A Tale of Two Biennales
The Hong Kong side of the two-city biennale featured a "Bring Your Own Biennale" component.
By David Spalding
Published: December 11, 2009
SHENZHEN/HONG KONG— The story of China’s rapid urbanization has long held the public’s imagination in its grip, and rightfully so: With so much history to preserve or demolish, a booming economy, and a top-down approach to city planning that has encouraged architects from around the world to realize some of their most outlandish and outstanding designs there, the rebuilding of China’s cities can sometimes seem like a high-speed dream sequence. Dazzled by the morphing skylines, it is easy to lose sight of the country’s citizens: those unpredictable individuals who inhabit, customize, and continually reinvent urban space. In an effort to redirect our sightlines and activate local debate, “City Mobilization,” the 2009 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism \ Architecture (as it is called in Shenzhen — each city gives itself top billing) opened last week with a mission: to create a large-scale exhibition with an international perspective that engages local residents about the experience of living in two of Asia’s largest and most dynamic cities. Rather than offering halls filled with architectural models and explanatory signage, the biennale’s two curatorial teams (headed by Ou Ning in Shenzhen and Marisa Yiu in Hong Kong) have taken the third edition of the biennale to the streets — and promenades, plazas and shopping malls — giving the public a multitude of opportunities to reconsider city life from a number of vantages.
It’s not surprising that an architectural biennale take place in Shenzhen and Hong Kong — these twin cities were among the earliest to urbanize within the region. Shenzhen, a former fishing village in Southern China, became a case study in steroid-induced urban development 30 years ago, when former Chinese Communist Party Vice Chairman Deng Xiaoping declared it the first of China’s Special Economic Zones. Presenting newly commissioned works by 64 participating artists, designers, architects, and collaborative teams, the biennale occupies three bustling venues on the Shenzhen side of the border that could not have been secured without government support: Shenzhen’s Civic Square, with its huge, Tiananmen-like plaza and underground exhibition space; Shenzhenwan Avenue, an outdoor, elevated walkway that is part of a busy shopping area; and the Yitian Holiday Plaza, an upscale mall. Throughout these sites, the curators have made every effort to draw the general public into discussions about urban forms, practices, and possibilities, and the results certainly seemed successful.
On opening day at the Shenzhenwan site, dozens of children and their parents were waiting to take a spin on Franceschini & Allende / Futurefarmers’ People’s Roulette (all works 2009), an octagonal, rotating wooden platform that is meant to suggest the mass migrations that accompanied China’s urbanization. Whether this was in the forefront of the participants’ minds is questionable, but the work is a place to pause, gather, and socialize in what would otherwise be a thruway between some clothing shops and a Starbucks. Remarkably, cornstalks could be seen growing in the distance, part of Land Grab City: A Geography of Spatial Prostheses, Joseph Grima, Jeffrey Johnson and Jose Esparza’s well-tended vegetable garden that doubles as a meditation on how megacities like Shenzhen tap the agricultural resources of rural areas near and far in their constant need for sustenance. As older people gathered around the work and discussed the quality of the crops, I couldn’t help but also see the work as a piece of Shenzhen’s not-so-distance past, miraculously restored. While the project was conceived as a temporary intervention, the artists and curators are now hoping that the garden will remain after the exhibition closes — a fantastic gift for the community.
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The Biennale works located at the Yitian Holiday Plaza — a tonier, self-enclosed shopping center — were also inspiring curiosity and sparking conversation when I visited. In the basement level, crowds were gathered around the work of two photographers: American Leroy Demery, Jr., shot Shenzhen in Kodachrome color slide film back in 1980, just as the city stood on the precipice of redevelopment. In his images, one sees a sleepy town of open roads and endless skies that now lives only in the memories of long-term residents. He Huangyou’s stark black-and-white photographs date back to the 1960s, and are remarkable both for their formal beauty and their striking candor: Through them we see moments of everyday life, the rising tide of urban development, and the changing political climate — a working people’s history of Shenzhen. He and Demery’s photographs make a great backdrop for considering both the other works in the biennale and the city itself. As curator Ou Ning points out in his writing on He’s work, “When there is a need to establish a city’s collective memory and identity, the collection of historical resources becomes even more urgent.”
The 38 projects on view in the underground galleries at the Civic Square location may be less interactive in nature, but they are no less engaging. These include renowned Slovenian artist and architect Marjetica Potrc’s Diagrams for New Orleans, Tirana, Shenzhen and Elsewhere, a series of poetic, colorful wall drawings Potrc uses to tell stories about her experiences in each place. In an exhibition understandably filled with video, photography, and installation, it’s a pleasure to discover the delicate line of the artist’s hand as she maps her associations and reflections. Shenzhen-based photographer Bai Xiaoci’s (aka Shen Xiaoming) large, horizontal-format pictures are anything but poetic: The perfectly centered, full-frontal shots of newly build county government buildings are direct, as if the artist has tried to get out of the way and let the architecture speak for itself. And it does speak — volumes, in fact — about the ways that official power chooses to represent itself through the language of civic building projects, sometimes in vernaculars that seems radically out of context.
Questions linking power and architecture are also overlaid onto the exhibition venue itself, through Beijing artist Wang Wei’s Natural History. A simple, subtle transposition that covers a section of the walls with the same colorful ceramic tiles used in the animal enclosures at the Beijing Zoo, the installation creates a sense of artifice and containment within the otherwise “neutral” exhibition space. As if seeking an alternative to the controlled confines of the built environment, Rotterdam-based, Spanish artist Lara Almarcegui’s fascinating project investigates and documents a small, unused piece of land that exists in a nether-zone between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, a flourishing patch of greenery that officially belongs to Hong Kong but is located within Shenzhen’s city limits. For Almarcegui, the project is a case study in how such non-sites can thrive according to natural processes, in sharp contrast to the heavily developed land that surrounds them. Looking outward, China-based photographer Charlie Koolhaas’s (daughter of architect Rem Koolhaas) installation Comparisons of Lagos and Dubai is a sweeping, curving lightbox filled with detailed photographic transparencies depicting the beauty, entropy, and commercialization of these two quickly growing cities — helping viewers to locate Shenzhen within the global context of expanding cities.
Crossing the border to reach the 2009 Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale, one discovers a remarkably different interpretation of the “City Mobilization” theme. The subtitle for the Hong Kong incarnation of the Bi-City Biennale is “BYOB,” which stands for “Bring Your Own Biennale.” I wish I had. Located on the West Kowloon Waterfront Promenade — a walkway and adjacent piece of relatively undeveloped land along Victoria Harbor that is slated for incorporation into the controversial West Kowloon Cultural District project — the Hong Kong Biennale is not easy to find, and even more difficult to critically engage. Of course, “BYOB” is not meant to be taken literally, but to instead suggest heightened levels of public participation within the exhibition structure. Yet when I visited the biennale on the day after the opening, during the presentation of a forum called “Mediascapes / Narrative Cities,” the place was nearly deserted. Panelists, including RMB City artist Cao Fei, sat on a platform facing an audience of mostly empty chairs. This was not a reflection of the quality of the public programming, but perhaps a result of what must be, for many, the Biennale’s remote and rather isolated location.
To enter the exhibition, one passes under Shigeru Ban’s impressive Pavilion, a large, arching latticework made from the architect’s signature paper tubes. With its austere elegance and nod toward sustainability, Pavilion is visually striking, though its design was reportedly “compromised” to accommodate demands from the Hong Kong building authorities, whose “reluctance to approve the building” required an “over-engineered structure,” according to the Hong Kong Biennale’s Web site. Seen in this light, Ban’s work is also a monument to the red tape and bureaucratic barriers that must have stood between the biennale’s ambitions and its execution.
Unlike pavilions at other biennales, Ban’s Hong Kong project doesn’t contain anything. Instead, it serves as a archway, opening onto a wide dirt footpath that winds around many of the biennale’s other works, which are sited either directly within the landscape or nestled into shipping containers. While the Hong Kong Biennale’s curatorial team has taken a populist and inclusive approach, the result is a wildly uneven experience for visitors hoping to investigate “the possibility of bottom-up mobilization and the organization of social life in the content of China’s contemporary urbanity.” The BYOB Challenge, created by staff at Time Out Hong Kong, one of the Biennale’s advertising partners, consists of “an installation that is a giant B” around six feet high. I missed it in situ, but in a text that appears in the Hong Kong Biennale’s “Catalogue in Progress,” its creators explain: “Besides old magazines, our only materials were one writer, 2 interns, 6 hours, and a whole lot of tape and string.” Design also figured prominently, with several works of outdoor furniture available for use, created by professional design studios or Hong Kong college students involved in class projects or short-term workshops. These are labeled variously as “BYOBenches,” and complimented by “BYOBooths,” and all were given equal status within the exhibition.
It may seem unfair to judge these biennale projects against the more conceptually and formally refined works with which they share space. Yet by placing them close together within the same exhibition, isn’t that exactly what the curators have intended? Or, caught up in the spirit of egalitarianism, are visitors required to suspend judgment altogether? Such questions are worthy of consideration, but cannot preoccupy an entire biennale.
A few works on view in Hong Kong stand out for their ability to connect to the location and ultimately alter one’s perception of the Waterfront Promenade. Excavation, a brilliant site-specific intervention by Kingsley Ng, Syren Johnstone, and Daniel Patzold, stages an archeological dig where an imagined future of the Promenade is seen partially unearthed. By taping off a large section of land and appropriating the visual cues of an excavation site — typed signage, maps, and inventory lists, nominal evidence of a now buried marketplace, as well as a shed belonging to a mysterious Uncle Hung — the artists create a parallel spatio-temporal experience that recasts the entire Biennale site as a ruin-in-progress. Another strong work, Douglas Young / G.O.D. Limited’s West Kowloon Walled City, is a large-scale modular structure designed to invoke the famous Kowloon Walled city, a dense slum where some residents thrived despite the danger of gang warfare, drug trade, and prostitution, and that was demolished between in 1993 and 1994. Standing defiantly in an area largely defined by luxury housing, shopping malls, and untapped cultural capital, the work is an anti-monument designed to activate public memory.
In practical terms, this year’s Bi-City Biennale is not only a tale of two cities; it is essentially a tale of two biennials, connected by little more than an ampersand. With separate curators, administrative offices, catalogues, and even Web sites, it appears that this arranged marriage is strained. Perhaps an annulment is in order. The two cities’ approaches to the theme of “City Mobilization” and all its democratic implications can be summarized as follows: in Shenzhen, the biennale has been produced to engage the public, while in Hong Kong, the public has been engaged to produce the biennale. Regardless, as Asia’s only biennale focusing on architecture and urbanism, both sites should be visited by anyone interested in the key debates, creative responses, and tactics for survival related to the built environment — concerns that define the texture of our daily lives with increasing urgency.
The 2009 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism \ Architecture is on view through Jan. 23 in Shenzhen and through Feb. 27 in Hong Kong. See szhkbiennale.org/en/ and hkszbiennale.org for current information about upcoming related public events.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
A Tale of Two Biennales
Courtesy Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale
The Hong Kong side of the two-city biennale featured a "Bring Your Own Biennale" component.
By David Spalding
Published: December 11, 2009
SHENZHEN/HONG KONG— The story of China’s rapid urbanization has long held the public’s imagination in its grip, and rightfully so: With so much history to preserve or demolish, a booming economy, and a top-down approach to city planning that has encouraged architects from around the world to realize some of their most outlandish and outstanding designs there, the rebuilding of China’s cities can sometimes seem like a high-speed dream sequence. Dazzled by the morphing skylines, it is easy to lose sight of the country’s citizens: those unpredictable individuals who inhabit, customize, and continually reinvent urban space. In an effort to redirect our sightlines and activate local debate, “City Mobilization,” the 2009 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism \ Architecture (as it is called in Shenzhen — each city gives itself top billing) opened last week with a mission: to create a large-scale exhibition with an international perspective that engages local residents about the experience of living in two of Asia’s largest and most dynamic cities. Rather than offering halls filled with architectural models and explanatory signage, the biennale’s two curatorial teams (headed by Ou Ning in Shenzhen and Marisa Yiu in Hong Kong) have taken the third edition of the biennale to the streets — and promenades, plazas and shopping malls — giving the public a multitude of opportunities to reconsider city life from a number of vantages.
It’s not surprising that an architectural biennale take place in Shenzhen and Hong Kong — these twin cities were among the earliest to urbanize within the region. Shenzhen, a former fishing village in Southern China, became a case study in steroid-induced urban development 30 years ago, when former Chinese Communist Party Vice Chairman Deng Xiaoping declared it the first of China’s Special Economic Zones. Presenting newly commissioned works by 64 participating artists, designers, architects, and collaborative teams, the biennale occupies three bustling venues on the Shenzhen side of the border that could not have been secured without government support: Shenzhen’s Civic Square, with its huge, Tiananmen-like plaza and underground exhibition space; Shenzhenwan Avenue, an outdoor, elevated walkway that is part of a busy shopping area; and the Yitian Holiday Plaza, an upscale mall. Throughout these sites, the curators have made every effort to draw the general public into discussions about urban forms, practices, and possibilities, and the results certainly seemed successful.
On opening day at the Shenzhenwan site, dozens of children and their parents were waiting to take a spin on Franceschini & Allende / Futurefarmers’ People’s Roulette (all works 2009), an octagonal, rotating wooden platform that is meant to suggest the mass migrations that accompanied China’s urbanization. Whether this was in the forefront of the participants’ minds is questionable, but the work is a place to pause, gather, and socialize in what would otherwise be a thruway between some clothing shops and a Starbucks. Remarkably, cornstalks could be seen growing in the distance, part of Land Grab City: A Geography of Spatial Prostheses, Joseph Grima, Jeffrey Johnson and Jose Esparza’s well-tended vegetable garden that doubles as a meditation on how megacities like Shenzhen tap the agricultural resources of rural areas near and far in their constant need for sustenance. As older people gathered around the work and discussed the quality of the crops, I couldn’t help but also see the work as a piece of Shenzhen’s not-so-distance past, miraculously restored. While the project was conceived as a temporary intervention, the artists and curators are now hoping that the garden will remain after the exhibition closes — a fantastic gift for the community.
Like what you see? Sign up for ARTINFO's weekly newsletter to get the latest on the market, emerging artists, auctions, galleries, museums, and more.
The Biennale works located at the Yitian Holiday Plaza — a tonier, self-enclosed shopping center — were also inspiring curiosity and sparking conversation when I visited. In the basement level, crowds were gathered around the work of two photographers: American Leroy Demery, Jr., shot Shenzhen in Kodachrome color slide film back in 1980, just as the city stood on the precipice of redevelopment. In his images, one sees a sleepy town of open roads and endless skies that now lives only in the memories of long-term residents. He Huangyou’s stark black-and-white photographs date back to the 1960s, and are remarkable both for their formal beauty and their striking candor: Through them we see moments of everyday life, the rising tide of urban development, and the changing political climate — a working people’s history of Shenzhen. He and Demery’s photographs make a great backdrop for considering both the other works in the biennale and the city itself. As curator Ou Ning points out in his writing on He’s work, “When there is a need to establish a city’s collective memory and identity, the collection of historical resources becomes even more urgent.”
The 38 projects on view in the underground galleries at the Civic Square location may be less interactive in nature, but they are no less engaging. These include renowned Slovenian artist and architect Marjetica Potrc’s Diagrams for New Orleans, Tirana, Shenzhen and Elsewhere, a series of poetic, colorful wall drawings Potrc uses to tell stories about her experiences in each place. In an exhibition understandably filled with video, photography, and installation, it’s a pleasure to discover the delicate line of the artist’s hand as she maps her associations and reflections. Shenzhen-based photographer Bai Xiaoci’s (aka Shen Xiaoming) large, horizontal-format pictures are anything but poetic: The perfectly centered, full-frontal shots of newly build county government buildings are direct, as if the artist has tried to get out of the way and let the architecture speak for itself. And it does speak — volumes, in fact — about the ways that official power chooses to represent itself through the language of civic building projects, sometimes in vernaculars that seems radically out of context.
Questions linking power and architecture are also overlaid onto the exhibition venue itself, through Beijing artist Wang Wei’s Natural History. A simple, subtle transposition that covers a section of the walls with the same colorful ceramic tiles used in the animal enclosures at the Beijing Zoo, the installation creates a sense of artifice and containment within the otherwise “neutral” exhibition space. As if seeking an alternative to the controlled confines of the built environment, Rotterdam-based, Spanish artist Lara Almarcegui’s fascinating project investigates and documents a small, unused piece of land that exists in a nether-zone between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, a flourishing patch of greenery that officially belongs to Hong Kong but is located within Shenzhen’s city limits. For Almarcegui, the project is a case study in how such non-sites can thrive according to natural processes, in sharp contrast to the heavily developed land that surrounds them. Looking outward, China-based photographer Charlie Koolhaas’s (daughter of architect Rem Koolhaas) installation Comparisons of Lagos and Dubai is a sweeping, curving lightbox filled with detailed photographic transparencies depicting the beauty, entropy, and commercialization of these two quickly growing cities — helping viewers to locate Shenzhen within the global context of expanding cities.
Crossing the border to reach the 2009 Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale, one discovers a remarkably different interpretation of the “City Mobilization” theme. The subtitle for the Hong Kong incarnation of the Bi-City Biennale is “BYOB,” which stands for “Bring Your Own Biennale.” I wish I had. Located on the West Kowloon Waterfront Promenade — a walkway and adjacent piece of relatively undeveloped land along Victoria Harbor that is slated for incorporation into the controversial West Kowloon Cultural District project — the Hong Kong Biennale is not easy to find, and even more difficult to critically engage. Of course, “BYOB” is not meant to be taken literally, but to instead suggest heightened levels of public participation within the exhibition structure. Yet when I visited the biennale on the day after the opening, during the presentation of a forum called “Mediascapes / Narrative Cities,” the place was nearly deserted. Panelists, including RMB City artist Cao Fei, sat on a platform facing an audience of mostly empty chairs. This was not a reflection of the quality of the public programming, but perhaps a result of what must be, for many, the Biennale’s remote and rather isolated location.
