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So much has been said and written about contemporary China. A fifth of humanity lives within its boundaries, the country is undergoing extraordinarily fast mutations, its cities dwarf whatever idea Europeans might have of a metropolis and its economy is increasingly linked to ours. Yet, i doubt there are many people out there who could honestly pretend they understand or 'know' the 'Middle Kingdom.' In fact, the splendor and history of imperial China is probably clearer in most minds than the country as it is nowadays.
The exhibition In the Chinese city. Perspectives on the transmutations of an Empire currently on view at the CCCB in Barcelona gives an overview of the recent processes of construction and implacable deconstruction that the country is undergoing and puts them into a historical and cultural context.
The show is split into a dozens sections linked between themselves by a Chinese word or concept that leads visitors through the urban design, architecture, landscape and infrastructure of various Chinese cities.
Archeological artefacts, maps, spectacular photographies guide visitors to the most exotic places: along the coast of Guangdong province where more than 100 000 workers recycle computers and other electronics waste products shipped from Japan, South Korea and the U.S. Or to Chongqing, a mountain city counting some 32 million inhabitants where bang bang workers carry huge amount of goods on their shoulders and to the Dafen Oil Painting Village, a village that churns out around the world about five million paintings every year -- most of them copies of famous masterpieces.
The most moving part of the show comes in the form of short movies shot by five young movie directors who present their personal visions of five cities. Jia Zhangke -whose previous movie Still Life won the Golden Lion at the 63rd Venice International Film Festival- portrayed Suzhou, the 'eastern Venice' in a short titled Heshang de aiqing (Cry Me a River).
Suzhou is remarkably well 'preserved' compared to other Chinese cities (most famously Beijing) who have felt the pulverizing wrath of modernization. According to Ruan Yongsan, who used to work at the Office of Building in Suzhou, there is no law that protects monuments in China, only labels given to 'famous, historical and cultural cities'. China is finally starting to awaken to the need to save its patrimony and some fear that authorities might want to erect some fake authentic buildings where monuments have been destroyed.
Interestingly, the exhibition is coupled with a series of debates and presentations that deal with delicate and controversial topics such as Tibet or political prisoners.
In the Chinese City is a co-production between the CCCB and la Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine de París. On view at the CCCB in Barcelona through February 22, 2009. If you can't make it to Barcelona, i'd recommend the catalog of the exhibition, In the Chinese City published by Actar. There's an english/french version, a catalan and a spanish one. I bought a copy at CCCB and forgot it in a hotel room. I wish i would not do this kind of silly acts so regularly.
Image on the homepage: "Espera", film for the exhibition about the city of Chongqing Director: Peng Tao. © Xstream Productions Ltd./CCCB/Cité de l'architecture et du Patrimoine. |
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Publisher Actar says: This book presents over 40 finished works by Chinese architects, produced between 2003 and 2008. A compelling selection representing a new generation of architects in a country whose building rhythm over the last decade has been unstoppable, as China's architects are making their mark within the backdrop of an avalanche of world class architecture stars. Featuring works by China Architecture Design & Research Group, Jiakun Architects, Atelier Deshaus, Mada s.p.a.m, MAD, TM Studio, Urbanus, Studio Pei-Zhu, Amateur Architecture Studio, Atelier Feichang Jianzhu, Atelier Z+, Standardarchitecture and Architectural Design & Research Institute Nanjing University. Contemporary architecture in China has met with a huge amount of coverage in the press. With so many shopping malls, gated communities and high-rise condos mushrooming within its borders, and with such cheap labour force, China has become a mecca for new architectural ideas. We've all been admiring photos of the Bird's Nest, the CCTV headquarters, the Water Cube, etc but every single one of these buildings has been designed mostly by foreign architects. So where are the Chinese architects? Who are they and more importantly what are they doing and building? Do they find inspiration in the heritage of their country or are they more influenced by what they see in the West? Are the spectacular edifices built in Beijing and Shanghai only? Positions gives some answers to those questions and they are encouraging answers. No pagoda-helmeted builders in sight. Instead, the book showcases dozens of constructions by mega-talented architects and introduces you to 15 of the most accomplished architecture studios. There's a one page biography and presentation of each practice, along with their contact address, followed by several pages that focus on the most striking works conceived and/or built by the architects. Here's a selection of buildings you encounter in the book (i wish i could have added many more but i struggled to find good images of some of the most remarkable edifices online):
MADA s.p.a.m's Hotel Village in the Jade Valley is the Shanghai-based architect's attempt to establish a vineyard in his childhood village. The house he designed in Lantian is both modern and deeply anchored in Chinese tradition.
