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.
Showing posts with label ou ning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ou ning. Show all posts
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Chinese Calligraphy and Modern Typography
Typography - the study of typefaces (or fonts, if you want to be a rube about it) seems to be a somewhat under appreciated discipline in the world of art. Most people don't think twice about the way a letter looks while they're typing in MS Word and probably don't know what sans-serif even is. However within graphic design having an eye for typography is not only helpful, but almost a necessity. Typography has even been around longer than modern graphic design, from the old hand drawn cursive of the 19th and 20th century to contemporary typefaces created almost completely digitally. Like an old shoemaker or watch maker, typography is all about the craft and precision, as well as an overall balance between design aesthetic and pragmatic use.
This brings me to the topic of Sunday's lecture on Graphic Design and Typography in China at the Literary Festival. On the panel was graphic designer Ou Ning, best known for his book, New Sound of Beijing, which brought and defined modern Chinese youth culture and style to the masses, his experimental magazine, Bie Ce and his numerous curatorial endeavors. While the other panelists, Lynn Pan and Pan Jian Feng, who discussed Futurism's influence on Chinese design and commercial typography in China, respectively, Ou Ning recounted his life growing up and being classically trained as a Chinese calligraphy, his life now as a contemporary designer, and how China as a whole could somehow transition from its centuries old tradition of calligraphy and marry it with modern typography. Since Chinese calligraphy is already a discipline based on practice and precision, as well as a limited yet endless level of micro-innovation, it seems like amalgamating the two would be simple and wildly successful. However despite this, the panelists seemed to be in agreement that a product of this perfect union has yet to be created. With its roots in the Futurist movement of the early 20th century, modern Chinese typography has manifested itself in a number of places including advertisements, books, and even street signs seen on storefronts along the street. And while a slew of different methods and ideas have been employed, Chinese typography still lags behind that of the West.
It is this emulation of the West's typographical tradition that is, in my opinion, stunting the growth of Chinese typography. Like painting and other art disciplines, China is still struggling to come into its own in terms of style and it seems like typography is yet another facet of this untapped potential within China. The panel explored a variety of first and second-hand perspectives and raised some interesting questions concerning whether or not Chinese typography and graphic design will ever come into its own. Perhaps it won't?
Inflated Expectations for the Fulfillment of Typography's Destiny in Contemporary China
We consider the destiny of Chinese typography and design in the sense that Chinese writing hovers between the abstract and the concrete. Unlike Western alphabets the Chinese characters have yet to be totally divorced from their hieroglyphic heritage, and in this way their union in contemporary design with photographic images represents at once this evolutionary ascent and melds them together in the formation of a singular aesthetic object. This destiny, then, is never completely attainable but stands as a goal to be sought after-- it is the ideal fusion of the ancient and modern in pursuit of the universal.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
From Italy to Shanghai...
Sunday's presentation did an incredible job at giving me a concise visual history of typography starting half way across the world and ending up in Shanghai. Tracing the journey of typography from Futurism to the creative advertising agencies of today highlighted the importance of the written (or digitally created) word itself. After spending so much time in Chinese class quickly jotting down hundreds of characters, the presentation served as a welcome reminder that each stroke has a certain significance that should not be taken for granted.Coming from the perspective of a person who knew nothing about typography before Sunday, I thought the presentation did a very good job of steering clear of industry lingo by giving a clear and concise explanation of the history and the direction that each panelist expects contemporary Chinese typography and graphic design to head in.
I also thought that seeing the history of the art form beginning in the early 1900's was a befitting introduction to the story of Pan Jian Feng, whos personal story made graphic design seem much less like an occupation and much more like a way of life. His story did a good job of tying in the importance of the tradition of calligraphy to contemporary Chinese graphic design.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Rewriting Asia: The Global Identity of Contemporary Asian Art
Finally someone gets it!
Rewriting Asia
The Global Identity of Contemporary Asian Art
Ou Ning
Commissioned by Michelle Nicol, Zurich
Translated from Chinese by Yu Hsiao Hwei, Paris
Standing at Antrepo no.3, the main venue of the 10th Istanbul Biennial, looking across the Bosporus Strait forming the boundary between Europe and Asia, I was able to look at Asia for the first time from a European standpoint. My line of sight moved quickly beyond the rows upon rows of buildings on the Asian side of Istanbul, and went onto the map in my mind. It flew rapidly over the territory of Turkey, past Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, got to China where I am from, and finally reached the Korean Peninsula and Japan. All this vast expanse of land that unfolded in my mind’s eye is the so-called “East” for Westerners. It can be subdivided further into the Near East, Middle East and Far East, according to its distance from Europe. For Chinese people like me, even though we are familiar with modern geographical knowledge that has been built up by Europeans through navigation and mapping, we still tend to consider the concept of “the East” as a synonym for China only, while ignoring other Asian countries. It is related to the fact that China has always regarded itself as a great power, the center of the world, but it is also because we haven’t had many opportunities to leave our own land, and to travel to other countries. It is interesting that, for many Europeans, “the East” often means Turkey, the country that is nearest to them; in particular, a city with unique cultures like Istanbul represents the perfect embodiment of “the East” in their imagination. From Gustave Flaubert, Alphonse de Lamartine, Gerard de Nerval to Le Corbusier, they all shared the same fascination (1).
