer is
also a respected academic, who has shaken off the legacy of his
father's grandiose plans for the Third Reich to formulate his own
vision of the need for human-focused, sustainable planning, as
highlighted in his 1992 book The Intelligent City.

James Brearley is an Australian architect and planner whose company
BAU - Brearley Architects and Urbanists - which he runs in
partnership with his wife Fang Qun - has been working on urban design
in China since 2001. BAU has designed masterplans for new areas in
a number of large and medium-size Chinese cities, including a 12
square kilometre zone in Chengdu, and a new centre for the city of
Jiangyin. James Brearley is also an Adjunct Professor of RMIT
University of Melbourne, and co-author of the book Networks Cities,
which outlines BAU's vision for functional and sustainable urban
development. He also organises regular discussions on architecture at
BAU's office.

Sun Le and Yang Cai are editors of Urban China magazine, which
provides some of the most thoughtful analysis of China's breakneck
urbanization, and has covered a wide range of social issues since it
was launched by academics at Tongji University in 2005. The
magazine aims both to reflect the problems raised by rapid urban
development - and to educate Chinese citizens to 'understand and care
about urban planning,' and the cities in which they live.

Samsung accused of $64m art fraud

might pertain China one day...
www.theartnewspaper.com/article.asp?id=7345
Samsung accused of $64m art fraud

The conglomerate's former house attorney alleges that the chairman
set up a slush fund which his wife used to buy art

Lucian Harris | 2.1.08 | Issue 187

Contact writerEmail writer Printable versionPrint Add
commentComment Send article

LONDON. Over $64m from a slush fund set up by Lee Kun-hee, chairman
of Samsung, was allegedly used to buy art for his wife Ra Hee Hong
Lee who is director-general of the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art,
according to the Korean corporation's former house attorney. None of
the art has been exhibited in Korea and its whereabouts is presently
unknown. Samsung denies the allegations.

The National Assembly has now approved an independent investigation
into the affair. With Samsung's huge financial sponsorship of the
arts under scrutiny, many other Korean corporations have ceased
buying art until the waters settle, causing confidence in the
country's art market to plummet.

In a series of press conferences starting on 29 October, Kim Yong-
chul, head of the legal department of the Samsung Group Restructuring
Office from 1997 to 2004, unleashed a slew of allegations concerning
a $225m slush fund which he claims was kept in the accounts of
various Samsung executives and administered by the Restructuring Office.

In addition to the currying of influence in political and legal
circles, Kim alleges that the slush fund was used to purchase
millions of dollars worth of art for the chairman's wife Ra Hee Hong
Lee and other members of his family.

Kim Yong-chul's allegations focused particularly on the acquisition
of Roy Lichtenstein's Happy Tears, 1964, which sold at Christie's New
York in 2002 for $7,159,500, a record price for the artist at the time.

He said that the painting was bought at the auction on behalf of the
chairman's wife by Hong Seong-won, director of the Seoul-based Seomi
Gallery, who is believed to have handled art purchases on behalf of
the Samsung group since the 1990s. He said that Mrs Hong Lee would
regularly call the Restructuring Office to ask for funds to be wired
to the Seomi Gallery for the buying of art.

To further back his claims, on 26 November Kim Yong-chul released a
full list of the art alleged to have been bought with money from the
Samsung slush fund as well as details of payments made to Christie's.
This list, seen by The Art Newspaper, details purchases of 30
paintings and photographs allegedly made at five different sales at
Christie's, New York between 2002 and 2003 with money from the slush
fund. According to this list, in one sale alone—the post-war and
contemporary art auction on 13 November 2002—over $20m was spent on
ten works including Lichtenstein's Happy Tears ($7,159,500); Barnett
Newman's, White Fire I, 1954 ($3,859,500); David Hockney's, Portrait
of Nick Wilder, 1966 ($2,869,500); Ed Ruscha's, Desire, 1969
($1,769,500); Donald Judd's, Untitled (Ten Units), 1969 ($1,439,500);
Agnes Martin's, Untitled #4, 1980 ($1,054,500); and Gerhard
Richter's, Abstract, 1992 ($1,054,500). When the sale continued the
following morning a further $1.3m was spent on seven more paintings.

The document also details a series of 57 staggered payments made by
15 different companies between January 2002 and December 2003. Of
these, 33 were made by Seomi Gallery through banks in Seoul and New
York, while other payments were made by finance and property
companies through banks in Seoul, Hong Kong, Singapore and London.
Between 3 and 10 December 2002, over $6m was paid from ANNC Co Ltd
through two different Korean banks.