To enter the exhibition, one passes under Shigeru Ban’s impressive Pavilion, a large, arching latticework made from the architect’s signature paper tubes. With its austere elegance and nod toward sustainability, Pavilion is visually striking, though its design was reportedly “compromised” to accommodate demands from the Hong Kong building authorities, whose “reluctance to approve the building” required an “over-engineered structure,” according to the Hong Kong Biennale’s Web site. Seen in this light, Ban’s work is also a monument to the red tape and bureaucratic barriers that must have stood between the biennale’s ambitions and its execution.
Unlike pavilions at other biennales, Ban’s Hong Kong project doesn’t contain anything. Instead, it serves as a archway, opening onto a wide dirt footpath that winds around many of the biennale’s other works, which are sited either directly within the landscape or nestled into shipping containers. While the Hong Kong Biennale’s curatorial team has taken a populist and inclusive approach, the result is a wildly uneven experience for visitors hoping to investigate “the possibility of bottom-up mobilization and the organization of social life in the content of China’s contemporary urbanity.” The BYOB Challenge, created by staff at Time Out Hong Kong, one of the Biennale’s advertising partners, consists of “an installation that is a giant B” around six feet high. I missed it in situ, but in a text that appears in the Hong Kong Biennale’s “Catalogue in Progress,” its creators explain: “Besides old magazines, our only materials were one writer, 2 interns, 6 hours, and a whole lot of tape and string.” Design also figured prominently, with several works of outdoor furniture available for use, created by professional design studios or Hong Kong college students involved in class projects or short-term workshops. These are labeled variously as “BYOBenches,” and complimented by “BYOBooths,” and all were given equal status within the exhibition.
It may seem unfair to judge these biennale projects against the more conceptually and formally refined works with which they share space. Yet by placing them close together within the same exhibition, isn’t that exactly what the curators have intended? Or, caught up in the spirit of egalitarianism, are visitors required to suspend judgment altogether? Such questions are worthy of consideration, but cannot preoccupy an entire biennale.
A few works on view in Hong Kong stand out for their ability to connect to the location and ultimately alter one’s perception of the Waterfront Promenade. Excavation, a brilliant site-specific intervention by Kingsley Ng, Syren Johnstone, and Daniel Patzold, stages an archeological dig where an imagined future of the Promenade is seen partially unearthed. By taping off a large section of land and appropriating the visual cues of an excavation site — typed signage, maps, and inventory lists, nominal evidence of a now buried marketplace, as well as a shed belonging to a mysterious Uncle Hung — the artists create a parallel spatio-temporal experience that recasts the entire Biennale site as a ruin-in-progress. Another strong work, Douglas Young / G.O.D. Limited’s West Kowloon Walled City, is a large-scale modular structure designed to invoke the famous Kowloon Walled city, a dense slum where some residents thrived despite the danger of gang warfare, drug trade, and prostitution, and that was demolished between in 1993 and 1994. Standing defiantly in an area largely defined by luxury housing, shopping malls, and untapped cultural capital, the work is an anti-monument designed to activate public memory.
In practical terms, this year’s Bi-City Biennale is not only a tale of two cities; it is essentially a tale of two biennials, connected by little more than an ampersand. With separate curators, administrative offices, catalogues, and even Web sites, it appears that this arranged marriage is strained. Perhaps an annulment is in order. The two cities’ approaches to the theme of “City Mobilization” and all its democratic implications can be summarized as follows: in Shenzhen, the biennale has been produced to engage the public, while in Hong Kong, the public has been engaged to produce the biennale. Regardless, as Asia’s only biennale focusing on architecture and urbanism, both sites should be visited by anyone interested in the key debates, creative responses, and tactics for survival related to the built environment — concerns that define the texture of our daily lives with increasing urgency.
The 2009 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism \ Architecture is on view through Jan. 23 in Shenzhen and through Feb. 27 in Hong Kong. See szhkbiennale.org/en/ and hkszbiennale.org for current information about upcoming related public events.
Courtesy Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale
The Hong Kong side of the two-city biennale featured a "Bring Your Own Biennale" component.
By David Spalding
Published: December 11, 2009
SHENZHEN/HONG KONG— The story of China’s rapid urbanization has long held the public’s imagination in its grip, and rightfully so: With so much history to preserve or demolish, a booming economy, and a top-down approach to city planning that has encouraged architects from around the world to realize some of their most outlandish and outstanding designs there, the rebuilding of China’s cities can sometimes seem like a high-speed dream sequence. Dazzled by the morphing skylines, it is easy to lose sight of the country’s citizens: those unpredictable individuals who inhabit, customize, and continually reinvent urban space. In an effort to redirect our sightlines and activate local debate, “City Mobilization,” the 2009 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism \ Architecture (as it is called in Shenzhen — each city gives itself top billing) opened last week with a mission: to create a large-scale exhibition with an international perspective that engages local residents about the experience of living in two of Asia’s largest and most dynamic cities. Rather than offering halls filled with architectural models and explanatory signage, the biennale’s two curatorial teams (headed by Ou Ning in Shenzhen and Marisa Yiu in Hong Kong) have taken the third edition of the biennale to the streets — and promenades, plazas and shopping malls — giving the public a multitude of opportunities to reconsider city life from a number of vantages.
It’s not surprising that an architectural biennale take place in Shenzhen and Hong Kong — these twin cities were among the earliest to urbanize within the region. Shenzhen, a former fishing village in Southern China, became a case study in steroid-induced urban development 30 years ago, when former Chinese Communist Party Vice Chairman Deng Xiaoping declared it the first of China’s Special Economic Zones. Presenting newly commissioned works by 64 participating artists, designers, architects, and collaborative teams, the biennale occupies three bustling venues on the Shenzhen side of the border that could not have been secured without government support: Shenzhen’s Civic Square, with its huge, Tiananmen-like plaza and underground exhibition space; Shenzhenwan Avenue, an outdoor, elevated walkway that is part of a busy shopping area; and the Yitian Holiday Plaza, an upscale mall. Throughout these sites, the curators have made every effort to draw the general public into discussions about urban forms, practices, and possibilities, and the results certainly seemed successful.
On opening day at the Shenzhenwan site, dozens of children and their parents were waiting to take a spin on Franceschini & Allende / Futurefarmers’ People’s Roulette (all works 2009), an octagonal, rotating wooden platform that is meant to suggest the mass migrations that accompanied China’s urbanization. Whether this was in the forefront of the participants’ minds is questionable, but the work is a place to pause, gather, and socialize in what would otherwise be a thruway between some clothing shops and a Starbucks. Remarkably, cornstalks could be seen growing in the distance, part of Land Grab City: A Geography of Spatial Prostheses, Joseph Grima, Jeffrey Johnson and Jose Esparza’s well-tended vegetable garden that doubles as a meditation on how megacities like Shenzhen tap the agricultural resources of rural areas near and far in their constant need for sustenance. As older people gathered around the work and discussed the quality of the crops, I couldn’t help but also see the work as a piece of Shenzhen’s not-so-distance past, miraculously restored. While the project was conceived as a temporary intervention, the artists and curators are now hoping that the garden will remain after the exhibition closes — a fantastic gift for the community.
Like what you see? Sign up for ARTINFO's weekly newsletter to get the latest on the market, emerging artists, auctions, galleries, museums, and more.
The Biennale works located at the Yitian Holiday Plaza — a tonier, self-enclosed shopping center — were also inspiring curiosity and sparking conversation when I visited. In the basement level, crowds were gathered around the work of two photographers: American Leroy Demery, Jr., shot Shenzhen in Kodachrome color slide film back in 1980, just as the city stood on the precipice of redevelopment. In his images, one sees a sleepy town of open roads and endless skies that now lives only in the memories of long-term residents. He Huangyou’s stark black-and-white photographs date back to the 1960s, and are remarkable both for their formal beauty and their striking candor: Through them we see moments of everyday life, the rising tide of urban development, and the changing political climate — a working people’s history of Shenzhen. He and Demery’s photographs make a great backdrop for considering both the other works in the biennale and the city itself. As curator Ou Ning points out in his writing on He’s work, “When there is a need to establish a city’s collective memory and identity, the collection of historical resources becomes even more urgent.”
The 38 projects on view in the underground galleries at the Civic Square location may be less interactive in nature, but they are no less engaging. These include renowned Slovenian artist and architect Marjetica Potrc’s Diagrams for New Orleans, Tirana, Shenzhen and Elsewhere, a series of poetic, colorful wall drawings Potrc uses to tell stories about her experiences in each place. In an exhibition understandably filled with video, photography, and installation, it’s a pleasure to discover the delicate line of the artist’s hand as she maps her associations and reflections. Shenzhen-based photographer Bai Xiaoci’s (aka Shen Xiaoming) large, horizontal-format pictures are anything but poetic: The perfectly centered, full-frontal shots of newly build county government buildings are direct, as if the artist has tried to get out of the way and let the architecture speak for itself. And it does speak — volumes, in fact — about the ways that official power chooses to represent itself through the language of civic building projects, sometimes in vernaculars that seems radically out of context.
Questions linking power and architecture are also overlaid onto the exhibition venue itself, through Beijing artist Wang Wei’s Natural History. A simple, subtle transposition that covers a section of the walls with the same colorful ceramic tiles used in the animal enclosures at the Beijing Zoo, the installation creates a sense of artifice and containment within the otherwise “neutral” exhibition space. As if seeking an alternative to the controlled confines of the built environment, Rotterdam-based, Spanish artist Lara Almarcegui’s fascinating project investigates and documents a small, unused piece of land that exists in a nether-zone between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, a flourishing patch of greenery that officially belongs to Hong Kong but is located within Shenzhen’s city limits. For Almarcegui, the project is a case study in how such non-sites can thrive according to natural processes, in sharp contrast to the heavily developed land that surrounds them. Looking outward, China-based photographer Charlie Koolhaas’s (daughter of architect Rem Koolhaas) installation Comparisons of Lagos and Dubai is a sweeping, curving lightbox filled with detailed photographic transparencies depicting the beauty, entropy, and commercialization of these two quickly growing cities — helping viewers to locate Shenzhen within the global context of expanding cities.
Crossing the border to reach the 2009 Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale, one discovers a remarkably different interpretation of the “City Mobilization” theme. The subtitle for the Hong Kong incarnation of the Bi-City Biennale is “BYOB,” which stands for “Bring Your Own Biennale.” I wish I had. Located on the West Kowloon Waterfront Promenade — a walkway and adjacent piece of relatively undeveloped land along Victoria Harbor that is slated for incorporation into the controversial West Kowloon Cultural District project — the Hong Kong Biennale is not easy to find, and even more difficult to critically engage. Of course, “BYOB” is not meant to be taken literally, but to instead suggest heightened levels of public participation within the exhibition structure. Yet when I visited the biennale on the day after the opening, during the presentation of a forum called “Mediascapes / Narrative Cities,” the place was nearly deserted. Panelists, including RMB City artist Cao Fei, sat on a platform facing an audience of mostly empty chairs. This was not a reflection of the quality of the public programming, but perhaps a result of what must be, for many, the Biennale’s remote and rather isolated location.
To enter the exhibition, one passes under Shigeru Ban’s impressive Pavilion, a large, arching latticework made from the architect’s signature paper tubes. With its austere elegance and nod toward sustainability, Pavilion is visually striking, though its design was reportedly “compromised” to accommodate demands from the Hong Kong building authorities, whose “reluctance to approve the building” required an “over-engineered structure,” according to the Hong Kong Biennale’s Web site. Seen in this light, Ban’s work is also a monument to the red tape and bureaucratic barriers that must have stood between the biennale’s ambitions and its execution.
Unlike pavilions at other biennales, Ban’s Hong Kong project doesn’t contain anything. Instead, it serves as a archway, opening onto a wide dirt footpath that winds around many of the biennale’s other works, which are sited either directly within the landscape or nestled into shipping containers. While the Hong Kong Biennale’s curatorial team has taken a populist and inclusive approach, the result is a wildly uneven experience for visitors hoping to investigate “the possibility of bottom-up mobilization and the organization of social life in the content of China’s contemporary urbanity.” The BYOB Challenge, created by staff at Time Out Hong Kong, one of the Biennale’s advertising partners, consists of “an installation that is a giant B” around six feet high. I missed it in situ, but in a text that appears in the Hong Kong Biennale’s “Catalogue in Progress,” its creators explain: “Besides old magazines, our only materials were one writer, 2 interns, 6 hours, and a whole lot of tape and string.” Design also figured prominently, with several works of outdoor furniture available for use, created by professional design studios or Hong Kong college students involved in class projects or short-term workshops. These are labeled variously as “BYOBenches,” and complimented by “BYOBooths,” and all were given equal status within the exhibition.
It may seem unfair to judge these biennale projects against the more conceptually and formally refined works with which they share space. Yet by placing them close together within the same exhibition, isn’t that exactly what the curators have intended? Or, caught up in the spirit of egalitarianism, are visitors required to suspend judgment altogether? Such questions are worthy of consideration, but cannot preoccupy an entire biennale.
A few works on view in Hong Kong stand out for their ability to connect to the location and ultimately alter one’s perception of the Waterfront Promenade. Excavation, a brilliant site-specific intervention by Kingsley Ng, Syren Johnstone, and Daniel Patzold, stages an archeological dig where an imagined future of the Promenade is seen partially unearthed. By taping off a large section of land and appropriating the visual cues of an excavation site — typed signage, maps, and inventory lists, nominal evidence of a now buried marketplace, as well as a shed belonging to a mysterious Uncle Hung — the artists create a parallel spatio-temporal experience that recasts the entire Biennale site as a ruin-in-progress. Another strong work, Douglas Young / G.O.D. Limited’s West Kowloon Walled City, is a large-scale modular structure designed to invoke the famous Kowloon Walled city, a dense slum where some residents thrived despite the danger of gang warfare, drug trade, and prostitution, and that was demolished between in 1993 and 1994. Standing defiantly in an area largely defined by luxury housing, shopping malls, and untapped cultural capital, the work is an anti-monument designed to activate public memory.
In practical terms, this year’s Bi-City Biennale is not only a tale of two cities; it is essentially a tale of two biennials, connected by little more than an ampersand. With separate curators, administrative offices, catalogues, and even Web sites, it appears that this arranged marriage is strained. Perhaps an annulment is in order. The two cities’ approaches to the theme of “City Mobilization” and all its democratic implications can be summarized as follows: in Shenzhen, the biennale has been produced to engage the public, while in Hong Kong, the public has been engaged to produce the biennale. Regardless, as Asia’s only biennale focusing on architecture and urbanism, both sites should be visited by anyone interested in the key debates, creative responses, and tactics for survival related to the built environment — concerns that define the texture of our daily lives with increasing urgency.
The 2009 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism \ Architecture is on view through Jan. 23 in Shenzhen and through Feb. 27 in Hong Kong. See szhkbiennale.org/en/ and hkszbiennale.org for current information about upcoming related public events.
Robin Peckham’s Notes on Shenzhen/Hong Kong Biennale
CONVERSATIONS: Robin Peckham’s Notes on Shenzhen/Hong Kong Biennale
December 10, 2009 by RedBox Review
Hong Kong-based Robin Peckham offers his impressions of the Shenzhen side of the “Shenzhen/Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism,” which opened December 6 in Shenzhen. Robin is also covering the Biennale in further depth on the Kunsthalle Kowloon blog, but here are some of the quick picks for “highlights” and “lowlights” of the much-hyped event.
Good, Bad, and Ugly at the 2009 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture
The 2009 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture, affectionately known as “shuang shuang zhan” to its devotees, is now open in full force across a number of sites in Shenzhen. Projects span a range of methodologies, curatorial frameworks, and goals, not to mention venues: from outdoor public art in the city square to shopping malls and urban villages, this exhibition has it all. Here’s a quick look at what to see first, and a few sites to leave off the itinerary.
Highlights:
Bai Xiaoci, “Public Building”
This photography project examines the territory of the “county town” as a site of mutual influence and struggle between urban and rural cultures, offering images of the grandiose municipal buildings constructed by local governments. The photographs appear as an earnest analysis of the ways in which local officials wish to present themselves architecturally. Bai Xiaoci, one of the few contemporary artists remaining in Shenzhen, may yet emerge as a significant outsider figure akin to Zheng Guogu in Yangjiang or Chu Yun’s previous life in Shenzhen.
Inheritance: Shenzhen, “Permanent Migrants”
Organized by London-based curator Claire Staunton, this satellite exhibition in a non-profit space sandwiched between a shopping mall and an urban village presents a modest retrospective of the nascent art history of Shenzhen, including work by current and former residents Bai Xiaoci, Chu Yun, Guy Delisle, Liu Chuang, Christian Jankowski, Jiang Zhi, Daniel Knorr, MAP Office, and Yang Yong. Although the work included is familiar, the format is inventive. Keep an eye on this space for further developments in its program through spring 2010.
Lara Almarcegui, “A Wasteland in the Shenzhen River”
This conceptual intervention focuses on a site on the north bank of the Shenzhen River known as Liu Pok. This fascinating territory once lay to the south of the river and thus belongs to Hong Kong, but due to waterfront reclamation and rerouting projects it is actually contiguous with mainland China. One of the very rare undeveloped pieces of land against the border, the Shenzhen government is lobbying to gain access to the property–a goal Almarcegui works towards by attempting to offer access during the biennale. No resolution has yet been reached.