This experiential and cognitive blind spot is due to the limitations of the times. In pre-modern societies, the high costs of and the social standing necessary for long-distance trips made traveling accessible only to a select few; therefore, we were unable to send ourselves to far-flung countries to experience the cultures of Others. In addition to the geographical barriers, obstacles in the form of political systems, languages, cultures and living habits also confined our experiences and knowledge to a rather narrow scope. We have all been tightly stuck in the finite space-time of the local, and have suffered the distances between one another; fortunately, these distances have also safeguarded the differences between countries and regions. Yet now, “all that is solid melts into air” (2), physical distances that were originally thought to be objective and unshakable have been surmounted by the astonishing speed invented in our era (high costs are no longer necessary to attain this speed), new technologies and the internet have started to offer the magic of high-speed compression of time and space, and geographical frontiers have started to disappear. An enormous amount of floating capital has broken through every political rampart and cultural barrier, in search of new places to increase profit in different regions around the world. In the name of eradicating poverty, it tries to get rid of all differences, and is even starting to shake the foundation of national governance, by reducing the political power of a country to “a mere security apparatus” (3). The sense of belonging to a nation-state that people used to have is becoming increasingly weaker as transnational travel and economic and cultural exchanges become more frequent. Nationalism is regarded as a feeling that doesn’t fit the time, while people are starting to construct a new identity based on the city (or more precisely, the district in the city) where they live. This is the era of so-called “globalization”, which we are living in today.
In an era like this, “mobility climbs to the rank of the uppermost of coveted values-and the freedom to move, perpetually a scarce and unequally distributed commodity, fast becomes the main stratifying factor of our late modern or postmodern times”.(4) This new value and stratifying criterion has been determined by transnational capital which, by nature, tends to be nomadic, because it is the real ruler of this world; it has stirred up the world, and turned its own characteristic (mobility) into a universal principle. Artists are undoubtedly one of the social classes that possess more freedom to move in this era. After the end of the Cold War, the former pattern of competition between groups of nations started to make place for competition between cities. Cities not only compete to host top international events such as the Olympic Games and the World Exposition, but also vie with each other for international capital and tourism with the organization of all sorts of cultural and artistic festivals and exhibitions, and by these, seek to further enhance the economic power of and people’s identification with the city. The proliferation of international art biennials is the epitome of this competition. It has created a great deal of opportunities for transnational travel, and has enabled different cultures to look at each other and to change. For instance, it is because I had been invited to participate in the Istanbul Biennial that, as a result of geographical and cultural displacements, I had the opportunity to get a different viewpoint of, to contemplate Asia in a new light, the place where I am from, the so-called “East” for Westerners.
Undoubtedly, all modern experiences and pedigrees of knowledge that we share today are mainly Western (in particular, European); Asia and other regions haven’t yet played much of a role in the historical process of the construction of global modernity. In the Western-centric eyes, Asia (the East) has always been the far-flung Other, the object of colonization, the cultural imagination of the West at the other end of the earth, and a reference that the West from time to time has recourse to based on its own discursive need. This long-standing attribute of the Other has resulted in Asian anxiety; it was present throughout nearly a century of Asian history, as Asia lived through changes and turbulences from the end of the nineteenth century onwards –the successive collapse of feudal monarchies, the continuous expansion of colonialism, the arduous establishment of modern nation-states, etc. Take the two Eastern empires, China and Turkey, for example, they almost coincided and shared astonishing similarities in the process of looking for their own modernity: the Chinese Qing dynasty and the Turkish Ottoman dynasty fell at about the same time, and Sun Yat-sen and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk emerged at roughly the same moment; both people were firm advocates of westernization, were deeply worried for their chronically weak countries, and in order to learn from the West and to catch up with it, they established a republican regime in their own country. The difference between these two countries is that, in the wave of globalization of today, Turkey is still eager to “leave Asia and join Europe” (5), to throw itself into the embrace of the European Union; on the other hand, after having experienced the collapse of the communist value system around the world, China still adheres to centralization, and is becoming stronger and stronger in the global economic framework with authoritarian capitalism that is proper to Asia.
Asian politicians have also made similar alliance-forming attempts. The ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), founded in 1967, implemented the ASEAN Free Trade Area in 2003, with the hope of creating the ASEAN economic community, so as to enhance the competitiveness of the region; the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation), founded in 1989, is an economic cooperation project that involves even more Asian countries and regions. These alliance-forming efforts reflect the enthusiastic embracing of global economic integration by Asian countries. However, it is a pity that they remain content simply with collaborations in the economic realm, and haven’t gone beyond that to form common “Asian values” on political and cultural levels. Singapore’s former leader Lee Kwan Yew, who is familiar with Western culture, fervently pleaded in favor of the construction of “Asian values”. He believed that this was the only effective way for Asian countries to avoid and resist the risks arising from their integration into the globalization process. However, the “Asian values” formulated by Mr. Lee only concerned such Confucian values as blood relations, family ties, fair hierarchy, the importance of authority, frugality, manners and protocol, etc. Although these values are shared by countries within the Confucian cultural circle, such as China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, etc, they fail to embrace Islamic and Hindu values. Due to the fact that Asia represents a rich diversity of races, cultures and religions, that each country is at a different stage of development, and that some countries still hold profound historical grudges against others, Asia has not been able to contend with the West by forming a highly integrated political, economic and cultural community that goes beyond national forms, like the European Union.