Samsung categorically denies the allegations. In a statement to The
Art Newspaper the company said: "These allegations are completely
groundless. We are cooperating fully with the current investigation."

"We understand the document that Mr Kim disclosed is a list of works
of art purchased by Seomi Gallery. Neither Mrs Hong Lee nor Samsung
Museum of Art purchased Roy Lichtenstein's Happy Tears."

"Mrs Hong Lee was invited to view the work but she decided not to
purchase it. Mrs Hong Lee has never misappropriated funds. When she
purchases works of art, she does so with her own funds. When Samsung
Museum of Art purchases works of art, it uses its own funds. The 30
works of art included on the list were not purchased by Samsung, nor
Mrs Hong Lee."

Seomi Gallery did not respond to our emails asking for comment but
according to the Chosun Ilbo newspaper, when initially questioned on
26 November it said that it had sold Happy Tears to a private collector.

However the following day, Hong Seong-won, director of Seomi Gallery,
told Korean reporters that the work was still in her possession. "I
bought it to sell in Korea but I could not find a buyer," she said.
"So I kept it and I will show it after sorting out shipping,
insurance and security." She admitted buying other works on the list
and said that she had sold them to various Korean collectors.

She also said that four works by Japanese photographer Hiroshi
Sugimoto were bought for herself.

The affair has affected confidence in the Korean art market to such
an extent that within weeks of the scandal breaking the country's two
main auction houses were reporting a 20% drop in sales.

As The Art Newspaper went to press the whereabouts of almost all of
the works on Kim's list remain a mystery.

Top

Some Olympic Imagery

at http://olympic-spirit.blogspot.com/

Mathieu Borysevicz at a Zhao Bandi fashion show

where art met fashion in shanghai. keep reading!

http://artforum.com/diary/id=19304#readon19304

"That was the first time I sat next to people who were actually
interesting at an event like this," a Shanghai fashion agent quipped
as he exited ShanghART Night, Zhao Bandi's Panda Couture fashion
extravaganza staged on a two-hour cruise up and down the neon-
splashed Huangpu River on Tuesday night. "I think it was all a little
over the top" a jaded socialite muttered as she swished coffee around
her champagne glass. As the yacht docked, the evening's VIP guests
filed slowly off into the freezing night.

Art in Propaganda or Propaganda in Art- the ultimate egg

here

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Blog It: New Wave of New Wave

Dates: Jan 19 – Mar 1, 2008
Venue: Chambers Fine Art Beijing
( Red No.1-D, Caochangdi, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100015, China)

Artists: Guo Hongwei, Tang Yi, Shi Jing, Zhang Jungang
Curator: Leo Xu





Blog it firstly appeared as a tiny button on Google’s toolbar for internet browsers. Once you click on it, you then get redirected to the editing page where what you were reading on the browser can be blogged and shared online with many others—that’s one of basic approaches of blog writing. Stemming from the private online diaries and grass-root journalism writing of the early days, blogging or blog writing has been generalized into each single aspect of individual expression in the era of Web 2.0. And in China blog—initially a western import enjoyed only by some IT elites and within quite a small circuit of netizens—has been boosted overnight by domestic portals like sina.com and in a mere couple of years has been adopted by an ever growing population ranging from celebrities, artists, and business moguls to a wider public, as an open platform to communicate with everybody else. The current function of blog involves more than news coverage, personal diary, an individual’s emotional outlet, celebrities’ online PR campaigns, tourist’s journals, and gossip, etc. Hence, blogging has been forging a new genre of writing and visual language through its worldwide participants and the off-beat presentation of text, picture, sound and video. Since blog and its Web 2.0 followers such as youtube, myspace, flickr become omnipresent either in the virtual world or in real life, those of us who are probably both bloggers and readers have to update our previous way of reading, perceiving, understanding and expression in order to catch up. And the spirit of blogging, if there is such a thing, is to define your own way of observing facts, receiving information, speaking out rather than merely running a blog.