Lin Chi Wei, “Social Measurement through Sound”
No doubt familiar to followers of the Chinese experimental music scene, Taiwanese sound artist exhibits an installation based on his “sound tape” project. In the context of live performance, the artist passes a long band through the audience, hoping they will collectively read the characters written on the tape. Ideally, the result is a harmonic voice of hive-like poetry. The installation presented here includes videos of such performances under idealized or constructed social situations, adding a layer of the visual surreal to the eery soundtrack.
Tor Lindstrand and Marten Spangberg, “Four Ecologies of International Festival”
This is a party, and don’t let the pretensions of any curator or architect tell you otherwise. In fact, it was such a good party that a significant portion of guests to the biennale opening were drawn away from official opening ceremony and towards this makeshift bar (at which drinks are ordered by color, not ingredient), karaoke rig (with remixed videos, at least until a hardcore local audience demanded a replacement DVD), and t-shirt giveaway (quickly confiscated by the more fashionable of the biennale security guards). One of the few projects reducing architecture to its basic principles, International Festival simply creates a place in the midst of space.
Wang Wei, “Natural History”
One of the subtler participants in the main exhibition of the biennale, Wang Wei is up to his usual architectural interventions. Here, he covers two walls with colorful tile patterns borrowed from antiquated animal enclosures in the Beijing Zoo, bringing the exhibition back towards the idea of architecture as both decoration and constraint–that is to say, hegemony and control. It would be easy to believe that the installation simply belongs here, attached to the car park of the Shenzhen Civic Center.
WEAK! Architects, “The Bug Dome”
Consisting of Hsieh Ying-chun, Roan Ching-yue, and Marco Casagrande, the team working on this project attempts to realign the conversation of architecture from the rhetoric of artistic monumentality towards the discursively “weak.” Their project succeeds magnificently, although their idea of weak architecture loses some of its appeal when its pseduo-utopian aims–the transformation of cities into slum-like super-villages like Taipei’s Treasure Hill–becomes apparent. Nevertheless, the “Bug Dome” itself sits handsomely on a construction site between skyscrapers in the north of the city.
Lowlights
Alterazioni Video and AnotherMountainMan, “Lanwei”
Research into the “lanwei lou,” or uncompleted construction project, as a figure on the cultural landscape can be fascinating, but here Hong Kong-based artist Stanley Wong and his Italian collaborators do little more than present their photographs and point out the fact that construction projects have been halted globally, often as a result of the continuing economic slowdown. Perhaps most interesting is the reuse and habitation of these unfinished structures, a phenomenon just barely touched upon here.
Chen Zhen, “Danser la Musique”
Although little blame can be placed with the artist, this debut realization of a participatory sculpture may end up doing more harm than good to the legacy of Chen Zhen. Consisting of a trampoline draped with a number of bells with bullets for clappers, the work is “completed” when children are allowed to jump on the structure. Dated multicultural conceptualism aside, the project ends up looking like a trashy amusement park attraction situated in a shopping mall parking lot between a 15 meter Christmas tree and a “Happy Vallery” neon billboard.
DnA Design and Architecture, “Construction Noise”
The ideas of sound art and field recording are apparently quite new to the world of architecture. This piece consists simply of the recorded sounds of a construction site replayed in an open space on the Civic Square–unfortunately, the site is physically and audibly overwhelmed by an actual construction site on one side. The project is also packaged in awkward rhetoric of drawing attention to migrant workers, another idea lost in the din of industrial machinery.
feld72, “Public Trailer”
Foreign architects and researchers studying China are often drawn to a strikingly similar set of phenomena; one feature figuring prominently in so many of these exhibitions is the cargo tricycle. Here the Austrian architects imagine themselves redefining public space by crossing the tricycle with karaoke and public address systems. Lack of creativity in conceiving an architectural installation would be understandable–there is, after all, a place for archival analysis–but such a failure of observation is unforgivable.
Neville Mars/DCF “10,000 Flowers”
The Dynamic City Foundation may be the best representative of a specific school of Chinese urbanism, one that celebrates speed, scale, and monumentality coupled with pretensions to artistic production. This video similarly presents a vision of Beijing highways as a kaleidoscope, recalling the Italian Futurists as read through the lens of contemporary China’s will towards development at any cost. Exhibitions such as this should reflect upon the shortcomings of this status quo, not provide an easy rationale for the inhumane pressures of reckless urban development.
December 10, 2009 by RedBox Review
Hong Kong-based Robin Peckham offers his impressions of the Shenzhen side of the “Shenzhen/Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism,” which opened December 6 in Shenzhen. Robin is also covering the Biennale in further depth on the Kunsthalle Kowloon blog, but here are some of the quick picks for “highlights” and “lowlights” of the much-hyped event.
Good, Bad, and Ugly at the 2009 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture
The 2009 Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture, affectionately known as “shuang shuang zhan” to its devotees, is now open in full force across a number of sites in Shenzhen. Projects span a range of methodologies, curatorial frameworks, and goals, not to mention venues: from outdoor public art in the city square to shopping malls and urban villages, this exhibition has it all. Here’s a quick look at what to see first, and a few sites to leave off the itinerary.
Highlights:
Bai Xiaoci, “Public Building”
This photography project examines the territory of the “county town” as a site of mutual influence and struggle between urban and rural cultures, offering images of the grandiose municipal buildings constructed by local governments. The photographs appear as an earnest analysis of the ways in which local officials wish to present themselves architecturally. Bai Xiaoci, one of the few contemporary artists remaining in Shenzhen, may yet emerge as a significant outsider figure akin to Zheng Guogu in Yangjiang or Chu Yun’s previous life in Shenzhen.
Inheritance: Shenzhen, “Permanent Migrants”
Organized by London-based curator Claire Staunton, this satellite exhibition in a non-profit space sandwiched between a shopping mall and an urban village presents a modest retrospective of the nascent art history of Shenzhen, including work by current and former residents Bai Xiaoci, Chu Yun, Guy Delisle, Liu Chuang, Christian Jankowski, Jiang Zhi, Daniel Knorr, MAP Office, and Yang Yong. Although the work included is familiar, the format is inventive. Keep an eye on this space for further developments in its program through spring 2010.
Lara Almarcegui, “A Wasteland in the Shenzhen River”
This conceptual intervention focuses on a site on the north bank of the Shenzhen River known as Liu Pok. This fascinating territory once lay to the south of the river and thus belongs to Hong Kong, but due to waterfront reclamation and rerouting projects it is actually contiguous with mainland China. One of the very rare undeveloped pieces of land against the border, the Shenzhen government is lobbying to gain access to the property–a goal Almarcegui works towards by attempting to offer access during the biennale. No resolution has yet been reached.
Lin Chi Wei, “Social Measurement through Sound”
No doubt familiar to followers of the Chinese experimental music scene, Taiwanese sound artist exhibits an installation based on his “sound tape” project. In the context of live performance, the artist passes a long band through the audience, hoping they will collectively read the characters written on the tape. Ideally, the result is a harmonic voice of hive-like poetry. The installation presented here includes videos of such performances under idealized or constructed social situations, adding a layer of the visual surreal to the eery soundtrack.
Tor Lindstrand and Marten Spangberg, “Four Ecologies of International Festival”
This is a party, and don’t let the pretensions of any curator or architect tell you otherwise. In fact, it was such a good party that a significant portion of guests to the biennale opening were drawn away from official opening ceremony and towards this makeshift bar (at which drinks are ordered by color, not ingredient), karaoke rig (with remixed videos, at least until a hardcore local audience demanded a replacement DVD), and t-shirt giveaway (quickly confiscated by the more fashionable of the biennale security guards). One of the few projects reducing architecture to its basic principles, International Festival simply creates a place in the midst of space.
Wang Wei, “Natural History”
One of the subtler participants in the main exhibition of the biennale, Wang Wei is up to his usual architectural interventions. Here, he covers two walls with colorful tile patterns borrowed from antiquated animal enclosures in the Beijing Zoo, bringing the exhibition back towards the idea of architecture as both decoration and constraint–that is to say, hegemony and control. It would be easy to believe that the installation simply belongs here, attached to the car park of the Shenzhen Civic Center.
WEAK! Architects, “The Bug Dome”
Consisting of Hsieh Ying-chun, Roan Ching-yue, and Marco Casagrande, the team working on this project attempts to realign the conversation of architecture from the rhetoric of artistic monumentality towards the discursively “weak.” Their project succeeds magnificently, although their idea of weak architecture loses some of its appeal when its pseduo-utopian aims–the transformation of cities into slum-like super-villages like Taipei’s Treasure Hill–becomes apparent. Nevertheless, the “Bug Dome” itself sits handsomely on a construction site between skyscrapers in the north of the city.
Lowlights
Alterazioni Video and AnotherMountainMan, “Lanwei”
Research into the “lanwei lou,” or uncompleted construction project, as a figure on the cultural landscape can be fascinating, but here Hong Kong-based artist Stanley Wong and his Italian collaborators do little more than present their photographs and point out the fact that construction projects have been halted globally, often as a result of the continuing economic slowdown. Perhaps most interesting is the reuse and habitation of these unfinished structures, a phenomenon just barely touched upon here.
Chen Zhen, “Danser la Musique”
Although little blame can be placed with the artist, this debut realization of a participatory sculpture may end up doing more harm than good to the legacy of Chen Zhen. Consisting of a trampoline draped with a number of bells with bullets for clappers, the work is “completed” when children are allowed to jump on the structure. Dated multicultural conceptualism aside, the project ends up looking like a trashy amusement park attraction situated in a shopping mall parking lot between a 15 meter Christmas tree and a “Happy Vallery” neon billboard.
DnA Design and Architecture, “Construction Noise”
The ideas of sound art and field recording are apparently quite new to the world of architecture. This piece consists simply of the recorded sounds of a construction site replayed in an open space on the Civic Square–unfortunately, the site is physically and audibly overwhelmed by an actual construction site on one side. The project is also packaged in awkward rhetoric of drawing attention to migrant workers, another idea lost in the din of industrial machinery.
feld72, “Public Trailer”
Foreign architects and researchers studying China are often drawn to a strikingly similar set of phenomena; one feature figuring prominently in so many of these exhibitions is the cargo tricycle. Here the Austrian architects imagine themselves redefining public space by crossing the tricycle with karaoke and public address systems. Lack of creativity in conceiving an architectural installation would be understandable–there is, after all, a place for archival analysis–but such a failure of observation is unforgivable.
Neville Mars/DCF “10,000 Flowers”
The Dynamic City Foundation may be the best representative of a specific school of Chinese urbanism, one that celebrates speed, scale, and monumentality coupled with pretensions to artistic production. This video similarly presents a vision of Beijing highways as a kaleidoscope, recalling the Italian Futurists as read through the lens of contemporary China’s will towards development at any cost. Exhibitions such as this should reflect upon the shortcomings of this status quo, not provide an easy rationale for the inhumane pressures of reckless urban development.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Back to Contemporary: One Contemporary Ambition, Many Worlds
Carol Yinghua Lu
Back to Contemporary: One Contemporary Ambition, Many Worlds
I was recently invited by the editors of Afterall to contribute to a book they are preparing on the monumental 1989 exhibition “Magiciens de la terre” with a text reflecting on the impact of this exhibition on the practice of Chinese artists. On that occasion I had a discussion with Chinese critic Fei Dawei, who had introduced the curator of the show, Jean-Hubert Martin, to many of the key artists of the ‘85 movement in China prior to the exhibition and worked as one of its regional advisors. As one of the earliest attempts to exhibit contemporary art from non-Western parts of the world in the West and to deal with the possibility of multiculturalism, this exhibition set an important precedent for many projects to come with its ambition of offering a global vision for contemporary art.
What concerned Fei and the many artists Martin encountered on his visit to China was the question of how to formulate the image of the contemporary in Chinese art. For this purpose, Fei deliberately set up studio visits for Martin to first meet with artists such as Wu Guanzhong, who worked in the modernist tradition or were part of the official art circuit in China, before leading him to meet the artists and critics of the ‘85 movement. At that time, both Fei and the artists consistently tried to convince Martin that contemporary art was something unfolding in the most lively manner in the country and that it represented the most current climate of artistic thinking and energy in the country—not folk art, not traditional art.
This visit left a strong impression on Martin. In the end, Chinese artists Huang Yongping, Gu Dexin, and Yang Jiechang were invited to participate in the exhibition, which also featured, for example, tribal art from Africa. It was a fortunate setup for Chinese contemporary artists—the relevance of their practice, which had previously developed in isolation, bound to circulate only within China, was situated and viewed in an international context for the very first time. This would also have a lasting impact on how Chinese contemporary art would be represented in the many exhibitions and occasions that followed in the West.
▴ Cyprien Tokoudagba, Voodoo Pantheon. The sculpture group shows the Voodoo gods Zangbeto (with Horns, in the background), and Legba, sitting naked, judging a sinner. The group was originally crafted for “Magiciens de la terre” in 1989. from here.
In 2006, German art historian Hans Belting pioneered a project entitled “Global Art and the Museum” in an attempt to document the global changes in contemporary art and its institutions. Acknowledging the fact that economic globalization has—along with its own institutional practices—taken contemporary art practice beyond the restrictions of national borders, he states:
With the new geography of auction houses, the art trade acts on a global scale, art museums, by contrast, operate within a national or urban framework in which they encounter the most diverse audiences. While art collecting has become en vogue on an unprecedented scale, it often lacks a common notion of art. Contemporary art also invades former ethnographic museums, which are forced to remap their areas of collecting. As yet, the novelty of the situation defies any safe categories.1
This ongoing project, consisting of a series of panel discussions, lectures, conferences, and publications, will lead to an exhibition at the ZKM in 2011 (whose vision to present what could possibly be the global image of contemporary art today is an enormous challenge in itself). Belting, who back in 1983 proposed the end of art history and the end of art’s historical narrative, has again stressed in this context that the German perspective is a local one, and that Western art history is a time-based and culture-specific concept whose sensitivity and relevance to other periods of time and cultures should always be re-examined. A workshop he led on global art at the ZKM this past summer proposed a paradigm shift; we were reminded to no longer think about the West as the singular model to be applied worldwide, but to reflect on how to expand this model using experiences from elsewhere, or even to approach art from the perspective of a multitude of models.
As a participant in the workshop, I became more aware of my own specific local context, which is China, a country whose own position in challenging and redefining multiculturalism and global contemporality, both back in 1989 and twenty years later in 2009, has always been in question. Perhaps it’s not simply a matter of creativity and what artworks are being produced, it’s also a matter of perspective and methodology: how to view the works produced in this context and, more importantly, how to develop a way of working that is perceptive with regard not only to the works but also to their context, one that is closer to the works’ internal complexities and constant transfigurations than to their external features and general applications.
In the following text, I would like to respond to the question “what is contemporary art?” through a historical self-reflection and by looking at the specific scenario in China through a very local perspective.
Even though China was absent from much of modernism’s chronological progression, it has followed a unique track and used a set of coordinates that fuse Western and Chinese experiences. Today’s Chinese artists are more than ever before deeply entrenched in an ever-evolving and gradually more autonomous system of art production and circulation, invigorated simultaneously by the continuous inflow of international knowledge and capital, but even more so by the sheer excess of local interest, investment, and imagination.
Artists, dealers, galleries, museums, art magazines, auction houses, biennials, and art fairs are interwoven into a tighter and tighter network, eagerly replicating the mature model established in the West, while continuously and uninhibitedly adapting it to the practical and philosophical needs of specific local conditions. The unparalleled imaginativeness and potential of this local system constantly defines and redefines the method of working here.
Incidentally or not, just prior to the opening of “Magiciens de la terre” in 1989, a regrettable transition occurred in China that resounded throughout many folds of public life, fundamentally shaping the collective political, social, cultural, and psychological landscape of China with a series of disheartening closures and departures. Cultural, spiritual, and artistic aspirations became secondary to a quickly spreading and highly infectious mood of market optimism and global trade. Economic development became an effective instrument for diverting people’s attention from intellectual pursuits and enlightenment. The disregard for knowledge and intellectual pursuits planted during the Cultural Revolution continued to manifest itself in a new wave of brainless entertainment. Ignorance became understood by many as a fashionable state of being.
Meanwhile, 1989 generated many drastic turns in terms of intellectual dynamics as well as personal choices. It was the year when the preceding decade of ideological opening-up and cultural enlightenment came to an abrupt and disillusioning end. Yet the prospect of a new beginning for everyone remained irresistible, offering instant and tangible compensations and achievements. The market economy introduced a system of quantification and evaluation according to materialistic value. A pragmatic and functionalist mindset was firmly established.
A 1991 correspondence between Beijing-based art critic and curator Li Xianting and Paris-based curator Fei Dawei, both of whom were involved in the curating and organization of the “China/Avant-Garde” exhibition in February of 1989, clearly revealed their differences, not only in their geographical positions but more profoundly in their intellectual judgments and value systems. In 1991, Li Xianting wrote:
Once art leaves its cultural motherland, it will surely die out. Exiled culture and arts have always happened in the macro cultural background in Europe. You [the artists and critics travelling abroad] represent new issues. What I want to know are opinions from every party. Although they were working against the same overall background, Warhol and Beuys each carried their respective cultural identities. Of course this is discussed on the condition that we acknowledge the new international system of value. Nationality is not the kind promoted by the government, but it does exist. We can’t follow the postmodernist styles in the contemporary West using the so-called principle of modernism. In the world today, nothing can be considered avant-garde. No matter what you do, it always appears to be familiar.2
At a time when international companies already spread their wings all over the world, speculating upon and investing in a near future when they would reap the benefits of building and becoming part of a global market, some Chinese intellectuals still clung to the idea of cultural locality, in doubt of this “new international system of value.” Such claims sounded extremely nationalistic and profoundly arrogant, lacking in curiosity or desire to understand the outside world. Unable to picture the West as an equal partner in cultural exchange, Li spoke about the West as both irrelevant and, at the same time, an impossible standard for the Chinese art world to emulate and be on par with. He certainly touched upon the issue of the impossibility of a contemporary avant-garde with his statement “no matter what you do, it always appears to be familiar,” which remains a relevant point that constantly shakes up our decisions and judgments today.