MAD studio has now gained world stardom. Their latest project is the conceptual, star-shaped, mobile Chinatown they are currently exhibiting at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. The new model would be self-sustaining and replace the usual restaurant streets and fake traditional buildings that gives a kitsch image of contemporary China.
One of my favourite building ever is the computer circuitry-inspired Digital Beijing, by Zhu Pei and URBANUS Architecture. The edifice concentrate, during the Olympic Games and afterwards, all the computer systems allowing the control of the smooth running of the Games and subsequently of the Capital. Inside the book. Slideshow: See also 0300tv's five part documentary China According to China. Related book reviews: The Chinese Dream - A society under construction, by DCF, Neville Mars and Adrian Hornsby and The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What It Means for the World, by Thomas J. Campanella. |
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Roughly one year after my first visit there, i went back to the 798 art district in Beijing.
I don't have an answer for that but one thing i know is that the ex-factory district remains a unique and irresistible place. A 2 million square feet place. I doubt there's many semi-legal artist studios left in the area but where else can you have a peek inside small workshops doing car repair or industrial laundry, walk a few meters and enter a commercial art gallery with Maoist slogans still gracing its walls, find that some guy has hung his trousers and a fish in the street to get some fresh air.... and right after that you get slapped in the face by Nike's brand new 'museum', complete with touch ipods as audioguides, sneakers memorabilia, exhibitions and huge screens made of revolving panels on the outside facade and on the ceiling. More images.
But all new openings in 798 have such a blatant and strict marketing aura. Launched a couple of months ago, Yuanfen New Media Art Space is a magnificently restored space dedicated to media art. It used to be a factory where ceramic resistors were produced. The gallery owner, Dave Ben Kay, has kept the original industrial potter's wheel and a Rapido scale. There's also a swimming pool upstairs at the disposal of any artist willing to create some site-specific and aquatic project.
As the opening exhibition of the gallery, Mind + Soul | Sensibility x Sensation presented a musical installation and 'sound paintings' of American artist Joe Diebes (video) as well as the interactive artworks of Hong Kong artist Hung Keung (video). One of Joe Diebes' music installations was particularly impressive. String Quartet No. 2 is an immersive installation of phantom musicians who endlessly reproduce their final performance while the composition itself changes. Diebes recorded each member of a string instrument ensemble. Each gesture became an isolated sound file on his computer. He then composed a computer program that produces in real time the music one could heard in the installation. A set of algorithms controls when a given gesture will be played and what manipulation will be applied to it. A random component generates infinite variations of the piece. Video showing Joe Diebes and Hung Keung's work at the Yuanfen NMA gallery:
Stamped with a 'Made in China' sign, the giant toy creatures are the perfect incarnation of a nation which has become the factory floor of the world. One version of the sculpture has the animal caged in a shipping crate, turning the sculpture into an export itself.
The artist has said: "The reason I enlarged the toys to such an enormous size is to highlight the political economic system behind [them]. Dinosaur toys are designed by some company from a Western country, and produced in China, then commercially distributed to the whole globe. It is the result of transnational capitalist production." No pink plastic Godzilla for me then but there was some consolation waiting in the gallery: prints of Robin Rhode's works. Amelie Gallery was running Memory or Reality, a show focusing on Chinese young artists' nostalgic sentiments. The press release states that this generation has little experience of the hardship of life compared to Chinese artists born in the 1960s-70s whose past was much more intertwined with the country's political or social life. The private memory of the young artists is much more a matter of self-reference, abandoned toys, knocked-down old time cinema buildings, demolished Hutong where they used to play Red Army role-play games. I particularly liked HuangKai's woodcuts, Next stop was at the Paris-Beijing Photo Gallery which, exactly like last year when i first visited 798 was showing the very popular and charming photos on brick of Wen Fang. The New Golden Brick installation features portraits of migrant workers as the new terracotta soldiers. The building blocks are the humble support of a country in perpetual change. Unlike those used in ancient buildings, their lives are ephemeral as they are infinitely reproduced and replaced. Each of the migrant construction workers wears the mandatory plastic helmet, each of them is smiling, even if they are often (and rightly so) described in the press as the victims of China's urbanization frenzy. Hiroshi Kobayashi's Step into the Mist solo show at the Gallery Artside was populated by toy animals that seemed to be frozen in time. Kobayashi developed his own process where toys are arranged in space and then filmed. The painter then imports the images to Photoshop and Illustrator, adjusts values, fix the contrasts. P.S. my visit to 798 was in June, most of the exhibitions i mention are now closed. And another P.S. I hope you'll forgive me for glossing over the Olympics. Sport on tv has zero interest to me. Except for its current mix of sport and politics. That's the sad thriller of the Summer for me. All my sympathy goes to the Chinese who resist and denounce. Somehow, i manage to gather some optimism for China's future, but i have very little hope for what's going in the country where i'm spending the Summer. Right here, in the middle of Europe, human rights are crushed to the ground and almost no one seems to care. |
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More notes about Synthetic Times - Media Art China, an ambitious exhibition about media art running for a few more days at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. I can't help but mention an interesting conversation which has just started on the spectre mailing list about whether exhibiting (and blogging about?) media art works in countries ruled by a "problematic" regime is suitable or not. One of the last two themes, Here, There and Everywhere almost consoled me for all the misery i had to face (no access to either of my own blogs) while in Beijing courtesy of the Great Firewall of China. The works selected in this chapter envision the corollaries of the networked society: the realm where the public and the private sphere merge, the issues of control and anti-control, and the challenges of the Big Brother world.