For artists, even those not working with new media and net-art, blogging can still be inspiring and encouraging in creating a new aesthetic and narrative. The flood of online posts and updates on one single social happening can be far more mind-boggling than any complex narrative by Jorge Luis Borges. The never predictable use and manipulation of images expands the definition of kitsch and deadpan aesthetics. Today from the Internet community to ordinary citizens, it is not only language that finds itself drastically revolutionized by the spawning abbreviations and acronyms as well as Internet slang and rhetoric, but also the diversity of art and culture which is made possible with the efforts of this blogging community throughout the world. Living through this Web 2.0 age, a younger generation of Chinese artists, whether they blog or just read blogs, are thrilled to be able to speak in their own voices, whilst they may still keep learning to survive amidst tides of the refreshing aesthetics and concepts which were and probably are not shared by their precursors. Created in such a context their work seems to drop those stereotypical images anticipated or favored by the West, presumed radical symbols of a New China, big-eyed eye-candies of a short-lived cartoon-inspired generation.

To examine the art of this generation riding the Web 2.0 wave, Blog It: New Wave of New Wave chooses to showcase the latest output by emerging artists working in three traditional disciplines: photography, painting and drawing.




1. Blogger-photographer
Soon after the international art-world discovered New Chinese Photography more than ten years ago, the internet community is witnessing the undercurrent steered by many art students, non-artists or more exactly bloggers. Harbing-based blogger Zhang Jungang takes photos that look alien to the New Chinese Photography which largely serves as documentation of artists’ performance and conceptual installations. As a self-taught photographer, Zhang studied photography from the Internet, from well-informed blogs like Conscientious and artist’s blogs like Alex Soth’s. Back then around 2000, online posting of photos became quite a fashion among netizens, and many western contemporary photographers’ work happened to knock open China’s door on the net. Wolfgang Tillmans’ novelistic account of youngsters’ lifestyles, Thomas Struth’s deadpan portraits and landscapes, and Daido Moriyama’s loosely composed candid shots were all widely blogged and influenced those who later refused to follow the simple-click photoshop approach or the shooting-the-performance school, but returned instead to the very root of photography per se—release the shutter and shoot what you see. Probably without ever having seen any exhibitions by these western artists, Zhang picked up a similar lexicon through online reading and directed his lens at his hometown Harbing and China’s cosmopolitan city Shanghai where he had briefly lived. What emerged from his cameras are episodes of coming-of-age stories beautifully depicted but told in a nostalgic tone. Those photographs compensate for the void of recognizable human content in much of the prior New Photography movement and bring back to the foreground topics that had been overlooked, for example youth culture.



2. Blog on canvas/paper
Since its inception Blogging has played a supportive role in encouraging individuals to document their personal experience, if not necessarily to give a journalistic view or critique. As a result, a number of diaries and autobiographical blogs emerged and became quite a phenomenon by gaining a cult following. Nourished by this kind of blog-esque narrative, some 20ish artists started to blog on canvas, so to speak. They employ what they may encounter on the net —text or images—to assist their painterly paraphrases of their memories. Guo Hongwei is among this generation. Guo paints his found images—especially boys and girls dressed in the fashion of 1980s, the decade that coincided with his boyhood—in black and white, and then blurs some of the strokes with drops of water and oil to achieve effects reminiscent of timeworn family albums; or for many netizens, it echoes the make-it-old trend of Photoshop manipulation recurrent in many photo-blogs, a kind of internet nostalgia popular among youngsters. Unlike his paintings with a yesterday-once-more effect, Guo’s hilarious drawings are more in tune with works by his global contemporaries, be they artists or non-artists (sometimes designers and bloggers not working in art). Humorous depictions of daily objects and cartoon-like portraits of teenagers become another reincarnation of the bloggers’ life.



3. Post-cartoon generation
No one will doubt that Tang Yi could start her second career as a youtube–era video maker or animator if she chose to leave canvas and brushes for a while as her paintings draw on online images/videos and have a remarkable cinematic quality. It is easy to see how in a time when there is free access to the formerly downloading service and now new products like youtube-a full click-and-view archives of films and videos, including artists’ works, TV commercials, music videos, fans’ parodies and family videos, it might be nearly impossible to escape the influence of the deluge of images. If underground copies of manga in the 1990s gave rise to the Cartoon Generation in the early years of this decade, then today the peers of this Cartoon Generation benefit from resources in the cyber world. This generation indulges itself in seas of video clips or podcasts, with which they not only entertain themselves but also, unintentionally perhaps, achieve their own visual language. That may explain why Tang works like a contemporary Zelig, first adopting the eerie storytelling of David Lynch, then shifting to mimicking the style of Discovery and later winding up painting a Japanese animation scene.



