Long March Project

ReBloggd, via Art Krush:


Inspired by the historic Mao Zedong-led Long March — the Red Army's grueling 6,000-mile retreat across China from pursuing Nationalist forces — the Long March Project was founded in 1999. In 2002, it enacted The Long March: A Walking Visual Display, a series of performances and interventions at sites along the Red Army's original route. In 2003, the 25000 Cultural Transmission Center (the Long March Space) was established in Beijing as a dynamic exhibition space. The Long March Project also continues to participate in international exhibitions and is included in the Fifth Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. Artkrush reviews editor Andrew Maerkle spoke with founder and chief curator Lu Jie about the project's history and current activities.

The interview, along with some other images can be found in the original post, here.

Image: Artwork by Qin Ga, Photograph from series The Miniature Long March, 2002–05 Courtesy the artist and Long March Project, Beijing, All Rights Reserved

Great leap forward

Their work is utterly shocking - but they just can't get arrested. Alfred Hickling on how China learned to love its young artists

Wednesday March 28, 2007
The Guardian


Helter skelter ... Ai Weiwei's Working Progress ... Fountain of Light. Photograph: © Ai Weiwei

Ten years ago, Xu Zhen was the archetypal garret-dwelling artist, scraping a living in a Shanghai apartment with barely room to swing a cat. To prove the point, he found a cat and swung it. The artist claims that the animal was already dead when he made the 45-minute performance video, which shows feline entrails being spattered across the walls. But the piece established Zhen as the rising star of the new generation of Chinese artists whose work now features in The Real Thing, an exhibition at Tate Liverpool that is the most comprehensive show of contemporary Chinese art ever staged in this country.

The Liverpool show opens at the same time that a group of Young British Artists make their first appearance in China. Aftershock: Contemporary British Art 1990-2006 brings items such as Tracey Emin's bed and the Chapman Brothers' Stephen Hawking statue to the Capital Museum in Beijing. But while these pieces have a retrospective feel, China arguably has the most vital, imaginative and uncontainable art scene in the world today.

Xu Zhen and his peers represent a new wave of firebrands set to make the Tate Liverpool show go off, quite literally, with a bang. Tomorrow evening, the exhibition launches with an explosive piece by the Yangjiang Group entitled If I Knew the Danger Ahead I'd Have Stayed Well Clear. The work takes the form of a massive firework battle worth £50,000.

If the YBAs are set to be supplanted by YCAs in terms of talent and notoriety, Xu Zhen is arguably the Chinese Damien Hirst. In June 2006 he organised a warehouse show of 30 young artists in Shanghai, of which the centrepiece was a video of a panda being masturbated for artificial insemination. The show was forced to close on its opening night.

It is, however, now quite difficult to provoke the authorities into closing an exhibition, as the Chinese government seeks to co-opt contemporary art to advertise the productivity and tolerance of the new China. In 2006, the Shanghai Biennale became the first major state-sponsored exhibition of contemporary art - even the fringe show, entitled Fuck Off, was left to run unimpeded. The Beijing exhibition of Young British Artists is another example of this eagerness to embrace international influences.

The U-turn in the official attitude can be gauged by the fate of Beijing's avant-garde in the wake of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989, when Beijing's radical artists relocated to an area beyond the city's third ring road, known as the East Village. With no money or conventional outlets for their work, the artists began to conduct increasingly extreme experiments on themselves. One, Zang Huan, covered himself in fish paste and honey and sat for several hours in a public toilet in 100-degree heat. The piece - a comment on the fate of the poet Ai Qing, who was forced to clean toilets during the Cultural Revolution - provoked the police to raid the East Village and evict its inhabitants. In 2001, the area was bulldozed to make way for a public park.

A new artistic community sprang up in the north-east of the city at Dashanzi, centred on a former machine tool plant known as Factory 798. This time, the government sanctioned the area as a cultural quarter, opening up a flood of international investment. Today, Dashanzi is a hub of international galleries, plush apartments and restaurants, with few practising artists left.

The official acceptance of the avant garde is a paradox for Chinese artists. Beijing-based critic and curator Pi Li identifies the emergence of "a kind of official, harmless contemporary art" which leaves artists in danger of losing their identity. "Their position had been the underground. Now they are widely shown and can sell their work very successfully. This has not brought about a good situation for Chinese art; on the contrary, it made the art lose its energy."

Works by Chinese artists have recently changed hands for as much as $1.5m - the amount paid recently by Charles Saatchi for a painting by Zhang Xiaogang - but The Real Thing's curator, Simon Groom, hopes the exhibition will re-establish Chinese art's radical edge. He has taken the bold, possibly even foolhardy, step of inviting Xu Zhen to collaborate in the selection process. "Some of his initial suggestions were a little unworkable," Groom says. "He proposed that we kidnap a drunk, lock him in the gallery and witness his reactions when he wakes up." Zhen also suggested handing out knives to exhibition visitors. One piece that did make the display is the tip of Mount Everest, lopped off by the artist during an expedition to the mountain and mounted in a glass case.

The Liverpool show also features a mammoth engineering project by Ai Weiwei, now China's best-known artist. Ai Weiwei recently collaborated with architects Herzog and de Meuron on the innovative "bird's nest" design of Beijing's Olympic Stadium. For Liverpool, he has created a soaring, illuminated spiral floating outside the Tate in the Albert Dock. "It's the kind of piece that could only be realised in China, where material and labour costs are low," says Groom. "But you cannot underestimate the speed of change in China. Young Chinese artists are less interested in politics than their own dreams and desires. That has never happened in China before, where art had always been a response to the state."

Groom still doesn't know if Zhen plans to attend. "In some ways, I'm rather hoping he doesn't. He's more likely to show up in disguise, or try to sabotage the show in some way. He might even try to close it down." That could be seen as the ultimate irony - once, the Chinese authorities used to shut down exhibitions. These days, the artists do it themselves.

The Real Thing: Contemporary Art From China is at Tate Liverpool from Friday to June 10. Details: 0151-702 7400

Never Say
The Sun Never Sets on the Maoist Empire

Few Remaining Works of Maoist Propaganda Reinvent Themselves in Western Commodity Fetish Niche Market

Upon arriving at the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Center’s dank basement-level one room collection which apparently constitutes a museum, I was dismayed to see ubiquitous “no photo” signs, as I had purposefully waited until my camera was repaired to go. Of course, they failed to deter me. I took photos anyways, but did so furtively, something which combined with my inexperience with shutter speed and aperture settings probably adversely affected the quality of the photos I managed to take when the guards weren’t shuffling to and fro. The museum was (as my response will be) arranged chronologically, with one large introductory information plaque at the front and several smaller plaques located throughout.

