EXHIBITIONS

In 2015, as part of the “Light Source” series, Xu Zhen reinterpreted the work of the artist Cornelis de Baellieur(1607-1671) titled “Intérieur d’une galerie de tableaux et d’objets d’art.” Every detail of the scene was preserved, with exotic objects displayed in a lavish interior space-shells, sculptures,and ornaments, while the walls were adorned with painting of still life,mythological and portraits. This artist followed the tradition of “art cabinet” genre established by Jan Brueghel the Elder and others in the Flemish region, making choices in the painting style.”Intérieur d’une galerie de tableaux et d’objets d’art.” seems to carry the legacy of the late Pieter Bruegel the Elder- in order to make the objects in the painting appear lively, there is a degree of deformation in the painted content, implying ahierarchy.However, fromthe result of the painting, it is evident that this artistic transformation does not stem from meticulous observation of reality, the artist’s goal is merely to complete a task. Comparatively, Xu Zhen’s reinterpretation is more vibrant, he overall lowers the brightness of the painting, making the peculiar
light source at the lower center of the composition stand out glaringly.

Xu Zhen froze the scene at the moment when a camera flash encroaches upon the painting. Using flash when taking photos is often considered damaging to oil paintings and is strictly prohibited in many occasions. The light invades from outside the artwork, yet seems as if it is reflected from within,reaching the audience. Nevertheless, the audience, or the general public who have entered the age of image with their smartphones or cameras, have forged a new relationship with art. Classical art offered “aura” ‘evoking palpitations and dizziness in the audience of its time. Nowdays, audience yearn for this kind ofdizziness, nurturing fantasies, while the traditional “aura of spirituality” gradually fades away, leaving behind records of visual experiences with physical light. How do we distinguish which of them still carry the remnants of the “aura,” and whether the “aura” is necessary in the context of contemporary Chinese art, serves as the starting point for the exhibition “You Spin Me Round like a Record.’

2023 marks Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art the 20th anniversary. Being the first public contemporary art museum founded by government in Mainland of China,Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art was also an important participant and promoter of con- temporary art in China in its infancy, and has thereafter experienced a major wave of de- velopment in the entire museum industry . In this overall background, we find the key word iteration that can sum up this changing times and the history of the museum itself. lteration not only emphasizes a Chinese phrase in its original sense of change and repeti- tion which means four seasons change, but also as a computer term for constant change.

The Noto Peninsula juts out into the Sea of Japan from central Honshu. Suzu is positioned at its very tip, surrounded by the sea on three sides. Suzu has a history as a “leading edge” location once open to the Sea of Japan, and features a rich culture including festivals and food. If you alter your perspective, even inconvenient remote land can become a “leading edge” location that opens up the future. This idea is the starting point. The Oku-Noto Triennale has attracted support from artists in Japan and abroad, who visit and express works rooted in this land of Suzu. This fall, the third Oku-Noto Triennale will begin. Contemporary art created through collaboration by artists, citizens and supporters will reverberate with the natural features of Oku-Noto, creating an experience of time and space that will stimulate the five senses.

BY ART MATTERS is proud to announce the fifth season exhibition Motion Is Action – 35 Years of Chinese Media Art, which will take place from September 22, 2023, to February 25, 2024. This groundbreaking exhibition marks the first retrospective presentation of Chinese contemporary art history from a Chinese perspective. By examining the development and transformations in Chinese media art, the exhibition aims to explore the significant role of media expansion in the evolution of contemporary art, brought about by the information age. Through this exploration, the exhibition examines a series of thought-provoking issues, including scene reconstruction, the manipulation of time and space, perceptual misalignment, the creation of new artistic languages, and reflections on social and cultural contexts.

This exhibition brings together 79 representative works by 72 artists and groups from different generations. The works encompass a variety of media, including video, installations, performance art, interactive pieces, games, and digital art. The exhibition not only reflects on the early practices of video art but also delves into the cutting-edge exploration of emerging media and art forms such as artificial intelligence and space art.

The artworks are connected in chronological order and revolve around the thematic keyword of “motion.” The exhibition is divided into three chapters: Motion as Action, Motion as Interaction, and Motion as Agency. Through the progression of these chapters, the audience can embark on a time-travel-like experience, tracing the artists’ evolving understanding of different issues and exploring the transformation of artistic creations in terms of media, forms of expression, and concepts. Additionally, visitors can gain a profound appreciation of the depth and breadth of the Chinese art world.

Beiqiu Museum of Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibition of the Art and Geography Series, Someone Has Been Disarranging These Roses, co-curated by architect Naitian Yang and curator Lin Liu. This exhibition will open on September 8, 2023 and run through December 10,2023.

Someone Has Been Disarranging These Roses delves into the historical and present context of BMCA’s site – Beijige Mountain,and investigates the pivotal role it has played in the evolution of meteorological science in China. Departing from the spectral atmosphere of the museum’s locus, the exhibition brings together about 20 artists,architects,and researchers from 6 countries to create a constellation of artworks engaging with this historical lineage and offering different perspectives towards the omnipresent reality of climate crisis.Beijige serves as a point of convergence for the history and reality of Nanjing and China. It weaves together various elements, including ancient myths/Daoist traditions, solar terms/agricultural activities, modernmete- orological science/intellectual individuals inChina’s modernizationprocess(suchas Zhu Kezhen, the founder of the Central Meteorological Observatory in Beijige), as well as civil defense projects/consumer spa- ces, collectively producing a complex, ambiguous,and romantic environment. The museum’s existing spaces further consolidate this essence, blending together mountain terrain, air raid shelters,and the “white cube” gallery environment. The exhibition seeks to portray this compressed moment through image and sound, and to extract the dynamic imagery of wind, rain, cloud, etc. It evolves from the perception of such phenomenon to the intangible existence of data clouds, and ultimately to the cultural and political weather and climate at large.