4. Informative labyrinth
The over-saturation of information in the Web 2.0 age complicates people’s reading. A happening can end up with millions of interpretations. The blogger covers the event from his own perspective while the reader chooses his own way to see it—actually both of them are trying to find an angle to study the truth. Following the centuries long exploration of the painter-viewer relationship and ways of seeing headed by artists like Velazquez, Shi Jing goes a bit further to address the modern way of perceiving information—similar to but not necessarily affected by the Web 2.0—rather than practicing a painterly methodology. Shi paints and yet conceals images on the canvas. Su Shi (1037-1101) described how a mountain looked from differently angles as Horizontally a peak and vertically a range. Likewise, the hidden information on Shi Jing’s canvas can be only revealed if it is observed from a specific angle; otherwise, his work looks like a blank canvas covered with abstract strokes. When Shi’s version of a Rembrandt self-portrait plays peek-a-boo with viewers, the latter are involved in the identical issue raised by Web 2.0 phenomenon on studying the truth—to detect the sources of real information within the informational labyrinth.


The new wave of new wave emerging from the Chinese art scene, though not technically related to the blog, parallels the Web 2.0 trend as the latter has created a more relaxed atmosphere for young Chinese and leads to an attitude that can be properly described as blog it. In this sense, blog is a means to synchronize (a jargon in blogging) with the ever-changing world and to express yourself and make your own point.




For more information, please contact: info@chambersfineart.com.cn

Or call Tel: +86-(0)10-51273298



Is this the first entry of Beijing Art Chase? ;)

The Metamorphosing Female

Press Release
The Metamorphosing Female
----Seven Female Artists Exhibition

Osage Gallery Shanghai will hold a seven female artists exhibition "The
Metamorphosing Female" from February 29th to March 28th 2008. The
artists include Cai Jin, Cui Xiuwen, Chen Xiaodan, Sun Guojuan, Xia
jing, Geng Xue.

De Beauvoir described women as the "Second Sex", indicating that
throughout history, they have been discriminated against, persecuted,
unfairly treated, and placed by men in the relative, subordinate
category of "Other". The "female sex" is a synonym of vulnerability,
tolerance, subservience and submissiveness; however, only females can
bring warmth to the cruel world we live in, allowing our history to
move forward. It is only with their wisdom that we manage to establish
and enrich a healthy society.

As time changes, the Chinese economy develops quickly and the society
gradually matures. Females are now creating enormous amount of social
wealth, demonstrating their wisdom and ability that are just as
powerful as their male counterparts'. The change to female status means
that women no longer need to seek balance in the battle against men.
Indeed, more and more of them are starting to focus on expressions and
social stances that are based on their brand new experience as females.
As the "Second Sex" theory fades into history, female artists start to
contemplate on their own metamorphosis, their natural differences from
men, and their roles in the modern society.

People have always believed that women are creatures of emotion,
whereas men are creatures of action. This explains why men are often
portrayed as hunters, builders and soldiers, whereas women's thoughts
are said to be more closely linked to their bodies. These thoughts
might not be as abstract as men's, but are usually more relevant and
focused. Similarly, female artists have purer creative motivations,
freer imagination and more direct expressions. They have invented a
special artistic language that is different from men's: gentle,
maternal and resilient, but also with craziness and soaring energy.
This energy comes from the memory of their own metamorphosis, their
inherited responsibilities and maternal nature, as well as their
instinctive but tangled emotions. By presenting the works of these
seven female artists, we hope that The Metamorphosing Female exhibition
will bring you their personal female perspectives on, and their unique
interpretations of, reality and memory, body and spirit, and the self
and the other.

Artists: Cai Jin, Cui Xiuwen, Chen Xiaodan, Sun Guojuan, Xia jing, Geng
Xue
Curator: Yang Li
Assistant Curator: Ella Liao, Emily Cheng

Opening Party:February 29th, 2008
Exhibition Date:February 29th � March 28th 2008
Address:Osage Contemporary Art and Ideas
93 Duolun Road, Hongkou District, Shanghai
Telephone:021-56713605 Contact Person: Emily Cheng, Lucia Liu
E-mail:emilycheng@osagegallery.com
    lucialiu@osagegallery.com

www.osagegallery.com


Osage Shanghai Introduction
Osage Shanghai is an elegant space located in a beautiful 1920s
mansion adjacent to the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, in a
precinct which is set to become Shanghai's contemporary cultural hub.