1949-1952
The Founding of Peoples’ Republic of China, The Land Reform, the Korean War, and Movements Against the Three Evils and the Five Evils

The plaque introducing the first period '49-'52 noted that nearly all posters were produced not by state owned enterprises, but instead by private enterprises which had formerly produced European style commercial advertisements in the '20’s and '30’s – proof that the sweetest irony is never fictional.

The plaque cited three broad categories of influences for the works of this period; traditional silks and Lunar New Year wood cut prints, Western art, and Eastern European art and literature. Particularly strong examples from the first camp are “Good for Both Water & Boss to Develop Production” – note, that’s not a typo, the placard really said that – and “Resist U.S. and Supporting Korea for Defending Family and Motherland,” which depicts Chinese and North Korean soldiers stabbing a stars and stripes clad big bad wolf caricature crawling its way across the Korean peninsula with Chinese and North Korean dual flagpole bayonets. The influence of western political cartoons on the latter is undeniable as it is in “Raise the Peace Torch to Brighten the Whole World,” “Founding Ceremony of New China,” and “Liberate Taiwan to Realize Reunification”, all of which also appear to draw on Eastern European (Soviet Style) art. With regard to the latter, I found it interesting to see the sham idea of liberation used to support imperialist ambitions in some context other than the United States’ War on Terror.

Perhaps the strongest piece of this period was the visually stunning “Strive to Produce More to Support the Most Beloved People to Attack U.S. Imperialism” whose use of sweeping movement in depicting a worker in the bottom left corner shoveling up and to the right and a soldier in the upper right corner rifle butting a grotesque caricature of a westerner down and to the left perfectly encapsulates the sense of sweeping change and juxtaposition of optimism and playful destruction of the political scene of the period.

Despite the political climate, some works of this period depict a docile proletariat’s life as domestic bliss. Works with this type of content drew stylistically mostly from traditional silks and Lunar New Year woodcut prints to display, as the poster puts it, “[display the] abundant imagination of a happy future,” of the time.

1954-1956

Peace, Industry, Domestic Bliss

During the subsequent period '54-'56, a peaceful and stable political milieu shifted the focus of majority of the propaganda to domestic industry and social life with a few notable exceptions. Perhaps one of the most exquisite pieces in the entire exhibit, entitled “Gala Night” comes from this period. In the foreground of the piece two porcelain faced school girls are engaged in a hypnotic, simultaneously symmetric and asymmetric pas de deux under a night sky trisected by spotlights’ beams at the intersection of which a firecracker explodes, creating an amazing sense of radial symmetry and motion. The piece reminded me of an equally exquisite Hermès scarf I bought for a lady friend entitled “Parapluies d’enticelles.”

Among the more visually interesting pieces related to industry during this period were “Strive to Produce More and Better Steel” in which two brawny steelworkers ride atop a steel dragon and “More Pigs for More Fertilizer to Obtain High Yield Grain” in which an enormous sow lies in front of a wall of grain with a litter of piglets suckling at her teat. The latter for some reason brought to mind that Sylvia Plath poem “Sow, ”included at the end of this entry should anyone wish to read it.

1957-1967

The Vietnam War and Dissolution of Soviet Alliances

The information plaque for the period 1957-1967 states that masses of farmers and workers produced cartoon style posters caricaturing the “naïve thought of the overenthusiastic people under Mao’s influence at that time,” though it’s difficult to tell whether or not it references the works displayed. If it does, the works do an excellent job of maintaining the Camp sensibility of the type of propagandist works they mimic – and all original agit-prop art falls into the realm of Camp sensibility. However I’d conjecture that the plaque is most likely not referencing them, as they appear too seamlessly campy to be intentional. As Susan Sontag notes “one must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp ("camping") is usually less satisfying[…] pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious.”

The plaque also asserts that the Chinese style of propaganda posters came into its own during this period, something I disagree with. The style of this period seems to be little more than a heavy handed illustrating style, one which I can’t quite put a name to, but extends far beyond the realm of Chinese agit-prop art. Though it is hard for me to say, not being an art historian, whether it influenced Chinese agit-prop art or whether Chinese agit-prop influenced it. Given the political history though, and the degree of openness between the West and China during this period however, I’m inclined to think that similar styles emerged independently. Regardless, it would be inaccurate to say that a unique Chinese agit-prop style came into being.

1967-1971

First Four Years of the Cultural Revolution

During the period of '67-'71, the start of the Cultural Revolution, a distinctly Chinese style of agit-prop art first emerges. The subject of almost all the pieces is Mao as the “red sun whose light brightens the whole country.” In these pieces Mao’s head usually blocks the sun, something which forms a halo around his face. Note the parallels between these images and Christian religious iconography as well as depictions of Louis XIV.

It is interesting to note that throughout this period Mao becomes increasing flatter (almost Byzantine), in relation to the three dimensional world around him, increasingly distanced from the proletariat, always in the foreground when the proletariat is in the background or vice versa. In many pieces his images is depicted only on posters within a mass of proletariat. It’s almost as if the communist propaganda becomes aware of itself as propaganda. Mao becomes an image within an image (think Godard’s films within films), or rather a plurality of images within a plurality
of images.

1972 - 1979

As the cultural revolution continued in the following period, propaganda poster production wound down, lost its center, and spun out into stylistic miscellany. Mao succeeded in deifying himself visually through the propaganda, but could only do so transiently. Mortality being at odds with deification, Mao ultimately failed and failed miserably. As for the masses who, in the words of the famous sociological tenet known as Thomas theorem, “defined the situation [of Mao’s deification] as real” and thus for whom the situation became ”real in [its] consequences”, something Anatole France said comes to mind; if ten million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing -- or in this case if one billion people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. Mao’s image as a communist Helios ultimately faded; Deng Xiao Ping destroyed the vast majority of the posters when he took power, some 3000 exist in the collection of the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Center, now nothing but relics of a bygone era.