Architect Naitian Yang’s choreography of the exhibition space creates an experience that negotiates with the existing concrete structure and resonates with the oscillating cadence of weather itself. In a time when weather and climate issues have transcended theoretical discourse and become an urgent reality, the exhibition endeav- ors to integrate people and weather into the same fluid,precarious,and crucial state. The artworks within the exhibition allude to what might conventionally be termed “bad weather”, yet the binary idea of “good / bad” is no longer applicable to our judgments of weather. Beyond a human-centered perspective, the synthesis of chaos emerges as the norm of weather, where “good” and “bad” coalesce. It pervades every aspect of ex- istence, whether living or not.

MadeIn Gallery is pleased to present the group exhibition “What Kind of Us Does Painting Need” on Sep 2, 2023. Curated by Xu Zhen, the exhibition invites thirteen artists from around the world to present their highly experimental and revealing paintings. Together the works on view investigate how painting might refresh and regenerate its power as a medium while being confronted with the dual challenges of algorithm and post-conceptualism. They galvanize us into thinking how we could remold ourselves and our experiences so that we can sustainably imagine, create, and view the new paintings.

“Finally, we have come to a time when the number of painters reaches its zenith on Earth.”

Someone opened ChatGPT, and a new so-called painter was born. Is this the mediocre fate of the new painting in the age of algorithms? Today’s painting is so compatible and adaptable that it loses its weight. Do we have any reason to approach a painting other than the fact that we have to look at it? Is painting still a portal in the city to an unknown universe? Why is it necessary to have so many paintings on our screens? How does the contingency of our eyes and hands duel in the picture with the inevitability of artificial intelligence? Can this many paintings justify our world? Does painting exist to drift on social media?

We are hereby honored to invite these artists to reveal their painting practice. They attempt to refresh painting and endow it with the renewed power of a medium that captivates the viewer as firmly as smartphones and constantly updated apps. After the artists bring out the painterliness of the object with their painting, the latter acts as a reminder that painting begins when we swipe our fingers over the image on the screen. It is only when we transcend our excitement over new technologies that we can truly begin to paint. In choosing to paint these objects, the artists are also manifesting their attitudes and intervening in our inertia. We can but seek fresh experiences to match these paintings.

Rather than asking what kind of painting is needed, we need to ask what kind of us such painting needs.

From July 1st to September 3rd, 2023, Le Voyage à Nantes will exhibit “European Thousand-Arms Classical Sculpture” from Xu Zhen®. Le Voyage à Nantes is a local, publicly-owned corporation it has chosen for its development as a tourist destination. From2011，Each year, the summer Voyage à Nantes enriches the permanent collection through temporary or permanent installations of contemporary artworks in the public space，with a completely new way to discover the city.This year chosed sculpture as the theme, a total of about 20 large-scale sculptures were exhibited, distributed in the squares, castles, streets and other places of the city .

The 14-metre (46 ft.) long and 5-metre (16 ft.) tall work, European Thousand-Arms ClassicalSculpture, transforms 19 archetypal Western figurative sculptures into one dancingbodhisattva.Eproduced and arranged in rows to represent the undulating, dancing arms of the thousand-armed Guanyin, they challenge the traditional idea of cultural separation, suggesting that all of humanity is part of a single, absurd celebration.

https://www.levoyageanantes.fr/en/events/the-summer-journey/

Selected from a recent major gift of works to the Hammer Contemporary Collection by the Haudenschild family, this exhibition focuses on pioneering Chinese photography and video from the 1990s and early 2000s. Cruel Youth Diary looks at a generation of artists whose work responded to a period of tremendous social, political, and economic change in mainland China. Through strategies of Conceptual art, performance, and installation, these artists reflected on and critiqued the visual culture of a burgeoning new China on the cusp of the 21st century.

Featuring works by Cao Fei, Chen Shaoxiong, Feng Mengbo, Hong Hao, Kan Xuan, Liu Wei, Shi Yong, Song Tao, Weng Fen (also known as Weng Peijun), Xiang Liqing, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong, Yang Yong, Yang Zhenzhong, Zhao Bandi, and Zhu Jia.

Cruel Youth Diary: Chinese Photography and Video from the Haudenschild Collection is organized by Nicholas Barlow, curatorial assistant, with Aram Moshayedi, Robert Soros Senior Curator.

The 3rd China Xinjiang International Art Biennale kicks off on Tuesday, and this year’s exhibition theme is “Harmonious Symbiosis.”

The exhibition is divided into the main exhibition area and a special exhibition section. The main exhibition area has three sections, titled “Civilization and Integration,” “Symbiosis and Dialogue,” and “Homeland Narrative and Ecological Wisdom,” involving 116 works by 77 artists from 12 countries, including China, Argentina, Italy, Belgium and Germany.

The special exhibitions are “Sketched Xinjiang,” a study of Xinjiang-themed works since the 20th century, and “Between Heaven and Earth,” the tradition and representation of contemporary Chinese ink painting. There are 143 artists from 11 countries, including China, and 260 works in the special exhibition.

The “Civilization and Integration” section of the main exhibition involves both natural and urban environments, as well as the human spirit, the expression of collective human memory, emotion and desire. The “Symbiosis and Dialogue” segment presents the reflection and expression of cultural, human and spiritual characteristics. Meanwhile, the ecology and homeland section focuses on the relationship between humans and nature.

This Biennale is hosted by China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism and the People’s Government of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. It has become an important platform for cultural exchange on the ancient Silk Road.

