CHINESE CONTEMPORARY ART ON YOUTUBE

http://youtube.com/watch?v=I7WkPByOS4Y

u like it

Final

Ai Wei Wei:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZihwS3LuO-Y

Contemporary ART - A selection of interviews by Matt, Grace, Helena

Opening schedule for Synthetic times-mEDIA ART CHINA 2008

6月2日—6月4日
展厅搭建
June 2 –June 4,
Gallery Construction

6月5日—6月9日
展览布展
June 5 – June 9
Installation

6月8日
June 8
晚6点30pm, 见面欢迎会
6:30pm, Meet the friends - Welcome Cocktail Reception
地 点： 王府井大饭店
Venue: Wangfujing Grand Hotel

6月9日
June 9
下午3点，新闻会／媒体预展
3pm Press Conference / Media Preview
地 点： 中国美术馆
Venue： NAMOC

下午5点，展览开幕及酒会
5pm Synthetic Times Official Opening / Cocktail
Reception
地 点： 中国美术馆
Venue： NAMOC

晚上7点， 开幕式：Ars 动漫艺术节， 奥地利林茨电
子艺术中心 (Ars Electronica Linz)，
国际新人录像观摹展，欧洲媒体艺术节（European
Media Art Festival）

7pm Opening: Animation Festival, Ars Electronica Linz;
Internatioanl Emerging
Video Art, European Media Art Festival
地 点： 北京皇城艺术馆
Venue： Beijing Art Museum of Imperial City

晚上8点，中国美术馆开幕晚宴（仅凭请柬）
8:00pm Opening Dinner (By NAMOC Invitation Only)

地 点： 娃哈哈大酒店一层
Venue： Ground floor at Wahaha Restaurant (near NAMOC)

6月10日
June 10
下午5点—8点，游离的边界 展览开幕式暨"阿拉里奥
之夜" （仅凭请柬）
5 -8pm Opening: Between the Light and the Dark and
"Arario Evening" Event (By Arario Invitation Only)

地 点： 酒厂艺术区阿拉里奥画廊
Venue： Arario Gallery

6月11日
June 11
下午5：30－9：30pm"瑞士之夜"－瑞士文化基金会专
场（仅凭请柬）
5:30 -9:30Pm Swiss Evening (By Prohelvetia Invitation Only)
地 点： 中国美术馆
Venue： Namoc

公共教育项目

EDUCational programs

地 点：中国美术馆
时 间：6月10日
VENUE: THE NATIONAL ART MUSEUM OF CHINA
Time: June 10 th

1. 圆桌讨论：未来的现在或现在的未来
时 间：上午10：00—11：30
地 点：中国美术馆7层学术报告厅
主持人：张尕，本展览策展人/艺术总监

Round Table Discussion: The Future of the Present or the Present of
the Future
Time: 10am – 11:30am
Venue: 7th floor, Academic hall at NAMOC
Moderated by Zhang Ga, Artistic Director / Curator, Synthetic Times