Contemplating questions of megalomania and arts awareness of itself as I exited, I came across a question of another sort; what visit to a communist propaganda museum wouldn’t be complete without a trip to the consumer capitalist crap fest that is the gift shop? The American side got the best of me and I ended up buying 16 postcards for 160 reminbi, most of which will be sent to my most conservative investment banker friends.

Throughout my perusing of the gift shop I couldn’t help but note, if the consumer capitalist nation-states in the West didn’t have a commodity fetish for vintage posters – remember that hideous craze like six years ago – this record of communist propaganda probably wouldn’t still exist. To the extent that the remaining images of Mao's deification does live on, it does so in an utterly ironic context.

***

Sow

Sylvia Plath

God knows how our neighbor managed to breed

His great sow:

Whatever his shrewd secret, he kept it hid

In the same way

He kept the sow--impounded from public stare,

Prize ribbon and pig show.

But one dusk our questions commended us to a tour

Through his lantern-lit

Maze of barns to the lintel of the sunk sty door

To gape at it:

This was no rose-and-larkspurred china suckling

With a penny slot

For thrift children, nor dolt pig ripe for heckling,

About to be

Glorified for prime flesh and golden crackling

In a parsley halo;

Nor even one of the common barnyard sows,

Mire-smirched, blowzy,

Maunching thistle and knotweed on her snout-

cruise--

Bloat tun of milk

On the move, hedged by a litter of feat-foot ninnies

Shrilling her hulk

To halt for a swig at the pink teats. No. This vast

Brobdingnag bulk

Of a sow lounged belly-bedded on that black

compost,

Fat-rutted eyes

Dream-filmed. What a vision of ancient hoghood

must

Thus wholly engross

The great grandam!--our marvel blazoned a knight,

Helmed, in cuirass,

Unhorsed and shredded in the grove of combat

By a grisly-bristled

Boar, fabulous enough to straddle that sow's heat.

But our farmer whistled,

Then, with a jocular fist thwacked the barrel nape,

And the green-copse-castled

Pig hove, letting legend like dried mud drop,

Slowly, grunt

On grunt, up in the flickering light to shape

A monument

Prodigious in gluttonies as that hog whose want

Made lean Lent

Of kitchen slops and, stomaching no constraint,

Proceeded to swill

The seven troughed seas and every earthquaking

continent.

modern art: an unexpected swirl down the virtual toilet and why it's the best thing since sliced bread.

Believe it or not, this title is only about 1/3 fecitious and actually 2/3 accurate.

Perhaps it also is an approximation of where I'd like to begin discussing this article's intended subject.

Oh what subject, might you ask?

Last Thursday I had the pleasure of attending the
The MOCA Shanghai Remote Control Exhibit. Needless to say I thoroughly enjoyed my visit even though I'm not always inclined to enjoy the visual arts. But the 'remote control' component of the exhibit title might just be exactly why I enjoyed this exhibit more than most other art gallery exhibits I've seen: The remote control exhibit is interactive. And to me that makes all the world in the difference as I will explain.

Just to give you an idea of my vast (cough) expanse of art knowledge...well, I once asked gallery attendants at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdamn if they had Van Gogh's ear on display anywhere and if so whether or not I could see it. Yes, I'm still waiting on that ear.


But the Remote Control exhibit is an example of the direction that I assume contemporary art is destined to follow. This was an entirely new experience for me as I have no prior experience with actual interactive art - and I think it is exciting both for practical and ideological reasons. My title anecdote about the virtual toilet was actually inspired by a piece at the remote control show. The piece is called "Fountain" and is the creation of Du Zhenjun (both creation and designed can be seen in the picture to the right and the original picture may be found here). The picture doesn't clearly portray the nature of the exhibit so I well do my best to explain. "Fountain" is an interactive art exhibit which responds to a viewer stepping on a hidden floor switch, animating a computer screen pointed upward towards the viewer yet embedded in a cube on the floor - auspiciously rather like a toilet. The computer screen responds to the viewer's pressure on the floor switch by showing a stream of liquid (closely resembling urine) pouring into the pictured toilet bowl. At this point the critical reader might ask "what in the blazes does a virtual toilet have to do with interaction and groundbreaking art?" to which I must quell my immediate response (don't be a philistine, loser) and more maturely reply that this is visual art that can only be performed by interacting with the viewer, merging a piece of the viewer's private (and inner bathroom) life with the larger museum as a whole - making a pleasant spectacle of bodily functions, the viewer and even the public space of the museum itself.

Interactive art allows for a highly personalized interpretation of a given piece based on the viewer's opinion even moreso than perhaps the artist's original intention. Of course with any given art piece individual interpretation and criticism will always be present, but the nature of interactive art is highly personalized to the 'essence' of the viewer because the viewer often enough becomes a part of the piece. A great example of this would be the "Brainwashing as a kind of Entertainment" piece by Alexander Brant. I really wish I had a picture of this piece in particular, but even a visual example of this piece would not do it justice. The viewer is strapped into a spinning carousel and shown a generic amalgamation of news segments, contrived pictures purporting supposed common value archetypes, and occasionally the words "I agree" in English. The ride is quite disorienting and will last indefinitely until the viewer presses a large button attached to their rotating chair saying "I Agree" in English or "我同意" 在中文。After demonstrating willingness to ritually sacrifice individual opinion, the viewer is allowed out of the exhibit accompanied by a dark monotone voice that booms "You are now a good person" in English followed by ”你现在是一个好人“在中文。Overt political statements aside, my immediate reaction is that I can't believe this is actually allowed to be publically shown in China. My next reaction is to applaud the museum for being willing to support such a potentially controversial piece. I would imagine this piece touches each viewer differently, reaching out deep enough to shake the human desire to communicate as an individual. This piece, as like the piece before it, interacts with the viewer in a three dimensional space on the viewer's terms of engagement. Each piece's automation will end as soon as the viewer decides the time is appropriate, ultimately letting each spend as much or as little time is needed on a given exhibit.

In the English major tradition students are taught that once a piece is written it gains a 'life' and sort of autonomy of its own. I believe this is the same for interactive art - except that the idea is actualized in the ritual of interaction with the viewer. The piece slips out of the artist's reach and into the hands of the viewer. They too share part of the artist role as their interaction with a given piece is a form of authorship in and of itself.