This exhibition is the first chapter of the debut of Start Museum, according to the team’s plan. The entire debut consists of 4 consecutive exhibitions, or the 4 seasons of “START”, each of them will last for 5 months in the upcoming 2 years. For the sake of diversity and complexity of art, each season will be demonstrated with different undertones and perspectives.

“Signal” is a contemporary art project initiated by artist XU ZHEN in 2022. XU ZHEN gives as a gift one of his “Passion” paintings to the global audience, and each recipient is invited to display the painting they receive on their social media accounts. A long-term, unceasing “art exhibition” will thus take place on Internet media platforms. The project aims to send the signal of art to people around the world and share with them the future of art.

Art field Nanhai Guangdong, a top-level international cultural festival, will open in Nanhai, Foshan on November 18. About 70 art projects from 15 countries and regions will be invited to participate in this festival, including China, Russia, France, Israel, Japan, Spain, the United States, Australia, India and Cameroon. The main venue is located in Xiqiao Town, Nanhai, Foshan, covering an area of 176 square kilometers. At the same time, there are 8 art sub-venues in Xiqiao Mountain, Tingyin Lake, Pingsha Island, Taiping Hui, Songtang Village, Ruxi Village, and Huanggang Village.

A true-to-life reproduction of the typical convenience store in China, XUZHEN Supermarket displays a dazzling array of daily consumer goods for sale at regular prices. On a closer look, however, one finds all the commodities bereft of substance. The anomaly of inviting viewers to purchase empty containers reveals the exchange-value crisis of global capitalism. Under the aesthetic disguise of product packaging, the emptiness of commodities points to the displacement of exchange and use values under the commercial hegemony. 

In his supermarket, Xu Zhen® constructs a space that parodies the rampant global consumerism. He simultaneously creates the simulacrum of commodities and of artworks alike, thus arriving at a simulacrum of contemporary life. As Baudrillard sees it, it is not an object but a sign, a concept that is consumed in capitalism, whereas simulacrums, without having any signified, become the only reality in a postmodern society. In this sense, once it enters the capitalist system, art turns into a sign or concept that is being consumed, a form of design or packaging; it has nothing to do with the artwork itself. This explains why the artist removes the goods while retaining only their packaging.

This exhibition focuses on artificial intelligence, 3D modeling software, social platforms, games, and other technologies that participate in social governance or rewrite aesthetic standards as human partners. Artists speculate on the potential mode of communication between humans, machines, and digital species and explore the possibility in the form of an exhibition. 

Integrating technology and art provides new thinking for developing the cultural and art industry in the new era. 

The exhibition also discusses two themes. One is to examine how humans handle the labor relationship between humans and machines when technological algorithms and artificial intelligence are particularly advanced. The other direction is how algorithms, 3D modeling software, and social platforms can generate subjective or alternative electronic species. The audience will see the ten artists’ images, paintings, and installation works and their imagination of the future world.

Bangkok, 8 June 2022 – The Bangkok Art Biennale Foundation is pleased to announce twenty-three new artists and four more venues for the third edition of the Bangkok Art Biennale (BAB) taking place from 22 October 2022 to 23 February 2023. This second announcement expands the Biennale’s line-up to 43 leading regional and international artists and 11 venues across the city’s cultural and heritage sites.

This edition’s theme CHAOS : CALM invites artists to contemplate the tumultuous conditions of the world around us as communities recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, and grapple with urgent climate crises and socio-political uncertainties around the globe. By exploring the binary opposites of chaos and calm, the Biennale aims to reflect on the confusing world we live in and offer glimpses of hope through art; celebrating a diversity of identities, cultures, and histories, and mapping a shared vision for our new post-pandemic world.

https://www.bkkartbiennale.com/

XU ZHEN^®  “SIGNAL” In conjunction with ShanghART Singapore 10th Anniversary Exhibition

Following the inaugural chapter of XU ZHEN®’s international contemporary art project “SIGNAL” at Art Jakarta in August, the gallery will be launching the Singapore chapter on the occasion of ShanghART Singapore’s 10th Anniversary Exhibition “Entrance”.

“SIGNAL” draws from a larger body of work, “Passion” which XU ZHEN® has been working on since 2021. The series consists of oil paintings on canvas derived from mobile devices screenshots of various social media platforms. The free-writing expressive brushstrokes and impasto work are a result of the artist’s attempts to capture the energy of online social media interactions. It is also the first time that the artist will be personally painting such a large number of works in a series, making it an exceptionally distinctive creation in his career.

An extension of this series of paintings, the pieces in the “SIGNAL” project are sized similar to handheld mobile devices. The artist will be gifting them to the global audience, creating more paintings as the project develops, while inviting each recipient to share the painting they receive on their social media accounts, resulting in a long-term, ongoing virtual art exhibition of these pieces on the Internet. This unprecedented way of disseminating art is a continuation of XU ZHEN®’s provocative approach, inviting the audience to ponder the future of art.

Accompanying the project’s “online exhibition”, the Singapore chapter will also consist of a physical presentation of four large canvases of the same series displayed in the gallery. The larger-than-life renditions of “Passion” in the gallery will be an immersive display of XU ZHEN®️’s “passion” as manifested on the canvases, allowing visitors to encounter the artist’s personal perceptions and experiences. Titling each painting after their physical weight, the artist explores an alternative way to quantify our online experiences. Instead of bytes and bits, the “Passion” series of paintings will become a new representation of the Internet and social media activity.