Osage was established in Hong Kong in 2004 and is dedicated to the
exhibition, promotion and development of contemporary artists, art and
ideas. Osage represents some of the most outstanding artists in Asia
and works closely with a variety of internationally respected curators,
critics and art historians to present and promote exhibitions that
address fundamental global issues. The Osage exhibition spaces include
a sensational 15000 ft" warehouse space at Osage Kwun Tong, an
intimate shop-front space at Osage Soho, an innovative experimental
space at Osage Atelier Kwun Tong, a spectacular 8800 ft" space at Osage
Singapore (opening October 2007) and a versatile white-cube space at
Osage Chaoyang District. With the opening of Osage Shanghai, Asia's
largest gallery group has just grown even bigger.

Osage aims to bring to the art world new voices, new vision, new ideas
and new styles; to present art that spurs the imagination; to present
work that addresses local issues, national concerns, and universal
themes and work that celebrates diversity and difference. We aim to
celebrate the achievements of humanity together with its limitations
and failures.

FOTOFEST2008-CHINA

http://www.fotofest.org

FotoFest’s 12th edition of the International Biennial of Photography and Photo-related Art, presents work by 34 Chinese artists, March 7- April 20, 2008 in Houston, Texas. Photography from China 1934-2008 features ten newly commissioned and curated exhibitions, including two recently recovered archives from the 1930s and 1940s. The China programs are a cornerstone of FOTOFEST2008, the six-week. city-wide celebration of photo-based art.

In addition to these exhibitions, FOTOFEST2008 presents a symposium on twentieth century Chinese Photography with Chinese scholars GU Zheng, (Fudan University, Shanghai) and CAO Tai, (Guangdong Museum, Guangzhou) as well as a film program, New Cinema in China, with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Forty Chinese artists and curators will attend FOTOFEST2008, its acclaimed portfolio review for artists; the Fine Print Auction; professional workshops; and the special presentation by Hewlett-Packard (HP) of new printing technology for
art work.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Menil Collection, Houston Center for Photography and the Holocaust Museum Houston are among 100 other organizations presenting exhibitions as part of FOTOFEST2008. Many of their exhibitions continue the China focus and the ancillary subject of Transformations as well as their own independent themes.

Photography from China 1934-2008, FotoFest’s exhibition program for FOTOFEST2008, reveals the diversity of roles and styles that have shaped photographic art over the past 74 years in China.

ETHNOGRAPHY, PHOTOJOURNALISM AND PROPAGANDA, 1934-1975
Reflecting a growing interest by the Chinese in the peoples and politics of China’s western border regions near Tibet, ZHUANG Xueben (1909-1984) began traveling to China’s far-western border regions in 1934. His work from 1934-1939 is one of the earliest and most serious photographic examinations of ethnic minorities in these regions. FOTOFEST2008 is the first time this work is being shown outside of China.

In 1937, at the age of 25, Sha Fei (1912-1950) had himself assigned to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) 8th Route Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945). Sha Fei photographed combat and training with the Chinese forces allied with CHIANG Kai-shek, against the Japanese. He set up pictorial magazines to publicize the 8th Route Army and its work in rural villages, and he organized a mass media system that became a principal part of the CCP’s propaganda system for the next 20 years, through the 1970s. After Sha Fei’s controversial execution in 1950, his work was blacklisted until the late l980s when his family and colleagues succeeded in rehabilitating his name. FOTOFEST2008 exhibits the newly recovered work of Sha Fei for the first time outside of China.

Editors and photographers trained by Sha Fei during the war became leaders of major CCP pictorial news media and propaganda agencies, using photography as one of the primary media promoting Chairman MAO Zedong’s agenda during The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). The exhibition curated by James and Vicky Chen, founders of 798 Gallery, one of Beijing’s most respected photography galleries, shows how photography was choreographed to promote the message of collective solidarity. The exhibit, commissioned by FotoFest, features three photographers working for news publications during The Cultural Revolution: WENG Nai Qiang, XIAO Zuang, and WANG Shi Long.

INDEPENDENT DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHY, 1985-2000
In the mid-1980s, a new generation of Chinese photographers began to produce strong personal bodies of photo-documentary work outside official media and news agencies. The first to gain international prominence was WU Jialin with his work on Yunnan province. A chance discovery of this work by FotoFest co-founder Frederick Baldwin at Marc Riboud’s Paris apartment led to his first exhibition in Western art world at FOTOFEST1996.

Two subsequent generations of photographers continue to develop independent approaches to documentary work. LU Nan’s, interest in the ethics of social interaction, led him to photograph the institutionalization of the mentally ill and underground Catholic communities in China. LI Lang’s early poetic work with the Yi People in central-western China has led to his current work exploring the human imprint on China’s landscape.