Thursday departure + your responses

Dear everyone,

For timely departure tomorrow, please meet in our off-campus classroom
at 12:30p.m. The shuttle will depart sharp at 12.45, as arranged by
Joyce sincerely.

Re. your weekly assignment:
The blogspot is currently down, but you can still upload your
responses to the MOCA show (and for those who have not covered Pecha
Kucha, Propaganda Center) along with your visuals and pictures through
blogger.com.

In your responses, please respond to the issues and challenges of
contemporary art presentation posed by your site visit to MOCA. What
are some of the more compelling works of Remote/Control? How is
contemporary art/new media merging with physical space? What do you
perceive as failures and successes? What are the conditions for art
display? How do you measure museum services and professionalism? etc.
As I said, feel free to be as loving and as critical as you'd like.

All the best with this, and see you tomorrow for a day of
introductions by key players in Shanghai!

Defne

Source Gallery- Pecha Kucha- WAH WAH.
I was assigned to go to the Source Gallery for my Art in Translation Class, which I visited prior to the Pecha Kucha event. The gallery was clearly an after thought to the store, and I doubt that most of the shoppers would even veer right on the stairway to enter the space. What I saw was an inconsistent display, featuring photos that represented three subcultures of punk, hip hop, and rave. The atmosphere was a bit too cutesy and seemed to place handicap the actual photographs, thus leaving me with no sentiments of “fear, distrust, anger, or destruction,” which was the point of the show. The crux of the show was Shanghai street fashion, represented by a wall of ordinary people rocking their everyday wear in addition to posed shots of stereotypical youth fashion- Goth, skater, rock star, etc.
The space transformed all together the night of Pech Kucha. The gallery was no longer about displaying art, rather, holding an event that promoted it. The original artwork in the space became obsolete in the presence of the speakers, and as time wore on, the event seemed to be more about socializing than appreciating. I was surprised, however, at the huge crowd the event did draw, especially after leaving the event not loving it or hating it.
For the most part, I was disengaged. I was pleased with how the event was run, the point being to expose a bulk of artists in a limited amount of time. This result, however, was a win/lose situation. Win in terms of the audience, who were able to get a snippet of who they liked and who bored them to death, and a lose situation in terms of the artist, who had to expose themselves and their work in such a limited time frame. Because of this fact, I was surprised that some of the artists did such a poor job in terms of self promotion-with long pauses, little explanation of content, and contradictory statements.
If I were to choose my favorite artist who presented that night, it would have been Andrea Ling. She presented a series of photos displaying her sculptures of body suits. Each series presented a separate story which she alluded to, but rather concentrated on production process than content. Her designs presented responsive extensions of the body, combining high-tech and low-tech materials and structures. For one of her dresses she stressed the use of industrial silk—the finished result appeared to be a dress of shingles- this incorporated artistic structure with high fashion. Her work was aesthetically pleasing, but the downside was her presentation and explanation, which added nothing to her work.
The biggest wah-wah of the night was the ‘musical performance.’ I was pretty psyched when crazy people dressed in animal costumes popped out from behind the screen, but not so enthused when all they did was bounce around and throw their empty pamphlets at us. Honestly, I did not even know what they were promoting. Oh well, thumbs up to wine and beer- and I can’t even remember if that was decent.

REMOTE/CONTROL

REMOTE/CONTROL
Interactive and Multimedia Art @ MoCA Shanghai
Exhibition Date: March 3rd –April 20th, 2007


REMOTE/CONTROL, the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai’s 10th exhibition, is an investigation of the presence of technology in contemporary art today, and the fraught encounter between these art objects and today’s ‘multi-medial’ spectator. The use of multi-media technologies is now an international art phenomenon, at once dazzling, seductive, subversive and above all accessible. These art works have not only profoundly changed the nature of aesthetic practice and display, but have also engendered a new means of perceiving and experiencing art. Interactive and video installations put into crises the distance between the work of art and ourselves, both interactive as well as interpersonal, creating an ambivalence of intimacy and alienation that is in itself a paradox of technological development in the global community.

Featuring the work of both international and local artists, REMOTE/CONTROL is an examination of various perceptual systems, processes, narrative structures, and aesthetic strategies that focus on the question of agency. As the spectator is kinesthetically and sensorially engaged with multimedia objects, the space of the museum is altered, as is the role of the artist. The artist, artwork and spectator are caught in a complex ambit of fantasy and control, inviting us to re-examine the place of art in a technological world, and our place in relation to it.


Curators: Wenny Teo, Ella Liao

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Agenda

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/magazine/25Style.China.t.html

Body Talk

EASTLINK G a l l e r y
Press Release
Body Talk
Time:13 January – 10 March 2007
Address:50 Moganshan Lu, Bld 6, Fl 5

China has been a place for a long time where it has been not allowed to communicate.
This exhibition aim to display the power of our body as well as providing an opportunity to look at how our body
talks to us. The show, which began on 13 January, gathered painting, photographs and sculptures from
different Chinese artists.

The artists show how the body is portrayed at different moments through the artists’ imaginary which links
human figures to protest topics. While the exhibition itself mingled works of different origins, the picture that
emerges provided a variety of explanations for the use of the body, from performance-art, body- art to painting
language.

These works instigate a dynamic point of view with regards to how look and understand our body to engage the
viewer through a complex thought revealing different meanings.
The show includes famous pieces by Huang Yan, Yang Zhichiao, Wang Qiang… and features new talented
artists as Zheng Huan, Zheng Dagong, etc…

Xmas Greetings from HangFeng!

Currently at Zendai Museum.