The exhibition took author Wang Anyi’s lecture as a point of departure.
Wang Anyi spoke about the three tools in Ah Cheng’s novels at the online lecture “The History of Civilization in Contemporary Chinese Fiction – on Ah Cheng’s Three Kings” this May. The three tools in Ah Cheng’s novels – namely, The King of Trees, The King of Children and The King of Chess – refer to knife, literature, and art-mathematics respectively. While Wang considered each tool a symbol of civilization, he also examined the true rationale behind Ah Cheng’s creation of the works and the self-positioning within an author who led the marching of the Xúngēn, or root-searching movement. Ah Cheng’s writings is a witness of the “sent-down” which was also part of Wang’s bodily memories of Down To The Countryside Movement. Yet what could explain Ah Cheng’s obsession over the three tools in his books? Wang found his answer in Yìwénzhì, or the Treatise on Art and Letters, “lost etiquette may be found in the wilderness.” In times of undue chaos, the wilderness and wilderness alone electrifies the homo sapiens out of the centre, returning to the uncharted territories and hoping to encounter civilization again.
The exhibition, instead of merely recycling Wang Anyi’s thoughts, is an extension of his perspective, calling upon an inquiry into the proliferation, if not contamination, of the tools’ presence. While math, diction and knife are manifested as symbols of civilization, they also became instruments of violence. Zhūyě is an assemblage of such seemingly conflicting yet parallel conditions. Zhū not only stands for variety and togetherness, but also a state of in-betweeness and in-betwixtness. Yě also transcends its original meaning, beholding both the traces of civilization and the quality of violence. Therefore, zhūyě has been translated as violence at the exceptional moment, for the fine line between salvation and its opposite is another fragile earthly frame.

XU ZHEN®’s site-specific sculpture, Hello, is the newest outdoor artwork on the Stanford campus and the inaugural commission for the Stanford Plinth Project.

Xu Zhen created the 15-foot sculpture especially for Meyer Green, a 2.45-acre open space located close to several university landmarks, including Green Library, the Law School and the Graduate School of Education. He combined traditional bronze techniques with the latest digital sculpting technology to create something that looks both ancient and contemporary. Its form is based on Greek architecture pillars, symbolizing the origin and cornerstone of Western civilization. As viewers move close, they will notice that the towering column is twisted in the form of a magnified and mutated snake, observing its surroundings from its perch on a plinth surrounded by soaring cedars.

The work fuses the classical Greek column shape and the snake’s aggressive biological attitude to stimulate viewers’ perception and experience of classic civilization. The moment the viewer’s eyes come across the Corinthian capital also represents a confrontation with the depth of history and culture. With the increasingly frequent blending and impacts among global civilizations, the work constitutes both a reality and a metaphor for encountering civilizations of different times and space.

In 2019, Stanford’s Public Art Committee chose Xu Zhen to create a site-specific outdoor work of art for the Plinth Project. This new initiative places a series of temporary, commissioned public artworks in the central Meyer Green campus location where the Meyer Library stood from 1966 to 2015. The work was to be installed the following year, but due to the pandemic, the installation was delayed. Xu Zhen was chosen in part for his representation of global perspectives and his engagement with issues relevant to the university. In his statement about creating Hello, he writes: “Located in Silicon Valley, Stanford University plays an important role in terms of innovations, developments and discovery of new talent. The people of this distinguished university share similar qualities with contemporary artists: the capability to see new possibilities and the courage to explore opportunities, even though results remain uncertain.”

Making it big in an Eastern country used to be a second choice for Western rockstars. Despite its multitude, the Chinese opinion was once considered inferior to established Western tastes. Yet China’s fast-paced transformation has turned the nation into a global powerhouse. These days companies, brands, and even nations from around the world all scramble to win the favour of Chinese consumers.
What does it mean to make it Big in China? It is no easy feat to captivate the attention of over a billion wandering eyes and minds. How do we draw the focus of so many unique individuals and make them move in unison? Artist Xu Zhen® shows us how it’s done by transforming into a kind of snake-charmer — mesmerising viewers with his colossal, dancing, twisting Corinthian column. Tang Nannan submerges us with mountainous waves until we become, as the Zen saying goes, simply one drop in an endless ocean. Lin Yan humbles and unites us as mortals under her vast, textural sky. These artists show us that it is not simply brute force that drives a nation and its people. Rather, it is the grand and overarching narratives, outstanding creativity and unique art practices that have the power to move a population en masse.

From Revolution to Globalisation surveys the cultural dynamism of contemporary China from the early 1970s to the present. China’s open-door policy of 1978 began an era of profound social and economic change. Cities across the country grew into global commercial centres affecting the everyday lives of millions of people. Amid China’s rise on the world stage, artists sought to engage in international conversations about art with their contemporaries. Challenging traditional ideas and art practices, they staged their own exhibitions and experimented with new mediums and unconventional styles. From Revolution to Globalisation looks at how international audiences have come to understand China today and captures the bold generation of artists who defined the contemporary Chinese experience.

Sorry, this entry is only available in 中文.

Sorry, this entry is only available in 中文.

Sorry, this entry is only available in 中文.

Futurism was an artistic movement that originated in Italy and Russia in the early 20th century, glorifying the charm of industry, machine, technology, power and speed while repudiating all the artistic styles and forms from the past. Today, “futurism” has already become a historical phase while the reality is increasingly turning into what “futurism” once envisaged. The power and speed of industry no longer stun people. Neither does technological aesthetics. Looking back upon the past one hundred years, we’d realize that futurism has actually reflected and shaped the zeitgeist of the time.

When artistic concepts of the past have gradually turned into reality and reality has even made a step further than those artists concepts, would art still be able to take the role as “herald”, especially in the historical period like now which is imbued with all kinds of possibilities of the future? As the inaugural exhibition of the Culture and Art Hub of Beijing Exhibition Center and theme exhibition of “Beijing Contemporary ·STORY”, Futurism from the Past features works of forty artists, demonstrating their signature styles.