In the cultural realm, contemporary Asian art has gradually emerged over the past twenty years, but has largely relied on the predominance of the West, and to a great extent, it has benefited from the prevalence of globalization and multiculturalism in the Western world. In the late eighties and the early nineties of last century, along with the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the USSR, the ideological opposition between the two camps came to an end; after having won its final victory, capitalism went further in its advance across the world by speeding up its pace and increasing its intensity, thereby inaugurating the movement of globalization. The political iron curtain having been torn open, not only could Western capital enter the once antagonistic third world countries, but the art of third world countries could also be brought to the West. In 1993, in an article entitled “Clash of Civilizations” published in the American Foreign Affairs quarterly, Samuel P. Huntington argued that in the post-Cold War world, the principal conflicts of global politics would occur between different civilizations, that the Confucian civilization in Asia and the Islamic civilization, in particular, would represent the most serious challenges to Western civilization. This argument has sparked a sense of crisis in Western civilization, and has further helped to turn multiculturalism into the widespread “political correctness” in the West, and the adoption of the cultures of the Other a key strategy for the reconciliation of conflicts between civilizations. France is the first Western country to bring in contemporary Asian art: after the large-scale Le Japon des avant gardes: 1910-1970 show in 1986, the Pompidou Center organized Les magiciens de la terre in 1989 which, other than showing a great number of contemporary African artists, presented works of contemporary Chinese artists for the first time in Europe. From then on, contemporary Asian art has frequently appeared in various important museums and biennials in the West.
In the course of the first post-Cold War decade, the exhibition of contemporary Asian art by the West still followed, to a certain extent, cold war thinking, that is, it preferred works that were ironic about local politics and identified with capitalism and global values, using them as evidence of the victory of the West. After 9/11, when it experienced a lasting sense of shock and fear, the Western world has further adhered to Huntington’s prophetic theory of a clash of civilizations. The strong sense of defeat has magnified the image of the Other coming from the other side of the world; it has never been this clear and near, and is ever-present in all aspects of everyday life. With his Enemy Kitchen project (2006), the Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz, who was born in New York and currently lives and works in Chicago, offered the young generation of America an opportunity to learn Iraqi cooking in a kitchen as a way of making sense of the “enemy” of the country. This work shows that the desire of people to understand other civilizations on the planet is becoming increasingly concrete. In the new millennium, the argument that globalization will inevitably result in cultural convergence is being reconsidered; the concept of “the other” that smacks of egocentrism is greatly losing effectiveness. In the meantime, as the economies of many Asian countries continue to grow, cultural coherence is being strengthened; regional group shows, exchanges and collaborations in contemporary art are becoming more and more frequent; artists of new generations are constantly emerging, and their psychological distance with the West is continually being reduced. All this results in a drastic change in the global art scene.
If “Asian values” remain hung in the balance under the efforts of politicians, what about the attempts made by the artists? In the era of globalization, are they also trying to create an Asian identity in the artistic landscape? Wong Hoy Cheong is a Chinese-Malaysian artist with a strong Asian consciousness. Since 1993, he has created a whole series of works to focus on issues of colonial history, political conflicts, immigrant identity and family traditions in Asian regions. As a fifth-generation Chinese immigrant in Malaysia, Wong Hoy Cheong was born in George Town; his mother tongue is Hokkien, but he received a British colonial education and then went to study in the United States. He speaks Chinese, Malay and English: he is himself a product of Asia’s diverse histories and cultures. Consequently, his early works showed typical traits of “Asian-ness” through the exploration of personal memories and family histories. For the Kwangju Biennale in 2000, his project consisted in collecting a great number of books on Asian history, and after burning them, reforming the pulp into paper tiles to pave the floor in the exhibition space, thus allowing the audience to step on different versions of Asian history and to discern blurred images of those political figures who had once influenced the fate of Asia. The construction of all identities has to rely on history; only history can define who you are, where you are from, and where you are going. In terms of the exploitation and utilization of historical resources, artists are more effective than politicians, because they always speak from a personal position, and place great stress on experiences; consequently, they are more likely to make people identity with them.
For his participation in the 10th Istanbul Biennial, Wong Hoy Cheong focused on the historical district of Sulukule in the center of Istanbul. Sulukule is the oldest existent Romany district in the world, gypsies have come here since 1000 AD, and have offered entertainment to this city with music, circus, story-telling, fortune-telling, etc; however, the Romany are now being confronted with the destruction of the district and are being asked to move out. Wong Hoy Cheong gave cameras and camcorders to children of Sulukule and taught them the basics of filming and animation, allowing them to express their memories, knowledge and imagination of this district; by doing so, he has tried to make an appeal for the protection of this district. Sulukule resembles a great deal the Dazhalan district near the Tiananmen Square in Beijing(6): they both have a long history, but gradually fell into oblivion during the process of searching for and development of new spaces of the city, and plunged into decline before turning into slums in the end; now they are going to be entirely wiped off from the landscape. The fate of these historical districts is intertwined with the fight of different interest groups for space to survive in the era of globalization, and implies the clashes between the two cultural forces of convergence and differentiation. The disadvantaged slum population is not only the manifestation of social stratification caused by floating capital, but also a metaphor for the desperate conditions of local cultures in their confrontation with strong global cultures. For those artists who refuse to be reduced to a component of the homogeneous culture of globalization, to stand up for history is the key to the preservation of local differences and the construction of local identities.