CONCEPTUAL AND STAGED WORK - NEW PHOTO, 1993-1998
In 1996, two Beijing artists, RongRong and LIU Zheng founded the influential New Photo magazine, an independent, underground publication that circulated in Beijing’s art circles. The magazine signaled a burgeoning Chinese interest in photography as a medium of contemporary art and marked an important turning point in the development of contemporary photography in China. FOTOFEST2008 presents this new exhibition for the first time outside of China, with 15 artists published in New Photo magazine. The exhibit is curated by ZHANG Li and organized by Three Shadows Photography Art Centre
in Beijing.

CONCEPTUAL AND STAGED WORK - CURRENT PERSPECTIVES, 1998-2008
Individual shows of 11 current, multi-disciplinary Chinese artists address issues of identity, memory, spirituality, gender, urbanism, and the complex relationships between the present and the past in contemporary China. Designed as a series of one-person exhibitions, these shows feature BAI Yiluo, CANG Xin, CHENG Lingyang, XING Danwen, LIU Lijie, LIU Ren, SUN Guojuan, WANG Chuan, WU Gaozhong, YAO Lu, and ZENG Han.

For more details on FOTOFEST2008 exhibitions and other programs please visit http://www.fotofest.org

Press contacts:
Vinod Hopson – 713.223.5522 x26, press3@fotofest.org
Janice Van Dyke Walden – 713.223.5522 x12, janice@vandykewalden.com

Friday, January 18, 2008

I am eternally optimistic; I am Chinese”

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article.asp?id=7408

I am eternally optimistic; I am Chinese"

On the eve of a retrospective at the Guggenheim, Cai Guo-Qiang
discusses his materials and his potentially explosive new book

Cristina Carrilo de Albornoz | 15.1.08 | Issue 187

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Cai Guo-Qiang's Inopportune: Stage One, 2004, originally shown at
Mass MoCA in North Adams, was acquired by the Seattle Art Museum in
2006 for its new building. Another edition of the work will be
installed in the artist's retrospective at the Guggenheim next month

Cai Guo-Qiang's Inopportune: Stage One, 2004, originally shown at
Mass MoCA in North Adams, was acquired by the Seattle Art Museum in
2006 for its new building. Another edition of the work will be
installed in the artist's retrospective at the Guggenheim next month

Cai Guo-Qiang is one of the most prominent living Chinese artists.
Trained in theatre design, in 1999 he won the International Prize at
the 48th Venice Biennale. He is best known for his firework-based set-
piece installations and for drawings made using ink and gunpowder. In
November, a set of 14 untitled drawings by the artist sold at
Christie's, Hong Kong, for £9.5m ($19.1m)—setting a new record for a
Chinese contemporary artist at auction. Next month the Guggenheim in
New York, will host Cai's first major retrospective, "I Want to
Believe". The show will coincide with the publication of a limited
edition, potentially

self-combusting book (nine copies only) entitled Danger Book: Suicide
Fireworks, published by Ivory Press and personally annotated by the
artist. Cai is currently also serving as artistic director of visual
and special effects for the Beijing Olympics this summer alongside
film-makers Steven Spielberg and Zhang Yimou who are artistic
consultants. His compatriot, artist Ai Weiwei who collaborated on the
design of the Olympic "bird's nest" stadium in Beijing with Swiss
architects Herzog & de Meuron, has now disassociated himself from the
event, referring to China's "disgusting" political conditions. Cai
declined to answer our questions about Ai Weiwei's statement or the
growing international lobby for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics

in protest at the human rights abuses within China and the regime's
support for the

Sudanese government.

The Art Newspaper: Your retrospective at the Guggenheim is called "I
Want to Believe". What does it refer to?

Cai Guo-Qiang: The title is based on my childhood curiosity. I
doubted everything,

but underneath I had a sort of expectation

and aspiration.

TAN: Your father was a historian and landscape painter who also
practised calligraphy. Did you emulate him in your youth?

CG-Q: I was more of a rebellious type. As a teenager I was immersed
in martial arts and even starred in some kung fu films. At the same
time my father introduced me to 5,000 years of Chinese poetry,
paintings and literature at a time when the [Communist] Party forbade
it. I understood quickly the value of the underground. I was always
very unwilling to align myself to any particular group. My peers were
producing politically pointed Pop paintings and installations. I
refused western influences and hiked to northwest China near Tibet,
visiting archaeological sites, studying nature and painting portraits
of people I met.