Fan Di'an (Director, NAMOC, China)/ 范迪安，中国美术馆馆长
Li Lei (Director of Shanghai Art Museum)/李磊，上海美术馆馆长
Wang Huangsheng (Director of Guangdong Art Museum)/王璜生，广东
美术馆馆长
Xu Jiang (President of China Academy of fine arts)/ 许江，中国
美术学院院长
Xu Bing (Vice President / Artist, Central Academy of Fine Arts,
China)/徐冰，中央美术学院副院长/艺术家
Zhang Qing (Deputy Director of Shanghai Art Museum)/张晴，上海
美术馆副馆长
Zhang Peili (Director of New Media Arts Department at China Academy
of fine arts)/张培力，中国美术学院新媒体艺术系主任
Wu Meichun (Associate professor, Research Department of China Academy
of fine arts)/吴美纯，中国美术学院研究部副教授
Shen Qibin (Director of Shanghai ZendaiMoMA)/沈其斌，上海证大
美术馆馆长
Marianne Burki (Director of Visual Art Department of Swiss Arts
Council Pro Helvetia)/瑞士文化基金会视觉艺术部主管
Alex Adriaansens (Director, V2, The Netherlands)/V2，荷兰多媒体
协会主任
Christine Schoepf (Co-Artistic Director, Ars Electronica Linz) /奥
地利林茨电子艺术中心艺术总监
Kelli Dipple (New Media Art Curator, Tate, UK)/英国泰特美术馆
新媒体艺术策展人
Barbara London (Media Curator, MoMA, US)/纽约现代艺术博物馆
媒体艺术策展人
Alfred Rotert (Director, EMAF, Germany)/德国欧洲媒体艺术节
主任
Mike Stubbs (Director, FACT, UK)/ 英国艺术与创新技术基金
会主任
Kim Machan (Director, MAAP, Australia)/澳大利亚亚太多媒体主任
Lars Spuybroek (Principle, NOX / Lars Spuybroek, The Netherlands)/
荷兰建筑公司主建筑师

2. 艺术家会谈
时 间：下午1：30—2：30
艺术家：Stelarc、Anthony McCall、蔡文颍，各20分钟

Artist talk (NAMOC)
Time: 1:30pm -2:30pm
Stelarc, 20 minutes
Anthony McCall, 20 minutes
Tsai Wenyin, 20 minutes

3. 艺术家讲座
时 间：下午3：00—4：30
艺术家：缪晓春、Yves Netzhamme、Lars Spuybroek各20分钟

Artist talk (NAMOC)
Time: 3pm – 4:30pmpm
Miao Xiaochun, 20 minutes
Yves Netzhammer, 20 minutes
Lars Spuybroek, 20 minutes

地 点：中央美术学院设计学院报告厅
时 间：6月10日
主持人：马刚，中央美术学院设计学院 副院长

Venue: Lecture Hall Of School Of Design, Central Academy Of
Fine Arts
Time: June 10th
Moderated by Prof. Ma Gang, Vice Dean, School of Design, Central
Academy of Fine Arts

1. 新媒体艺术的活力，第一部分
上海电子艺术节的特别项目
时 间：上午10：00—11：30

The Vitality of New Media Art - Part I
- A special program organized by Shanghai eArt Festival
Time: 10:00am -11:30am

2. 艺术家演示
时 间：下午1：30—3：00
艺术家：etoy、Knowbotic Research、Edwin van der Heide各20分钟

Artist Talk
etoy, 20 minutes
Knowbotic Research, 20 minutes
World Theater, 20 minutes
Edwin van der Heide, 20 minutes

Time: 1:30 -3:00pm

3. 艺术家演示
时 间：下午3：30—5：00
艺术家：David Rokeby、Paula Geatano、吴珏辉、Marnix de
Niijs各20分钟

Artist Talk
David Rokeby, 20 minutes
Paula Geatano, 20 minutes
Wu Juehui, 20 minutes
Marnix de Niijs, 20 minutes

Time: 3:30pm -5pm

地 点：清华大学美术学院学术报告厅
时 间：6月10日
主持人：鲁晓波，清华大学艺术与科学研究中心 副
所长

Venue: Lecturre Hall, Academy Of Arts And Design, Tsinghua University
Time: June 10th
Moderated by Prof. Lu Xiaobo, Deputy Director, Art and Science
Research Center Tsinghua University

1. 艺术家演示
时 间：上午10：00—11：30
艺术家：Exonemo、Christopher Hildebrand、Sissel Tolaas、AL +
AL各20分钟

Artist Talk
Exonemo, 20 minutes
Christopher Hildebrand, 20 minutes
Sissel Tolaas, 20 minutes
AL + AL , 20 minutes

Time: 10am – 11:30am

2. 艺术家演示
时 间：下午1：30—3：00
艺术家：Chico MacMurtrie、Marek Walczak、Luc Courchesne、Keith
Armstrong各20分钟