NYU urban tour: Shanghai

If you ask people living in Shanghai, ‘have you ever climb the LuPu Bridge?’ nine out of ten would definitely say no. Even stayed in Shanghai for more than three years, I never heard there is a platform on the top of this river. Thanks Defne, as well as Giel, for giving us such a fully planned urban tour, offering us a great opportunity to view and apperceive this traditional and reformed modern city.
Our first site is Pujiang town, one of the nine satellite towns that are supposed to relieve the pressure from the downtown residential areas. Associated with the LuPu Bridge and coming Metro Station, this area is recognized as a large, under developed foreground. However, the 5 bn yuan’s investment and Italian architecture’s design do not bring us a bran-new, attractive idea of combining Venice and Chinese concepts. Instead, those gray, humdrum light colors give us an uncomfortable, disharmonious feeling, making both foreign people and Chinese dislike it. The impractical river, close style traditional design, and few residents extraordinarily criticize the urban development. The most amazing thing is the first-phase apartments and villas have all been sold out. One sentence by Professor Shi still swings in my mind, ‘Chinese always know to build, they do not care whether they (the houses) will be sold, they believe there will be buyers.’ The pressure from the house in Shanghai indeed needs newly developed apartments; but the market urges not only the land, but also something more deep, like culture and art environment, which will more reveal the urbanization.
Our second site is LuPu Bridge of Shanghai. If it is not the fog, the platform will be the best location to view the 2010 world Expo site that day. Besides the factor of traffics, this bridge outflows the aesthetics of modern architecture. Born under the foot of Mount Tai, climbing this bridge brings me one widely different feeling. Stand above the river, all the buildings are all in the sight. The bustle traffic is under the foot, unlike the steady feeling brought by a mountain; it is more like standing in the air of a noise city. Maybe this is just the one time experience, quick impressive feeling. Maybe it’s the result of fast pattern in metropolitan.
Our third site is Yangshupu Lu. I love the title ‘Urban Regeneration’ in the booklet. The old warehouse lying near the river, secret quiet location, and simple traditional materials’ creatively reused, all of this gives me a sight of perfect integration of west and east. This is a place full of creativity. The designer is so smart to use the stuffs, such as using the tiles to make the floor, the steel tube to be the handrail near a modern commode, and a large mirror to board and puzzle people’s eyes. In a word, the designer successfully adds the modern convenience into the primitive and simple traditional structure.
Furthermore, Mr. Giel gave us a meaningful short lecture. In his vivid presentation, I viewed the huge contribution by the artists, who successfully exert the contemporary visual art into public places. Like the pure white tube in the subway, that simple and particular idea of design solved the headachy graffito problem. We also cognize the operation of art in the commercial area, by advertising in the online world. I realize those artists looked like living leisurely, in fact, they burdened more social obligations than ordinary people. The traditional culture needs them, the urbanization also needs them.

From Art Basel Miami

as shot by Ai WeiWei

Yellow Box Project and Chinese Aesthetics

Yellow Box Project and Chinese Aethetics
By Prof. Gao Shiming

“Yellow Box” is a project initiated by the Visual Culture Research
Centre of China Academy of Art. This project intends to investigate
issues of connoisseurship and display that are embedded in Chinese
traditional spaces; meanwhile it also intends to reinterpret
traditional literati spirit in light of contemporary art. In 2005, the
first exhibition of “Yellow Box” subtitled “Contemporary Calligraphy
and Painting in Taiwan” was held at the Taipei Fine Art Museum. That
exhibition experimented with solutions for displaying the subtlety of
literati art within the sterile “white cube” by either building
mediating structures or setting up viewing procedures. Based on that
exhibition’s experiment, the present “Yellow Box” project continues the
research in exhibition practice by studying contemporary art and
architecture. In September 2006, “Yellow Box” project takes the Xiao
Ximen (Minor West Gate) group of traditional vernacular buildings in
Qingpu district as the subject of investigation and experimental space
for contemporary art, seeking to discover hidden potentials for
different artistic media in such a place of living and working, while
also keeping in mind the parameter of Chinese daily activities. This
project hopes to stimulate new creative attitudes for contemporary art
and bring to fore the implicit cultural significance hidden in
vernacular architectural spaces. This is done by building a bridge
linking traditional culture and the creative industries, so as to
uncover the mechanics of interdependence between native resources and
cultural creativity.

At present there is a rage of building art galleries and art museums
throughout China. It is therefore important to ask questions such as:
Does the space of museums have to follow the canonical spectator
regime? Will the traditional culture of intimate appreciation still
retain its charm in the museum system? What is the significance of the
classical experience in art appreciation to the configuration of space
in contemporary architecture? How do we retain traditional visual
memories, and at the same time endow them with fresh significance and
activity. These are the questions that the “Yellow Box” hopes to
illuminate.

Prof. Gao Shiming of China Academy of Art will present the research of
“Yellow box” project, which is concerned with the relationship between
Chinese traditional culture of appreciation and museum-based
spectatorship regime.

Zhao Bandi Solo-Exhibition: Dec. 16 – Jan. 20, 2006

Zhao Bandi Solo-Exhibition: Dec. 16 – Jan. 20, 2006
Opening Reception: Dec. 16, 5.00-7.00 pm 2006

ShanghART Gallery is proud to present solo-exhibition by Zhao Bandi (b. 1966). Zhao Bandi’s practice encompasses photography, video and performance with issues of concern to contemporary society.

Zhao Bandi has made his reputation with staged scenarios where he and his toy panda play out everyday situations. Sometimes these consist of scenes from the life of a single father. Other times, the panda assumes the role of partner and lover. The panda is treated and acts as a ‘real’ character with a voice of its own that appears as speech bubbles in the photos. The toy panda becomes a spokesperson, allowing the artist to touch upon challenging issues and messages with an appealing sense of humor.

Zhao Bandi was born in 1966 in Beijing, where he lives and works. He graduated from the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1988. Since 1993, his works have been shown at international exhibitions, including the Sydney Biennale (1998), 48th Venice Biennale (1999), 1st Guangzhou Triennale (2002) and the 5th AsiaPacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2006). His project “Zhao Bandi & Panda” has been on public display in Shanghai, Milan, London and elsewhere.

New Book: Performance Art in China

Performance Art in China takes as its subject one of the most dynamic
and controversial areas of experimental art practice in China. In his
comprehensive study, author Thomas J. Berghuis, introduces and
investigates the idea of the ?role of the mediated subject of the
acting body in art,? a notion grounded in the realization that the
body is always present in art practices, as well as their subsequent,
secondary representations.

Through a series of in-depth case studies, Berghuis reveals how during
the past 25 years Chinese performance artists have ?acted out? their
art, a process involving the preparation of material, as well as
planning and arranging the way the body operates in space, often in
opposition to the principles governing correct behavior in the public
domain.

In addition to a 25 year chronology of events, a systematic index of
places, names and key terms, as well as a bibliography and a glossary
in English and Chinese, Performance Art in China also offers the
reader numerous previously unpublished photos and documents, making it
a must for anyone interested in contemporary art today.