In the two almost symmetrical gallery spaces, what viewers would encounter is a mixture of our past visions of the future, present recollections of the past, present imagination of the future, and reverie of the past from a future perspective. Works on view, whether classic or recent, cast light on not only the imagery, imagination and narrative of the future in contemporary art, the historical anticipation of the past one hundred years of China, prospects of the future from a present perspective, but also a dynamical view of time that is unique to China: The future generations will look upon us just like we look upon our past.

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Pearl Art Museum is delighted to present a group exhibition entitled “From Clay to Words: Ceramics as Media” from May 29 to August 22, 2021. The show begins simply with the material and attempts to explore the serene depths of artistic concepts and languages, showing visitors unique artistic creations made of ceramic that go well beyond typical displays of ancient ceramics and handicrafts. The exhibition will showcase fourteen dynamic artists from around the world (listed alphabetically by last name): Céleste Boursier-Mougenot (FR), Chen Xiaodan, Geng Xue, Liang Shaoji, Liang Wanying, Liu Danhua, Liu Jianhua, Liu Xi, Su Xianzhong, Sui Jianguo, Sun Yue, Xu Xinhua, XU ZHEN®, and Zhao Zhao. They have created more than thirty diverse pieces, either made of ceramic or related to ceramics, spanning sculpture, installation, video, and painting. The works have been divided into seven sections: “Born Out of Earth,” “Studying the Nature of Things,” “Nostalgia and Appropriation,” “Ordinary and Extraordinary,” “Body and Identity,” “Time,” and “Synesthesia and Nature.” The exhibition explores and presents new concepts, new expressions, and new languages in ceramic art, a medium with a long and storied history.

Nostalgia and appropriation are common working methods or themes in post-modern art. The XU ZHEN® contribution to this exhibition is MadeIn Curved Vase – Famille Rose Olive Vase with Bat and Peach Design, Yongzheng Period, Qing Dynasty. The original model for the piece was a legendary famille rose vase that was once used as a table lamp, then broke sales records for Qing dynasty porcelain vases, and entered a museum collection. Using the firing methods of ancient porcelains, XU ZHEN® bends the neck of a classic Chinese porcelain vase ninety degrees, creating a new shape.

To celebrate Hong Kong’s annual art month, foster cross-cultural dialogue and inspire through the arts, K11 Art Foundation (KAF) presents a remarkable international arts programme at K11 MUSEA. Headlining the programme is Calligraphy Rhapsody – Retrospective Exhibition of Georges Mathieu co-presented with the Consulate General of France in Hong Kong & Macau, showcasing the preeminent artist’s works spanning four decades. Showing in Hong Kong for the first time, In Just a Blink of an Eye is the landmark installation by Xu Zhen, a leading figure in Chinese contemporary art. The programme will also debut the first-ever bronze sculptures by Japanese artist Izumi Kato, as well as the publication launch of City As Studio, giving an exciting glimpse of the forthcoming City As Studio exhibition slated for 2022, helmed by legendary curator Jeffrey Deitch.

Further augmenting the agenda of art and cultural happenings this month, KAF presents an additional array of cross-cultural projects including: the inaugural edition of Micromégas artist residency and cultural exchange programme between Hong Kong and France co-organised with the Consulate General of France in Hong Kong & Macau and Videotage, supported by the Institut français; KAF x MOCA: Transpacific Stream, an all-digital collaborative video art programme co-presented with The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) now screening on KAF’s newly revamped official website; and the release of Katharina Grosse: Mumbling Mud Catalogue, an extension of the acclaimed German artist’s first solo exhibition in China.

MadeIn Gallery is pleased to present “Art as Living Organism”, a group exhibition featuring three artists Ge Hui, Song Kun and XU ZHEN®, opening on May 8th, 2021 and running through June 30th. This will be the gallery’s last exhibition at One Museum Place. The exhibition revolves around the creation of figuration as well as the internal logic and driving force of its evolutional process. Based on their own experiences and different perspectives, Ge Hui, Song Kun and XU ZHEN® entitle the figures to grow in narration or develop in forms; and thereby extend to in-depth investigations on materials and artistic languages.

OCAT Shanghai is pleased to present the exhibition The Circular Impact: Video Art 21, which will be on view from April 28th to July 11th, 2021. The exhibition, curated by Dai Zhuoqun, features a sample of Chinese video art since 2000, showing 21 artists whose primary medium of practice has been moving images, with works spanning 21 years from the beginning of the 21st century to the present. This exhibition showcases the curator’s ongoing exploration of the development of Chinese video art in recent years. From the large-scale group exhibition Free Prism Video Wave in the fall of 2019 to The Circular Impact: Video Art 21 in the spring of 2021, the focus of Dai’s curatorial practice on video art always centers within the screen, revolving around content, rather than the medium itself. Amid waves of the avant-garde and new wave art, video art emerged to serve as a medium of enlightenment for the most cutting-edge consciousness and concepts of the contemporary Chinese society, recording and reflecting the social and spiritual conditions of Chinese people, as well as the great diversity of thoughts and emotions.

Based on these ideas, Dai Zhuoqun divides Chinese video art into three periods shown in three chapters, based on the reality and conceptual representations of different stages of time where a decade is a generational interval. The first chapter, “1988-1999, Spring Story,” focuses on the early video practices in the early avant-garde art period between 1988 and 1999. “Spring Story” comes from the song sung by Dong Wenhua in the 1990s to celebrate reform and opening up and Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour. The other two chapters in this exhibition cover the two decades of the new century, the globalized economy, and the Internet era, which have redefined our understanding and perception of the world and even our way of thinking. Chapter two, “Love Song 2000” and Chapter three, “Floating World and Faint Shadow,” attempt to afford an optimistic and humanistic narrative to the new century. Meanwhile, both chapters faintly reveal gradual diversification and fragmentation in Chinese society since its enlightenment in the 1980s and its transition into its current manifestations in the post-globalization era.