Similar efforts are also seen in the works by the Vietnamese artist Jun Nguyen Hatsushiba. For the Yokohama Triennial in 2001, after his original intention to create a cyclo (cycle rickshaw) museum, had been compromised due to a shortage of space, he invited Vietnamese fishermen from Nha Trang to pull cyclos in the water, and made a video film of it for the exhibition. As the oldest and principal means of transport in Vietnam, cyclos embody the life memories of the Vietnamese people. However, they now may have to fight for the right to survive against the global city transportation system that is synonymous with efficiency and order—the image of cyclos moving forward with difficulty under the sea, is “a striking metaphor for struggle and survival” (7). In comparison with the convergence of imagination, the impulse for differentiation they have aroused seems to become reality in a more widespread manner. Objectively speaking, homogeneity is a partial concept of globalization, whereas difference is its essentially profound characteristic. We have already seen that, with the progress of globalization, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, “signaling a new freedom for some, upon many others it descends as an uninvited and cruel fate” (8), and that instead of being rejected with contempt and disappearing from the world, nationalism is gaining ground day by day. Although most artists are reluctant to attach a national label to their identity or works, it is hard for them to go beyond their personal growth experiences, historical imprints, and linguistic and thinking sets. Difference is the essence of this world, and cannot be obliterated or altered by any capital-related, political or other man-made force.
Consequently, regardless of its content or subject matter, or the medium it uses, we can always perceive a distinguishable trait of “Asian-ness” in a work by a contemporary Asian artist — this characteristic is sometimes consciously performed by the artist, but sometimes goes beyond his or her intentios. Recently, Jun Nguyen Hatsushiba started a project series entitled “Breathing is Free: 12756.3”. The artist intends to run the physical distance of 12756.3 km, the diameter of the earth, in different parts of the world within a certain period of time, and have the whole process filmed by others. This time, he won’t hire any actors, but “will be the one to move and struggle” (9) himself, to measure and experience the distance of the earth with his own body. In this project, the idea of using the body as an artistic medium is different from that of many Western artists: here, the body is not to be stripped bare or to be displayed, it is not used to challenge taboos, either; instead, it is the vehicle through which the artist aims to train his will, it is the arena where spirit confronts material. This penance-like artistic practice has also been undertaken by other Asian artists: The US-based Taiwan artist Teh-ching Hsieh carried out a series of one-year performances in New York in the seventies and the eighties, for instance, living in a cage for one year, punching a time clock every hour for one year, living outdoors for one year, etc. Chinese artist He Yunchang picked up a rock in a small town called Boulmer on the Northumberland coast in northern England, and carried it all the way around the coast of Great Britain and finally went back to Boulmer to put the rock back in the same place. Besides using the body as a medium, the biggest characteristic of these works is to show meaning through meaningless behavior, showing typical Asian thinking.
Nevertheless, just like the way that political practices have failed to reach unified “Asian values,” the global identity that contemporary Asian art has tried to construct is also fragmentary; even the most brilliant observer is unable to sum up a complete attribute suitable for every Asian country. Maybe we can say that fragmentation is in itself an appropriate image for Asia (like its geography), because as a matter of fact, its diversity fits in with the formula of energy production in the globalization era. No matter which description we use, today’s Asia has certainly opened up a road of modernity that is different from that of the West, and on the negotiating table among global powers, it is no longer an irrelevant other; and people can no longer neglect the voice it has. Asia is no longer the orphan of the world, the progress it has accomplished today cannot be compared with the past: it is the moment to rewrite history.
December 5, 2007
Notes:
(1) In his Istanbul: Memories of a City, Orhan Pamuk quotes a great deal of the travel notes on Istanbul of these French writers and poets and their impressions of “the East”. Le Corbusier is the author of Le Voyage d’Orient.
(2) Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto.
(3) Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of Mexico’s Zapatista rebels, wrote in the French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique (p4-5, August, 1997): “In the cabaret of globalization, the state performs a striptease, at the end of which it is left wearing the minimum necessary: its powers of repression. With its material base destroyed, its sovereignty and independence abolished, and its political class eradicated, the nation state increasingly becomes a mere security apparatus in the service of the mega-enterprises…”
(4) Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: the Human Consequences, Chinese translation “quanqiuhua: renlei de houguo”, the Commercial Press, 2001, page 3.
(5) Turkey has submitted an application to join European Union since 1987, but up to today, its candidacy has still not been accepted. The idea of “leaving Asia and joining Europe” had already been put forward by the Japanese Fukuzawa Yukichi during the Meiji period.