Title: Performance Art in China
Author: Thomas J. Berghuis
Publishing City: Beijing
Publishing Date: November 2006
ISBN: 988-99265-9-8
Document Type: Hardcover
Book Language: English
Pages: 320
Color Images: 200+
Dimensions: 27 x 21 cm
Retail Price: $40.00

Copies can be ordered online at: www.timezone8.com

International distribution to bookstores will follow over the next few
months.

Yang Zhenzhong and Phillip Tinari at NYU Shanghai Center

Museums vs. Chinese Art Market

The current state of contemporary museums in Shanghai is a complex web of funding and weaving of resources to attempt to provide a feasible museum to the public. With the emerging interest in the collection of Asian art, galleries and collectors have often times made quick assertions about the perceived value of contemporary Chinese art. In Shanghai alone, dozens of museums and galleries have emerged with the goal of not only advancing artistic ideas, but pushing, and literally selling these ideas to the rest of the world. In this new emerging world of Asian art questions begin to arise as to whether or not contemporary museums and galleries in Shanghai are taking the ethical steps necessary to provide the proper reciprocal benefits to the artistic community, as well as valuing art for its creativity, and not simply its capitalistic market worth.
Currently in China today, the government lacks a cohesive plan that would allow for non-profit organizations to feasibly exist. As a result, this situation makes the various museums and galleries come up with creative means to sustain and fund their artistic ventures. Unlike in the United States, where a system of donations allows a tax benefit and unlike in Europe, where the governments provide cultural budgets to stimulate the arts, a void exists in China to the extent that neither of these two forces are present. With the lack of government support and philanthropic tradition, Chinese galleries and museums have resorted to various means of raising capital, such as finding corporate sponsors, selling the art being displayed, providing professional services like graphic and concept design, and in some cases receiving donations from private individuals.
As a result, many galleries have been forced to find a business solution to allow for the continued existence of their organization. In the case of BizArt, which opened in 1996, an innovative solution had to be found. According to the director of BizArt, David Quadrio, “BizArt is a self-supported and not-for-profit art center that combines artistic and commercial pursuits with the ultimate goal of advancing contemporary art in Shanghai and beyond. The name ‘BizArt’ refers to our straddling the duel roles of business and art, and the ‘bizarre’ nature of our existence.” Although BizArt advocates its non-for-profit status in the pursuit of artistic creativity and development, the harsh reality is that BizArt needs to receive revenue to survive. This gray area, or as BizArt would say, “bizarre” nature of its existence, points to the conflicts that exist within its not-for-profit status and its need to create revenue through business endeavors such as graphic and concept design. Despite this juxtaposition of values, BizArt recognizes the growing imbalance of the cost of Chinese art in relation to funding allocated to artists and creative organizations. BizArt acknowledges this growing hyper-inflation of Chinese art, and strives to reinvest in the artistic community by the creation of Arthub. Arthub supports a process of creative contemporary art free of pressures resulting from the hyper-inflated contemporary Chinese art market.
Another contemporary art space in Shanghai, the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, better known as the Shanghai MoCA, has experienced many of the effects of commercialization due to the lack of a philanthropic tradition. Opened in 2005 from the support of Samuel Kung, who contributed US$1.5 million, the museum quickly needed to find a way to bring in extra revenue that would allow for its continued existence. Endorsed by the Shanghai Municipal Government, the MoCA has become a notable tourist attraction in the heart of Shanghai. Despite its not-for-profit status, the MoCA contains a restaurant, as well as holds private functions. Thus the MoCA’s status of non-for-profit is tainted by its need to bring in income. A perfect example arises from personal experience when we visited the MoCA, the staff members were preparing to move a famous clay pot exhibit by Ai WeiWei to make space for a Ferrari that was to be shown at a private party later that evening. In addition, an AirFrance model for their new first class seating was blocking Miao Xiaochun’s “Last Judgment” exhibit, which already had poor visibility and viewing space. These two examples force us to question what is the priority of the MoCA - is it to make money, or display contemporary art? The MoCA claims to be the first not-for-profit contemporary art museum, but what line is to be drawn between where art ends and profit begins?
Likewise, the Zendai Museum of Contemporary Art brings to mind similar ethical questions. The Zendai is funded by the Zheng Da Property Group, which is the largest single property developer in Pudong. Although the Zendai is willing to take chances and exhibit edgy, more controversial pieces of art, the fact is that Zendai is entirely funded by a single organization, thereby creating a potential conflict of interests. In addition, the future plans are to create a center for contemporary art, called The Himalaya Center, which includes a five-star hotel, commercial space, and office space for creative businesses. The Zendai therefore represents the current commercialization of contemporary art, and the current hyper-inflation that threatens artistic creativity. Despite being free from having to look for outside contributors to fund its space, the relationship between Zendai and the parent corporation is in need of scrutiny. The fact remains that Zheng Da is a developer in Shanghai, and the Zendai may not be free to take truly creative measures in displaying art. It may instead be forced to display art that would appeal to the hyper-inflated art market and bring in tourism money to create a profit for the parent sponsor.
In our examination of these three major players in the Shanghai art world, there is a lack of definite boundaries between art for its intrinsic value, and art for its commercial value. There lacks a sanctity in the use of an art space such as the MoCA or Zendai, as compared to museums in America and Europe, which believe that art should be displayed for intellectual and cultural value. Understandably, the realm that these art spaces exist within is inextricably bound to the need to attain financial viability due to lack of proper societal contributions. However, these museums and galleries should strive to limit the influence of the commercial art market to maintain their integrity as public art spaces. As the Shanghai art scene develops and expands, one can only hope that the true spirit of art will be preserved from an ever growing capitalist influence.

Yang Zhenzhong Review

Yang Zhenzhong uses the video, and goes through a lot of experiments, putting his personal special view on the simple object in the daily life to present a different meaning in order to gradually become the avant-courier in the visual art field in China. One of his great works, “I will die”, is very impressive collection of different people’s narrating the simple truth. A tiny difference showing on the face before and after one said the truth, the tone coming from different background people, give people one deep think and conjecture. He is also very good at combining two seemingly unrelated things together to form a unique visual meaning, as in the work named “Blow”, once exhibited in 2002 Shanghai Biennial. A girl blows in one screen, and on the opposite screen the artist uses the technique of rewind to show a shoot in one busy street. When seeing the two screen together, it seems as if the air the girl blowing moves the street back, the exaggerated blowing indirectly reveals and accentuates the strength coming out of the girl. His creative idea is not only on technique, some earlier works of him also show a human wisdom, like the “922 rice”. He recorded a couple chicken to eat the rice and count the number when one chicken nods. He uses the nod to count the number of the rice and in return, to criticize the emphasis on number instead of the real things, which human recently represented. In his recent works, he becomes more and more focuses on the equipment and also the works are more delicate. It can be said that Yang Zhengzhong smoothly progress in the field of visual art, and make his own characteristic more visible.