naked bandit / here, not here / white sovereign, by Knowbotic Research, is a critique of the new power structure that global information technologies are bringing about in our world. They are producing new territorial principles of order and new logics of space, as well as constituting forms of transnational power and sovereignty. An autonomous helium-filled blimp controls and attacks black balloons, the naked bandits, which are kept captive, floating in space. The silver zeppelin, fitted with an orientation camera, is scanning the room, looking for whichever balloon is furthest away.
The harmless and tech-less black balloons are the targets of the sovereign robotic logics which role is to scan, filter, profile, detect and target. Visitors can symbolically intervene in the process. by constructing obstacles in space via their physical presence (serving as additional targets) and making the sovereign space more and more un-navigable.
Meanwhile, coming from above, a mechanical voice repeatedly utters the words "naked bandit / here, not here" in a tone of command that is followed by a another voice representing the "naked bandit". The sound of the installation specifies the vague status of the prisoner stripped of all rights, who is languishing incarcerated - "here" - in a very real sense. But whose legal existence is suspended - "not here".
The last chapter The Recombinant Reality presents artworks which embrace the way reality is processed and meditated, revealing new types of reality that reshape our notion of existence while posing questions of epistemological urgency that characterize contemporary experience, in which a Cartesian world view no longer ensures comfort, and syllogistic reasoning finds no suitable dwelling.
Most of Henrik Menné's dynamic sculptures are machines or installations are almost organic in the way they transform a material - plastic, wax, metal or stone - into objects. 56L, first created in 2004, consists of solid glue, a fan, iron, a heating element, and an engine. 56L produces a white web of glue. The machine heats up solid glue, which then flows down in thin threads in front of a fan that blows the strings in different directions and forms a surprisingly beautiful sculpture. Although the 56L machine remains the same no matter the gallery where it is displayed, the process of leading to the final glue sculpture is not only subject to change in the environment but is also relying on forces such as gravity and the peculiar qualities of the material chosen. Therefore, the exact dimensions and shape of the final work are almost impossible to control. The work was probably the most low-tech (what is the correct expression? is it the lowest tech?) one in the show. It reminded me of Michel Blazy's installations. The artist sets the parameters and the rest has to be left in the hands of a combination of elements. On view until July 3, 2008 at the NAMOC in Beijing. |
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Beijing is the hot city for media art this month. Tonight the Summer Digital Entertainment Jam was inaugurated in a gallery at 798 (the exhibition takes place at Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology), there is the amazing Greenpix media facade and a show which has been dubbed "the biggest exhibition of new media art in the world." This kind of heavy superlative rubs me the wrong way. The show nevertheless turned out to be an excellent panorama of contemporary media art practice (well, minus my very favourite: activism, China is not exactly big on critics) featuring works easy to understand and engage with even if you're not a regular of ars electronica festivals. With Synthetic Times - Media Art China 2008, Beijing managed to do what some previous Olympic cities have failed to do (i'm looking at you Torino 2006): taking the Olympics as an opportunity to propose a brave, meaningful, edgy and inspiring art event. I went to the museum twice and was amazed to see so many visitors, from very age range, in the rooms. They were clearly having a good time, asking their husbands or friends to take picture of themselves in front of installations as if these were the Eiffel Tower and laughing all the way while playing with the works.