Time is a circle, which travels circularly, and the moving image is an art form based on time and mirror images of the myriad world. Images and sounds wander and collide in our receptive senses, and life revolved around the screens has become our way of experiencing the world. In this sense, the art of moving images engages, assesses, intervenes, or has even shaped the psychological symptoms and social life of our generation.

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The city binds the works of the past, the contemporary, and the future. It’s more a system that operates the lives of the urbanites, but a collective work of many generations; it’s not a written book, but one that’s being re-read and re-written. The new urban dwellers who have just arrived are inventing new features and forms of the city and transforming it into their works.

Every city is a work of art created by generations of people living there, while the new city has also been “on exhibit” in each generation’s works.

Contemporary art has afforded the city a compound structure to encompass time, space, bodies, and desires. It can transform a product of space into an artwork about space, transforming urban dwellers from product consumers to creators of their own artworks. Contemporary art supports new urbanites:

· To realize one’s experience in the city over a period of time into a work of art;

· To present one’s artwork in one’s city;

· To transform the city into one’s artwork;

· To present the city in one’s artwork.

Contemporary art integrates the spaces of everyday living, architecture, design, the fashion of a city into the “gesamtkunstwerk” of art and discovers new capacities for surviving the Anthropocenic city of a new festival of commonality.

In an era where new works are being created, APSMUSEUM aims to unite artists, architects, designers, and all talents in the creative disciplines to stimulate new desires and wisdom in the city and show the public other possible tracks of life beyond work and leisure. We will engage in urban practice through integrated interdisciplinary art exhibitions, public programs, art shops and an art flash shop in collaboration with Xinhua Bookstore, a subsidiary of Shanghai Xinhua Media Group. In doing so, we aim to foster a pollinating economy that would bring together contemporary art, architecture, design, and fashion beyond the art institutions and social practice and engendering the ethic of stems in the new urban society, where its components, intrigue, share, contribute, empower and reciprocate with one another.

As the anthropologist and sociologist, Georges Bataille has put it, an art space is the lungs of the metropolis, and the masses that poured in are the blood that stimulates the city. By amplifying, fermenting, cataloging works of art and their relationships with their viewers, an art space in the city introduces fresh oxygen and provides a profound grammar for urban space planning and the development for organizing urban life.

XU ZHEN®’s practice is committed to probe issues around the pretension of human condition, looking to upset and challenge the assumptions of established order. Experience – Venus de Milo presents an elaborated outline of the classic “Venus without arms”. Based on their own cultural experience, viewers can still clearly identify the source of the image. The work fuses digital media and cultural genes to create a new perspective on aesthetics and angle on media representation, as well as stimulate viewers’ visual memory through cultural experience.

Himalayas Museum has gone through a glorious and beautiful time, and has also made its due efforts and contributions to contemporary art. Even though the tide has ebb and flow, and ups and downs, we have not been lost, nor have we given up. Despite the hardships and difficulties that we have encountered, we have been learning and renewing ourselves. And we are still full of hopes and have confidence in our future. The reason why this special exhibition is entitled “Black Out” is to show that even though there have been some embarrassing and helpless situations, contemporary art is also experiencing aphasia and amnesia in the current context. The fact that we dare to honestly face those situations is to demonstrate that we have confidence in ourselves. It also indicates that we will start anew. We will continue to make our efforts in this heated field with ideal and passion and will try to turn a new page in the history of our museum. Even though mountains may have valleys, they have broad terrains. “Black Out” is a turning point and it will bring about sunshine and hope……

The year of 2020 defines a great watershed of the global landscape as well as of mankind as a whole. The ideology strucutres since Cold War and post-Cold War has been downright overthrown as the pandemic rages. In the meantime, to worsen the matter, the once familiar cultural and political conflicts have violently staged its comeback, further accelerating the collapse of globalization and the turmoil of humanity.

The art world (and the culture system as well) which clings to the global Capitalism system has fully revealed its weakness in this era of pandemic. Even today, the COVID and the looming global conflicts have not yet stopped, and the destiny of the world and mankind have become indeed indefinite. At the moment, we are not only facing the question of how to regain the will of life, or the power of art, but more importantly, that of deciding what the role and function of art will (or should) be.

At this special historical moment, three artists, Wang Xingwei, Xu Zhen® and Song Ta, who were born in the late 1960s, 70s and 80s, have gathered together and hope to create a new voice of the era and action force through their intersections and collision. The three artists grew up in three different places: northeast, east and south of China. All of them have strong regional characteristics, but at the same time, they share many common qualities. In addition to their shared keen senses to art, they have this kind of humor, frankness and conceited evilness that are capable of desecrating all sacred power. Yuan Mei, a scholar of Qing Dynasty, wrote in his poem Mount Zhuo Bi: “A solitary peak stands tall for a long time without earthly strives, where there are gods in all sides of the wind and cloud. With this pen that is from the horizon to the sky, who do I need to rely on?” The poem conveys the artistic conception that only by being outstanding can one be able to amaze the world. Perhaps it is the most appropriate description of the three artists.

This exhibition is honored to gather the three artists’ works in recent years. They are full of reasonless absurdity and oriental colors that are both real and sham. They are stylish and novel, but not carnivals; they are alternative and non-mainstream, yet they stay closely to the pulse of the earth and the times; they are a manifesto of new aesthetics, but not a simple patchwork of symbols. In fact, they lead to deep ponderings of history and extraordinary imagination for the future, in various methods of handling complicated matters with ease and vice versa. The three artists sketch a picture of the Chinese culture, society and politics in the era of globalization. Although it seems extremely incorrect and even reprehensible, what it carries may be most Chinese people’s expectation for the future.