Lecture notes on Qiu Anxiong presentation- dated 11.3.06

Class notes following visual artist Qiu Anxiong presentation in the classroom- dated 11.3.06, provided by NYU student Erica D Swallow. Thank you Erica for sharing your notes with us.

• “Jian Nan Cuo” (2005)
o Time: 13:10
o Birds on branches (flying onto and off of tree at times)
o Shot in black and white to mirror traditional Chinese painting that used black and white ink
o Constant beat is heard in the background (percussion/bongo)
o Heavy bass sound as if in a dungeon; haunting drone sounds
o Interestingly, he gives mention to the cast as: “Cast: Wind Cloud Tree Bird”
o He says that this piece is about Time:
• Modern people see time as a very fast thing
• We seldom look for natural development. We always need stories.
• This is a natural time flow, but in the film it seems very slow and much longer. Actually, however, it is just a normal progression of time.
• This is a basic Chinese philosophy used to look at the world, especially during the Song dynasty – One should try to blend in with the environment instead of taking a third person point of view. This is very typical of traditional Chinese art, as well. The artist will blend in with the environment.
• From a distance, you can’t see the movement of the trees as they gently sway in this video, but if really focus, you can see it. In this way, we should look at the natural progression of time in everyday life. From a distance, we may not see things moving, but if we put our soul into it, we can see how everything is moving and changing.

• “In the Sky” (2005) (This is the first animation that he ever made.)
o Music Tchaikovsky/Stockhausen
o Time: 8:18
o For this piece, he had no special plan. He did it out of pure feeling.
o All hand-painted
o He was influenced by an African artist, William Kentridge. Kentridge does not use complicated techniques. He uses simple elements and does not focus on a huge, complicated production. Anxiong admires this.
o He thinks Chinese animation was better before the 1990s. This is due to the current marketization and importing of ideas from foreign countries and companies, like Japan, for example.
o 1930-1940s: The first animation to ever be made in China was “Journey to the West” by two brothers.
o 1950-1980s: Ink animations develop in China
o “This work is not a story-telling work. Its like a dream of snapshots,” he explains.
o In one image, two heads on sticks protruding from a grassy hill are depicted, and one is taken away by a bird. When Sonia asked what this meant, he said that this signified the time upon creating the piece when his wife was gone and he missed her.
o He has no clear thoughts about the piece of art in theory, but reiterates that he made it just from his feelings.

• “Flying to the South” (May 2006)
o Time: 9:12
o Soundtrack of voices in background
o Flying books
o This piece was an installation at an Expo in May in Shanghai. It had statues installed along with the video, but the government shut the show down. The statues and film are prohibited to be shown together.

• Anxiong’s Ideas on the Point of Art
o Instead of looking at the history and progression of art as a form of expression to understand art as a media, we should look at the world. When we look at the world, we look at true history.
o We look at the world with a whole system of symbols. We have lost the instinct to see the world in a direct way for what it really is in essence. Instead, we see an expressive world, rather than a truthful one. We use too many symbols to define it.
o We only know part of existence. We don’t know all of it.
o Today we have so much knowledge. Knowledge has cut the world into pieces. We no longer have a world in its entirety. Our world is categorized and humanized.
o We need an original way of looking at the world: an origin. It is important to every culture to have this type of origin.
o Although China is developing into a very complex system, we still ask ourselves the same elementary questions about our origins. Still, we are puzzled.
o For example, we look at a computer and think it is easy to understand. We know what it does and we can use it. But we can’t see what is inside it and we do not know how it really functions. We look at our world in this way. We think we understand the world, but really we do not know its truths.
o Unfortunately, we look at our world from a point of knowledge and understanding, not from a participatory point of view. We distance ourselves from the world, and we no longer have a mutual relationship.
o He uses art to connect with the world in a more intimate way. This is his general understanding of art.

• “The Book of Mountains and Sea [1]” (2006)
o The song at the end, to him, was very “human”. It conveyed a different perspective than his own. He feels that it did not convey the same ideas and feelings of his art shown before it in the animation. It does not have the same sacred and objective feeling of his work. His friend from Chengdu wrote it after reading the book he wrote. The credits at the end mention “Jin Wang” and “Ou Bo” as the musicians credited in the film. I’m not sure which one created this song.
o He quotes Confucius from a story about Confucius and three of his students. They are all discussing the goals of the students. Confucius asks the first one what he wants to be. He says he wants to be a general. Confucius then asks the second student, who replies that he wants to be a secretary. When the third student is asked what he wishes for his, he says that he would like to go swimming in the river with his friends. The song is like the third student, an ordinary perspective. He thinks that if everybody had this perspective, maybe our society and world could reach its’ pinnacle. In this perspective, the ordinary becomes the ideal. The simplest goals bring the greatest successes.
o Some images discusses from the animation include:
• The explosion of New York City. It is not caused by an external force, such as a bomb. Instead, one may notice that it explodes from within. This symbolizes internal problems with society.
• The singular person that remains standing after the other terrorists fly away. Before class began, Anxiong told Eric and I that this guy does not represent anything in particular. Instead, he represents the many possibilities. He challenged us to think about it ourselves, expressing that it is up to the viewer to ponder over this matter. There are so many possible ways the story could end, and the viewer must consider these options. In my opinion, this is part of the beauty of this piece as it leaves us asking questions and challenging our views.
o The refrain from the song at the end is:
• “Who is sighing? Who is lamenting the parting of geese on autumnal journey?”

Nell Freudenberger on The Dissident

Nell Freudenberger on The Dissident

When I was in the tenth grade, a Visiting Scholar came to our school. I went to a single-sex, private, non-sectarian preparatory school in Los Angeles, which celebrated its centennial while I was a student there. We wore violet, pink, yellow or white button-down dresses with the school’s initials monogrammed on the sleeves, or else pleated flannel kilts. The required footwear, in the late eighties and early nineties, was the saddle shoe. It was as if an enthusiastic Angelino had read “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” and decided to found a school—but hadn’t gotten it quite right.