Pneumatic Sound Field, by NOX/Lars Spuybroek and Edwin van der Heide, at the entrance of the museum Synthetic Times - Media Art China 2008 distributes the work of both established and emerging artists around four main themes: Beyond Body, Emotive Digital, Recombinant Reality and Here, There and Everywhere. I had seen many of the projects before but that didn't prevent me from being delighted to re-discover them in a new context. However, this post will mostly focus on the works i had never As its title suggest the Beyond Body section explores how artists are adopting electrical, poetical, olfactory or digital paths to extend the physical body. raising questions of subjectivity and the norms of ethical codes.
Back in 2000, Sissel Tolaas embarked on a projects related to fear. She tracked down 20 men from 20 corners of the word, with different background share one characteristic: they are afraid of other bodies for various reasons. These men were asked to carry a tiny electronic device everywhere with them. Whenever they found themselves in a situation where they were likely to be afraid, the men had to place the device under their armpits. The equipment registered the molecules of the respective sweat. This information was then used to simulate the respective sweat in research laboratories, then microcapsulated. The microcapsulated sweat smells were then integrated into white sheets of papers placed on the surface of a white wall, without any clear borders. The smell could be released only by a gentle scratch 'n' sniff.
The other installation i enjoyed was Jean Michel Bruyère's The Path of Damastes. 21 white hospital beds, overhung by 21 fluorescent "daylight" tubes, slowly move and perform a ballet. Each bed is equipped with an electric scissor jack, which permits a vertical movement of the bed from 38 to 81 centimetres up from the ground. It also disposes of motorized control of positioning of the upper body, which permits a roundabout movement of part of the mattress in the angle values from 0 to 70 degrees. These movements can be executed either simultaneously or independently. The 21 beds are linked together via a MIDI system to a PC which commands and synchronizes its programmed movements*. The beds are also animated individually and together they make a vast choreographical ballet. The numerous variations of creaks produced by the lattice structure under the beds in the effort to lift them compose the very music of the piece and its ballet. The beds are neatly aligned in a circular corridor. Once you enter the corridor and walk, beds keep appearing step after step, it almost seems like it will never end again.
The Emotive Digital chapter engages with ideas of the emotions and the often surprising personality that digital life, machines and interactive devices might be imbued with. Exonemo (whom Vicente interviewed a while ago) had installed a very successful artwork. Object B VS is a modified first-person shooting game. You are very welcome to play with it and control the action. However, you'll have to count with a kinetic machine situated on the other side of the screen and assembled from a bunch of household objects, power tools and computer input devices. As wild and chaotic that the machine might seem it does click on the mouse, activate the keyboard and use a pen tablet. Its action hysterically controls an avatar in the game. Try as much as you can, managing to take control over the crazy ugly machine is just a Sysiphean task. The objects' whimsical actions trigger automatic commands, according to which the game develops.
With Hand Gesture, Wu Juehei explores the way tools shape the way people work and function. Because we spend a lot of time typing on a computer, we got used to a series of "short-cuts" and they came to control our habits of using computers. It is often advised to periodically press (Ctrl + S) in order to save the materials we are working on. Thus, many people would unconsciously press Ctrl + S more than needed without even thinking, as if such action calms their conscious. A simple keyboard had its users forming various and numerous habitual hand gestures.
A keyboard is only a small piece to the puzzle, which kind of new behaviours have came to form part of our unconscious gesture through regular use of the handle of a joy pad, the opening of a cell phone, steering wheel, etc? My photo set. The exhibition runs at the National Art Museum of China until July 3. |
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Some choose to embrace art from China, others believe that we should boycott their art as much as the political context. If you follow this blog you'll know on which side i stand, i can't get enough of the China art scene. All my China art-mania didn't save me from being castigated: my blog has been banned in China (euh? what happened here? too much pornography?)
Unrepentant and un-vindicated, i paid a second visit to Florence this year, to check out China China China !!! at the recently opened Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina (CCCS). The title of the exhibition reflects quite well the plethora of contemporary Chinese art exhibitions which have been sweeping Europe over the past few years. I recently complained that i keep seeing works by the same elite of artists again and again at every exhibition about Chinese art i happen to visit. Maybe that's one of the many reasons that explain why i like it so much. It's a kind of McDonald's effect, i know before i enter what i'm going to find inside: laughing men, a spat of blood here and there and oh! look! Mao has grown tits!