Artist Talk
Chico MacMurtrie, 20 minutes
Marek Walczak, 20 minutes
Luc Courchesne, 20 minutes
Keith Armstrong, 20 minutes

Time; 1:30pm – 3:00pm

3. 新媒体艺术的活力，第二部分
上海电子艺术节的特别项目
时 间：下午3：30——5：00

The Vitality of New Media Art - Part II
- A special program organized by Shanghai eArt Festival
Time: 3:30pm – 5pm

工 作 坊

Workshops

工作坊1：
纽约帕森斯学院在中央美术学院（DIY—无线）
地点：中央美术学院媒体工作室
时间：6月8日

Workshop 1
Parsons at CAFA (DIY – Wireless)
Venue: New media art studio at Central Academy of Fine Arts
Time: June 8

工作坊2：
Etoy在清华大学美术学院
地点：清华大学美术学院学术报告厅
时间：6月15日

Workshop 2
etoy at Tsinghua University
Venue: Academic hall at Academy of Art and Design, Tsinghua University
Time: June 15

讲 座

Lectures

1. 主讲：Oliver Grau
地点：清华大学美术学院
时间：6月11日下午3pm

Oliver Grau
Venue: Tsinghua University
Time: 11TH June, 6:30pm

2. 主讲：Erkki Huhtamo
地点：中央美术学院设计学院报告厅
时间：6月11日下午 3PM (待确认)

Erkki Huhtamo
Venue: Lecture hall of School of Design at Central Academy of Fine Arts
Time: 11TH June, 3pm(TBC)

奥地利林茨电子艺术中心

和BASIS WIEN联合项目

地 点：北京皇城艺术馆
时 间：2008年6月10日—11日
主持人：李振华, 本次展览制作总监
A JOINT EVENT OF ARS ELECTRONICA LINZ AND BASIS WIEN
Venue: Beijing Art Museum of the Imperial City (BAMOIC)

Time: June 10 and 11, 2008
Moderated by Mr. Li Zhenhua, Project manager / Producer, Synthetic
Times-Media Art China 2008

第一部分：
时间：6月10日下午2：00—6：00
艺术实践在过去30年里不断改变：许多艺术家已不再
独立创作，艺术家特别是媒体艺术家与技术人员、程
序员、科学家和理论家一起创作，出现了诸多灵感激
发的合作。在艺术和艺术市场已经走向全球化的今
天，西方艺术界和中国艺术界如何应对在文化全球化
时代中的新环境？应对东西方艺术创作、策展、文件
和档案保存时应采用什么样的新策略? 这些是奥地利
林茨电子艺术中心和BASIS WIEN希望与艺术家、策展人
和艺术档案研究者在6月10日和11日的两个小组讨论中
讨论的议题。

PART I
June 10, 2 – 6 pm
Artistic practices have changed within the last 30 years: Many
artists are not working alone anymore, the artist and specially the
media artist is working together with technicians, programmers,
scientists, theoreticians, more and more inspiring collaboratives are
being founded. Art - and the art market - have gone global. How do
Western and Chinese players in the art field deal with these new
conditions of production in the era of cultural globalization? Which
new strategies does this imply for the production, curation and
documentation & archiving of art in East and West?
These are the questions Ars Electronica Linz and basis wien want to
discuss with artists, curators and archivists in two panels on June
10 + 11, 2008.