(6) The Dazhalan project that Cao Fei and I collaborated on also took part in this Istanbul Biennial. For more on this project, please visit: www.dazhalan-project.org
(7) Jonathan Napack: Vietnam’s Artists Try to Break Free of Their “Velvet Prison”, The International Herald Tribune, June 9, 2005.
(8) Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences, Chinese translation, the Commercial Press, 2001, page 71.
(9) Uda Motoko: Interview with Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, ARTiT, Summer/Fall, 2007
Rewriting Asia
The Global Identity of Contemporary Asian Art
Ou Ning
Commissioned by Michelle Nicol, Zurich
Translated from Chinese by Yu Hsiao Hwei, Paris
Standing at Antrepo no.3, the main venue of the 10th Istanbul Biennial, looking across the Bosporus Strait forming the boundary between Europe and Asia, I was able to look at Asia for the first time from a European standpoint. My line of sight moved quickly beyond the rows upon rows of buildings on the Asian side of Istanbul, and went onto the map in my mind. It flew rapidly over the territory of Turkey, past Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, got to China where I am from, and finally reached the Korean Peninsula and Japan. All this vast expanse of land that unfolded in my mind’s eye is the so-called “East” for Westerners. It can be subdivided further into the Near East, Middle East and Far East, according to its distance from Europe. For Chinese people like me, even though we are familiar with modern geographical knowledge that has been built up by Europeans through navigation and mapping, we still tend to consider the concept of “the East” as a synonym for China only, while ignoring other Asian countries. It is related to the fact that China has always regarded itself as a great power, the center of the world, but it is also because we haven’t had many opportunities to leave our own land, and to travel to other countries. It is interesting that, for many Europeans, “the East” often means Turkey, the country that is nearest to them; in particular, a city with unique cultures like Istanbul represents the perfect embodiment of “the East” in their imagination. From Gustave Flaubert, Alphonse de Lamartine, Gerard de Nerval to Le Corbusier, they all shared the same fascination (1).
This experiential and cognitive blind spot is due to the limitations of the times. In pre-modern societies, the high costs of and the social standing necessary for long-distance trips made traveling accessible only to a select few; therefore, we were unable to send ourselves to far-flung countries to experience the cultures of Others. In addition to the geographical barriers, obstacles in the form of political systems, languages, cultures and living habits also confined our experiences and knowledge to a rather narrow scope. We have all been tightly stuck in the finite space-time of the local, and have suffered the distances between one another; fortunately, these distances have also safeguarded the differences between countries and regions. Yet now, “all that is solid melts into air” (2), physical distances that were originally thought to be objective and unshakable have been surmounted by the astonishing speed invented in our era (high costs are no longer necessary to attain this speed), new technologies and the internet have started to offer the magic of high-speed compression of time and space, and geographical frontiers have started to disappear. An enormous amount of floating capital has broken through every political rampart and cultural barrier, in search of new places to increase profit in different regions around the world. In the name of eradicating poverty, it tries to get rid of all differences, and is even starting to shake the foundation of national governance, by reducing the political power of a country to “a mere security apparatus” (3). The sense of belonging to a nation-state that people used to have is becoming increasingly weaker as transnational travel and economic and cultural exchanges become more frequent. Nationalism is regarded as a feeling that doesn’t fit the time, while people are starting to construct a new identity based on the city (or more precisely, the district in the city) where they live. This is the era of so-called “globalization”, which we are living in today.
In an era like this, “mobility climbs to the rank of the uppermost of coveted values-and the freedom to move, perpetually a scarce and unequally distributed commodity, fast becomes the main stratifying factor of our late modern or postmodern times”.(4) This new value and stratifying criterion has been determined by transnational capital which, by nature, tends to be nomadic, because it is the real ruler of this world; it has stirred up the world, and turned its own characteristic (mobility) into a universal principle. Artists are undoubtedly one of the social classes that possess more freedom to move in this era. After the end of the Cold War, the former pattern of competition between groups of nations started to make place for competition between cities. Cities not only compete to host top international events such as the Olympic Games and the World Exposition, but also vie with each other for international capital and tourism with the organization of all sorts of cultural and artistic festivals and exhibitions, and by these, seek to further enhance the economic power of and people’s identification with the city. The proliferation of international art biennials is the epitome of this competition. It has created a great deal of opportunities for transnational travel, and has enabled different cultures to look at each other and to change. For instance, it is because I had been invited to participate in the Istanbul Biennial that, as a result of geographical and cultural displacements, I had the opportunity to get a different viewpoint of, to contemplate Asia in a new light, the place where I am from, the so-called “East” for Westerners.