Here I quote Li Xianting again:
But we all cherish your activities abroad. Maybe every kind of effort has its value. We are all cornerstones and nothing (we do) would be worth international attention. Do you really believe that you yourself have had an impact on the Western art world?3
In this condescending letter, Li Xianting was not only referring to Fei Dawei but to a group of Chinese artists and intellectuals who left China in the 1980s and ‘90s to pursue their careers in foreign countries. Among them were Huang Yongping, Chen Zhen, Wang Du, and Hou Hanru in Paris; Cai Guoqiang in Japan; Xu Bing, Zhang Huan, and Ai Weiwei in New York, and so on.
The conception of Chinese art as being unworthy of international attention or unable to have an “impact on the Western art world” was to quickly change with the increase in international attention on the political and social situation in China. In no time, Chinese contemporary art was embraced by the international art market as a hot item—not particularly for its artistic value, but for its ideological and sociological revelations. In this way, the label of Chinese art became extremely crucial to works that would command international recognition. For many years, even up till today, most Chinese artists, many of whom thrive in the art market, maintain a very strong national identity as compared to a very underdeveloped professional and individual identity. The biggest danger of all would be to then equate one with the other and enjoy artistic success based on identity politics without realizing its true nature.
The fad of buying and exhibiting Chinese art on an international level didn’t really speak to the quality of artistic thinking and working in the country, but instead indicated the growing importance of Chinese economic and social power. The consequences of this dimension of the Chinese art world are strongly felt today with the fall of the Chinese art market. It was a necessity of the so-called “cultural multiplicity” that the West was pursuing for their society to help sustain and glorify their global market activities. Chinese contemporary art was simply a souvenir one had to have to showcase one’s international lifestyle. But the question of how actual contemporary art practice in China is relevant and valuable to that of the Western world remains unanswered.
Since the 1990s, a newly developed and unconstrained art market took over the Chinese art world as it was still in its infancy, before it had achieved the institutional diversity that characterizes longer-established art infrastructures in other countries. As a result, contemporary art in China has become almost entirely dependent on market forces, which have set themselves up as the dominant, and virtually the only system of evaluating and crediting artworks and the success of artists. The vibrancy of the market gave a huge boost to the confidence and ambition of the players and fed into the “bigger means better” frenzy. There were bountiful resources for opening galleries of 1,000 square meters, stage expensive productions, mount large-scale exhibitions, produce bulky catalogues and host luxurious opening-night parties. All of a sudden, everything was possible. Artists responded to such optimism with attempts at mega-productions. Artworks and art practices were discussed and received, not from an artistic and conceptual point of view, but on the basis of misplaced criteria such as size, production budget, market price, and the preferences of collectors.
Concerning artistic production itself, the advancement of contemporary art practice in China hasn’t followed the linear logic of Western art history. Intellectual development was basically stagnant and taken hostage by political movements during the preceding decades of Communist rule. This situation worsened with the launch of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, which severed not only the link between the country’s intellectual life and the outside world, but also the bloodline that connected it with its own history and cultural traditions. Education was suspended and knowledge and ideas were dismissed.
Thus, when the country reopened its doors and resumed its interest in culture at the end of the 1970s, there was already a great discrepancy between what was going on in the heads of Chinese artists and intellectuals and what was happening in the rest of the world. Chinese artists rushed to assimilate disjointed and sometimes misinterpreted information and adapted it to the social, historical, and cultural specificity of the country in order to shape their own methodology. Modernism, postmodernism, classical philosophy, eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, liberalism, anti-imperialism, and other intellectual movements from the Western world were introduced into China all at once to become parallel and mixed influences on the practices of artists.
The 1989 “China/Avant-Garde” exhibition can be considered a rather extensive and reliable gauge of the mixture of styles and thinking that contemporary Chinese artists were keenly exploring during the 1980s. All of it, however, was charged with a great sense of randomness, which was telling with regard to the intellectual state of the artists. Their system of knowledge was fragmented. On one hand, they suffered from the missed opportunity for education during the Cultural Revolution and from a missing link to the traditions that were wiped out by it. On the other hand, the sudden shift from having one type of visual and cultural experience (the omnipresent revolutionary realism) to being exposed to a dazzling diversity of aesthetic and conceptual possibilities presented the artists with the challenge of having to decide what to choose. Often the choice was made based upon an instinct or an attitude, and this would become the operational basis on which artists would form their own artistic structure and language.
Although parallel practices continued to exist from the 1990s up to the present day, the international interest and art market have been mostly focused on works that prioritize socially and politically charged subject matter over stylistic experimentation and conceptual investigation. Artists that created cynical realist, social realist, political pop works that feed into a kind of collective imagination of a Chinese society have been gaining so much recognition since the early ‘90s that the artists even strove to minimize technological and formal complexity in order to focus the attention of the viewer on the depicted content. Their method of referring to social content has become the central theme that runs through their entire practice and leaves little room for anything else.
Li Xianting, who wrote the above-quoted letter in 1991, was an important figure in the 1980s whose editorial work in art publications such as Meishu (Fine Arts) gave crucial visibility and endorsement to promising young artists and artist groups. It was a time when artists and critics seemed to venture hand-in-hand into completely new territory, later overlooked by the political hype of proceeding years. This new territory involved recovering the normal need to express and experiment artistically without being bound by ideological or political obligations. Formal and conceptual investigations were considered to be a matter of intellectual awakening.
The “China/Avant-Garde” show was less a thematic group exhibition than a platform and occasion, as well as a valid context, for an outburst of emotional and spiritual energy pent up in the previous decades.
Just two years after the “China/Avant-Garde” exhibition, reality seemed much farther away. Contemporary art somehow took a back seat to what the country was occupied primarily with, namely, economic development. There were considerably fewer chances to exhibit publicly within China, and those who had been actively involved in the 1980s took the time to reflect on building group dynamics and collective ways of working such as through political activism, which offered a source of emotional comfort and courage. Artists and critics were also pondering and searching for a new future in the absence of a clear model to follow. It would take a few more years before the knowledge, understanding, and capital from the Western art structure, along with what Li called “the International system of value,” would trickle down to have an effect on the formation of the art system in China.
It was around this time, in 1991, when Li wrote the letter to Fei quoted above. It reflected a rather conservative and functionalist mindset, one that rejected and critiqued the position of those artists and intellectuals who worked outside of China. He attributed the temporary inactivity of Chinese artists residing overseas to the fact that they were outside of their context. Fei pointedly responded by saying that the inability to respond to new contexts was deeply rooted in the education and ideology these artists were subjected to in China, and argued that only when the artists were able to surpass their given cultural and social contexts would they be able to truly succeed internationally. As Fei himself put it:
Most Chinese artists who have left China couldn’t fully realize their talents as they did back in China. Besides the issues of language and practical life, the main reason was precisely the particular intellectual quality and way of thinking that were cultivated in their intellectual native land. It prevents them from entering the contemporary cultural issues in a new context. This kind of creative “drought” comes from the inability of these artists to turn what they have learned in their own country into something that can transcend the cultural gap and continue to be effective. Yet this “inability” is exactly the result of the long-term influence of the closed and conservative cultural spirit unique to Chinese society. Thus, I think what you said might be reversed: “Art must die out without leaving its cultural motherland.”
Naturally, what I meant by “leaving” is that art must have a side that transcends its native culture in order to develop. The world today is in the era of globalized culture and openness. We can only truly discover our own uniqueness and enable our native culture to gain momentum by perceiving and being involved in those common issues that transcend culture . . . To reflect on ourselves while keeping the door closed is like a person facing himself in a mirror. No matter how he thinks of himself, it is eventually making himself believe in himself. Although this can be regarded as “sticking to one’s native culture,” it is actually no more than a self-tortured psychological habit developed in a long-term situation of being closed-minded. In my view, only when the “native culture” walks out of its “native culture,” can it become the real “native culture.” It’s time to reverse what Lu Xun proposed in the ‘30s, “what is more national is more international” into “what is more international is more national.”
What are doing, and what we want to do, is to gradually place issues brought from the Chinese context into the larger cultural background of the world, in a lively and creative way, so that it can set in motion a process of becoming “common” and “extensive.”4
There was a great deal of idealist passion as well as critical understanding of one’s own cultural context running through Fei’s appeal. Cultural specificity shouldn’t be a defining trait of one’s existence and thinking; it can however be valuable when placed in an international context to be scrutinized and renewed, in constant interaction and dialogue with an external cultural sphere.
Throughout the past two decades, under the influence of the art market, an infrastructure for contemporary art has slowly taken shape. Yet although it bears all the familiar characteristics of a mature art system—with galleries, contemporary art museums, art magazines, collections, art centers, archives, and so on—a lot of them are just forms without real substance. Art magazines run informational articles, which are rarely critical, and feature neither reviews nor art criticism. Art museums operate by renting out exhibition spaces and filling programs with paying shows, completely lacking in curatorial framework or presentation. Art centers accept shows supported by gallery money or the investment of private art dealers and so-called collectors (who are actually speculators). Art archives and triennials are initiated, funded, and curated by private gallerists who seek to feature their own represented artists in a broader and apparently more authoritative context. Art historians compile bulky histories of contemporary art heavily informed and influenced by their closed circle of contacts.
While these roles in the scene are often very blurry, the more profound and problematic aspect is that no matter what motivation or scheme lies behind all of these institutions, the quality of their projects is always the lowest priority, and almost always compromised.
It’s interesting to observe this dynamic in the art scene by examining the way Chinese society is organized. In recent years, the interest in individuality that has arisen from a capitalist economy has met with a strong tradition of surrendering one’s own desires to those of a collective situation. Collectivism is about the loss of individual desires, as well as of individual responsibility.
As for the Chinese artists based abroad, it would take longer for them to be recognized. However, the functionalist and results-oriented mentality prevalent in China was also hindering leading critics like Li himself, who was once among those making headway by looking beyond his given reality. Less than two decades later, many of the “exiled” artists who left China to live and work abroad in the 1980s and ‘90s have gradually returned to major cities in China, many with admirable international careers behind them. More importantly, these figures brought back not only their practice and artistic ideas, updated and shaped by their time overseas, but also formidable number of possibilities for influencing the art scene within China.
▴ Zhang Huan, Berlin Buddha, 2007. Aluminium, 370 x 260 x 290 cm.
In the case of Zhang Huan, an artist who lived in New York between 1998 and 2005, he had left China for the States after already being a prominent figure in the performance art movement in the early 1990s in China. Once in New York, it didn’t take long for him to be invited to perform and work with important American and international institutions. He proved to be able not only to overcome the constraint of cultural contexts but also to transfer effortlessly between two cultures, in either direction. In 2005 he moved back to Shanghai and established a fifteen-acre studio and production center on the outskirts of the city. Zhang’s continuous international success is the object of envy for many local artists and his way of working has certainly presented a new model for the local art scene. Here, he hired and trained skilled workers and technicians from various regions across the country, whose technical competence complimented his own thinking. This sophisticated and well-managed production workshop churned out a great number of Zhang’s physically imposing oversized sculptures.
Although made in China, Zhang’s current works are rarely exhibited inside the country, even though he exhibits actively and sells work on an international level. His first solo exhibition in China, planned last year for the Shanghai Museum of Art, was eventually cancelled due to sensitive content. The last decade of market inflation has given a lot of people false confidence and false belief in the sustainability of the local system. Here the lack of criticality and intellectual scrutiny is replaced by an overemphasis on networking, the formation of personal alliances, and the necessity of strategic maneuvering in order to tease a primitive market appetite. It is this very way of being that characterizes the local art system, which seems to have a hard time finding a way to contextualize, understand, and present the international artistic language and practice of Zhang Huan. He remains an enigma for the art scene in China today.
Meanwhile, many people in the Chinese art scene are still perplexed and held back by doubts of a general and primitive nature. One afternoon when I once walked around the art district in Beijing, the few people I ran into—gallerists, directors of art spaces—coincidentally told me the same thing: now that the market is down, they want to discover new talent and work with young artists. This is as much an illusion as the idea that older and more established artists are no longer active or involved, and have thus lost their value. Like anywhere else, people are obsessed with youth and emerging talent, yet the difference is that the Chinese art structure hasn’t diversified enough to gain the intellectual and theoretical momentum necessary to address the ongoing practice of already established artists and their relevance. The roles of the institutions are not clearly defined and everyone is competing for the same resources, while being simultaneously unable to develop a stable discourse through which to position the actual work.
◂ Ai Weiwei, White House, 1999. From the series “Finger,” B/W Print, Edition of 10, 51 x 61 cm / 90 x 127 cm.
What Fei Dawei was arguing for almost two decades ago is unfortunately still a valid premise and goal for those of us working in China: how do we examine and activate our own cultural conditions and contexts in a global discourse, rather than emphasize our own uniqueness and become burdened by it? It’s not international attention that will release us, but our self-discipline and critical engagement with our own practices and ideas that will possibly make us active participants in the global art scene, artists who do not lose sight of the rest of the world. Maybe it’s less relevant to ask what is “Chinese art” than to think about what is contemporary in our own particular context and how it relates to the larger context of the world.
It seems that we are living in a contemporary world just like everyone else, and we have the same kind of exposure to news and information and entertainment; if we look hard enough, we find that we drink the same kind of coffee and are sensitive to similar kinds of things. But for many of us living in China, it’s as if we are only beginning to make the journey to the contemporary. For China, the 1960s and ‘70s were periods of temporary suspension and removal from the modernist movements—and more importantly, from the transition from the modern to the contemporary—that took place in other parts of world, and this distance proved to be devastating. In the past few decades, we have slowly built up a certain degree of confidence and resources, sufficient perhaps to finally examine the same sets of concerns and issues on the same level and to finally make the transition to the contemporary.
☁
Back to Contemporary: One Contemporary Ambition, Many Worlds
I was recently invited by the editors of Afterall to contribute to a book they are preparing on the monumental 1989 exhibition “Magiciens de la terre” with a text reflecting on the impact of this exhibition on the practice of Chinese artists. On that occasion I had a discussion with Chinese critic Fei Dawei, who had introduced the curator of the show, Jean-Hubert Martin, to many of the key artists of the ‘85 movement in China prior to the exhibition and worked as one of its regional advisors. As one of the earliest attempts to exhibit contemporary art from non-Western parts of the world in the West and to deal with the possibility of multiculturalism, this exhibition set an important precedent for many projects to come with its ambition of offering a global vision for contemporary art.
What concerned Fei and the many artists Martin encountered on his visit to China was the question of how to formulate the image of the contemporary in Chinese art. For this purpose, Fei deliberately set up studio visits for Martin to first meet with artists such as Wu Guanzhong, who worked in the modernist tradition or were part of the official art circuit in China, before leading him to meet the artists and critics of the ‘85 movement. At that time, both Fei and the artists consistently tried to convince Martin that contemporary art was something unfolding in the most lively manner in the country and that it represented the most current climate of artistic thinking and energy in the country—not folk art, not traditional art.
This visit left a strong impression on Martin. In the end, Chinese artists Huang Yongping, Gu Dexin, and Yang Jiechang were invited to participate in the exhibition, which also featured, for example, tribal art from Africa. It was a fortunate setup for Chinese contemporary artists—the relevance of their practice, which had previously developed in isolation, bound to circulate only within China, was situated and viewed in an international context for the very first time. This would also have a lasting impact on how Chinese contemporary art would be represented in the many exhibitions and occasions that followed in the West.
▴ Cyprien Tokoudagba, Voodoo Pantheon. The sculpture group shows the Voodoo gods Zangbeto (with Horns, in the background), and Legba, sitting naked, judging a sinner. The group was originally crafted for “Magiciens de la terre” in 1989. from here.
In 2006, German art historian Hans Belting pioneered a project entitled “Global Art and the Museum” in an attempt to document the global changes in contemporary art and its institutions. Acknowledging the fact that economic globalization has—along with its own institutional practices—taken contemporary art practice beyond the restrictions of national borders, he states:
With the new geography of auction houses, the art trade acts on a global scale, art museums, by contrast, operate within a national or urban framework in which they encounter the most diverse audiences. While art collecting has become en vogue on an unprecedented scale, it often lacks a common notion of art. Contemporary art also invades former ethnographic museums, which are forced to remap their areas of collecting. As yet, the novelty of the situation defies any safe categories.1
This ongoing project, consisting of a series of panel discussions, lectures, conferences, and publications, will lead to an exhibition at the ZKM in 2011 (whose vision to present what could possibly be the global image of contemporary art today is an enormous challenge in itself). Belting, who back in 1983 proposed the end of art history and the end of art’s historical narrative, has again stressed in this context that the German perspective is a local one, and that Western art history is a time-based and culture-specific concept whose sensitivity and relevance to other periods of time and cultures should always be re-examined. A workshop he led on global art at the ZKM this past summer proposed a paradigm shift; we were reminded to no longer think about the West as the singular model to be applied worldwide, but to reflect on how to expand this model using experiences from elsewhere, or even to approach art from the perspective of a multitude of models.