However, the Florence exhibition is different on several levels. The first reason jumps at you as you enter one of the first rooms of the exhibitions and discover a series of videos and texts. Each of them document how several exhibitions have recently felt the wrath of the very elastic rules that guide censorship in China. They had to close because some works contained nudity or were judged too "unstable". Not only does China China China!!! offer a clear vision of the difficult situation that curators, gallerists and artists alike have to deal with, it also takes up the challenge to give visitors a glimpse of the way Chinese artists echo the complex reality of a country facing an historical change and cultural transformation. To ensure a balanced and somewhat independent view on the "China phenomenon", the CCCS invited three "insiders", all of whom live and work in China, are not associated with government institutions, and have worked independently for years. Each of them has a very different but complementary and always critical perception of China's art scene and its mechanism. The result is nothing like the Chinese art you've been seeing around Europe and the USA over the past few years.
Beijing-based artist, curator and founder of the independent Art Lab Li Zhenhua curated the section that i found the closest to my own interests. His approach focuses on common cultural roots between different populations, both between China and its neighbours and, at the more macroscopic level, between East and West. His contribution in the exhibition revolved around the figure of Genghis Khan, founder of the Mongol Empire, the largest contiguous empire in history. He came to power by uniting many of the nomadic tribes of northeast Asia. After founding the Mongol Empire, he set himself the goal to invade and conquer East and Central Asia. During his life (c. 1162-1227), the Mongol Empire eventually occupied most of Asia.
Li Zhenhua chose to invoke his figure as a symbol of the pioneering spirit and communication between civilizations. However, the focus goes beyond the historical past and leads to an analysis of the roots of possible visions of the future of humanity. His section, entitled "Multi-Archaeology", explores cultural identity, the way individuals are shaped by constant change and reciprocal cultural influences, and thereby the relative value of concepts such as "nation" or "race".
His selection includes Nomadic Plan in Outer Space is a body of work by Mongolian artist Wu Ershan that comprise, sculptures, installations and photographs along with the costume and photos from the film which represent Mongolians' nomadic life in the universe. They allude to a non-linear story where the past, the present and the future merge.
The art video by Zhao Liang and Shen Shaomin documents the situation on the Chinese border with North Korea and Russia. An analysis of the consequences of the Mongolian invasion by Genghis Khan on Asiatic culture is compared to the impact of modern globalization, in the constant cultural interchange between East and West. In the same time, the works highlight that the Chinese are not the homogeneous, mono-faceted people we often refer to.
Shen Shaomin's subject is particularly melancholic and poignant. His video, called I am Chinese, takes place in Hongjiang, a village on the border with Russia. During the First World War, when Germany invaded Russia, some Russians on the Chinese border were forced across the Heilongjiang River to Hongjiang Village. Other immigrants joined during WW2 and the October Revolution but the whole Russian community was still struggling to integrate with Chinese society. Things turned really sour during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) as some of the Russians in the village were suspected of being spies and the village got nicknamed "the village of spies". In order to be finally accepted by the Chinese, the elders in the Russian community suggested that marriage should be allowed only to pure Chinese in order to mask the Russian origin of their offspring. This of course resulted in genetic modifications and the birth of a mixed culture.
Equally moving is Return To The Border, a documentary in which Zhao Liang narrates the return to his hometown, Dandong, near the border with North Korea. Until the 1990s, these two socialist states were allies. However, the minute China concluded a trade treaty with South Korea, trade and cooperation was terminated and the people were forcibly plunged into opposite camps. Traveling along the river that separates the two countries, the filmmaker examines what is left of the socialist dreams on both sides of the water. Video extract: In his section, Davide Quadrio, director of BizArt Art Centre in Shanghai, developed a very engrossing multi-screen installation entitled 40 + 4 Art is not enough, not enough! Working together with documentary filmmaker Lothar Spree and filmmaker Zhu Xiawen, he interviewed forty different artists in Shanghai and asked them a series of questions about the role of the artist, their relationship with the external world, the social consequences of their work and the international market effects on traditional artistic production modes. The video, edited from 90 hours of film, offers a portrait as much as a dynamic investigation into the fast changing landscape of Shanghai's art scene. On another level, the film stretches beyond the limits of Shanghai and offers a study of the contemporary art scene in China that reveals what lays beneath the glossy, enchanting and almost uniform surface Westerners are used to see in exhibitions.
The third curator, Zhang Wei, is the director of Vitamin Creative Space Contemporary Art in Ghuangzhou. With Throwing Dice, she composed a mosaique of individual visions of human existence in a constantly changing world. The videos of Kan Xuan, Pak Sheung Chuen and Yang Fudong, Cao Fei's explorations into Second Life, technological installations by Chu Yun, and paintings by Duan Jianyu offer individual stories that engage the spectator in the discovery of the artistic sensibility in China today.
China China China!!!, Chinese contemporary art beyond the global market is on view at the Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina (CCCS), part of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, until May 4, 2008.
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