1，如何教授新媒体课程？
Marie Luise Angerer (DE, teacher, curator)/德国，教授、策展人
冯梦波， 中国， 艺术家

How To Teach New Media Art

Marie Luise Angerer (DE, teacher, curator)
Feng Mengbo (CN, artist)

2，如何创作新媒体艺术
龚彦，中国，策展人、艺术家
Kurt Hentschläger (AT, artist) ， 奥地利，艺术家
冯梦波， 中国，艺术家

How To Make New Media Art
Gong Yan (CN, curator, artist)
Kurt Hentschläger (AT, artist)
Feng Mengbo (CN, artist)

3， 如何选择新媒体艺术
Christine Schoepf (AT, co-founder & artistic director of Ars
Electronica)奥地利，奥地利林茨电子艺术中心创建人，
艺术总监
李振华，中国，艺术家、策展人
Katja Kwastek (AT, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research,
researcher) 奥地利，媒体艺术研究中心，研究员

How To Select New Media Art
Christine Schoepf (AT, co-founder & artistic director of Ars
Electronica)
Li Zhenhua (CN, artist, curator)
Katja Kwastek (AT, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research,
researcher)

第二部分：
时间：6月11日下午2：00—6：00

为什么记录和存档艺术？艺术存档和记录会创建"明
天的艺术史"？他们在帮艺术家曝光更多？电子存档
的持久性如何？在全球语境中，不同文化环境的新的
艺术创作条件下，艺术存档和记录有什么不同？谁在
记录和存档艺术？公众社团？机构？或者艺术家本人
应该自己存档？谁来决定记录和存档什么？

如何记录和存档新媒体艺术？
With Katja Kwastek (AT, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research
Linz) 奥地利，奥地利林茨媒体艺术研究
李媚，中国，中央美术学院
李振华，中国，艺术家、策展人
Barbara London ， 美国，纽约现代艺术美术馆，策展人
Lioba Reddeker ，奥地利， basis wien
Angelica D. Schmitt ，德国，新媒体理论家
Christine Schoepf，奥地利，奥地利林茨电子艺术中心创
建人，艺术总监
Marianne Burki ，/瑞士文化基金会视觉艺术部主管
张兰生，中国/澳大利亚，皇家墨尔本理工大学兼职
教授

PART II
June 11, 2 – 6 pm
Why to archive and document art? Do archives and documentations
create the »art history of tomorrow«? Do they give more visibility
to artists? What about the sustainability of (digital) archives?
What does »archiving & documenting« of art mean in different
cultural traditions, in the global context and under new production
conditions?
Who is archiving & documenting? The community? Or institutions? Or
should the artist practice self-archiving? Who decides about what
should be archived?

How To Document & Archive (New Media) Art
With Katja Kwastek (AT, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research
Linz)
Li Mei (CN, Chinese National Academy of Arts)
Li Zhenhua (CN, artist, curator)
Barbara London (US; MOMA New York)
Lioba Reddeker (AT, basis wien)
Angelica D. Schmitt ( DE, media theorist )
Christine Schoepf (AT, co-founder & artistic director of Ars
Electronica)
Marianne Burki, Director of Visual Art Department of Swiss Arts
Council Pro Helvetia
Zhang Lansheng (CN / AU, RMIT University)

Shanghai Art Museum to donate their seven day ticket sales to Sichuan

 Shanghai Art Museum to donate their seven day ticket sales

 Li Lei, director of the Shanghai Art Museum Executive announced yesterday, the museum June 2 to 8 seven days of all ticket sales will be donated to the earthquake-stricken area. In this period of seven days, the Shanghai Museum of Fine Arts Exhibition is an important first "Wenchuan 2008 --- Shanghai photographers to Wenchuan earthquake photo exhibition."

Shanghai, the exhibition brings together dozens of mainstream print media to interview the cameraman filming the disaster areas of more than 100 works, reflects both the brutality of the disaster, people in the disaster areas also reflected the strong and Junjing Min Yi Tiaoxin the moving scene.  To the disaster area photographer Shi Jianping, Ma Jun, Yang Lei and also "This is Love" and other works more than 10 exhibitors.

Mr. Four Fingers

Last week I went and saw the Sheng Qi "History in Black and Red" show at the Andrew James Art Gallery. Looking back at the images I took at the show along with reading the catalogue of the work, I still am not sure how I feel about the work. I was recently printing some photographs at a studio, and noticed a young man picking up his work. They laid out these very nice large scale black and white prints, but then I noticed that he had photo shopped the one part of the image, for instance a house, and made it blue. It was awful and amusing at the same time.  I have seen much of this done here while living in China, and if Sheng Qi is incorporating these ideas into this series then I think it works. 