In this Internet era that is constantly upgrading, we still have to do business with passion, do passional business, and turn business into passion, because that is art-making and exhibition-planning. “Commerce of Passions” is how the famous utopian socialist, Charles Fourier, addresses art. He regards art as a broader business, as a business in a biological economy, a political economy, a libido economy, a contribution (anti-entropy) economy other than the capitalist economy. “Art For Sale” in 1999 had raised this question: Why not? In the age of stacking, contemporary art has to be such commerce of passions: through such exchanges, everyone has equal rights in front of automatic machines, express parcels and mobile phone screens; at the same time, it recognizes and encourages different workers to equally contribute to public welfare, so that everyone can freely devote themselves to the cause they love.

This is because the use of contemporary art to transform urban core and its commercial space must not only support the re-appropriation of wealth by all residents as co-authors of the city, but also re-utilize all concurrent estate in the city by building a dominant force, restoring their original use values, in order for cities to become everyone’s common currency, and everyone’s own art-text.

Therefore, at present, this art and commerce project with “Social, Vision and Playfulness” as the main axis is realizing an ideal: with culture and art as t thread, international vision as pattern, in the commercial space to explore interactive relationships among humans, between human and consciousness domains, and between human and urban space.

In addition to incorporating contemporary art, the “Shanghai Plaza” project is also engraved in history. It started in the east section of Huaihai Middle Road, and this year marks the 120th anniversary of its construction. In the long axis of time, it is the background of past prosperity, and also a testimony to the values of new generations. This is for the first time a business model integrates consumption, office, art, culture, creativity and other dimensions into one. It is an attempt to wrap around life with “fineness”, and “fineness” has already surpassed the previous customary definition, demonstrating further connotations and directions beyond.

“Panorama: Serendipitous Encounters of Worlds” is a multi-year project that brings together a large-scale art exhibition and the urban landscape. The concept of the “panorama” was important to the initial construction of the museum space, which emphasizes the juxtaposition of the exhibition and its urban setting. Visitors move between views of the exhibition gallery and views of the city from the air, so the works of art are part of both the exhibition and the urban space. The spatial dislocations of multiple times, spaces, and regional cultures, which are comprised of space (in the architectural sense) and works of art, are connected to the subtitle of the show: “Serendipitous Encounters of Worlds.”

“People who live in the world are constantly shaping the world based on their surroundings—whether they be realities or dreams. People are caught up in these many worlds, and no one can be left behind. In the art world, artists are all realists, actively creating dreams and occasionally forgetting themselves. Here, visitors can look at art and occasionally look down on the entire city. While reveling in the urban panorama, you will come to appreciate the art around you—the experience is a blend of the real and illusory, true and false, believable and doubtful. Our grasp of the world is decided by our grasp of ourselves. Are we innocent bystanders or directly involved? Is this the real world or nirvana? All of this is related to how we manage our relationships with others.” This was how Wang Yamin, the exhibition’s curator, poetically explained the experience of viewing the exhibition. He puts himself in the viewer’s shoes, discussing the exhibition as a viewer would. Hovering outside the self reflects the exhibition’s uncertainty, another element in this show. During the nine-month exhibition, Wang Yamin and the G Museum team will present a series of public education events focused on the subject of the city. These mobile lectures and dialogues become part of the exhibition, creating truly meaningful encounters between conceptions of the world.

Sorry, this entry is only available in 中文.

Sorry, this entry is only available in 中文.

What is painting? That is the question that runs across a rectangle of canvas exhibited in the new installation of the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York:

WHAT IS PAINTING

DO YOU SENSE HOW ALL THE PARTS OF A GOOD PICTURE ARE INVOLVED WITH EACH OTHER, NOT JUST PLACED SIDE BY SIDE? ART IS A CREATION FOR THE EYE AND CAN ONLY BE HINTED AT WITH WORDS.

John Baldessari’s painting, What is Painting (1966-68), sparked the attention of Austin Lee when he saw the work at the Museum of Modern Art last fall. “It’s been stuck in my head ever since,” Lee recounts. “I think of painting as evidence of a state of mind. Documentation of thoughts. That can take form in an infinite amount of variations.”

Good Pictures, curated by Austin Lee, expands Baldessari’s investigation into what it takes to make a good painting, or more generally, a good picture. In Good Pictures, Lee has brought together artists with whom he has a personal history, some of which he considers part of his artist community. As Lee reveals, “They are artists who have influenced what my idea of painting is. Some through years of discussion, some from only seeing the work online.”

The works in Good Pictures embrace the holistic idea suggested by Baldessari’s painting that “all the parts of a good picture are involved with each other, not just placed side by side.” The exhibition showcases a mix of styles and techniques with some technological experimentation. Baldessari’s ironic painting is an invitation to celebrate seemingly simple “fundamentals of art.” The show is not meant to answer the question, but provide a prompt for artists in a group show to do what they always do.

Prior to the grand opening of the 13th Shanghai Biennale “Bodies of Water” this fall, the Power Station of Art is going to hold “Shanghai Waves: Historical Archives and Works of Shanghai Biennale” from July 31 to November 15, 2020, representing more than sixty works by 51 domestic and foreign artists and groups, including paintings, installations, videos, etc. Most of these exhibits are from the collection of previous editions of the Shanghai Biennale held in the China Art Museum,Shanghai and the Power Station of Art. The exhibition is built on two cross-referential documentary threads, which serve as the development course of the era linked up by major events, and personal objects, photos, materials and other documents at the courtesy of many artists. By converging personal memories into a historical narrative framework, the exhibition shall present the history of the Shanghai Biennale with feelings and evolutions, in order to inspire and enlighten viewers by revisitng the past and considering the present in the post-pandemic period when they are forced into a slowdown and standstill.