Undoubtedly, all modern experiences and pedigrees of knowledge that we share today are mainly Western (in particular, European); Asia and other regions haven’t yet played much of a role in the historical process of the construction of global modernity. In the Western-centric eyes, Asia (the East) has always been the far-flung Other, the object of colonization, the cultural imagination of the West at the other end of the earth, and a reference that the West from time to time has recourse to based on its own discursive need. This long-standing attribute of the Other has resulted in Asian anxiety; it was present throughout nearly a century of Asian history, as Asia lived through changes and turbulences from the end of the nineteenth century onwards –the successive collapse of feudal monarchies, the continuous expansion of colonialism, the arduous establishment of modern nation-states, etc. Take the two Eastern empires, China and Turkey, for example, they almost coincided and shared astonishing similarities in the process of looking for their own modernity: the Chinese Qing dynasty and the Turkish Ottoman dynasty fell at about the same time, and Sun Yat-sen and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk emerged at roughly the same moment; both people were firm advocates of westernization, were deeply worried for their chronically weak countries, and in order to learn from the West and to catch up with it, they established a republican regime in their own country. The difference between these two countries is that, in the wave of globalization of today, Turkey is still eager to “leave Asia and join Europe” (5), to throw itself into the embrace of the European Union; on the other hand, after having experienced the collapse of the communist value system around the world, China still adheres to centralization, and is becoming stronger and stronger in the global economic framework with authoritarian capitalism that is proper to Asia.
Asian politicians have also made similar alliance-forming attempts. The ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), founded in 1967, implemented the ASEAN Free Trade Area in 2003, with the hope of creating the ASEAN economic community, so as to enhance the competitiveness of the region; the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation), founded in 1989, is an economic cooperation project that involves even more Asian countries and regions. These alliance-forming efforts reflect the enthusiastic embracing of global economic integration by Asian countries. However, it is a pity that they remain content simply with collaborations in the economic realm, and haven’t gone beyond that to form common “Asian values” on political and cultural levels. Singapore’s former leader Lee Kwan Yew, who is familiar with Western culture, fervently pleaded in favor of the construction of “Asian values”. He believed that this was the only effective way for Asian countries to avoid and resist the risks arising from their integration into the globalization process. However, the “Asian values” formulated by Mr. Lee only concerned such Confucian values as blood relations, family ties, fair hierarchy, the importance of authority, frugality, manners and protocol, etc. Although these values are shared by countries within the Confucian cultural circle, such as China, Japan, Korea, Singapore, etc, they fail to embrace Islamic and Hindu values. Due to the fact that Asia represents a rich diversity of races, cultures and religions, that each country is at a different stage of development, and that some countries still hold profound historical grudges against others, Asia has not been able to contend with the West by forming a highly integrated political, economic and cultural community that goes beyond national forms, like the European Union.
In the cultural realm, contemporary Asian art has gradually emerged over the past twenty years, but has largely relied on the predominance of the West, and to a great extent, it has benefited from the prevalence of globalization and multiculturalism in the Western world. In the late eighties and the early nineties of last century, along with the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the USSR, the ideological opposition between the two camps came to an end; after having won its final victory, capitalism went further in its advance across the world by speeding up its pace and increasing its intensity, thereby inaugurating the movement of globalization. The political iron curtain having been torn open, not only could Western capital enter the once antagonistic third world countries, but the art of third world countries could also be brought to the West. In 1993, in an article entitled “Clash of Civilizations” published in the American Foreign Affairs quarterly, Samuel P. Huntington argued that in the post-Cold War world, the principal conflicts of global politics would occur between different civilizations, that the Confucian civilization in Asia and the Islamic civilization, in particular, would represent the most serious challenges to Western civilization. This argument has sparked a sense of crisis in Western civilization, and has further helped to turn multiculturalism into the widespread “political correctness” in the West, and the adoption of the cultures of the Other a key strategy for the reconciliation of conflicts between civilizations. France is the first Western country to bring in contemporary Asian art: after the large-scale Le Japon des avant gardes: 1910-1970 show in 1986, the Pompidou Center organized Les magiciens de la terre in 1989 which, other than showing a great number of contemporary African artists, presented works of contemporary Chinese artists for the first time in Europe. From then on, contemporary Asian art has frequently appeared in various important museums and biennials in the West.
In the course of the first post-Cold War decade, the exhibition of contemporary Asian art by the West still followed, to a certain extent, cold war thinking, that is, it preferred works that were ironic about local politics and identified with capitalism and global values, using them as evidence of the victory of the West. After 9/11, when it experienced a lasting sense of shock and fear, the Western world has further adhered to Huntington’s prophetic theory of a clash of civilizations. The strong sense of defeat has magnified the image of the Other coming from the other side of the world; it has never been this clear and near, and is ever-present in all aspects of everyday life. With his Enemy Kitchen project (2006), the Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz, who was born in New York and currently lives and works in Chicago, offered the young generation of America an opportunity to learn Iraqi cooking in a kitchen as a way of making sense of the “enemy” of the country. This work shows that the desire of people to understand other civilizations on the planet is becoming increasingly concrete. In the new millennium, the argument that globalization will inevitably result in cultural convergence is being reconsidered; the concept of “the other” that smacks of egocentrism is greatly losing effectiveness. In the meantime, as the economies of many Asian countries continue to grow, cultural coherence is being strengthened; regional group shows, exchanges and collaborations in contemporary art are becoming more and more frequent; artists of new generations are constantly emerging, and their psychological distance with the West is continually being reduced. All this results in a drastic change in the global art scene.