On the other hand I am tired of all the drips. It has been way over done recently, and Sheng Qi's series is no different. The newspaper images of the Communist Revolution and Mao, seem repetitive and overplayed. I want to see something new, such as the works  of the women officers holding the 100 kuai bills. 

In the end "History in Black and Red" was worth seeing, but fell short of my expectations. I think the work was so close to being good, but something is off for me, I'm lost in the drips...

Art Fairs

Remembering Rauschenberg.

American Inventor

Remembering Rauschenberg.

    * By Jerry Saltz

Robert Rauschenberg was not a giant of American art; he was the giant. No American created so many aesthetic openings for so many artists. Jasper Johns, his sometime lover, said, "Rauschenberg was the man who in this century invented the most since Picasso." His output always bordered on the mad and ecstatic; his art could be theatrical, wan, redundant, or just cruddy-looking. In fact, everything he made, good or bad—and many think his late work is junk—has an edge of wit, optical nerve, and invention.

Sometimes those qualities could be almost invisible, as in his 1953 Erased de Kooning Drawing, which is exactly what the title says. In this page of faint smudges, Rauschenberg stumbled onto kryptonite. He'd rocked the boat of Abstract Expressionism and set out toward the more populist shores of art. (It's touching and telling that de Kooning gave the drawing to Rauschenberg, knowing what the young artist intended.) This ritualistic killing, however aggressive or loving, gives you a sense of how desperate Rauschenberg and his generation were. They wanted to move on from high-minded heroism to something more vernacular. Rauschenberg seemed to make it all possible.

A year later, saying he "had literally run out of things to paint on," Rauschenberg invented a new form, the combine. Not quite painting, not quite sculpture, it was for him like discovering fire. He began to use everything from bedding to doors to parachutes. One combine, Monogram, features a stuffed goat encircled by a tire atop a horizontal painting. Rauschenberg is a mischievous Satyr grazing on art history, or the goat is a gargoyle protecting the art. Either way, the title suggests that Rauschenberg was leaving his mark.

That mark has lasted. Large swaths of the current Whitney Biennial owe him a huge debt. Yet as young artists are still expanding on the idea of the combine, by the late fifties Rauschenberg had tired of it, and he went on to another new technique: using a solvent to transfer images from one surface to another. He used this low-tech, ethereal process to make his set of luminous illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy. Here, Dante and Virgil are athletes out of Sports Illustrated; Olympic weight lifters stand in for giants in the eighth circle of Hell; astronauts are the sinners. It is one of the most visually literate works ever made, by one of the most articulate artists who ever lived.

I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, "the ability to conceive failure as progress." Most of all, I love him for his fecundity and fearlessness.

Artforum- Sean Keller on the BEIJING OLYMPIC GAMES

Summer 2008

Beijing Olympics

THE OLYMPIC GAMES as we know them were born out of a late-nineteenth-century marriage of classical mythology and political science fiction. They decree that every four years all the nations of the world will set aside their political struggles and come together to compete in proxy battles of sport; everyone will watch. Yet such a premise naively denies both the relentlessness of politics and the equally irrepressible need for political power to be represented, to be made into images. Having stubbornly refused to follow their script, the modern Olympics stand in collective memory as a series of political—not athletic—events: Berlin '36 (Nazis), Mexico '68 (murdered protesters and censured Black Power salutes), Munich '72 (Middle Eastern terrorism), Montreal '76 (boycott against apartheid), Moscow '80 (boycott against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), Los Angeles '84 (boycott against the previous boycott), and now, controversial already, Beijing '08.