The Visiting Scholar was from China. (At that time, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to ask where in China). I don’t remember his name, but I know he had three of them, and that to my fascination, they began with “X,” “Y,” and “Z.” He painted traditional Chinese ink landscapes of bamboo, rocks, and trees, very fast, on a pristine, white tablet. Everyone was eager to use the hollow bamboo brushes with fine horsehair tips, the blue-black ink in tiny glass bottles, and there was a long line to paint with the Visiting Scholar. I decided to be patient. Sooner or later the other girls would lose interest, and Mr. XYZ would be mine alone.

My strategy paid off, and soon I was one of only two or three girls who continued coming to the demonstrations, as Mr. XYZ’s stay was extended from two to three weeks, and then to another month. We progressed from rocks to bamboo, and finally, the crowning achievement—to lobsters. A bamboo had three leaves on its top stem, and two on each of the subordinate branches. Similarly, a lobster’s body had three or five segments, but never four or six. I brought home large, thin sheets of paper, spotted and sometimes torn, where I had pressed too hard, which my parents dutifully admired. (To say I was not a gifted art student is to be tactful). And yet, Mr. XYZ’s instructions, delivered in the few words of English he knew, were a kind of revelation to me. You did not have to wait for a bolt of inspiration. (Who had the time, particularly if you were only in America for two months, and were possibly trying to slip the bounds of your exchange visa?) Mr. XYZ did not tell us to “be creative” or “use our imaginations;” perhaps he didn’t know those words. There were, rather, instructions: three leaves, not two; five segments, not four. In other words: there was a way to do this. There was a place to start.

I never learned whether Mr. XYZ stayed in Los Angeles, or eventually went home. I hadn’t thought of him for many years when I began studying Mandarin, in 2001. A few years later I made my first trip to China through the State Department’s generous cultural exchange program for writers, where I met university students in five cities around the country. That summer, I also saw the excellent “Between Past and Future” show of photography and video art from China, curated by Wu Hung and Christopher Phillips. Most interesting to me were the photographs from a place called the “Beijing East Village;” I lived in the New York East Village, and wondered what its Chinese sibling might be like.

That exhibit was my introduction to Rong Rong and the artists of the Beijing East Village, who appear in this novel somewhat disguised. The neighborhood, a ghetto on the eastern edge of the city, became an accidental haven in the early nineties for aspiring artists, some of whom had come to Beijing from the provinces with very little money. The photographer Rong Rong arrived there with his sister in early 1993, and wrote in his diary: “This place is actually a garbage dump for Chaoyang District. All sorts of people, such as garbage collectors, construction workers and the unemployed, live here. I don’t know how we are going to survive here on my income from limited and occasional shots for newspapers, and when my sister’s paintings can not even be sold for one RMB.”

Soon, however, Rong Rong and his sister discovered that they weren’t the only artists living there. As a way to meet people, he began taking portraits of some of the other young artists; together they nicknamed their neighborhood, “Dong Cun,” or the Beijing East Village. Rong Rong’s portraits of the performance artist Zhang Huan, the aspiring rock star, Curse, and the beautiful, effeminate painter, Ma Liuming, started a tradition of collaboration, which lasted until June of 1994. That month, the Beijing East Village was raided by police, who interrupted “Fen-Ma’s Lunch,” a performance by Ma Liuming in which he cooked fish in the nude. The performance landed him and several members of his audience in a detention center, and forced the other artists to flee their homes. In 2000, the village was razed to make way for a public park.

In January, 2005, I went back to China and interviewed some of the artists I’d been reading about for the past few years. I didn’t expect to meet Rong Rong—one of the most successful artists in Beijing, whose photographs sell for upwards of $10,000—but when a friend offered to introduce me, I couldn’t say no. During a long cab ride in the dark, to a village just outside Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road, I was thrilled and also a little worried. I was writing a novel that took place at a girls’ school in Los Angeles and an artists’ ghetto in Beijing. To me, the novel was about confusion—the way Americans determine our own identities, and about the way we imagine foreignness—Chineseness in particular. Would meeting the person on whom I’d based my character make the story I’d been writing seem wrong, or fake?

I visited Rong Rong and his Japanese wife, inri (both are “art names”) at their live/work studio in Caochangdi. The very modern main living space was dominated by a large, steel worktable, and an oversized antique enlarger. The couple works together, and their pictures line the walls: the most striking series was taken in Japan, on their honeymoon at Mount Fuji, where they’d used a tripod to photograph themselves in front of the iconic mountain in the snow. Rong Rong and inri often work naked; the series shows the two of them progressing further and further toward the mountain, until they are just black twigs in a vast expanse of frozen whiteness. “The irony is that even though we wanted to photograph Mount Fuji, you couldn’t even see the mountain,” Rong Rong told me.

I asked about the East Village of course, but the artist wasn’t especially interested in discussing such old work. Even today it’s difficult to see truly contemporary Chinese art in the U.S., since curators take some time to bring shows here. Chinese artists and curators have complained to me that American audiences are biased in favor of work that is recognizably political; oddly, we seem to prefer the reverse in homegrown art.

The day after I met Rong Rong and inri, I visited Chaoyang Park, which lies on top of the old East Village. In that season, it was a bleak, brown public space, with abandoned amusement park rides and only a few old people, walking briskly or practicing tai ji. I thought of something inri wrote in “Tui/Transfiguration,” a catalogue she published with her husband last year:

“People who go visit those places cannot perceive the world of our experience. That world does not exist anywhere in the real world. You can only possess that world with us in our photos.”

To say that this is a novel about identity and cultural misunderstanding seems a little pretentious—or as my tenth grade English teacher would’ve said, “highfalutin.’” I think that I write fiction to force myself to remember very simple things about the world: for example, that any description of character has more to do with the person observing than with the one being observed. To me, this is a book about learning to write, in particular about learning to make fictional characters. “The Dissident” is also a story about copying and faking -- which is the way I believe a person learns to make any kind of art.

-Nell Freudenberger
Message Edited by LitEditor on 11-10-2006 05:22 PM