As a participant in the workshop, I became more aware of my own specific local context, which is China, a country whose own position in challenging and redefining multiculturalism and global contemporality, both back in 1989 and twenty years later in 2009, has always been in question. Perhaps it’s not simply a matter of creativity and what artworks are being produced, it’s also a matter of perspective and methodology: how to view the works produced in this context and, more importantly, how to develop a way of working that is perceptive with regard not only to the works but also to their context, one that is closer to the works’ internal complexities and constant transfigurations than to their external features and general applications.
In the following text, I would like to respond to the question “what is contemporary art?” through a historical self-reflection and by looking at the specific scenario in China through a very local perspective.
Even though China was absent from much of modernism’s chronological progression, it has followed a unique track and used a set of coordinates that fuse Western and Chinese experiences. Today’s Chinese artists are more than ever before deeply entrenched in an ever-evolving and gradually more autonomous system of art production and circulation, invigorated simultaneously by the continuous inflow of international knowledge and capital, but even more so by the sheer excess of local interest, investment, and imagination.
Artists, dealers, galleries, museums, art magazines, auction houses, biennials, and art fairs are interwoven into a tighter and tighter network, eagerly replicating the mature model established in the West, while continuously and uninhibitedly adapting it to the practical and philosophical needs of specific local conditions. The unparalleled imaginativeness and potential of this local system constantly defines and redefines the method of working here.
Incidentally or not, just prior to the opening of “Magiciens de la terre” in 1989, a regrettable transition occurred in China that resounded throughout many folds of public life, fundamentally shaping the collective political, social, cultural, and psychological landscape of China with a series of disheartening closures and departures. Cultural, spiritual, and artistic aspirations became secondary to a quickly spreading and highly infectious mood of market optimism and global trade. Economic development became an effective instrument for diverting people’s attention from intellectual pursuits and enlightenment. The disregard for knowledge and intellectual pursuits planted during the Cultural Revolution continued to manifest itself in a new wave of brainless entertainment. Ignorance became understood by many as a fashionable state of being.
Meanwhile, 1989 generated many drastic turns in terms of intellectual dynamics as well as personal choices. It was the year when the preceding decade of ideological opening-up and cultural enlightenment came to an abrupt and disillusioning end. Yet the prospect of a new beginning for everyone remained irresistible, offering instant and tangible compensations and achievements. The market economy introduced a system of quantification and evaluation according to materialistic value. A pragmatic and functionalist mindset was firmly established.
A 1991 correspondence between Beijing-based art critic and curator Li Xianting and Paris-based curator Fei Dawei, both of whom were involved in the curating and organization of the “China/Avant-Garde” exhibition in February of 1989, clearly revealed their differences, not only in their geographical positions but more profoundly in their intellectual judgments and value systems. In 1991, Li Xianting wrote:
Once art leaves its cultural motherland, it will surely die out. Exiled culture and arts have always happened in the macro cultural background in Europe. You [the artists and critics travelling abroad] represent new issues. What I want to know are opinions from every party. Although they were working against the same overall background, Warhol and Beuys each carried their respective cultural identities. Of course this is discussed on the condition that we acknowledge the new international system of value. Nationality is not the kind promoted by the government, but it does exist. We can’t follow the postmodernist styles in the contemporary West using the so-called principle of modernism. In the world today, nothing can be considered avant-garde. No matter what you do, it always appears to be familiar.2
At a time when international companies already spread their wings all over the world, speculating upon and investing in a near future when they would reap the benefits of building and becoming part of a global market, some Chinese intellectuals still clung to the idea of cultural locality, in doubt of this “new international system of value.” Such claims sounded extremely nationalistic and profoundly arrogant, lacking in curiosity or desire to understand the outside world. Unable to picture the West as an equal partner in cultural exchange, Li spoke about the West as both irrelevant and, at the same time, an impossible standard for the Chinese art world to emulate and be on par with. He certainly touched upon the issue of the impossibility of a contemporary avant-garde with his statement “no matter what you do, it always appears to be familiar,” which remains a relevant point that constantly shakes up our decisions and judgments today.
Here I quote Li Xianting again:
But we all cherish your activities abroad. Maybe every kind of effort has its value. We are all cornerstones and nothing (we do) would be worth international attention. Do you really believe that you yourself have had an impact on the Western art world?3
In this condescending letter, Li Xianting was not only referring to Fei Dawei but to a group of Chinese artists and intellectuals who left China in the 1980s and ‘90s to pursue their careers in foreign countries. Among them were Huang Yongping, Chen Zhen, Wang Du, and Hou Hanru in Paris; Cai Guoqiang in Japan; Xu Bing, Zhang Huan, and Ai Weiwei in New York, and so on.
The conception of Chinese art as being unworthy of international attention or unable to have an “impact on the Western art world” was to quickly change with the increase in international attention on the political and social situation in China. In no time, Chinese contemporary art was embraced by the international art market as a hot item—not particularly for its artistic value, but for its ideological and sociological revelations. In this way, the label of Chinese art became extremely crucial to works that would command international recognition. For many years, even up till today, most Chinese artists, many of whom thrive in the art market, maintain a very strong national identity as compared to a very underdeveloped professional and individual identity. The biggest danger of all would be to then equate one with the other and enjoy artistic success based on identity politics without realizing its true nature.
The fad of buying and exhibiting Chinese art on an international level didn’t really speak to the quality of artistic thinking and working in the country, but instead indicated the growing importance of Chinese economic and social power. The consequences of this dimension of the Chinese art world are strongly felt today with the fall of the Chinese art market. It was a necessity of the so-called “cultural multiplicity” that the West was pursuing for their society to help sustain and glorify their global market activities. Chinese contemporary art was simply a souvenir one had to have to showcase one’s international lifestyle. But the question of how actual contemporary art practice in China is relevant and valuable to that of the Western world remains unanswered.
Since the 1990s, a newly developed and unconstrained art market took over the Chinese art world as it was still in its infancy, before it had achieved the institutional diversity that characterizes longer-established art infrastructures in other countries. As a result, contemporary art in China has become almost entirely dependent on market forces, which have set themselves up as the dominant, and virtually the only system of evaluating and crediting artworks and the success of artists. The vibrancy of the market gave a huge boost to the confidence and ambition of the players and fed into the “bigger means better” frenzy. There were bountiful resources for opening galleries of 1,000 square meters, stage expensive productions, mount large-scale exhibitions, produce bulky catalogues and host luxurious opening-night parties. All of a sudden, everything was possible. Artists responded to such optimism with attempts at mega-productions. Artworks and art practices were discussed and received, not from an artistic and conceptual point of view, but on the basis of misplaced criteria such as size, production budget, market price, and the preferences of collectors.
Concerning artistic production itself, the advancement of contemporary art practice in China hasn’t followed the linear logic of Western art history. Intellectual development was basically stagnant and taken hostage by political movements during the preceding decades of Communist rule. This situation worsened with the launch of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, which severed not only the link between the country’s intellectual life and the outside world, but also the bloodline that connected it with its own history and cultural traditions. Education was suspended and knowledge and ideas were dismissed.
Thus, when the country reopened its doors and resumed its interest in culture at the end of the 1970s, there was already a great discrepancy between what was going on in the heads of Chinese artists and intellectuals and what was happening in the rest of the world. Chinese artists rushed to assimilate disjointed and sometimes misinterpreted information and adapted it to the social, historical, and cultural specificity of the country in order to shape their own methodology. Modernism, postmodernism, classical philosophy, eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, liberalism, anti-imperialism, and other intellectual movements from the Western world were introduced into China all at once to become parallel and mixed influences on the practices of artists.
The 1989 “China/Avant-Garde” exhibition can be considered a rather extensive and reliable gauge of the mixture of styles and thinking that contemporary Chinese artists were keenly exploring during the 1980s. All of it, however, was charged with a great sense of randomness, which was telling with regard to the intellectual state of the artists. Their system of knowledge was fragmented. On one hand, they suffered from the missed opportunity for education during the Cultural Revolution and from a missing link to the traditions that were wiped out by it. On the other hand, the sudden shift from having one type of visual and cultural experience (the omnipresent revolutionary realism) to being exposed to a dazzling diversity of aesthetic and conceptual possibilities presented the artists with the challenge of having to decide what to choose. Often the choice was made based upon an instinct or an attitude, and this would become the operational basis on which artists would form their own artistic structure and language.
Although parallel practices continued to exist from the 1990s up to the present day, the international interest and art market have been mostly focused on works that prioritize socially and politically charged subject matter over stylistic experimentation and conceptual investigation. Artists that created cynical realist, social realist, political pop works that feed into a kind of collective imagination of a Chinese society have been gaining so much recognition since the early ‘90s that the artists even strove to minimize technological and formal complexity in order to focus the attention of the viewer on the depicted content. Their method of referring to social content has become the central theme that runs through their entire practice and leaves little room for anything else.
Li Xianting, who wrote the above-quoted letter in 1991, was an important figure in the 1980s whose editorial work in art publications such as Meishu (Fine Arts) gave crucial visibility and endorsement to promising young artists and artist groups. It was a time when artists and critics seemed to venture hand-in-hand into completely new territory, later overlooked by the political hype of proceeding years. This new territory involved recovering the normal need to express and experiment artistically without being bound by ideological or political obligations. Formal and conceptual investigations were considered to be a matter of intellectual awakening.
The “China/Avant-Garde” show was less a thematic group exhibition than a platform and occasion, as well as a valid context, for an outburst of emotional and spiritual energy pent up in the previous decades.
Just two years after the “China/Avant-Garde” exhibition, reality seemed much farther away. Contemporary art somehow took a back seat to what the country was occupied primarily with, namely, economic development. There were considerably fewer chances to exhibit publicly within China, and those who had been actively involved in the 1980s took the time to reflect on building group dynamics and collective ways of working such as through political activism, which offered a source of emotional comfort and courage. Artists and critics were also pondering and searching for a new future in the absence of a clear model to follow. It would take a few more years before the knowledge, understanding, and capital from the Western art structure, along with what Li called “the International system of value,” would trickle down to have an effect on the formation of the art system in China.
It was around this time, in 1991, when Li wrote the letter to Fei quoted above. It reflected a rather conservative and functionalist mindset, one that rejected and critiqued the position of those artists and intellectuals who worked outside of China. He attributed the temporary inactivity of Chinese artists residing overseas to the fact that they were outside of their context. Fei pointedly responded by saying that the inability to respond to new contexts was deeply rooted in the education and ideology these artists were subjected to in China, and argued that only when the artists were able to surpass their given cultural and social contexts would they be able to truly succeed internationally. As Fei himself put it:
Most Chinese artists who have left China couldn’t fully realize their talents as they did back in China. Besides the issues of language and practical life, the main reason was precisely the particular intellectual quality and way of thinking that were cultivated in their intellectual native land. It prevents them from entering the contemporary cultural issues in a new context. This kind of creative “drought” comes from the inability of these artists to turn what they have learned in their own country into something that can transcend the cultural gap and continue to be effective. Yet this “inability” is exactly the result of the long-term influence of the closed and conservative cultural spirit unique to Chinese society. Thus, I think what you said might be reversed: “Art must die out without leaving its cultural motherland.”
Naturally, what I meant by “leaving” is that art must have a side that transcends its native culture in order to develop. The world today is in the era of globalized culture and openness. We can only truly discover our own uniqueness and enable our native culture to gain momentum by perceiving and being involved in those common issues that transcend culture . . . To reflect on ourselves while keeping the door closed is like a person facing himself in a mirror. No matter how he thinks of himself, it is eventually making himself believe in himself. Although this can be regarded as “sticking to one’s native culture,” it is actually no more than a self-tortured psychological habit developed in a long-term situation of being closed-minded. In my view, only when the “native culture” walks out of its “native culture,” can it become the real “native culture.” It’s time to reverse what Lu Xun proposed in the ‘30s, “what is more national is more international” into “what is more international is more national.”
What are doing, and what we want to do, is to gradually place issues brought from the Chinese context into the larger cultural background of the world, in a lively and creative way, so that it can set in motion a process of becoming “common” and “extensive.”4
There was a great deal of idealist passion as well as critical understanding of one’s own cultural context running through Fei’s appeal. Cultural specificity shouldn’t be a defining trait of one’s existence and thinking; it can however be valuable when placed in an international context to be scrutinized and renewed, in constant interaction and dialogue with an external cultural sphere.
Throughout the past two decades, under the influence of the art market, an infrastructure for contemporary art has slowly taken shape. Yet although it bears all the familiar characteristics of a mature art system—with galleries, contemporary art museums, art magazines, collections, art centers, archives, and so on—a lot of them are just forms without real substance. Art magazines run informational articles, which are rarely critical, and feature neither reviews nor art criticism. Art museums operate by renting out exhibition spaces and filling programs with paying shows, completely lacking in curatorial framework or presentation. Art centers accept shows supported by gallery money or the investment of private art dealers and so-called collectors (who are actually speculators). Art archives and triennials are initiated, funded, and curated by private gallerists who seek to feature their own represented artists in a broader and apparently more authoritative context. Art historians compile bulky histories of contemporary art heavily informed and influenced by their closed circle of contacts.
While these roles in the scene are often very blurry, the more profound and problematic aspect is that no matter what motivation or scheme lies behind all of these institutions, the quality of their projects is always the lowest priority, and almost always compromised.
It’s interesting to observe this dynamic in the art scene by examining the way Chinese society is organized. In recent years, the interest in individuality that has arisen from a capitalist economy has met with a strong tradition of surrendering one’s own desires to those of a collective situation. Collectivism is about the loss of individual desires, as well as of individual responsibility.
As for the Chinese artists based abroad, it would take longer for them to be recognized. However, the functionalist and results-oriented mentality prevalent in China was also hindering leading critics like Li himself, who was once among those making headway by looking beyond his given reality. Less than two decades later, many of the “exiled” artists who left China to live and work abroad in the 1980s and ‘90s have gradually returned to major cities in China, many with admirable international careers behind them. More importantly, these figures brought back not only their practice and artistic ideas, updated and shaped by their time overseas, but also formidable number of possibilities for influencing the art scene within China.
▴ Zhang Huan, Berlin Buddha, 2007. Aluminium, 370 x 260 x 290 cm.
In the case of Zhang Huan, an artist who lived in New York between 1998 and 2005, he had left China for the States after already being a prominent figure in the performance art movement in the early 1990s in China. Once in New York, it didn’t take long for him to be invited to perform and work with important American and international institutions. He proved to be able not only to overcome the constraint of cultural contexts but also to transfer effortlessly between two cultures, in either direction. In 2005 he moved back to Shanghai and established a fifteen-acre studio and production center on the outskirts of the city. Zhang’s continuous international success is the object of envy for many local artists and his way of working has certainly presented a new model for the local art scene. Here, he hired and trained skilled workers and technicians from various regions across the country, whose technical competence complimented his own thinking. This sophisticated and well-managed production workshop churned out a great number of Zhang’s physically imposing oversized sculptures.
Although made in China, Zhang’s current works are rarely exhibited inside the country, even though he exhibits actively and sells work on an international level. His first solo exhibition in China, planned last year for the Shanghai Museum of Art, was eventually cancelled due to sensitive content. The last decade of market inflation has given a lot of people false confidence and false belief in the sustainability of the local system. Here the lack of criticality and intellectual scrutiny is replaced by an overemphasis on networking, the formation of personal alliances, and the necessity of strategic maneuvering in order to tease a primitive market appetite. It is this very way of being that characterizes the local art system, which seems to have a hard time finding a way to contextualize, understand, and present the international artistic language and practice of Zhang Huan. He remains an enigma for the art scene in China today.
Meanwhile, many people in the Chinese art scene are still perplexed and held back by doubts of a general and primitive nature. One afternoon when I once walked around the art district in Beijing, the few people I ran into—gallerists, directors of art spaces—coincidentally told me the same thing: now that the market is down, they want to discover new talent and work with young artists. This is as much an illusion as the idea that older and more established artists are no longer active or involved, and have thus lost their value. Like anywhere else, people are obsessed with youth and emerging talent, yet the difference is that the Chinese art structure hasn’t diversified enough to gain the intellectual and theoretical momentum necessary to address the ongoing practice of already established artists and their relevance. The roles of the institutions are not clearly defined and everyone is competing for the same resources, while being simultaneously unable to develop a stable discourse through which to position the actual work.
◂ Ai Weiwei, White House, 1999. From the series “Finger,” B/W Print, Edition of 10, 51 x 61 cm / 90 x 127 cm.
What Fei Dawei was arguing for almost two decades ago is unfortunately still a valid premise and goal for those of us working in China: how do we examine and activate our own cultural conditions and contexts in a global discourse, rather than emphasize our own uniqueness and become burdened by it? It’s not international attention that will release us, but our self-discipline and critical engagement with our own practices and ideas that will possibly make us active participants in the global art scene, artists who do not lose sight of the rest of the world. Maybe it’s less relevant to ask what is “Chinese art” than to think about what is contemporary in our own particular context and how it relates to the larger context of the world.
It seems that we are living in a contemporary world just like everyone else, and we have the same kind of exposure to news and information and entertainment; if we look hard enough, we find that we drink the same kind of coffee and are sensitive to similar kinds of things. But for many of us living in China, it’s as if we are only beginning to make the journey to the contemporary. For China, the 1960s and ‘70s were periods of temporary suspension and removal from the modernist movements—and more importantly, from the transition from the modern to the contemporary—that took place in other parts of world, and this distance proved to be devastating. In the past few decades, we have slowly built up a certain degree of confidence and resources, sufficient perhaps to finally examine the same sets of concerns and issues on the same level and to finally make the transition to the contemporary.