As the latest addition to this lineage, Beijing '08 presents a new variety of Olympic propaganda, one that reflects the ambiguities of the post–cold war world. Like its present mixture of socialism and capitalism, the Chinese government's motivations for hosting the games are apparently contradictory. Beijing competed for the Olympics in order to stage a coming-out party as a global superpower, but it simultaneously needs to demonstrate that this power is benign (in both geopolitical and environmental terms). The games have thus become a very public test for the complex compromises that define contemporary China as it faces serious internal and external pressures.

The context for this global examination will be a massively reshaped Beijing. Since the decline of World Expositions, the Olympics have provided a unique opportunity for political representation on an international scale; and for host cities such as Beijing, they are primarily an architectural and urban-planning event—the physical environment serving as the medium for the host's message. At the level of domestic politics, the games provide an excuse for otherwise unrealizable civic acts, as the neutral forms of the fields, tracks, and pools become embedded in a field of ideologically charged urban design.

Given Beijing's desire to send a global welcome message via its orchestration of sport, spectacle, and architecture, and given its own history of occupation by Japan, one of the Axis powers in World War II, it seems scarcely believable that the name behind its new urban plan is Albert Speer—son of Albert Speer (himself the son of an Albert Speer). Immediately, one must say that the current Speer has had a long and respectable career as an architect and urban planner, and that he appears guilty of nothing more than choosing the same profession as his infamous father. Yet more than the name has provoked comparisons to Berlin circa 1936. Like the grandiose scheme envisioned by his father for Hitler's Berlin, Speer's plan for Beijing is organized around a monumental north-south axis anchored by a large new train station. The correlation is certainly tempting. But again, one must resist and acknowledge that, historically, the monumental axis is so widespread as an urban device, and has been hitched to such a range of political wagons, that it would be a mistake to assign any inherent political "meaning" to the grand axis in abstracto.

Speer himself rejects the comparison to Berlin and emphasizes the deep Chinese roots of his plan. Drawing on centuries of tradition, it reasserts and extends the axis of the Forbidden City, which, after the end of imperial rule in 1911, was progressively weakened in favor of the east-west axis of Chang'an Avenue—itself a highly symbolic new "axis of the people" elaborated by both Republican and Communist governments. But even within this specific context, an assessment of the master plan remains elusive. What value to give to the decision by the current leaders of the Communist Party to reject their own urban planning legacy and return to the imperial axis? Is it, as Speer has claimed, a progressive renewal of the traditions of the Chinese people? Or is it a repackaging of the party's power in the guise of the historical authority it once claimed to reject?

Perhaps more telling than the return to the imperial axis is the manner of its extension, and here the historical comparisons are useful. If axiality has traditionally been used as an unambiguous sign of centralized power, in contemporary Beijing the symbolic effect has been deliberately tempered. The Beijing planners are using the axis as a fundamental principle, and at a vast scale, but—through displacements, asymmetries, and curvilinear landscape elements—they have modulated its northern extension as it passes through the Olympic Green and dissolves into a large park (the Green is the work of US-based Sasaki Associates). The urban effect is "soft power" on a grand scale. The dilemma this raises—and it is a fundamental problem in thinking about China today—is whether it is better to deal with an autocratic political system that clearly represents itself as autocratic, or with an autocratic political system that partially dissimulates itself with gestures toward openness.

Practically, the rebuilding of the city has been achieved through the application of unambiguously "hard" power. The Chinese government has admitted to displacing fifteen thousand residents; human rights groups estimate the actual number may be as high as 1.5 million. Much of the city's traditional urban fabric, based on the narrow alleys called hutongs, has been demolished to make way for the modern hotels, apartment buildings, offices, and parks that the government wants as a backdrop for the games; and in the frenzied sweep of construction equipment many historical sites have been unearthed and built over faster than they can be recorded.

Click to enlarge

PTW Architects, China State Construction Engineering Corporation, Arup, National Aquatics Center, 2003–2008, Beijing. Interior. Photo: PTW Architects.