TAN: What was your idea of an artist?

CG-Q: When I was a child, the Chinese government did not allow
citizens to buy flowers because it was a very bourgeois thing, but
since my hometown of Guangzhou was far from the capital, I could buy
flowers from farmers and go home and paint them. I associated this
bourgeois act with being an artist. I didn't want a nine-to-five job.
I wanted to live freely.

TAN: In China you started experimenting with gunpowder in the making
of art. Was this a way of expressing yourself with no fears or limits?

CG-Q: Gunpowder is a spontaneous, unpredictable and uncontrollable
medium. The more you learn to control it, the more obsessed you
become with the material. It is like making love with your husband or
wife. The outcome is unpredictable and the same results are never
guaranteed. Furthermore, in using gunpowder

I can explore all my concerns: the relation to notions of
spirituality as well as an interest in spectacle and entertainment,
and the transformation of certain energies—such as violent explosions—
into beauty and a kind of poetry. An artist should be like an
alchemist using poison against poison, which is very much a
philosophy from Chinese medicine. Turning something bad into
something good…countering the force. It's the whole idea of the
alchemist, using dirt, dust, and getting gold out of it. From
gunpowder, from its very essence, you can see so much of the power of
the universe—how we came to be. You can express these grand ideas
about the cosmos.

TAN: Did using gunpowder allow you more creative freedom?

CG-Q: Initially I began working with gunpowder to foster spontaneity
and confront the controlled artistic traditions and social climate in
China at the time. Using gunpowder and making burn drawings were an
extension of my childhood dream of being a painter. Also from my
childhood I remember the sound of fireworks going off. In my
hometown, every significant social occasion of any kind, good or bad—
weddings, funerals, the birth of a baby, a new home—is marked by the
use of fireworks. They even use fireworks when they elect Communist
party officials, or after someone delivers a speech. Fireworks are
like the town crier, announcing whatever's going on. I also remember
the sound of artillery fire from a nearby army base directed at
Taiwan. Gunpowder in Chinese means "fire-medicine", it's potentially
therapeutic.

TAN: In 1986 you moved to Japan. Did you find greater artistic
freedom there?

CG-Q: In Japan I did find and enjoy artistic freedom, but the catch
is that you still need to be given the opportunity to do so. The
contrast between China and Japan is that in China, it was easy to
access materials—such as gunpowder—but there was less artistic
freedom. In Japan, there was more freedom, but the materials were
harder to find.

TAN: Since 1995 you have lived mainly in New York. What have you
learned in that city? You still do not speak much English after all
this time. Would it not help you to integrate?

CG-Q: New York is like a global square where I have the possibility
of running into my friends from all corners of the world at any time.
Not being able to speak English has been one of the biggest
frustrations of my life.

TAN: Why did you move there?

CG-Q: The opportunity that brought me to New York was a grant from
the Asian Cultural Council to participate in a year-long residency at
PS1 Contemporary Art Centre, as a representative

of Japan.

TAN: Your Guggenheim exhibition will travel to Beijing to coincide
with the Olympic Games, where you are in charge of visual and special
effects. What themes will be presented in the opening ceremony and
how do you define the role of an artist in the Olympic Games? What
are your priorities?

CG-Q: It's not an easy undertaking, but it's absolutely necessary.
The Olympics combine the entire country's efforts, and can do a lot
of previously unimaginable things. You can display your work in front
of an audience of billions, but at the same time it can feel like
you're making the work for yourself. Through this event, one can
contemplate and better understand what "Chinese culture" is. One
needs to think about the past, present, and future of China and its
relationship with the world. You can use this platform to tackle the
topics of ritual and ceremony. In brief, it can be an opportunity for
self-growth.

TAN: How tolerant and supportive are the authorities towards the new
cultural and artistic boom?

CG-Q: The higher the level of the official, the broader their vision
becomes. They tend to pursue newer things and are more ambitious and
tolerant to new culture than their subordinates. The Chinese
government has changed more drastically than it appears to the
outside world.

TAN: Do you recognise the so-called new China that everybody is
taking about, where changes are taking place at such great speed?

CG-Q: This new China is not changing that fast, and it's not that
serious a problem.

TAN: You are a consummate experimentalist who has combined
traditional materials and methods from the east (from the historical
and living cultural traditions of both China and Japan) with
strategies from western art history. How important are these Chinese
traditions for you?