☁
A Game Played Without Rules Has No Losers
Pauline J. Yao
A Game Played Without Rules Has No Losers
That contemporary art in China has developed in response to the cultural, political, intellectual, economic, and social conditions of its particular (and highly transformative) environment is beyond doubt. Yet to what extent we view art as merely reflective, illustrative, or representative of its specific cultural context, rather than endowed with the capacity to transcend difference and engage critically to change, readapt, redesign, or push against these contested frameworks, has nearly always been in question. It is this contradiction—between art’s capacity to reveal certain social determinants and its ability or willingness to effect change upon them—that underlies much of contemporary art production today. The tendency to go against prescribed systems and institutional structures in the art world, cross the boundaries of art, or question how we define art in the first place, has become accepted shorthand for closing the gap between art and everyday life, itself a gesture widely interpreted as promoting positive values and contributing to the betterment of society at large. How such transgressions might come to be envisioned, realized, and recognized, in a place like contemporary China—with its underdeveloped art infrastructure and overdeveloped sense of control—still remains to be seen.
China finds itself today in a peculiar position vis-à-vis the global art world. While international art centers struggle to define the role of art institutions, and countless artists and curators appear eager to jettison their modernist frameworks and container aesthetics, China is eagerly adopting the very institutional systems and structures that the Western art world is ready to abandon. The overarching narrative of contemporary art in China, starting with the late 1970s, has been largely predicated on acknowledgement, acceptance, and recognition by the “official” system, even as Chinese artists struggled with its ideologies and prescribed stylistic conventions. The debates and discussions which followed centered on the exclusion of certain art forms from the official ranks, without calling into question the inequalities and injustices of the system itself. Today, ongoing efforts are similarly so mired in the rush to professionalize, to establish boundaries and structures of governance for the sphere of contemporary art to the extent that experiments performed outside or against these efforts have become scarce and of indeterminable gain. The legacy of anti-institutional practices that we most readily associate with contemporary art in the West barely exists in the Chinese context; if anything, it represents a conundrum for artists who strive to maintain a critical stance while supporting the aim of mainstream acceptance. The process of reconciling these two goals—of gaining entry into hitherto closed institutions locally while at the same time maintaining an “outsider” or “anti-establishment” aesthetic or political position in the eyes of the global community—produces a tension that underlies artistic production in China, just as it does in many other developing art centers.
▴ View of Zheng Guogu’s Age of Empire in process, 2008. Photo courtesy of the artist.
The ongoing conundrum around art’s autonomy—the degree to which art should be responsible to itself alone or to its own particular context and society—is a global issue left largely unresolved. As the world faces a shrinking global economy and the collapse of world financial markets, questions surrounding art’s sovereignty have become all the more pressing. We are all well aware of the ineffectiveness of art criticism in the face of the market, and of the superficialities that have accompanied the art world’s recent bout of lavish overspending and self-aggrandizement.1 But statements that demonize the market or advocate a turn towards sobriety, a “return to substance,” or going back to “art making as it should be,” not only suggest an air of non-complicity, but imply that there is some clear consensus on what it is we should be returning to. By now we are well aware that art has never only been about the market or business-end strategies. The presence of commerce is not anathema to creativity, nor does its absence immediately restore art to a state of purity and innocence. Indeed, the insistence that art production should remain totally free from the market runs dangerously close to one that confines those same aesthetic practices to a space of meaningless insignificance, independent of the social and political conditions that inform and ensure its own very existence.
Rather than look to the market as culprit, we might turn instead to factors that sustain rather than misappropriate artistic production. If we recognize the art market as a subset of concerns contained within a larger entity we know as the art world, then what can be said of the concerns of the art world itself? In order to meet the demands of the market, contemporary art in China has witnessed an unprecedented ramping up of production, and this tendency has threatened outlets for critical reflection and thinking, which in turn thwarts long-term sustainability. Moreover, if the imported aesthetics that inform contemporary Chinese art—installation art, video, and new media—on the one hand trigger suspicion in official institutions and academies raised on a diet of traditional painting and socialist realism, they provide on the other hand a much-needed image of progress and modernization to cover for the government’s totalitarian attitudes. Assessing art’s relationship to autonomy, sovereignty, and independence in the midst of China’s pronounced lack of autonomy in other spheres of life—namely, certain political and social freedoms and values we associate with civil society—becomes entangled not only in social and political concerns, but in increasingly present economic ones. On the surface it would appear that support for contemporary art in China has reached new heights, proven by the influx of art fairs, exhibitions in state-run institutions, and even new forms of government funding.2 But the spirit that underlies these ventures remains solidly aimed at capital gain, market interests, and the business end of art production, with little, if any evidence of support for activities outside this sphere. Whatever subversive tendencies that might remain from earlier periods is quietly tolerated, but more often commercially packaged or even neutralized by the government’s apparently open stance on contemporary art—a position only leveraged by certain individuals when it is deemed convenient (read profitable) or when it follows the prevailing political wind.
▴ Xijing Olympics, opening ceremony, 2008. The Xijing Men. Photo courtesy of the artists.
In his essay “The Politics of Installation,” published in this journal, Boris Groys reminds us that although artworks cannot escape their commodity status, they are also not expressly made for buyers and collectors; in other words, the multitude of art biennials, art fairs, and major blockbuster exhibitions has generated an “art public” in which the typical viewer is someone who rarely views the work as a commodity. For Groys, this is evidence that the art system is “on its way to becoming part of the very mass culture that it has for so long sought to observe and analyze from a distance.”3 Such an assessment may hold true for the bulk of the Western art world, but carries less weight in China or in many non-Western regions where contemporary art is still far from being a constitutive element of mass culture. Despite growing numbers of visitors to museums and arts districts in China, contemporary art remains mostly unrecognized by mainstream culture, only haltingly accepted into government-run institutions, absent from the average university art department, and virtually unknown to the average citizen. These truths are often forgotten, especially when one’s time is spent sealed within the gallery-filled espresso culture of the urban contemporary art world. However, there is a sense that this is all about to change, and this makes it all the more important to pay attention to how the groundwork is laid for creative and aesthetic practices that operate apart from, away from, or in resistance to the dominant spheres of commercialism surrounding them. The phenomenon of self-contained “art zones” such as Beijing’s 798 Art Zone are symptomatic of both a desire to segregate art from regular life and an effort to enhance its marketability by referencing its own legacy of success. In the absence of any counterpoint with which to understand this activity, contemporary art continues to be treated explicitly as a form of entertainment, a photo backdrop, or a moneymaking scheme for the burgeoning middle and upper classes. Media attention, private sponsorship, corporate ventures, and personal museums do little to counteract a growing perception that equates contemporary art with investment and market value.
The most enduring dilemma lies in the government’s own directives, which consciously limit art’s interactions with the rest of society. Lumped together into the amorphous designation of “creative industries” and isolated within “creative industry zones,” contemporary art has found itself walled off in places that both contain art and impose a sense of hermeticism. The rapid territorial expansion of contemporary art in Beijing in particular has not only stimulated studio-bound, market-oriented artistic practices, but has further limited site-specific practices to being responses to physical sites at the expense of social or political ones. This radicalization of space serves as a constant reminder of the contested nature of public space in China, and of a lurking authoritarian presence that seeks to control artistic as well as personal participation in the creation of everyday culture.
Distinguishing art from the rest of social life serves the interests of certain groups more than others. Keeping art at a safe distance from (or above) meaningful political engagement and in limited contact with society perpetuates its dependence on status quo economic conditions and social structures, no matter how radical its aesthetics might appear. While the Western appetite for “resistance” has a tendency to cast all art production in China as oppositional or “anti-regime,” this is rarely the case. It may be true that in the absence of meaningful civil society, political society encompasses everything, but by the same token this stimulates an utter indifference with regard to politics itself. Contemporary art in China is plagued by the absence of politics and worse, by the banalization of it. What we need are models that do more than critique the commercial atmosphere surrounding art (while operating from a position of safety)—models that engage meaningfully with the social determinants of production that shape and form art in the first place, asking not what is made, but who makes it, for whom, and under what conditions.4
▴ Xijing Olympics, 2008. Tsuyoshi Ozawa during competition. The Xijing Men. Photo courtesy of the artists.
Contemporary art throughout China today suffers from being cut off from both the traditions of the past and the life of the present. Attempting to untangle the knot of aesthetic autonomy in this context only magnifies art’s two perceived dead-ends: autonomous irrelevance or engaged complicity.5 The model of “engaged autonomy” that Charles Esche proposes is thus an intriguing one, suggesting a way to think of autonomy not as something that is invested in the object itself but rather as an action or a way of working.6 It advocates not only an active and participatory attitude, but replaces traditional top-down methods of assigning value and worth with more homespun measures of self-declared legitimacy and collective gain.
Efforts to detach contemporary art from its enclaves have already begun. Art collectives, alternative art spaces, deterritorialized social and relational practices all fit within this schema and present possible critical models for how we understand and witness the ways in which art can exert its own energy upon a given environment or social context, rather than simply emerge as its byproduct. I myself have helped initiate one such endeavor in Beijing called the Arrow Factory—a modestly sized art space where artistic production comes up against the social realities of its own immediate environment. Below I highlight two further art projects which embody possible strategies for an “engaged autonomy” that demonstrates a desire not only to create something that lies beyond the boundaries of the art world, but also to reach new, unprepared audiences.
▴ Xijing Olympics, 2008. Table Tennis Competition. The Xijing Men. Photo courtesy of the artists.
The work of the Xijing Men is rooted in everyday life and addresses the concerns of average individuals while simultaneously embracing and shattering nationalist frameworks by collaborating across cultural and linguistic borders. Their 2008 Xijing Olympics project has received wide international acclaim, due in part to its availability on websites such as YouTube. Formed by Chinese artist Chen Shaoxiong, Japanese artist Tsuyoshi Ozawa, and Korean artist Gimhongsok on the premise that there exists a northern capital (Beijing), a southern capital (Nanjing), and an eastern capital (Tokyo), but no western capital as of yet, The Xijing Men have taken it upon themselves to explore the option of making one. Collectively hailing from the fictional place of Xijing, their fixed attitudes towards nationhood and cultural or regional identities are overshadowed by values of plurality, multiplicity, and open-ended experimentation from the very start. Collaboration between these three artists from three different Asian countries conjures complicated notions of Asian-ness while offering a discourse centered less on the homogenizing forces of globalization than on the celebration of difference. One key to understanding the Xijing Men can be found in their method of communication. Without a common verbal language, the artists rely instead upon a mixture of broken English, physical gestures, hand-drawn sketches, and occasional handwriting (Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans all share an understanding of Chinese characters) to convey their ideas to one another. Even though they hail from different cultural background, the equalizing factor is language, with each from the very start working outside his ‘zone of comfort’ linguistically.
Staged in August 2008 during the official Beijing Olympic Games, Xijing Olympics presented a humorous yet provocative take on the unabashedly spectacular Olympics mania that gripped China last summer. In the outskirts of Beijing, the artist group carried out their own version, casting themselves as “athletes” and their family and friends as “audience.” Drawing from everyday objects and experiences—kicking watermelons instead of soccer balls, marathon napping, giving massages with boxing gloves, and other absurdities such as a three-way table tennis match using shoes as paddles—their version mocked the seriousness and solemnity with which the Chinese government (and by association, the Chinese public) treated the glitzy theatrics of the real Beijing Games. The Xijing Men replaced themes of winning, success, and public entertainment with modesty, simplicity, and failure. If the Games themselves constituted the supreme performance of Chinese national pride under the auspices of international diplomacy (never mind the subtext of China’s own eager aspirations to secure its position among the global superpowers), then the Xijing Olympics represented a caricature of these attitudes in which humor, playfulness, and aimlessness are injected into the highly scripted and ceremonial tone of the official games. Their antics worked to present a kind of informal locality to offset the trope of national spectacle, and in the process identified more directly with the concerns of average citizens, whose struggles to negotiate the massive transformations enveloping their way of life go largely unnoticed. The low-tech theatrics of the Xijing Olympics reflected a form of practice that is refreshingly human-scaled and attuned to the proximity of individuals rather than traditional groupings conditioned by notions of the “mass” and the “people.”
Continuing the logic of game-playing, artist Zheng Guogu’s ambitious Age of Empire (2001–) is part land art, part playground, and part social experiment. Inspired by the computer game series Age of Empires, in which players control historical world civilizations, Zheng is gradually transforming an agricultural area on the outskirts of Yangjiang city into a real-world replica of the game’s virtual community. It began in 2000, when a friend gave him a tip on some cheap land in the outskirts of the city, after which he soon bought up 5000 sq m. By 2005 he had acquired more neighboring plots to arrive at 20,000 sq m, which has today grown to 40,000 sq m (approximately 10 acres) and counting. Zheng has since replaced the existing landscape with an entirely new one that includes hills and mountains and a small village area, all surrounded by a stone wall.
▴ An unusual building being built at the foot of the mountain for Zheng Guogu’s Age of Empire, 2009. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Age of Empire is a project that does not concern itself with making a finished artwork—to date not a single building has been completed—rather, it functions as an exercise in turning the fictional into reality, or, more accurately, as an experiment in the social process of making itself. For many contemporary artists in China, art is viewed as a profession—treated as an occupation rather than a way of life. The prescribed categories of artist, calligrapher, or architect are all designations that Zheng disavows and slowly works to dissolve. Although ostensibly meant to house an artist studio, a small museum, and living and entertainment quarters, the real achievement of Age of Empire lies in its integration of life and art. As Zheng recreates his made-up game on real land, he faces real-world concerns about securing money, building rights, and the location of materials. Thus the sleepy coastal town of Yangjiang—small by Chinese standards, with a population of some 2 million—comes to stand as a microcosm for survival: underneath lurks a contested ground, a community full of underground systems and partial struggles that inform everyday life, and, by association, Zheng’s diverse practice.
Though his work deals with familiar themes of consumerism and tropes of transformation, he is also content to show us that which is constant and unchanging—a glimpse into the steady pace of life in his hometown of Yangjiang in the southern province of Guangdong. As Zheng knowingly acquired his land through illegal means (though he exchanged money and signed agreements with all the farmers he bought from, this land was legally not theirs to sell, as all land in China belongs to the state), which essentially means that local building officials can give him constant headaches for building on it and potentially obstruct the whole enterprise. Thus Zheng’s daily activities have quickly become consumed by wining, dining, and bribing the local officials in efforts to curry favor, maintain good relations, and negotiate with the proper channels. In making Age of Empire, he cooperates with the system in order to transcend it, becoming complicit yet independent at the same time. As Zheng says, “I live here and drink with my friends all day. I can let them know the traces of an artist. I can talk about art to a fishmonger today, to a man eating abalone tomorrow. Or I can talk to the boss of a snack bar.” His family, friends, objects, experiences, social interactions, and recreational activities—nearly everything in his life and surroundings—embed themselves and leave traces in his art. From this stable position, a certain sense of freedom enables Zheng to take risks that transcend the usual boundaries of art. In this sense, Zheng Guogu presents us with a sort of hypothesis: if real life can become art once it enters the world of art—by means of galleries, museums, and exhibitions—then what are the ways in which art can be returned to become a part of one’s everyday existence?
Projects like Age of Empire and the work of the Xijing Men will continue to operate spontaneously with no fixed timeframe, set limits, or defined outcome. Zheng has calculated a means of living his art through his daily actions, calling into question our awareness of our own practices as artists, critics, curators, historians, and audience members—practices that define the boundaries of the art world in the first place. Like Zheng talking to the man eating abalone, or to the fishmonger, we are witnessing the art world’s traditional borders becoming indivisible from those of the social order it is inclined to merely portray. As Zheng says, “The artist is around them, and he does leave a trace. It’s a gradual process to see the effect of that.”7 The question becomes whether this trace is deemed immanent in the utopian processes we attribute to art.
▴ View of Zheng Guogu’s Age of Empire site, 2008. Photo courtesy of the artist.
☁
A Game Played Without Rules Has No Losers
That contemporary art in China has developed in response to the cultural, political, intellectual, economic, and social conditions of its particular (and highly transformative) environment is beyond doubt. Yet to what extent we view art as merely reflective, illustrative, or representative of its specific cultural context, rather than endowed with the capacity to transcend difference and engage critically to change, readapt, redesign, or push against these contested frameworks, has nearly always been in question. It is this contradiction—between art’s capacity to reveal certain social determinants and its ability or willingness to effect change upon them—that underlies much of contemporary art production today. The tendency to go against prescribed systems and institutional structures in the art world, cross the boundaries of art, or question how we define art in the first place, has become accepted shorthand for closing the gap between art and everyday life, itself a gesture widely interpreted as promoting positive values and contributing to the betterment of society at large. How such transgressions might come to be envisioned, realized, and recognized, in a place like contemporary China—with its underdeveloped art infrastructure and overdeveloped sense of control—still remains to be seen.
China finds itself today in a peculiar position vis-à-vis the global art world. While international art centers struggle to define the role of art institutions, and countless artists and curators appear eager to jettison their modernist frameworks and container aesthetics, China is eagerly adopting the very institutional systems and structures that the Western art world is ready to abandon. The overarching narrative of contemporary art in China, starting with the late 1970s, has been largely predicated on acknowledgement, acceptance, and recognition by the “official” system, even as Chinese artists struggled with its ideologies and prescribed stylistic conventions. The debates and discussions which followed centered on the exclusion of certain art forms from the official ranks, without calling into question the inequalities and injustices of the system itself. Today, ongoing efforts are similarly so mired in the rush to professionalize, to establish boundaries and structures of governance for the sphere of contemporary art to the extent that experiments performed outside or against these efforts have become scarce and of indeterminable gain. The legacy of anti-institutional practices that we most readily associate with contemporary art in the West barely exists in the Chinese context; if anything, it represents a conundrum for artists who strive to maintain a critical stance while supporting the aim of mainstream acceptance. The process of reconciling these two goals—of gaining entry into hitherto closed institutions locally while at the same time maintaining an “outsider” or “anti-establishment” aesthetic or political position in the eyes of the global community—produces a tension that underlies artistic production in China, just as it does in many other developing art centers.
▴ View of Zheng Guogu’s Age of Empire in process, 2008. Photo courtesy of the artist.
The ongoing conundrum around art’s autonomy—the degree to which art should be responsible to itself alone or to its own particular context and society—is a global issue left largely unresolved. As the world faces a shrinking global economy and the collapse of world financial markets, questions surrounding art’s sovereignty have become all the more pressing. We are all well aware of the ineffectiveness of art criticism in the face of the market, and of the superficialities that have accompanied the art world’s recent bout of lavish overspending and self-aggrandizement.1 But statements that demonize the market or advocate a turn towards sobriety, a “return to substance,” or going back to “art making as it should be,” not only suggest an air of non-complicity, but imply that there is some clear consensus on what it is we should be returning to. By now we are well aware that art has never only been about the market or business-end strategies. The presence of commerce is not anathema to creativity, nor does its absence immediately restore art to a state of purity and innocence. Indeed, the insistence that art production should remain totally free from the market runs dangerously close to one that confines those same aesthetic practices to a space of meaningless insignificance, independent of the social and political conditions that inform and ensure its own very existence.
Rather than look to the market as culprit, we might turn instead to factors that sustain rather than misappropriate artistic production. If we recognize the art market as a subset of concerns contained within a larger entity we know as the art world, then what can be said of the concerns of the art world itself? In order to meet the demands of the market, contemporary art in China has witnessed an unprecedented ramping up of production, and this tendency has threatened outlets for critical reflection and thinking, which in turn thwarts long-term sustainability. Moreover, if the imported aesthetics that inform contemporary Chinese art—installation art, video, and new media—on the one hand trigger suspicion in official institutions and academies raised on a diet of traditional painting and socialist realism, they provide on the other hand a much-needed image of progress and modernization to cover for the government’s totalitarian attitudes. Assessing art’s relationship to autonomy, sovereignty, and independence in the midst of China’s pronounced lack of autonomy in other spheres of life—namely, certain political and social freedoms and values we associate with civil society—becomes entangled not only in social and political concerns, but in increasingly present economic ones. On the surface it would appear that support for contemporary art in China has reached new heights, proven by the influx of art fairs, exhibitions in state-run institutions, and even new forms of government funding.2 But the spirit that underlies these ventures remains solidly aimed at capital gain, market interests, and the business end of art production, with little, if any evidence of support for activities outside this sphere. Whatever subversive tendencies that might remain from earlier periods is quietly tolerated, but more often commercially packaged or even neutralized by the government’s apparently open stance on contemporary art—a position only leveraged by certain individuals when it is deemed convenient (read profitable) or when it follows the prevailing political wind.
▴ Xijing Olympics, opening ceremony, 2008. The Xijing Men. Photo courtesy of the artists.
In his essay “The Politics of Installation,” published in this journal, Boris Groys reminds us that although artworks cannot escape their commodity status, they are also not expressly made for buyers and collectors; in other words, the multitude of art biennials, art fairs, and major blockbuster exhibitions has generated an “art public” in which the typical viewer is someone who rarely views the work as a commodity. For Groys, this is evidence that the art system is “on its way to becoming part of the very mass culture that it has for so long sought to observe and analyze from a distance.”3 Such an assessment may hold true for the bulk of the Western art world, but carries less weight in China or in many non-Western regions where contemporary art is still far from being a constitutive element of mass culture. Despite growing numbers of visitors to museums and arts districts in China, contemporary art remains mostly unrecognized by mainstream culture, only haltingly accepted into government-run institutions, absent from the average university art department, and virtually unknown to the average citizen. These truths are often forgotten, especially when one’s time is spent sealed within the gallery-filled espresso culture of the urban contemporary art world. However, there is a sense that this is all about to change, and this makes it all the more important to pay attention to how the groundwork is laid for creative and aesthetic practices that operate apart from, away from, or in resistance to the dominant spheres of commercialism surrounding them. The phenomenon of self-contained “art zones” such as Beijing’s 798 Art Zone are symptomatic of both a desire to segregate art from regular life and an effort to enhance its marketability by referencing its own legacy of success. In the absence of any counterpoint with which to understand this activity, contemporary art continues to be treated explicitly as a form of entertainment, a photo backdrop, or a moneymaking scheme for the burgeoning middle and upper classes. Media attention, private sponsorship, corporate ventures, and personal museums do little to counteract a growing perception that equates contemporary art with investment and market value.
The most enduring dilemma lies in the government’s own directives, which consciously limit art’s interactions with the rest of society. Lumped together into the amorphous designation of “creative industries” and isolated within “creative industry zones,” contemporary art has found itself walled off in places that both contain art and impose a sense of hermeticism. The rapid territorial expansion of contemporary art in Beijing in particular has not only stimulated studio-bound, market-oriented artistic practices, but has further limited site-specific practices to being responses to physical sites at the expense of social or political ones. This radicalization of space serves as a constant reminder of the contested nature of public space in China, and of a lurking authoritarian presence that seeks to control artistic as well as personal participation in the creation of everyday culture.
Distinguishing art from the rest of social life serves the interests of certain groups more than others. Keeping art at a safe distance from (or above) meaningful political engagement and in limited contact with society perpetuates its dependence on status quo economic conditions and social structures, no matter how radical its aesthetics might appear. While the Western appetite for “resistance” has a tendency to cast all art production in China as oppositional or “anti-regime,” this is rarely the case. It may be true that in the absence of meaningful civil society, political society encompasses everything, but by the same token this stimulates an utter indifference with regard to politics itself. Contemporary art in China is plagued by the absence of politics and worse, by the banalization of it. What we need are models that do more than critique the commercial atmosphere surrounding art (while operating from a position of safety)—models that engage meaningfully with the social determinants of production that shape and form art in the first place, asking not what is made, but who makes it, for whom, and under what conditions.4
▴ Xijing Olympics, 2008. Tsuyoshi Ozawa during competition. The Xijing Men. Photo courtesy of the artists.
Contemporary art throughout China today suffers from being cut off from both the traditions of the past and the life of the present. Attempting to untangle the knot of aesthetic autonomy in this context only magnifies art’s two perceived dead-ends: autonomous irrelevance or engaged complicity.5 The model of “engaged autonomy” that Charles Esche proposes is thus an intriguing one, suggesting a way to think of autonomy not as something that is invested in the object itself but rather as an action or a way of working.6 It advocates not only an active and participatory attitude, but replaces traditional top-down methods of assigning value and worth with more homespun measures of self-declared legitimacy and collective gain.
Efforts to detach contemporary art from its enclaves have already begun. Art collectives, alternative art spaces, deterritorialized social and relational practices all fit within this schema and present possible critical models for how we understand and witness the ways in which art can exert its own energy upon a given environment or social context, rather than simply emerge as its byproduct. I myself have helped initiate one such endeavor in Beijing called the Arrow Factory—a modestly sized art space where artistic production comes up against the social realities of its own immediate environment. Below I highlight two further art projects which embody possible strategies for an “engaged autonomy” that demonstrates a desire not only to create something that lies beyond the boundaries of the art world, but also to reach new, unprepared audiences.
▴ Xijing Olympics, 2008. Table Tennis Competition. The Xijing Men. Photo courtesy of the artists.
The work of the Xijing Men is rooted in everyday life and addresses the concerns of average individuals while simultaneously embracing and shattering nationalist frameworks by collaborating across cultural and linguistic borders. Their 2008 Xijing Olympics project has received wide international acclaim, due in part to its availability on websites such as YouTube. Formed by Chinese artist Chen Shaoxiong, Japanese artist Tsuyoshi Ozawa, and Korean artist Gimhongsok on the premise that there exists a northern capital (Beijing), a southern capital (Nanjing), and an eastern capital (Tokyo), but no western capital as of yet, The Xijing Men have taken it upon themselves to explore the option of making one. Collectively hailing from the fictional place of Xijing, their fixed attitudes towards nationhood and cultural or regional identities are overshadowed by values of plurality, multiplicity, and open-ended experimentation from the very start. Collaboration between these three artists from three different Asian countries conjures complicated notions of Asian-ness while offering a discourse centered less on the homogenizing forces of globalization than on the celebration of difference. One key to understanding the Xijing Men can be found in their method of communication. Without a common verbal language, the artists rely instead upon a mixture of broken English, physical gestures, hand-drawn sketches, and occasional handwriting (Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans all share an understanding of Chinese characters) to convey their ideas to one another. Even though they hail from different cultural background, the equalizing factor is language, with each from the very start working outside his ‘zone of comfort’ linguistically.
Staged in August 2008 during the official Beijing Olympic Games, Xijing Olympics presented a humorous yet provocative take on the unabashedly spectacular Olympics mania that gripped China last summer. In the outskirts of Beijing, the artist group carried out their own version, casting themselves as “athletes” and their family and friends as “audience.” Drawing from everyday objects and experiences—kicking watermelons instead of soccer balls, marathon napping, giving massages with boxing gloves, and other absurdities such as a three-way table tennis match using shoes as paddles—their version mocked the seriousness and solemnity with which the Chinese government (and by association, the Chinese public) treated the glitzy theatrics of the real Beijing Games. The Xijing Men replaced themes of winning, success, and public entertainment with modesty, simplicity, and failure. If the Games themselves constituted the supreme performance of Chinese national pride under the auspices of international diplomacy (never mind the subtext of China’s own eager aspirations to secure its position among the global superpowers), then the Xijing Olympics represented a caricature of these attitudes in which humor, playfulness, and aimlessness are injected into the highly scripted and ceremonial tone of the official games. Their antics worked to present a kind of informal locality to offset the trope of national spectacle, and in the process identified more directly with the concerns of average citizens, whose struggles to negotiate the massive transformations enveloping their way of life go largely unnoticed. The low-tech theatrics of the Xijing Olympics reflected a form of practice that is refreshingly human-scaled and attuned to the proximity of individuals rather than traditional groupings conditioned by notions of the “mass” and the “people.”
Continuing the logic of game-playing, artist Zheng Guogu’s ambitious Age of Empire (2001–) is part land art, part playground, and part social experiment. Inspired by the computer game series Age of Empires, in which players control historical world civilizations, Zheng is gradually transforming an agricultural area on the outskirts of Yangjiang city into a real-world replica of the game’s virtual community. It began in 2000, when a friend gave him a tip on some cheap land in the outskirts of the city, after which he soon bought up 5000 sq m. By 2005 he had acquired more neighboring plots to arrive at 20,000 sq m, which has today grown to 40,000 sq m (approximately 10 acres) and counting. Zheng has since replaced the existing landscape with an entirely new one that includes hills and mountains and a small village area, all surrounded by a stone wall.
▴ An unusual building being built at the foot of the mountain for Zheng Guogu’s Age of Empire, 2009. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Age of Empire is a project that does not concern itself with making a finished artwork—to date not a single building has been completed—rather, it functions as an exercise in turning the fictional into reality, or, more accurately, as an experiment in the social process of making itself. For many contemporary artists in China, art is viewed as a profession—treated as an occupation rather than a way of life. The prescribed categories of artist, calligrapher, or architect are all designations that Zheng disavows and slowly works to dissolve. Although ostensibly meant to house an artist studio, a small museum, and living and entertainment quarters, the real achievement of Age of Empire lies in its integration of life and art. As Zheng recreates his made-up game on real land, he faces real-world concerns about securing money, building rights, and the location of materials. Thus the sleepy coastal town of Yangjiang—small by Chinese standards, with a population of some 2 million—comes to stand as a microcosm for survival: underneath lurks a contested ground, a community full of underground systems and partial struggles that inform everyday life, and, by association, Zheng’s diverse practice.
Though his work deals with familiar themes of consumerism and tropes of transformation, he is also content to show us that which is constant and unchanging—a glimpse into the steady pace of life in his hometown of Yangjiang in the southern province of Guangdong. As Zheng knowingly acquired his land through illegal means (though he exchanged money and signed agreements with all the farmers he bought from, this land was legally not theirs to sell, as all land in China belongs to the state), which essentially means that local building officials can give him constant headaches for building on it and potentially obstruct the whole enterprise. Thus Zheng’s daily activities have quickly become consumed by wining, dining, and bribing the local officials in efforts to curry favor, maintain good relations, and negotiate with the proper channels. In making Age of Empire, he cooperates with the system in order to transcend it, becoming complicit yet independent at the same time. As Zheng says, “I live here and drink with my friends all day. I can let them know the traces of an artist. I can talk about art to a fishmonger today, to a man eating abalone tomorrow. Or I can talk to the boss of a snack bar.” His family, friends, objects, experiences, social interactions, and recreational activities—nearly everything in his life and surroundings—embed themselves and leave traces in his art. From this stable position, a certain sense of freedom enables Zheng to take risks that transcend the usual boundaries of art. In this sense, Zheng Guogu presents us with a sort of hypothesis: if real life can become art once it enters the world of art—by means of galleries, museums, and exhibitions—then what are the ways in which art can be returned to become a part of one’s everyday existence?
Projects like Age of Empire and the work of the Xijing Men will continue to operate spontaneously with no fixed timeframe, set limits, or defined outcome. Zheng has calculated a means of living his art through his daily actions, calling into question our awareness of our own practices as artists, critics, curators, historians, and audience members—practices that define the boundaries of the art world in the first place. Like Zheng talking to the man eating abalone, or to the fishmonger, we are witnessing the art world’s traditional borders becoming indivisible from those of the social order it is inclined to merely portray. As Zheng says, “The artist is around them, and he does leave a trace. It’s a gradual process to see the effect of that.”7 The question becomes whether this trace is deemed immanent in the utopian processes we attribute to art.
▴ View of Zheng Guogu’s Age of Empire site, 2008. Photo courtesy of the artist.
☁
Thursday, October 01, 2009
Seeing One’s Own Eyes-Contemporary art from the Middle East
Seeing One’s Own Eyes
Contemporary art from the Middle East
Seeing One’s Own Eyes offers its audience a rich paradox, dissolving any monolithic views of 'contemporary Middle Eastern art' but instilling a strong sense of the specificity inherent to the art’s identity. It is a border-crossing show, consisting of mostly powerful large-scale installations and a selection of paintings and collages.
The meeting of different moments, referents, and cultures is complicated by the impression that perceptions of the Middle East bear heavily on the identity of art made in the region. This is a richly fascinating survey and anyone with an interest in the Middle East, at any level, would do well to take a look at these views. What were the specific conditions out of which modern and contemporary art emerged? How have ideas about tradition and modernity played out in a specific context? This show looks at how definitions of tradition and modernity have shifted over time and in different national contexts in the Middle East. Curated by the new art agency ‘MadeIn’, the exhibition avoids any prescriptive frame and steers clear of any didactics, instead the exhibition tries to present a representative – if never comprehensive – sample of what Middle Eastern wants to br about today... wheter we like it or not.
Outside conceptions of the Middle East today are often dominated by media images, by reports of death and destruction, and the human misery caused by long-held political and religious antagonism. This widespread conflict overshadowing the region has tended to obscure the remarkably vibrant contemporary art scene that seems to be alive and well.
There are so many powerful, authoritative and insightful works in this show that it will be difficult to mention them all. One of the most arresting and moving pieces is ‘Keep me Calmed (Down)’. This installation piece consists of a floor full of broken bricks, debris, dust – it is a sight of a human shelter that lies flattened beneath you. Nothing is there, besides a yawning emptiness of destruction. Looking closer you can see the debris moving up and down in soft, slow waves, there is no calmness after the bomb.
Another eye-catching piece is ‘Extermination’, also a large-scale installation that consists of hundreds of military boots, respectively just the cut of front part of them, shaped to form a big empty circle. This work may be about grievance, about all the people that have suffered from the numerous wars in the region. What makes these artworks so remarkable is they transcend their context. Though all are referring in general terms to the situation in the Middle East, their art is universal in its appeal, and it doesn't depend for its effect on our knowledge of specific political or social issues.
At a distance the painted series titled ‘Make-up’ look like blown-up and distorted Persian miniatures, with their rich colors and delicate arabesques, but their satire is savage. Calligraphies may resemble Pollock’s abstract paintings, and whether the artist’s attitude to this is celebratory or critical is hard to say. The works are pretty or battle-scarred; or, maybe, tacky and clapped out, depending on how you look at it. Its abstract narrative tells a story that cannot be told rationally. The same may be true for the other paintings of the exhibition.
Another hauntingly beautiful installation piece is ‘The Soul has been replaced by Anxiety’ which consists of a merry-go-round. The life-size carrousel itself might allude to childhood dreams, but this piece do certainly not: Here, the carousel is a bleak and black ‘deus ex machina’ – turning around and around without destination. The innocence has been distorted, and the effect is both highly effective and emotional.
Bringing very diverse works together, such as the grand mixed-media collages ‘Widespread’ based on satire and clichéd cartoons of the Middle Eastern conflict found in publications around the world, and contrasting them with each other, the curators of ‘MadeIn’ set up an engaging experiment in which all viewers have to position themselves in relation to the various actions portrayed and their inevitably propagandistic point of view.
Finally, the exhibition takes its title after the installation ‘SEEING ONE'S OWN EYES’ – a grand circular-shaped pool carrying a boat covered with a Persian rug. The spacious installation works as an oasis, a place to rest and dream in the shades of the palm-trees that surrounds the liquid. In line with the title, this piece is a reflection on vision and optics, and self-reflection. It serves to remind us that altering ones perspective will allow and encourage the world to come into and out of focus before our eyes. THE TITLE, AS THE SHOW ITSELF, SIGNIFIES A PARADOX: OBVIOUSLY, YOU CAN ONLY SEE YOUR EYES (i.e. VIEWS) THROUGH OTHER PEOPLE, AND THAT MIGHT BASICALLY BE WHAT THE EXHIBITION WANTED TO BE ALL ABOUT. It demonstrates the exciting potential where two sides are reconciled.
The exhibition is highly affecting, and one reason for its impact is that there is no simple message. It eludes interpretation, but invokes hope.
(MadeIn is a company established in the year 2009 in Shanghai by Xu Zhen. The firm expands its diversity on the creation, support, spread and curation of art.)
Category: Artist
Language: English In Other Languages: 看见自己的眼睛——中东当代艺术展 Chinese
Related Artist:
MadeIn
Related Exhibitions:
Seeing One's Own Eyes——Middle East Contemporary Art Exhibition
Seeing One's Own Eyes——Middle East Contemporary Art Exhibition
Contemporary art from the Middle East
Seeing One’s Own Eyes offers its audience a rich paradox, dissolving any monolithic views of 'contemporary Middle Eastern art' but instilling a strong sense of the specificity inherent to the art’s identity. It is a border-crossing show, consisting of mostly powerful large-scale installations and a selection of paintings and collages.
The meeting of different moments, referents, and cultures is complicated by the impression that perceptions of the Middle East bear heavily on the identity of art made in the region. This is a richly fascinating survey and anyone with an interest in the Middle East, at any level, would do well to take a look at these views. What were the specific conditions out of which modern and contemporary art emerged? How have ideas about tradition and modernity played out in a specific context? This show looks at how definitions of tradition and modernity have shifted over time and in different national contexts in the Middle East. Curated by the new art agency ‘MadeIn’, the exhibition avoids any prescriptive frame and steers clear of any didactics, instead the exhibition tries to present a representative – if never comprehensive – sample of what Middle Eastern wants to br about today... wheter we like it or not.
Outside conceptions of the Middle East today are often dominated by media images, by reports of death and destruction, and the human misery caused by long-held political and religious antagonism. This widespread conflict overshadowing the region has tended to obscure the remarkably vibrant contemporary art scene that seems to be alive and well.
There are so many powerful, authoritative and insightful works in this show that it will be difficult to mention them all. One of the most arresting and moving pieces is ‘Keep me Calmed (Down)’. This installation piece consists of a floor full of broken bricks, debris, dust – it is a sight of a human shelter that lies flattened beneath you. Nothing is there, besides a yawning emptiness of destruction. Looking closer you can see the debris moving up and down in soft, slow waves, there is no calmness after the bomb.
Another eye-catching piece is ‘Extermination’, also a large-scale installation that consists of hundreds of military boots, respectively just the cut of front part of them, shaped to form a big empty circle. This work may be about grievance, about all the people that have suffered from the numerous wars in the region. What makes these artworks so remarkable is they transcend their context. Though all are referring in general terms to the situation in the Middle East, their art is universal in its appeal, and it doesn't depend for its effect on our knowledge of specific political or social issues.
At a distance the painted series titled ‘Make-up’ look like blown-up and distorted Persian miniatures, with their rich colors and delicate arabesques, but their satire is savage. Calligraphies may resemble Pollock’s abstract paintings, and whether the artist’s attitude to this is celebratory or critical is hard to say. The works are pretty or battle-scarred; or, maybe, tacky and clapped out, depending on how you look at it. Its abstract narrative tells a story that cannot be told rationally. The same may be true for the other paintings of the exhibition.
Another hauntingly beautiful installation piece is ‘The Soul has been replaced by Anxiety’ which consists of a merry-go-round. The life-size carrousel itself might allude to childhood dreams, but this piece do certainly not: Here, the carousel is a bleak and black ‘deus ex machina’ – turning around and around without destination. The innocence has been distorted, and the effect is both highly effective and emotional.
Bringing very diverse works together, such as the grand mixed-media collages ‘Widespread’ based on satire and clichéd cartoons of the Middle Eastern conflict found in publications around the world, and contrasting them with each other, the curators of ‘MadeIn’ set up an engaging experiment in which all viewers have to position themselves in relation to the various actions portrayed and their inevitably propagandistic point of view.
Finally, the exhibition takes its title after the installation ‘SEEING ONE'S OWN EYES’ – a grand circular-shaped pool carrying a boat covered with a Persian rug. The spacious installation works as an oasis, a place to rest and dream in the shades of the palm-trees that surrounds the liquid. In line with the title, this piece is a reflection on vision and optics, and self-reflection. It serves to remind us that altering ones perspective will allow and encourage the world to come into and out of focus before our eyes. THE TITLE, AS THE SHOW ITSELF, SIGNIFIES A PARADOX: OBVIOUSLY, YOU CAN ONLY SEE YOUR EYES (i.e. VIEWS) THROUGH OTHER PEOPLE, AND THAT MIGHT BASICALLY BE WHAT THE EXHIBITION WANTED TO BE ALL ABOUT. It demonstrates the exciting potential where two sides are reconciled.
The exhibition is highly affecting, and one reason for its impact is that there is no simple message. It eludes interpretation, but invokes hope.
(MadeIn is a company established in the year 2009 in Shanghai by Xu Zhen. The firm expands its diversity on the creation, support, spread and curation of art.)
Category: Artist
Language: English In Other Languages: 看见自己的眼睛——中东当代艺术展 Chinese
Related Artist:
MadeIn
Related Exhibitions:
Seeing One's Own Eyes——Middle East Contemporary Art Exhibition
Seeing One's Own Eyes——Middle East Contemporary Art Exhibition
Saturday, September 26, 2009
History in the Making:Shanghai 1979 – 2009
History in the Making:
Shanghai 1979 – 2009
September 10th - October 10th , 2009
(10:30 to 19:00 every day)
Opening reception: September 9th 2009, 19:30
Curator: Biljana Ciric
Venue:
Ju Men road 436 (near Xie Tu road)
Information: biljana.ciric@gmail.com
Participanting artists:
"BEIHEI MENG" Photography Association, Birdhead, Chen Juyuan, Chen Yanyin, Ding Yi, Gong Jianqing, Gu Lei, He Yang, Hu Jianping, Hu Jieming, Huang Kui, Jin Feng (Xiao), Jin Feng+Su Chang, Jin Shan, Li Mu, Li Pinghu, Li Shan, Liang Yue, Liu Jianhua, Lu Chunsheng, M Group, Mian Mian, Ni Jun, Ni Weihua, Qian Weikang, Qiu Anxiong, Qiu Deshu, Shen Fan, Shi Yong, Song Tao, Sun Liang, Tang Guangming, Tang Maohong, Xiang Liqing, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong, Yang Hui, Yang Xu, Yang Zhenzhong, Yu Youhan, Zhang Ding, Zhang Enli, Zhang Jianjun, Zhang Long, Zhang Pingjie, Zhang Xin, Zhou Xiaohu, Zhou Zixi
Curatorial Concept:
As highly active and experimental, artist groups in Shanghai have long played an important role in the shaping of the contemporary art world in China. History in the Making: Shanghai 1979 – 2009 intends to trace an all-encompassing overview of the Shanghai contemporary art scene since 1979 through to the present.
This exhibition is not only an overview of the Shanghai contemporary art scene, but also the first time that several generations of characteristic artists from Shanghai (including different age groups, different artistic approaches) have been brought together in the form of an exhibition. In this way, the exhibition also is an accumulation of the city's cultural growth and current status through the perspectives and attitudes of nearly 50 artists and cultural practitioners who have contributed to the urban culture of Shanghai.
The exhibition would sort through and explore the multiple layers of the social and cultural fabric of Shanghai, taking note of several important clues:
• First, the exhibition will reflect upon the cultural background of Shanghai: from 1979 through to the present, how have the historical trends of the Shanghai contemporary art scene, within a larger cultural perspective, influenced the individual reflections of the practitioners?
• The exhibition will also reflect upon the use and adaptation of different artistic languages during three decades
• Finally, the exhibition will reflect upon the various styles of presentation developed over the years: this exhibition has consciously avoided the typical mode of presentation for an overview of this scope. The placement and curation of the works by the artists on show will be decided after discussions between the artists and the curator, taking into account the current status of the different artists.
The presentation of the individual artists will be informed by the following considerations:
• The important turning points in an artist's career
• Certain installations from the early 90s will be reproduced, since few have been preserved to this day
• The accepted creative style of years past will be adopted as a starting point to create new artworks that reference also the contemporary attitude, using the realities of the present day as the materials for creation.
This exhibition is the work of curator Biljana Ciric, who has been actively collecting the many historical documents from Shanghai contemporary art exhibitions over the years and interviewing over 30 artists so far.
The exhibition hopes to reveal to the great extent that Shanghai contemporary art groups have contributed to the development of contemporary art nationwide, while detailing the individual processes of development and creative clues that are visible in the presentation of the various materials and works. In recognition of the artistic strength it requires to operate at this scale of activity, it is important to note that numerous local arts institutions, such as the Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art and the Ke Center for Contemporary Art, Shanghart have provided supported to the exhibition.
Shanghai 1979 – 2009
September 10th - October 10th , 2009
(10:30 to 19:00 every day)
Opening reception: September 9th 2009, 19:30
Curator: Biljana Ciric
Venue:
Ju Men road 436 (near Xie Tu road)
Information: biljana.ciric@gmail.com
Participanting artists:
"BEIHEI MENG" Photography Association, Birdhead, Chen Juyuan, Chen Yanyin, Ding Yi, Gong Jianqing, Gu Lei, He Yang, Hu Jianping, Hu Jieming, Huang Kui, Jin Feng (Xiao), Jin Feng+Su Chang, Jin Shan, Li Mu, Li Pinghu, Li Shan, Liang Yue, Liu Jianhua, Lu Chunsheng, M Group, Mian Mian, Ni Jun, Ni Weihua, Qian Weikang, Qiu Anxiong, Qiu Deshu, Shen Fan, Shi Yong, Song Tao, Sun Liang, Tang Guangming, Tang Maohong, Xiang Liqing, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong, Yang Hui, Yang Xu, Yang Zhenzhong, Yu Youhan, Zhang Ding, Zhang Enli, Zhang Jianjun, Zhang Long, Zhang Pingjie, Zhang Xin, Zhou Xiaohu, Zhou Zixi
Curatorial Concept:
As highly active and experimental, artist groups in Shanghai have long played an important role in the shaping of the contemporary art world in China. History in the Making: Shanghai 1979 – 2009 intends to trace an all-encompassing overview of the Shanghai contemporary art scene since 1979 through to the present.
This exhibition is not only an overview of the Shanghai contemporary art scene, but also the first time that several generations of characteristic artists from Shanghai (including different age groups, different artistic approaches) have been brought together in the form of an exhibition. In this way, the exhibition also is an accumulation of the city's cultural growth and current status through the perspectives and attitudes of nearly 50 artists and cultural practitioners who have contributed to the urban culture of Shanghai.
The exhibition would sort through and explore the multiple layers of the social and cultural fabric of Shanghai, taking note of several important clues:
• First, the exhibition will reflect upon the cultural background of Shanghai: from 1979 through to the present, how have the historical trends of the Shanghai contemporary art scene, within a larger cultural perspective, influenced the individual reflections of the practitioners?
• The exhibition will also reflect upon the use and adaptation of different artistic languages during three decades
• Finally, the exhibition will reflect upon the various styles of presentation developed over the years: this exhibition has consciously avoided the typical mode of presentation for an overview of this scope. The placement and curation of the works by the artists on show will be decided after discussions between the artists and the curator, taking into account the current status of the different artists.
The presentation of the individual artists will be informed by the following considerations:
• The important turning points in an artist's career
• Certain installations from the early 90s will be reproduced, since few have been preserved to this day
• The accepted creative style of years past will be adopted as a starting point to create new artworks that reference also the contemporary attitude, using the realities of the present day as the materials for creation.
This exhibition is the work of curator Biljana Ciric, who has been actively collecting the many historical documents from Shanghai contemporary art exhibitions over the years and interviewing over 30 artists so far.
The exhibition hopes to reveal to the great extent that Shanghai contemporary art groups have contributed to the development of contemporary art nationwide, while detailing the individual processes of development and creative clues that are visible in the presentation of the various materials and works. In recognition of the artistic strength it requires to operate at this scale of activity, it is important to note that numerous local arts institutions, such as the Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art and the Ke Center for Contemporary Art, Shanghart have provided supported to the exhibition.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Fwd: eARTS BEYOND: Shanghai International Gallery Exhibition of Media Art
eARTS BEYOND - Shanghai International Gallery Exhibition of Media Art
September 11th – September 20th, 2009
Shanghai Oriental Pearl TV Tower | Shanghai Exhibition Center (SH Contemporary)
Preview: September 10th
Artistic Director: ZHANG Ga
Producer: LI Zhenhua
e-ARTS Beyond is a new platform and destination for adventurous minds that aims to cultivate a marketplace for media art's unique and vibrant contemporary aesthetic experience.
e-Arts Beyond is a project of eARTS Shanghai which is funded by the Shanghai Cultural Development Foundation under the joint supervision of the Shanghai World Expo 2010 Coordination Bureau and the Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture, Radio, Film and TV, among other government agencies. eARTS Shanghai stages the citywide eARTS Festival celebrating electronic and digital art and culture in the form of exhibitions, performances, public events, workshops and symposia that welcome millions of local and international enthusiasts.
"base target=new" is the inaugural exhibition of eARTS Beyond, which borrows a common but often overlooked HTML tag as a metaphor, annotating a technical concept in which any hyperlink triggered by a click in a master page will produce a child window to load newly queried content. The title symbolizes new horizons of artistic propositions and formal strategies that resonate with contemporary experiences underlined by the ubiquitous presence of electronic and media technologies. On view are works spanning four decades of media art history, witnessing the trajectory of artistic experiments with electronic media from the inception of conceptual art as seen in Joseph Kosuth's 1965 seminal work Five Fives (to Donald Judd), one of the first artworks to explore neon as a visual and textual medium to Kristin Lucas's 2007 interventionist act which parrots the ubiquitous phenomena of "refreshing a webpage" to Refresh the artist's own real world identity, succinctly critiquing the contemporary paradox of multiple realities and expanding the tradition of conceptual art. From video's early adaptation as a creative toolkit in documenting performance art as evident in Marina Abramovic's 1975 work Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful to Wolfgang Staehle's Umbria (August 30, 2006) which uses webcam latency as an inherent means of expression to evoke a transcendent moment of nature's sublime; from Takeshi Murata's expressionist abstraction of video imagery to Miao Xiaochun's complex 3D worlds; from video painting (Ben Jones) to algorithmically generated moving images (David Rokeby, George Legrady and Michael Grey), these exemplary works implicitly delineate video art's rich subject matter and evolving visual language. Among the many installation works presented in the exhibition, Nam June Paik's interactive work Enlightenment Compressed critiques media culture with a tint of tranquility and irony, while Zhang Peili's latest video installation Hard Evidence, No. 2, alternating live images taken from audience with the footage of destruction of the TV set, assaults the culture of the screen with an unmistakably visceral force. The forty-four works on display encompass classic pieces by media art pioneers such as Rebecca Horn, Anthony McCall, Bill Viola and Manfred Mohr to mid-career artists like Kevin and Jennifer McCoy, Luc Courchesne and Jim Campbell to new talents including Leandro Erlich, Evan Gruzis and exonemo, to name just a few. Chico MacMurtrie's large pneumatic sculpture installed on the plaza is a spectacle in its own right. The organic forms intuitively engage public participation with elegance and surprise as if to show new media art's amorphous capacity that can be as unpredictably intrusive as agreeably playful. The exhibition runs a wide gamut of artistic positions and critical voices giving a glimpse of the development of media art from its formative years to its current state of affairs.
Along with the exhibition, an expert panel discussion will take place at the Shanghai Exhibition Center as an integral part of the lecture series of Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair. The panel will bring together media art professionals, dealers and collectors to engage in discussions about the positioning, evaluation, collection and distribution of media art in the context of the art marketplace.
Participating galleries:
Arario Gallery | bitforms gallery | James Cohan Gallery | Boers-Li Gallery | DAC/DAS | Deitch Projects | Eastlink Gallery | Sean Kelly Gallery | Lucy Mackintosh Gallery | Groupe Molior | Pari Nadimi Gallery | Postmasters Gallery | Dam Stuhltrager Gallery | Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery
Exhibiting artists:
Marina Abramovic | Jim Campbell | collectif_fact | Luc Courchesne | Jean Dubois | Leandro Erlich | exonemo | Michael Joaquin Grey | Evan Gruzis | Rebecca Horn | Huang / Waldvogel | Jodi | Ben Jones | Joseph Kosuth | Ryota Kuwakubo | Yongbaek Lee | George Legrady | Li Fuchun | Li Ming | Kristin Lucas | Chico MacMurtrie | Nalini Malani | Anthony McCall | Jennifer and Kevin McCoy | Miao Xiaochun | Manfred Mohr | Takeshi Murata | Nam June Paik | Brose Partington | Ara Peterson | Alan Rath | Atelier Hauert Reichmuth | David Rokeby | Lincoln Schatz | Björn Schülke | Wolfgang Staehle | Olaf Val | Bill Viola | Ryan Wolfe | Zhang Liaoyuan | Zhang Peili |
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