At the scale of individual buildings, the Chinese Olympic committee has chosen to sponsor the most advanced forms of international architecture. Flanking the central axis near the park are the architectural icons of the Beijing games: the National Stadium, designed by Swiss stars Herzog & de Meuron, and the National Aquatics Center, by a partnership of Australia-based PTW Architects and the Chinese group CSCEC (China State Construction Engineering Corporation). Both buildings have involved substantial collaboration with Arup, the engineering powerhouse behind so many famous new buildings. Better known by their popularizing nicknames the "Bird's Nest" and the "Watercube," the two projects—a bowl of steel bands and a box of blue bubbles—are examples of the particularly effective soft-power tactic of naturalization: the ascription of natural qualities to man-made entities. By describing architecture in terms of nature, naturalization can make design choices seem both inevitable and neutral. In Olympic history, the precedent for this approach is again German. Given the terrible legacy of Berlin '36, Munich '72 faced the difficult problem of creating a nonthreatening national monumentality. It solved this representational conundrum with a "landscape" of enormous tentlike roofs developed by Frei Otto and based on the forms taken by soap films in tension—forms that seemed to represent nothing more than the laws of nature.

Soap bubbles are back for Beijing '08 at the National Aquatics Center—and with a similar rationale. This complex building is essentially a large hollow box carved out of a foam of giant "bubbles," each roughly ten feet in diameter. More precisely, the bubbles are twelve- and fourteen-sided polyhedrons packed together in a regular three-dimensional array. Their arrangement is based on a recently discovered solution to the problem of efficiently dividing space into cells of equal volume (like bubbles in an ideal foam). In the Aquatics Center, this geometry is embodied in twenty-two thousand steel members that mark the edges of the polyhedrons. On the exterior and interior faces of the building the edges are spanned by thin sheets of plastic, creating a deep, sealed envelope of space around the perimeter. This perimeter is slightly pressurized, causing the sheets to bulge like hundreds of taut balloons and turning the building into an energy-efficient greenhouse. According to the designers, the building is both environmentally responsible and conceptually tied to natural forms such as crystals, cells, and, of course, water bubbles.

Engineers and architects have long taken cues from nature, but one aspect marks the Aquatics Center as a particularly contemporary design, suited to the contradictory demands of Beijing '08. Although the ideal "bubble" array itself is entirely regular and repetitious, the volume that the Watercube cuts through this array has been arbitrarily rotated on all three axes. The result is that the array appears to be irregular as it reaches the exterior and interior faces of the Aquatics Center. This choice can only have been driven by representational desires, since it greatly complicates the construction process. Even from the point of view of representation, it would have been an unthinkable decision until just the past decade or two. Rather than celebrating the well-ordered solution to the efficiency problem on which the building is based, the architects have willfully skewed and sliced it in order to suggest a pseudonaturalistic disorder. The widely publicized blue face of the Watercube is, then, a disarming mask for the thoroughly optimized and repetitious array that lies behind.

Herzog & de Meuron's "Bird's Nest" National Stadium is technically less advanced than the Aquatics Center—but architecturally more ambitious. Collabo­rating with Chinese art star Ai Weiwei and the Chinese Architectural Design & Research Group, the Pritzker Prize–winning firm conceived a monolithic concrete bowl that seats ninety-one thousand, resting within and partially beneath a saddle-shaped lid formed by an irregular weave of steel bands. To explain the project, Herzog & de Meuron have offered two principal metaphors. First, the firm relates the overall form of the stadium to that of a Shang dynasty vessel, suggesting that, although entirely contemporary, the stadium also draws on the ancient traditions of Chinese art. This metaphor expresses the desire for an "archaic" form that would overcome the hodgepodge of ticket gates, snack shops, and Jumbotrons that make up a typical contemporary stadium. The second metaphor comes from the structural concept of the project: Like twigs in a bird's nest, each element would support and be supported by the others, producing a nonhierarchical structure. The steel bands would also be fully exposed, thereby acting as both the building's facade and its ornament. The result is just the sort of twist on high-modernist principles that has become characteristic of Herzog & de Meuron's work. Here the distinction between structure and ornament is collapsed à la Mies, but instead of the master's calm Neoclassical order, we are given a taut sense of barely contained chaos. The underlying desire was to work against the great size of the stadium, to de-monumentalize it through the erratic web of bands. In the New York Times Magazine in 2006, Pierre de Meuron spoke of trying to ensure that "this huge structure is not oppressive." Again, the tendency is to soften the power of what is ostensibly a monumental project. (Herzog & de Meuron achieved this softening effect quite literally in the firm's much-celebrated Allianz Arena in Munich, where the unitary drum of the building is given a quilted skin of air-filled pillows—technology that Arup has transferred to the Watercube.)