CG-Q: Just like western art is important to westerners, Chinese
traditions are important to me. However, while they are my origins
and foundation, they are not my main purpose in making contemporary
art. The main purpose in making art is to have fun and to redefine
the nature of objects. Where are the limits when an object becomes a
work of art? Making contemporary art can throw up obstacles but it
does not worry me. I am eternally optimistic;

I am Chinese.

TAN: Your new book, published by Ivory Press, is called Danger Book:
Suicide Fireworks. Why?

CG-Q: It goes beyond what is traditionally regarded as a book. It's
more an art object containing drawings and gunpowder paintings. It
will be on display at the Guggenheim in a special chapel. It is a
book that fuses the opponents, life and death, with the ephemeral
value of beauty.

TAN: But a danger to what?

CG-Q: I used gunpowder to draw pretty images of fireworks, but
included in the design is the possibility of committing suicide. If
the owner pulls the string that is attached to a bundle of matches,
it ignites the gunpowder on the pages and explodes the book. Even if
the owner does not pull the string, there will always be the
potential for danger and thus he or she will always have a dangerous
relationship with

the book.

TAN: What was your biggest concern at the making of it ?

CG-Q: I wanted to make something that was hard to possess permanently.

TAN: Is discipline the foundation of your life?

CG-Q: Perhaps it's because I am disciplined that I chose gunpowder as
a medium.

TAN: In your work, you deal constantly with the ephemeral. One year
of work can disappear in 15 seconds. Do you ever feel frustrated by
this?

CG-Q: I feel good with the volatile nature

of gunpowder; I am looking for the unchanging through the always
changing. Nature always changes but the fact of change—or evolution—
never does. I also associate it with the discipline and spontaneity
of calligraphy, that most honoured Chinese art form. In calligraphy
the artist is a "perpetual amateur". This is the model

I identify with as an artist. n

Translation by Alicia Lu and Anni Lin

Biography

Born: Guangzhou, China, 1957. Lives in New York

Education: Shanghai Drama Institute

Selected solo shows. 2006: Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin 2005:
Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh 2004: Massachusetts Museum of
Contemporary Art 2003: Asia Society, New York

Coming up: "I Want to Believe" retrospective, Guggenheim Museum, New
York, February-May

ShContemporary director may have to step down

http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article.asp?id=7431

Organisers of Chinese fair are discussing Pierre Huber's future

Georgina Adam | 15.1.08 | Issue 187

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LONDON. According to a source close to the fair organisers, the
Geneva dealer Pierre Huber may be forced to resign as artistic
director of ShContemporary, which launched in Shanghai in September
with 120 dealers.

Mr Huber is involved in a legal dispute with the Parisian dealer
Enrico Navarra (The Art Newspaper, November 2007, p69), who has
accused Mr Huber of numerous conflicts of interest. Mr Navarra cites
the ShContemporary catalogue cover which features a work of art from
Mr Huber's own gallery. He also says Mr Huber accompanied VIPs to
artists' studios in Shanghai and then suggested purchases should be
made through him.

Mr Huber's lawyer says Mr Navarra "owes Mr Huber money", which
accounts for the allegations.

Mr Navarra acknowledges he is in dispute with Mr Huber over the
purchase of around 30 works of art by Chinese artists, in which he
invested around $1.5m. Both men have filed lawsuits against each other.

Lorenzo Rudolf, co-founder of the ShContemporary fair and a previous
director of Art Basel, says: "We cannot have a situation where the
artistic director of a fair has a conflict of interest." But he
denies that Mr Huber will be asked to step down. "No decision has
been taken, but we are in discussions to resolve this matter," he says.

"I think it is important to keep ethical in this business. There
should be boundaries between the commercial and the artistic at the
major fairs. Pierre Huber is a great person but there is a line you
should never cross," says Olivier Bélot of Yvon Lambert, which
exhibited in Shanghai.

However, others agree with Mr Huber's lawyers. "This would never have
happened without the Navarra affair," says Lorenzo Fiaschi, director
of Galleria Continua, which also exhibited at ShContemporary.

"If Pierre Huber leaves, I'm not sure if I will go back there and I
think others won't either. He has in-depth specialist knowledge of
the Chinese market, and he is a guarantee of the high artistic
quality of the fair," said Ursula Krinzinger of Krinzinger, another
ShContemporary exhibitor. "It will only benefit the Beijing fair [Art
Beijing takes place from 6 to 9 September 2008]. All the major fairs
are set up by dealers," says Ms Krinzinger. At the time of going to
press, Mr Huber had not responded to repeated requests for a comment.

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