If “Asian values” remain hung in the balance under the efforts of politicians, what about the attempts made by the artists? In the era of globalization, are they also trying to create an Asian identity in the artistic landscape? Wong Hoy Cheong is a Chinese-Malaysian artist with a strong Asian consciousness. Since 1993, he has created a whole series of works to focus on issues of colonial history, political conflicts, immigrant identity and family traditions in Asian regions. As a fifth-generation Chinese immigrant in Malaysia, Wong Hoy Cheong was born in George Town; his mother tongue is Hokkien, but he received a British colonial education and then went to study in the United States. He speaks Chinese, Malay and English: he is himself a product of Asia’s diverse histories and cultures. Consequently, his early works showed typical traits of “Asian-ness” through the exploration of personal memories and family histories. For the Kwangju Biennale in 2000, his project consisted in collecting a great number of books on Asian history, and after burning them, reforming the pulp into paper tiles to pave the floor in the exhibition space, thus allowing the audience to step on different versions of Asian history and to discern blurred images of those political figures who had once influenced the fate of Asia. The construction of all identities has to rely on history; only history can define who you are, where you are from, and where you are going. In terms of the exploitation and utilization of historical resources, artists are more effective than politicians, because they always speak from a personal position, and place great stress on experiences; consequently, they are more likely to make people identity with them.
For his participation in the 10th Istanbul Biennial, Wong Hoy Cheong focused on the historical district of Sulukule in the center of Istanbul. Sulukule is the oldest existent Romany district in the world, gypsies have come here since 1000 AD, and have offered entertainment to this city with music, circus, story-telling, fortune-telling, etc; however, the Romany are now being confronted with the destruction of the district and are being asked to move out. Wong Hoy Cheong gave cameras and camcorders to children of Sulukule and taught them the basics of filming and animation, allowing them to express their memories, knowledge and imagination of this district; by doing so, he has tried to make an appeal for the protection of this district. Sulukule resembles a great deal the Dazhalan district near the Tiananmen Square in Beijing(6): they both have a long history, but gradually fell into oblivion during the process of searching for and development of new spaces of the city, and plunged into decline before turning into slums in the end; now they are going to be entirely wiped off from the landscape. The fate of these historical districts is intertwined with the fight of different interest groups for space to survive in the era of globalization, and implies the clashes between the two cultural forces of convergence and differentiation. The disadvantaged slum population is not only the manifestation of social stratification caused by floating capital, but also a metaphor for the desperate conditions of local cultures in their confrontation with strong global cultures. For those artists who refuse to be reduced to a component of the homogeneous culture of globalization, to stand up for history is the key to the preservation of local differences and the construction of local identities.
Similar efforts are also seen in the works by the Vietnamese artist Jun Nguyen Hatsushiba. For the Yokohama Triennial in 2001, after his original intention to create a cyclo (cycle rickshaw) museum, had been compromised due to a shortage of space, he invited Vietnamese fishermen from Nha Trang to pull cyclos in the water, and made a video film of it for the exhibition. As the oldest and principal means of transport in Vietnam, cyclos embody the life memories of the Vietnamese people. However, they now may have to fight for the right to survive against the global city transportation system that is synonymous with efficiency and order—the image of cyclos moving forward with difficulty under the sea, is “a striking metaphor for struggle and survival” (7). In comparison with the convergence of imagination, the impulse for differentiation they have aroused seems to become reality in a more widespread manner. Objectively speaking, homogeneity is a partial concept of globalization, whereas difference is its essentially profound characteristic. We have already seen that, with the progress of globalization, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, “signaling a new freedom for some, upon many others it descends as an uninvited and cruel fate” (8), and that instead of being rejected with contempt and disappearing from the world, nationalism is gaining ground day by day. Although most artists are reluctant to attach a national label to their identity or works, it is hard for them to go beyond their personal growth experiences, historical imprints, and linguistic and thinking sets. Difference is the essence of this world, and cannot be obliterated or altered by any capital-related, political or other man-made force.
Consequently, regardless of its content or subject matter, or the medium it uses, we can always perceive a distinguishable trait of “Asian-ness” in a work by a contemporary Asian artist — this characteristic is sometimes consciously performed by the artist, but sometimes goes beyond his or her intentios. Recently, Jun Nguyen Hatsushiba started a project series entitled “Breathing is Free: 12756.3”. The artist intends to run the physical distance of 12756.3 km, the diameter of the earth, in different parts of the world within a certain period of time, and have the whole process filmed by others. This time, he won’t hire any actors, but “will be the one to move and struggle” (9) himself, to measure and experience the distance of the earth with his own body. In this project, the idea of using the body as an artistic medium is different from that of many Western artists: here, the body is not to be stripped bare or to be displayed, it is not used to challenge taboos, either; instead, it is the vehicle through which the artist aims to train his will, it is the arena where spirit confronts material. This penance-like artistic practice has also been undertaken by other Asian artists: The US-based Taiwan artist Teh-ching Hsieh carried out a series of one-year performances in New York in the seventies and the eighties, for instance, living in a cage for one year, punching a time clock every hour for one year, living outdoors for one year, etc. Chinese artist He Yunchang picked up a rock in a small town called Boulmer on the Northumberland coast in northern England, and carried it all the way around the coast of Great Britain and finally went back to Boulmer to put the rock back in the same place. Besides using the body as a medium, the biggest characteristic of these works is to show meaning through meaningless behavior, showing typical Asian thinking.