Given the enviable sophistication of the firm's practice, it is not surprising that, despite the use of these nearly contradictory metaphors, the architects have largely got what they wanted. The Bird's Nest is both unitary and scaleless, primitive and novel: a massive urban device that denies its own weight. In the wake of this undeniable achievement, the pressing question that remains is whether these motivations are appropriate for Beijing '08. The point becomes especially acute when one considers the conditions in which the metaphorical nest was constructed. Jacques Herzog remarked enthusiastically in 2006 that "such a structure you couldn't do anywhere else." Why not? Because, as the architects estimated, "construction costs in Beijing are one-tenth the amount in the West." For despite its lightweight metaphor, the one archaic aspect of the Bird's Nest was its dependence on a sheer mass of poorly compensated manual labor. As many as seven thousand workers, mainly migrants from the countryside, worked for about $4 per day to raise and weld the forty-two thousand tons of steel on time. While it would be unfair to blame Herzog & de Meuron for the hardship of the Chinese builders, they have taken advantage of the conditions that produce this suffering—as have all of us who benefit from the inexpensive labor and lax regulations of the world's fastest-growing major economy. The stadium, then, does not represent the value-free world of nature (as its nickname suggests), nor even the timeless values of traditional Chinese art. Instead, it represents the use of authoritarian politics and raw capitalism to produce a desirable product. Which is to say that it is a monument to the relationship that we in the West have to China today.

If Herzog & de Meuron imagine the stadium as an ancient Chinese vessel, the firm also surely knows that Ai Weiwei has made a name for himself by smashing such antiquities. Having played an instrumental part in the design of the stadium that will host the opening ceremonies, the artist has since disavowed the games entirely: "I hate the kind of feeling stirred up by promotion or propaganda. . . . It's the kind of sentiment when you don't stick to the facts, but try to make up something, to mislead people away from a true discussion," he remarked last year in The Guardian. Yet Ai says he does not regret his involvement in the project, suggesting that its value lies in some future contribution to Beijing, not in its present use by the state. While seemingly erratic, his shifting position is in fact an honest reflection of the aporia presented by the choice of engagement or boycott that defines the politics of Beijing '08.

Finally, the Olympic buildings may provide one other cautionary lesson. Encouraged by these and other recent projects—especially Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren's nearby CCTV Television Station and Headquarters—Western architects and critics have been celebrating the opening of China to their most advanced designs. One may even be tempted to see this as a sign of a more general political tolerance. However, a less encouraging interpretation is also possible: Perhaps architecture is given latitude only because of its capacity to remain representationally vague (in contrast with journalism, for example, which remains tightly controlled). The Bird's Nest and the Watercube, as well as Beijing's overall reconstruction, suggest a China that is more open and less authoritarian than it is. This slippage between architectural representation and political reality can be seen either as a mask or as a projection—as a cover for the abuse of power, or as an image of China's emerging better self. Thus, for those concerned with reform in China, the real challenge posed by Beijing '08 is not to artificially separate the Olympics and its architecture from politics, but to force the Olympics to become a political projection; and then to get the reality to match the representation.

Sean Keller is an assistant professor of architectural history and theory at the College of Architecture, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago.