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.
☁
Thursday, November 26, 2009
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 |
|
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Fwd: Public Programme Art Economies beyond Pattern Recognition艺术新经济-公共交流项目讲座-Osage Shanghai上海奥沙
上海奥沙画廊将于2009年7月3日(本周五)下午4：00举办“艺术新经济-公共交流项目”讲座系列二，诚邀您的光临，请提前来电预定座位。
讲座主题：
“当代艺术的媒体平台——对待文化各自的策略”
本次进行的系列谈话将把近阶段较为活跃的几家当代艺术媒体平台带到现场，话题集中在他们一直在进行的针对当代艺术文献方面的工作及其不同的目标。对话试图制造一个交流的平台，使这些以媒体身份对当代艺术的过去和现在进行文献编辑的嘉宾分别介绍各自的运作策略及支撑系统。
受邀嘉宾包括：
郑为民-Artlink（中国当代艺术的维基百科）
龚燕-《艺术世界》杂志
左靖-《艺术与投资》杂志
王宝菊-《今日美术》杂志
何彬-东方视觉（“展览史”板块）
比利安娜-Art-ba-ba（超级资料）
“艺术新经济-公共交流项目”讲座系列二
概念策划：比利安娜
时间：2009年7月3日 16:00
地点: 奥沙画廊 上海市虹口区多伦路93号（靠近多伦美术馆）
电话：86-21-56713605
联系人：李一鸣
Dear friends:
Osage-Shanghai will hold the Public Programme： Art Economies beyond Pattern Recognition on July 3rd 2009. We cordially invite you to the lecture on this Friday, July 3rd at 16:00.
Lecture Theme:
Contemporary Art Media Platforms- Archive Initiatives
This series of talks aims to bring recent initiative of media platforms in archiving of contemporary art and their different approaches. Dialogue tempts to share exchange of ideas in using media platforms in archiving present and past and their different supporting systems
Speakers Include:
Artlinkart (wikipedia of Chinese contemporary art): Zheng Weimin
Art World ( new media art archiving): Gong Yan
Art and Investment: Zuo Jing
Today Art: Wang Baoju
Ionly ( exhibition history project): He Bin
Art-ba-ba: Biljana Ciric
Public Programming: Art Economies beyond Pattern Recognition
Lecture concept by Biljana Ciric
Venue: Osage Shanghai
Address: 93 Duolun Road, Hongkou District, Shanghai 200081 (close to Duolun Museum of Modern Art)
Date: 3rd July, 2009 16:00
Tel: 86-21-56713605
Contact: Reika Li
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Fraction of Interview with Jutta Friedrichs
Zachary Velazquez
Contemporary Art/New Media in China
Defne Ayas and Zhao Chuan
Interview with Jutta Friedrichs
- In what ways has living in Shanghai influence your work?
No matter where, the environment always influences or depending on the
level of engagement, shapes one's character. Those changes can be slow
and subtle and may only manifest them self much later. I think living
here in China will influence my work even long time after I will be
gone (or perhaps I'll never leave, who knows).
For my last line, my main inspiration was contrast, which I found a
lot in a city on a fast train of trying to overcome old traditions and
poverty. The city's increasing awareness of environmental issues
contrasting the excitement for consuming the newest products
(pollution through production) was an other inspiration to combine
natural with manufactured elements, aesthetically as well as in the
material.
- How do you resolve the matter of being a Western artist working in
China?
I don't know if there is anything to resolve. It provides a chance to
engage with something new, which sets my experience, myself and in the
end my work apart from most other artists and designers in the world.
There were and are personal issues to address of how to develop a new
aesthetic true to myself and my new environment. Funny enough, in the
beginning I was given the impression that I had an advantage of being
a foreign designer here in China. I easily got credibility. Very
recently the tables have turned. There seams to be a new sudden,
wildly urge to find China's exotic super designer of tomorrow and with
a foreign passport, I am now often excluded from competitions. Either
way has no relevance to the quality of the design but the
differentiation and exclusivity has become a marketing tool, following
the trend of the Arts.
- I read that you used to design Italian kitchens. Is there any
specific reason why you chose to concentrate on designing furniture
upon moving to Shanghai?
I moved to China for a tempting product design position. I had 70
products produced with the first two years. It was a very condensed
experience but soon I didn't feel comfortable anymore throwing one low
value product after the other into the world. Products often end up in
drawers and most of the time have a much shorter lifespan than
furniture. Furniture occupies a beautiful space in between the body
and the environment/architecture communicating between the two. It is
always exposed as oppose to products of occasional use. Good furniture
gains value over time whereas electronics for example loose value fast
and with it fades its design.
- The wood in your furniture is quite beautiful. Is there anything
you distinctly look for when choosing wood for your pieces? Do you
feel this is important?
Of course. Design is all in the detail and the material is one
important detail. I love the idea of creating colourful pieces with
natural materials. All the wood is naturally finished, showing it's
original colour and grain. I handpick the veneer for the first
samples. Since it is a natural material, the grain shape and width,
the contrast and colour can vary a lot. Getting it right can make a
huge difference.
- Recently, the lines between art and design have increasingly worn
thin. Do you feel any need to categorize your work as one or the other?
Historically a differentiation between the two didn't exist. The
distinction is a product of the industrialization. The consumer/
market has more power and is demanding certain product in a certain
style. In a way, addressing a brief (designing) is a lot easier than
setting your very own guidance as an artist. For MÜ I have fully
followed my own call but I have still created functional and sellable
pieces. I guess there, I felt for the first time that I was touching
the border between design and art. The pieces, I am working on now, I
consider much more as art. They will be exhibited in a gallery and be
communicating pieces of my thought process. I often think, it is a
waist of time that everybody spends so much time thinking and talking
about the difference between art and design. However, I think there is
a difference. Maybe we just need a new word for the people that work
in the grey zone "dancing on both parties" - perhaps creators - then
it can be easily confused with curators...great, another blurry zone...
Other References
- http://re-title.com/artists/Xue-Tao.asp
- http://www.100percentdesign.com.cn/2008/ENG/news.5d66947ee84323c6.htm
- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/3347809/Shao-Fan-at-Chelsea-fertile-ground.html
- http://phillipsartexpert.com/forums/7/597/
- Twelve Experimental Exhibitions – A Documented History
The Space Between Furniture and Art by Zachary Velazquez
Zachary Velazquez
Contemporary Art/New Media in China
Defne Ayas and Zhao Chuan
The Space Between Furniture and Art
When considering our surroundings it is natural to intuitively view
our environment as occupying its own space, separate from the self.
After all, as an individual, one can only assume complete control over
him/herself. Every other object in our surroundings exists as its own
entity, created and swayed by multiple influences that extend far
beyond the individual. However, today we no longer live in a world
oblivious to mankind. Humans have molded and created the material
world that we live in. Not only has the land around us been reshaped
and partitioned, but almost every object in our daily lives is the
result of human interference and design. This includes something as
seemingly natural as a home garden, as simple as a kitchen table, and
as complex as a computer. People not only rely on the objects and
environment that surround them, but these external things are the
direct result of the human mind.
In one way or another, it has taken will, creativity, innovation, and
an understanding of emotion to develop the objects that are now often
dismissed as purely functional. Without the artistic mind, much
around us could not have possibly developed to the point that it has.
Furniture, which can be viewed as one of the most common and
functional objects of our daily lives, is no exception to this.
Furniture has had an important role in our lives for thousands of
years, acting as an extension of local culture. Different designs and
variations in structure are telling of a people's customs, idea of
beauty, method of interacting with the world, and concept of their
surroundings. China is a country with a long history of furniture
design, with a unique aesthetic that developed independently from the
West. However, today, as China opens itself up to globalization and
receives influence from the West, contemporary Chinese artists are
designing furniture that comments on change and the space that we
currently live in. As this investigation continues, Chinese artists
are gradually picking away at the line between art and design,
creating work that tackles this conflict and tries to surpass
limitations.
Furniture, as an object, is not only identified by itself, but also
the space that it inhabits. In an interview, designer Jutta
Friedrichs states, "Furniture occupies a beautiful space between the
body and the environment/architecture, communicating between the
two." Furniture acts as a mediator between the individual and the
greater space that he/she occupies. The flow, direction, and emotion
of a room can be determined by where a piece of furniture sits. It
creates the boundaries in which one can move and invites an individual
to act and rest in a particular manner. But just as furniture is
designed and arranged to create order within one daily life, it can be
contorted and rearranged to create confusion and a new context for
interpretation. Ai Weiwei's "Furniture" series, which was started in
1997, dissects and reinterprets furniture pieces from the Ming and
Qing Dynasties. Works such as "Table with Two Legs on the Wall," in
which a table is folded in half so that two legs are weighted on the
floor and the other two rest against the wall, beg the viewer to re-
evaluate the way they experience their environment. This simple
gesture pushes a traditional item of stability onto its side, where it
remains in a defunct order, hanging on the edge of reality. Another
piece by the name of "Grapes" is composed of nine partially merged
stools that curl around each other to form a single piece that
resembles a cluster of grapes. By deconstructing and rearranging the
stools, Ai Weiwei is able to change our conception of ordinary form.
"Grapes" takes away the preconceived notion of how stools are supposed
to function, while at the same time drawing attention to the
traditional form's structure and capacity for a more playful use. Ai
Weiwei doesn't simple destroy the old and make a new, but is able to
use a long and established history of precise wood working, fitted
joints, and shaping to his advantage. He works within the old
structure, making adjustments so that he can create an evolved form
that can stand on its own as a unique piece. The space as we know it
is not destroyed, but reconsidered and worked into a context that
provides depth and understanding.
The idea of re-evaluating the spaces we have grown accustomed to has
been a reoccurring trend in contemporary Chinese art that goes beyond
furniture design. Experimental exhibitions such as Art for Sale
(1999) and Post-Sense Sensibility: Distorted Bodies and Delusion
(1999) have tried to find a new way to display and curate a show. The
Persistent Deviation/Corruptionists (1998) exhibition focused on
giving the artist a platform to develop his or her own obsessions and
not be restricted to conforming to a "commonality or mutual
relationship." This show attempted to do away with exhibition
limitations that try to have a group of artists adhere to a theme or
method. The show was thus held in the basement of a residential
building in Beijing, away from the white wall galleries and the eye of
the government, allowing the artist to explore their freedom of
individual expression. The artist's space became his own, and he was
able to use it according to his own will and ambition. Acknowledging
that a piece derives important and meaning through the space that it
occupies, gives an artist the freedom to experiment with its context
and the established notion of what something is supposed to do.
Since most furniture is viewed primarily as a commercial product, and
not as art, the more artistically geared designers end up working in
the grey space between the fine arts and design. Each category has
its own context that implies a certain way of evaluating the work.
Furniture works such as the Ai Weiwei series are created specifically
for the gallery. In Ai Weiwei's case, functionality is not his
primary concern. Although certain pieces such as "Table with Two Legs
on the Wall" could theoretically be used like a traditional table, the
piece was primarily created to be studied and interpreted by a viewer
and not used as a common object. Furniture designers such as XYZ
Design and Jutta Friedrichs of MÜ Furniture, on the other hand, create
works that must be functional and reproducible by request or within an
edition. When explaining the distinction between design and art,
Jutta Friedrichs says, "Historically, a difference between the two
didn't exist. The distinction is a product of industrialization. The
consumer/market has more power and is demanding certain products in a
certain style. In a way, addressing a brief (designing) is a lot
easier than setting your very own guidance as an artist." Although
furniture design first relies on making works that are sellable in a
commercial market, the pieces can often be considered as art and shown
in expos, competitions, and galleries.
A problem that contemporary furniture faces in both the design and art
world is accessibility. Although furniture made by design companies
is marketed to people interested in this type of product, both
networks are relatively small and unknown to the greater public.
Furniture shown in art galleries, especially in China, is viewed by a
small public of insiders and intellectuals who come to see the pieces
as sculptural works of art. In Shanghai and Beijing, most exhibitions
are not well advertised and there isn't a well-developed class of
people interested in contemporary art. However, if a piece or series
is really well received, it has the opportunity of reaching
international circles. Works by furniture designers are viewed as
contemporary furniture first and works of art second. This means that
some pieces, no matter how artistic they seem, may not get the
attention they deserve. These furniture pieces also reach a specific
group of people and are produced in relatively small numbers.
The issue of accessibility does not lie in the content or design of
these works, but in the platform on which they are shown. Many
furniture pieces benefit from being displayed in a gallery setting
since it provides the work with a neutral environment that allows it
to be read as art. The problem, however, is that China does not
promote the study of contemporary art to its people. One of the more
successful contemporary Chinese art districts, 798 in Beijing, has had
more success in attracting a visiting public. However, a large
percentage of viewers are Westerners and are only in town for vacation
or business. Through education, advertising, and a better-developed
gallery scene, one could be certain that contemporary art could reach
a much larger Chinese population. However, fully functional and
sellable furniture that is shown in design exhibitions, might have a
harder time reaching the public since its geared to a much more
specific array of people. If the design works are brought directly to
the people in an open setting that allows the passing public to
stumble upon the exhibition, then more interest can be stirred and a
more general public could be aware of the artist's work.
Although this divide between furniture design and fine art is more
discernable in the works of artists like Ai Weiwei and XYZ, certain
artists, such as Xue Tao, drift closer to that ambiguous border. Art
website re-title.com writes, "Xue Tao is one of a young generation of
artists who are unconcerned with the category in which people wish to
place them, preferring to work unconstrained, between disciplines. He
leaves the decision of whether his works are to be viewed as art or
design to the viewer." Xue Tao's furniture contains a rich social
critique as well an appealing aesthetic that easily puts his work on
the edge of art and design. By making sculptures entirely of knotted
newspaper, Xue Tao is able to make works that comment on the
experience of living in modern day China. The country's rapid change
and constant influx of information make newspaper a perfect material,
while the delicate hand worked technique calls back to a more
traditional and labor intensive time. By curling and knotting the
newspaper, Xue Tao is able to evoke an active struggle that is laden
in the framework of contemporary culture. The fact that he makes one
of a kind pieces that aren't mass-produced, widely circulated, or
often functional has little importance when trying to classify the
piece as art or design. There are many examples of one of a kind
furniture pieces that have very little physical practicality (such as
a ceramic craft vase). Pieces like "Stool 1" have the shape and
design that allow it to be labeled as furniture and the content that
helps describe it as art. As more and more artists realize that
categories are often inaccurate and vague, they can create without the
pressure of feeling as though they need to conform.
A category that can, with certainty, be used to classify Chinese
furniture designers are those that are foreign born, but now living
and working in China, and those that are native Chinese. What really
divides these two types of artists is the inherent cultural struggle
and sense of identity that is worked into their individual pieces.
Shao Fan, one of the most notable Chinese artists to work with
furniture, reconstructs and juxtaposes modern and traditional forms to
create a dialogue on language and identity. While Ai Weiwei uses
existing artifacts from past dynasties, Shao Fan will often integrate
contemporary design and material, with the style of furniture from the
Ming dynasty. When commenting on his piece entitled "Ming Turd," a
fat and distinctly designed curved bench, he says, "I wanted to show
that even the most ordinary, base things can be made beautiful and
turned into art. Of course, no artist who wanted to live would have
dared to offer the divine emperor an artwork that might suggest he was
human. But we are all emperors now. We are all the same." A piece
such as "Ming Turd" is able to comment on social developments in China
by altering a traditional form so that it can create an internal
dialogue. Other works, such as his chair pieces, interject sleek
metal forms into the worn wooden curves of traditional Ming dynasty
chairs. The chair piece entitled "Moon" had been designed to contain
the logographic nature of its character, while at the same time
indicating an obvious gap between the old and new. The constructed
contrast between modern minimalistic aesthetics and tradition shape
and material is brought to light when Shao Fan reflects on his art
education. In an interview with Telegraph newspaper, Shao Fan says,
"I realize now that my education was Western. As I got older I wanted
to move away from the Western aesthetic – the aesthetic that academics
in China teach and which are espoused by most contemporary Chinese
artists. I had to learn by myself how to be a Chinese artist, by
trial and error." This is a conflict of identity that is apparent in
his work, and one that can only be expressed by a Chinese artist.
Even if a foreign artist attempted to mimic Shao Fan's style, there
would be an ingrained emotional conflict and personal struggle missing
from the confines of the piece.
Although there are certain Chinese issues that a foreign artist living
in China would have less success tackling, a foreign artist can
without a doubt make Chinese furniture that is relevant to
contemporary issues. MÜ Furniture designer Jutta Friedrichs is a
German born artist, who went to school in London, and moved to China
in 2005. After doing product design in Shanghai for two year,
Friedrichs decided to branch out on her own and start designing
furniture, something she felt had greater value and a more meaningful
lifespan. When designing her last line, she drew direct inspiration
from the city of Shanghai as well as her impulse to connect with
nature. Friedrichs states, "My main inspiration was contrast, which I
found a lot in a city on a fast train of trying to overcome old
traditions and poverty. The city's increasing awareness of
environmental issues contrasting the excitement for consuming the
newest products (pollution through production) was an other
inspiration to combine natural with manufactured elements,
aesthetically as well as in the material." This contrast is a
signature element of her pieces, which combine a sleek manufactured
aesthetic with richly textured wood. Her furniture pieces are
beautifully simple and provocative, juxtaposing the hard lines of the
city with the tapering grain of nature. By engaging in a new
environment, Friedrichs was able to eventually find a new aesthetic
that was true to both herself and her surroundings. This is a
transformation within the visual arts that is the direct result of her
experience as a foreigner living in China. Her furniture pieces thus
become just as much a part of Chinese culture as any local artists'
work.
Contemporary Chinese furniture design currently occupies a conflicting
yet exciting space in both the art world and within China's quickly
developing society. Tottering between the applied and fine arts gives
the artist the opportunity to design furniture that works within
different contexts and plays with different notions of our
surroundings. Globalization and social conflicts that are unique to
China bring forth an investigation of identity and a desire to come to
terms with contrasting perspectives. In the process of breaking down
these boundaries, Chinese artists are freeing up their minds to
uninhibited expression and tackling issues that are true to themselves
and the surroundings that have influenced them.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
blog collection by Daniel Kekacs
Outstanding Art: Underwhelming Experience
I saw a sign for Contemporary Art in M50 the other day and decided to check it out. Outstand Art Gallery was having an exhibition featuring the works of artists Yu Jin, Wei Ru, Qin Shengxian, Zhang Yuyin, and Jin Shi, among others. I was curious to see how this contemporary art would compare to the works we mention in class, but ultimately I was somewhat disappointed. Too much red, too many of the same cultural symbols, too much Mao. Yu Jin's Red Guard series depicted black and white young adults with something prominently red, like the flag of China, or their arm bands. They stood around and didn't really do anything, nor did they do anything for me. Jin Shi's masks featured disgustingly obese and effeminate men doing uncomfortable things, their lips painted a bright, luscious red, not unlike Wei Ru's Sentiment series, featuring the familiar combination of black and white people with only one color: red lips. Buddhas smile in the background. My favorite piece was a silhouette of Mao, with Buddhas in his face. It felt completely uninspired. The plaque describing Zhang Yuying's inspiration for painting animals seemed interesting, but the paintings were, again, somewhat uninspired. Cute donkeys, dogs, pigs, etc wandered around with sad faces while easily recognizable landmarks (like the Imperial City) floated in the background.
Whether it was their response to pressure from the external world or their own conception, I hope that emerging artists will discard the notion that Chinese art can't be Chinese unless it contains the same tired cultural symbols (Mao, the Imperial City, propaganda-style posters, emphasis on the color red, etc). I'm sick of Mao in every possible way, and I never want to see him ugly mug again.
Zhongjian: Midway at Eastlink Gallery
Seeing something that looks like a bird skeleton wrapped in cabbage is kind of cool, but only the first five times. Are six nearly identical, bone-white bird skeletons wrapped in cabbage necessary for anything? Does the fourth one convey some message that the first three, either individually or collectively, do not? Or the fifth? Eastlink's Zhongjian – Midway exhibition just opened on Sunday, and I was still in Shanghai, waiting for an erroneously-booked Monday flight home, although in retrospect I'm glad I got to have the extra two or three days to settle down before leaving. In addition to Shen Shaomin's cabbages, Zhongjian featured the works of Liu Qinghe, Julie Bartholomew, Zhang Qing, and Jin Sha, who was also the curator.
Liu Qinghe's paintings of waif-like girl I mistook for a calligraphy painting at first glance, thinking their wispy hair was strands from a willow tree or something similar. Not the case, fortunately. I particularly enjoyed Jin Sha's Fading Away, the plaque for which discussed the commoditization of culture, and like how so many aspects of China before, it, Chinese culture too would soon become defined, delimited, and purchasable anywhere you want, except in the places where it used to be. Based on my time in China, I have the same fears: that something that used to be natural and unique will become just another Chinese export, as fake and plastic as everything else in this country.
Huaihai 570
Right down the road is the art center at 570 Huaihai Lu. Its open space and nicely renovated buildings aren't as shabby as those of M50, the entire space is far more open and inviting, which I much prefer to claustrophobia. In this sense, it sort of reminds me of 798 in Beijing than the A ring of galleries and cafes surround a relatively open green space, where various sculptures have been installed – multicolored feet, a tantalizingly inviting bicycle with one open seat that reads, "Do not touch," and my favorite piece, a massive, hulking, metal bull. Part animal, part machine, the bull charges, frozen in time, the power conveyed by its size and posture amplified by both the impenetrable metal from which it is made and the pipes, bolts, and gears that gradually take over its body from head to toe. Its horns are almost 1/3 of its entire length, and they are slim, graceful, and deadly.
Right across from the bull is the Red Bridge sculpture gallery, a space that I really enjoyed and strongly recommend checking out. With maybe 100 sculptures inside, the space was very inviting and many of the artworks were both interesting and innovative. Xiang Yi's simple Waiting for the Next Bus resin sculpture depicted a man leaning forward and peering with an intense scrutiny, ostensibly waiting for the next bus. His body was all white, except where shadows were suggested in dark blue. The plaque describing the work expanded the simple act of waiting for a ride home into a metaphor for life in general: "Life is full of occasions where we are waiting alone for something to come. Life is full of dreams that are to be realized through everything that we are doing. We experience the tune of growing up in the course of expecting one after another." At the risk of getting too personal, this piece struck me because I felt like I've spent far too much time waiting alone for something to come or something to happen, a passivity that I have always disliked about myself, yet I also suspect I am far from being the only person who feels this way. Thinking back to the sculpture, I could see how much energy the blue and white man had invested in simply waiting, and I wondered what else he might have been able to do right now. This sculpture reminded me that in order to live the lives we want to lead and experience the things that we want to see and feel, we can't be content with simply waiting for things to come to us – we must become active participants in our own lives in order to make our dreams and desires reality.
Jin Xing and Modern Dance
Frankly, I was surprised to discover that the Chinese army was so supportive of the arts, let alone a transsexual dancer. I knew that the PLA was a major patron of the arts in China, currently trying to purchase Chinese works from all around the globe to bring them back to China, but I was surprised that they seemed so personally invested in the life and success of Jin Xing, especially in light of her transsexuality.
How did the army come to be such a major destination for children whose parents want them to pursue a future in dance? It seems strange that an institution that so many associate with power, control, and "evil" could have produced someone as progressive and potentially controversial as Jin Xing. Sylvie Levey's documentary did an excellent job capturing the emotions, motivations, and methodology of both Jin Xing and her peers, and I was glad that it was more than just a sensationalized documentary on a sensational subject. We previously watched another of her documentaries and even had a chance to talk with her in class The City and the Environment. She followed the lives of a relatively poor family in Shanghai for seven years while they waited to receive the news of their home's demolition and the plans for their future relocation. While she was forced to abandon filming before any conclusion ever came, while editing and producing the film back home she received the news that their relocation had been ultimately successful. Both documentaries were excellent and I would love to see more of her work in the future.
Blackboard Exhibition at ShanghART H-Space
While I wasn't expecting to find 20 different blackboards made by 20 different artists decorated with chalk landscapes or portraits or covered with Hello Kitty stickers at the Blackboard exhibition, I was pleasantly surprised to discover an exhibition more creative than I had thought it would be. The first piece visitors encounter is He An's blackboard, which is neither black nor a board. Colored neon lights frame a large white space as each side and color illuminates, clockwise, in turn. It felt like an advertisement for something ("Car Wash!" or "99 cent Hamburger!"), but where any text or photo might have been, instead was an open white space, freeing the viewer to imagine anything they wanted inside of this "blackboard."
Cheng Ran's blackboard was exactly the opposite: it was an entirely spray-painted black creation, a cutout scene where physical layers provided the only way to differentiate between this black and that black… for whatever reason my first thought was of Halloween, which of course made me miss every kind of chocolate other than Dove (like Hershey's!).
Jin Shan did use an actual blackboard to create his work, but not in any way that you might be expecting. He tied a rope to the board and strapped it to his back, stood on the side of the road, and created a six minute video of himself asking passing motorists to take him to New York, thus the title of the piece: To New York. If Jin Shan has ever seen an episode of Candid Camera, the concept might not be all that creative, but it was an enjoyable video at least, and certainly used the blackboard in an unexpected way. I'm not sure whether the performance was staged or not, but the video ends with the driver of a white van agreeing to load his blackboard into the back: they drive off into the distance, before the video fades to black. I'm not sure they made it to New York.
My favorite piece was Qiu Zhijie's blackboard, which he sprayed black before lending it to various committees, organizations, and even a farmers' market to use for periods of time ranging from a few weeks to a few months. He photographed the blackboard in use at each location, wiped it clean after the final use, and attached the four photos to the blank slate.
Tiananmen 20 Years Later: Art from a Soldier
A former soldier who was present at the Tiananmen square events in 1989 is turning his photographs into oil paintings, despite pressure from officials. Stationed at the square to subdue the protests in June 1989, Chen Guang took photographs of the event as a routine procedure, but ended up keeping nearly 100 of the photos. Showing once again the army's connection with the arts, Chen was only a soldier for a little longer before transferring from a military art school to the Chinese Academy of Fine Art.
I am curious to see what these paintings will depict, how they will be received, and if they will ever be displayed, or even viewed, and even if they are viewed, will anyone discuss them? There are almost too many variables to consider. I also wonder why he is converting photographs into oil paintings – does this legitimize them as artistic instead of the complete realism that photographs contain? Is Chen afraid that photos of such a sensitive event would be considered too 'dangerous,' while oil paintings are completely harmless? I do not think this is the case, but I am interested what the content of the work will be, and also to see how it will be received within China. "I'm not doing anything wrong," he said. "I'm just talking about my experiences."
Read the full article at the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/world/asia/04soldier.html
Performance Art and Experimental Theater
Saying that I struggled to make sense of Gerry Pryor, let alone his video of Chance Running, would be an understatement. He's a colorful character, and I would have liked to see some of his other performances too, because I don't think I was the only person who felt a little confused about what they had just seen and who they had just met. My only real issue was the barely-suppressed glee with which he proclaimed, "Using my body in this way is sort of like a sin. Every time I create art... I'm actually sinning." He seemed tickled to death by this fact, but I'll leave my criticism at that.
Last week, we watched a variety of performance art videos with Zhao Chuan, and these were somewhat greater in scope and in length of time than Chance Running. This type of art is definitely abstract, but never to the point of meaninglessness. While I won't claim to be able to extract a single, clear, direct message from any of these works, it is still more than possible to take something away from them. Thinking about Li Ning's work in particular, as emphasized by the frequent nudity, the human body is an essential component of the performance art we saw. As simple as it sounds, I was especially struck by how the actors/performers moved in strange ways, and in ways I wasn't expecting. Eventually, I made a list of what these performances were all "doing." Sure they were running around naked and lighting meat on fire or whatever, but generally these videos emphasized:
1. Thinking about and using our bodies in new ways, and
2. Interacting with and moving through the world in different ways,
both concepts that I think easily translate to a larger, more accessible "meaning," raising questions about anything from the fragility of the human body or the fragility of humanity in general, to posing questions about our roles as individuals within the world or in society, and to what extent our lives and our ways of thinking are shaped (or constrained, or guided) by the particular environment in which we live.
Finally, I was almost surprised at how much I enjoyed the grass stage performance last Friday. I know that accessbility isn't a requirement of any form of art, but I found that a lot of the material presented or addressed in the show felt quite relevant to either my own life and experiences or to humanity in general. It was also a fun opportunity to get to talk to a few of the actors later at the Mommy Foundation party, and hear about how the ways in which they invented and developed the performances, and where they found inspiration for their individual characters.
James Cohan Gallery
Last week Xiaoxia and I spent an absurd amount of time trying to find Stephen the Spectacular at ddmwarehouse, failed, but did manage to see the exhibition at the James Cohan gallery. Featuring works by Xu Zhen, Bill Viola, Nam June Paik, and Anselm Kiefer, Matters of Faith is a small but surprisingly enjoyable exhibition (although it took me a while to figure out that the creepy, giant monkey guarding the bathroom wasn't actually part of this show).
The painted palm leaves didn't manage to engage me at all, and Xu Zhen's model of the Potala Palace built from thousands of miniature playing cards seemed like it was tedious to build but not overly innovative, but I particularly enjoyed the two video art installations. Nam June Paik's Enlightenment Compressed presented a small bronze Buddha watching its own live image displayed on a television screen a few inches in front of it. At first whimsically comical (Buddha seeking enlightenment by contemplating his own image, and on a TV screen, no less), but gradually encountering the layers of meaning, I wondered whether this Buddha was meditating, or merely in a mindless trance. And what about my own childhood, mostly spent inches away from a similar TV? Was Sesame Street really just a vehicle to reaching nirvana? Something tells me no.
Finally, Bill Viola's video featured two women, initially obscured by wierd fuzz. As they approaced the viewer, their forms passed through a grey veil of water before emerging into a world of clarity and color. Upon reaching this world (our world?), a mix of apprehension, outright fear, longing, and hope flashed across their faces. Ultimately, either defeated or disappointed, one woman seemed unable to bear the sight of the new world she had discovered, and fled back through the sheet of water into shades of grey; her companion, after a final warm glance, allowed herself to be pulled back through as well. I found this work to be the most engaging, and I enjoyed hypothesizing what lay on each side of the veil: knowledge and ignorance? order and chaos? Or maybe it was just a room full of monkeys, and the grey-haired lady had a bad childhood experience.
Lin Fengmian
With a relatively limited knowledge of Chinese art, I wanted to do some research for my blog this week. It seemed logical to begin with one of the pioneers in what can be considered modern Chinese art: Lin Fengmian.
Lin Fengmian was born in 1900 in Guangdong, China. The son of a traditional Chinese painter, Lin studied European styles in France and Germany before returning to China in the mid 1920's. His work primarily attempted to synthesize Eastern and Western artistic styles, blending traditional Chinese methods with European modernism. After gaining much fame for his innovative style, Lin Fengmian helped to found the National Academy of Art in Hanghzou, a school that focused both on developing Chinese culture and on integrating Eastern and Western art.
Lin Fengmian produced a large number of paintings depicting autumnal landscapes, many of which are relatively dark and emotive.
Unfortunately, many of his works have been destroyed, first during the Japanese invasion that began in 1937, and later during the Cultural Revolution, when he destroyed many of his own works due to criticism from the Communist Party and the Gang of Four. Despite this, he was still imprisoned for nearly four years, after which he moved to Hong Kong in 1977, where he lived until his death in 1991.
Hello from Hangzhou
While I didn't check out any galleries or studios this weekend, I did get a chance to see something that I think I'd be unlikely to see while exploring Shanghai: nature (or something like it). Specifically, I saw big trees, green grass, and blue sky this weekend in Hangzhou – three things I have yet to see in this gray, hazy metropolis. Sure, I'm from Maine, where we have a lot of trees, but I wasn't expecting every inch of this city to be paved over. I've seen a lot of places here where there's plenty of room for a patch of grass or even a little bush, but instead it's just a big empty space covered with pavement or dirty tiles.
Yet even in Hangzhou, where trees are more than 30 feet tall, the fields of surprisingly green grass were off-limits, and in a park the size of ECNU on the shore of the West Lake, there were something like 10 benches for 10,000 people. Although beautiful, the throng of people trying to enjoy the weather were forced to keep moving, walking on paving stones through this artificial and untouchable landscape.
In the end we decided to jump the fence and play a game of cards on the grass. Four thousand Chinese followed our example. I wish I had before and after pictures of this phenomenon, but all I have is a "before-the-police-arrived-to-kick-us-out" picture of everyone finally enjoying themselves, sitting on the grass. Just because it's simple doesn't mean we don't need it. Does China hate nature? Probably not – but where has it gone?
Panda Propaganda
If not necessarily a record of China's growth as a nation, the Propaganda Poster Art Museum in Shanghai is at least a unique view into the ideological growth of the Communist Party. A chronicle of propaganda posters from the Mao Era, the artwork enables viewers to construct a sort of timeline of events occurring within China and around the world during this time. Yet even with my limited knowledge of modern Chinese history, the world depicted in these posters feels more like a parallel universe from The Twilight Zone than anything close to reality: when I saw peasants happily working in the fields with baskets full of food, I guessed that at the time this poster was created, China was probably starving, or close to it. When hundreds of tanks, airplanes, and soldiers had their guns pointed toward Taiwan, I tried to imagine how threatening Taiwan and its American allies must have seemed.
More interestingly, the characters depicted in the propaganda posters highlight an interesting evolution in China's perception of itself and its allies. Older posters prominently feature Stalin, Lenin, Marx, and Engels superimposed onto pictures of Chinese commoners, industries, or military, reinforcing the link between these older philosophers and China's present reality. Eventually, perhaps as the relationship between China and its Soviet uncle declined, Lenin and the others are nowhere to be found, replaced by Mao himself as the ideological leader of China. Still later, one can observe through the posters as Mao transcends from mere human to a revered symbol of China as a whole.
Finally, my favorite poster was one of the last posters in the collection, a futuristic scene from 1979 that reminded me of the intro of The Jetsons. Set in a forest of futuristic buildings, the viewer is surrounded by warplanes, elevated railways, cars, bizarre helicopters, spaceships, and cargo trucks as they try zoom out of the poster and into my face, into the future, but they can't quite make it. Even 30 years later, this utopian vision of a modernized China is still incomplete, and I'm not sure when, if ever, it will become a reality.
An Instant in the Process
Common themes among the projects of the Intrude: Art and Life 366 exhibition at the Zendai MoMA were those of identity and change. In a constantly changing world, and especially in a city like Shanghai, how does one define or even create his or her identity? A culture in flux and a city under construction complicate this process, endlessly replacing old cultural landmarks and traditions with newer, arguably less meaningful ones.
Zhang Jianjun's chalk and painting performance, "An Instant in the Process – 2008 Shanghai Shikumen Scene," highlights both the endless progression of modern life and the inevitable recession of the present into mere memory. Zhang chose two locations where traditional stone gate shikumen houses were being demolished to make room for new apartments or office buildings as locations for his performance. After painting the scenes on paper with water, he invited young children, the new generation of Shanghai, to come draw the scenes on the sidewalk with chalk. Zhang's paintings likely faded within a few hours, and the children's chalk might have lasted a few days, but all eventually faded from sight, as will the shikumen homes, brick by brick. Ultimately, very little will be left of these uniquely Shanghai buildings other than memories, perhaps preserved for another generation in the minds of the children who helped Zhang Jianjun with his project, but in time even these memories will fade.
Interestingly, a project directly beside "An Instant in the Process" provided some comfort for those seeking to reconnect with the past. Huang Dehua's green tile installation, "Echo," consisted of patterned green floor tiles from the 1970's and 1980's placed in various locations within Shanghai. The patterns of the tiles were supposedly well-known, and had "become part of the collective memory of a whole generation." In this way, these simple tiles gave people "a sense of nostalgia and security" that the endless cranes and construction sites around the city likely do not. Things that are constant, and images of daily realities, are always comforting to see, "reminding people of the simple beauty of the past." Though neither a solution to the difficulties of retaining traditional cultural symbols nor a resolution for the tension between old and new, the tiles at least allow for some brief moments to remember a time when things did not feel quite so uncertain.
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