Nevertheless, just like the way that political practices have failed to reach unified “Asian values,” the global identity that contemporary Asian art has tried to construct is also fragmentary; even the most brilliant observer is unable to sum up a complete attribute suitable for every Asian country. Maybe we can say that fragmentation is in itself an appropriate image for Asia (like its geography), because as a matter of fact, its diversity fits in with the formula of energy production in the globalization era. No matter which description we use, today’s Asia has certainly opened up a road of modernity that is different from that of the West, and on the negotiating table among global powers, it is no longer an irrelevant other; and people can no longer neglect the voice it has. Asia is no longer the orphan of the world, the progress it has accomplished today cannot be compared with the past: it is the moment to rewrite history.
December 5, 2007
Notes:
(1) In his Istanbul: Memories of a City, Orhan Pamuk quotes a great deal of the travel notes on Istanbul of these French writers and poets and their impressions of “the East”. Le Corbusier is the author of Le Voyage d’Orient.
(2) Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto.
(3) Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of Mexico’s Zapatista rebels, wrote in the French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique (p4-5, August, 1997): “In the cabaret of globalization, the state performs a striptease, at the end of which it is left wearing the minimum necessary: its powers of repression. With its material base destroyed, its sovereignty and independence abolished, and its political class eradicated, the nation state increasingly becomes a mere security apparatus in the service of the mega-enterprises…”
(4) Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: the Human Consequences, Chinese translation “quanqiuhua: renlei de houguo”, the Commercial Press, 2001, page 3.
(5) Turkey has submitted an application to join European Union since 1987, but up to today, its candidacy has still not been accepted. The idea of “leaving Asia and joining Europe” had already been put forward by the Japanese Fukuzawa Yukichi during the Meiji period.
(6) The Dazhalan project that Cao Fei and I collaborated on also took part in this Istanbul Biennial. For more on this project, please visit: www.dazhalan-project.org
(7) Jonathan Napack: Vietnam’s Artists Try to Break Free of Their “Velvet Prison”, The International Herald Tribune, June 9, 2005.
(8) Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences, Chinese translation, the Commercial Press, 2001, page 71.
(9) Uda Motoko: Interview with Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, ARTiT, Summer/Fall, 2007
Friday, May 18, 2007
San Yuan Li
San Yuan Li, a collaborative project by Ou Ning, Cao Fei and U-thèque members, is a case study of the typical "village-amidst-the-city" phenomenon in the process of urbanization in Guangzhou. Commissioned by Hou Hanru for Z.O.U.(Zone of Urgency), 50th Biennale di Venezia, 2003
More here.
More here.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
3030 New Photography In China, by John Millichap
3030 New Photography In China, by John Millichap
Freelance journalist and founder of 3030 Press (an organization set up to produce high-quality English-language books about all aspects of contemporary creativity in China), John Millichap worked with professor of photography Gu Zheng and contemporary artist/author Ou Ning to bring 30 of China's contemporary photographers under 30 together in an energetic photographic survey titled “3030: New Photography in China.” All artists represented in the book are using photography as a medium to speak the language of the social and economic transformation that has occurred over the past few decades. “Together these works can be seen as an attempt to highlight the possibilities and anxieties of life in modern China, as well as a powerful new sense of creative identity,” explains Millichap. Each image in the book is representative of a new generation in China whose, according to Gu Zheng's theory of Chinese personal photography, “sensibilities and character are utterly distinct and for whom the power of the image is paramount.” Chinese society has undergone a major change marked by the embrace of consumerism since the mid-1990s and one glance at any given image in Millichap's book lets the viewer feel that behind the photograph lies a story affected by such transformation. Within the pages exists scenes of love and want, distraction and politics, but most apparent are the thrilling suggestions of a new China brimming with individuals whose voices ring loudly and uniquely through the photographic lens. We're especially fond of Cao Fei's series featuring Star Wars clad figures in everyday China scenes.
Whitney Rosenberg
Freelance journalist and founder of 3030 Press (an organization set up to produce high-quality English-language books about all aspects of contemporary creativity in China), John Millichap worked with professor of photography Gu Zheng and contemporary artist/author Ou Ning to bring 30 of China's contemporary photographers under 30 together in an energetic photographic survey titled “3030: New Photography in China.” All artists represented in the book are using photography as a medium to speak the language of the social and economic transformation that has occurred over the past few decades. “Together these works can be seen as an attempt to highlight the possibilities and anxieties of life in modern China, as well as a powerful new sense of creative identity,” explains Millichap. Each image in the book is representative of a new generation in China whose, according to Gu Zheng's theory of Chinese personal photography, “sensibilities and character are utterly distinct and for whom the power of the image is paramount.” Chinese society has undergone a major change marked by the embrace of consumerism since the mid-1990s and one glance at any given image in Millichap's book lets the viewer feel that behind the photograph lies a story affected by such transformation. Within the pages exists scenes of love and want, distraction and politics, but most apparent are the thrilling suggestions of a new China brimming with individuals whose voices ring loudly and uniquely through the photographic lens. We're especially fond of Cao Fei's series featuring Star Wars clad figures in everyday China scenes.
Whitney Rosenberg
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