Artists participating in this exhibition are: Moinak Biswas, Chang Qing, Chen Junde, Chen Shaoxiong, Chen Zhen, Willem De Rooij, Ding Yi, Fang Lijun, Regina Jose Galindo, Gu Wenda, Hong Hao, Hu Xiangcheng, Huang Yongping, Ji Dachun, Leandro Katz, Liang Shaoji, Liang Shuo, Liu Qingyuan, Liu Wei, Luo Yongjin, Mao Yan, Yasumasa Morimura, Bird Head, Qiu Anxiong, Qu Fengguo, Raqs Media Collective, Shang Yang, Surabhi Sharma & Tejaswini Niranjana, Shen Fan, Gagandeep Singh, Wang Tiande, Weng Fen, Cell Art Group, Xia Junna, Xia Yang, Xiang Liqing , Xiao Qin, Xu Zhen, Yan Peiming, Yang Zhenzhong, Zhang Enli, Zhang Huan, Zhang Jianjun, Zhang Peili, Zhang Yu, Zhang Zhenggang, Zhou Changjiang, Zhou Chunya, Zhou Tao, Zhou Tiehai, Zhou Xiaohu (in alphabetical order)

History and Evolution of Shanghai Biennale

Founded in 1996, the Shanghai Biennale has become one of the most important international art biennales after 24 years of academic persistence by generations of art museum professionals. It is not only a biannual international art event, but also an important source of urban renewal and cultural production in Shanghai.

The initial intention of the Shanghai Biennale was very simple, that is, to build a platform for Chinese artists to effectively communicate with the world, and to open a window for Chinese audience to understand the world’s most cutting-edge artistic thinking and creation. Fang Zengxian (1931-2019), initiator of the Shanghai Biennale, wrote in his word to the first Shanghai Biennale, “China should have its own international art exhibition. In order to achieve two-way selections and equal exchanges in a real sense, it is a noble ideal of art, and also the only way in history.” The 1st Shanghai (Fine Art) Biennale “Open Space” mainly displayed easel paintings by domestic painters, and many of them applied mixed materials to experimental artworks. In addition, the exhibition featured the installations by Chinese artists Chen Zhen, Gu Wenda, and Zhang Jianjun, who are active overseas.

Since its establishment, the Shanghai Biennale keeps to the path of continuous self-innovation and exploration, with its root set in Shanghai. “With Shanghai as the matrix, it will practice a series of propositions in a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary way in the development of an Eastern city” (Xu Jiang). In 1998, the 2nd Shanghai (Fine Art) Biennale “Inheritance and Exploration” consisted of two main sections “Inheritance and Exploration” and “Absorption and Integration”, which analysed and demonstrated the new dynamic of ink and wash as a traditional Chinese medium under the current cultural context,“Inheritance and Exploration” and “Absorption and Integration”. In 2000, the 3rd Shanghai Biennale made a major breakthrough by building on the previous two exhibitions. It removed “Fine Art” from the title of the biennale, and started to widely include more diverse forms such as installations and videos. At the same time, the Shanghai Biennale established the curator system and invited international curators and artists into the Shanghai Biennale, allowing difference voices to rise and constructing positive conversations Since then, the Shanghai Biennale has become China’s first international biennale in the real sense. In 2004, the 5th Shanghai Biennale “Techniques of the Visible” established a “News Center” in order to reach a wider range of audience through media publicity across multiple channels, which had effectively increased the number of visitors over the past sessions. In 2006, the 6th Shanghai Biennale “Hyper Design” officially established the Shanghai Biennale Organizing Committee and launched the official website. In 2012, the Shanghai Biennale moved its venue to the Power Station of Art. With the establishment and implementation of the Academic Committee and Chief Curator Systems, the Shanghai Biennale took the opportunity of “reactivation” to develop jointly with this building which was known as the Nanshi Power Plant in the memory of the city.

The Shanghai Biennale encompasses a rich variety of themes. In 2002, the 4th edition “Urban Creation” described the current development of new urban architecture in China and the lifestyle of urban residents. In 2004, the 5th edition “Techniques of the Visible” was dedicated to introducing the image technology in visualization, as well as the multiple relationships between technology and humanities. In 2006, the 6th edition “Hyper Design” took off from design to reduce opposition between art and practicality. In 2010, the 8th edition “Rehearsal” observed the Expo host city Shanghai from the perspective of the “Expo Theater”. “Rehearsal” is an experiment conducted to discover multiple possibilities at this moment, and to build the Biennale Theater into a multi-domain and cross-media public scene. The exhibition theater has become a multi-domain and cross-media public scene. The Shanghai Biennale Exhibition has now become a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-media dialogue. The topics and impacts involved have radiated to wider domains such as urban studies, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology.

Shanghai, an international metropolis that took the lead in embracing modernity, provides the Shanghai Biennale with a fertile soil for organic growth, and constantly motivates curators and artists to think. In 2000, Hou Hanru, co-curator of the 3rd Shanghai Biennale “Shanghai Spirit”, believed that the core of Shanghai spirit lies in its “cultural openness, diversity, hybridity and positive innovative attitude”. This biennale regards the development process of Shanghai as a unique modernity and explores the cultural positioning of contemporary cities in the context of globalization. In 2008, the 7th Shanghai Biennale “Translocalmotion” focused on “people”, who are workers, migrants and residents in this rapidly developing city. In the main project, the exhibition invited about 20 domestic and foreign artists to conduct field research on the iconic “People’s Square” and take it as a starting point for creation. In 2014, the 10th edition “Social Factory” shifted its attention from Shanghai’s social phenomena to the core of its modern social structure. In 2018, the 12th edition borrowed the word “Proregress” from the American poet e. e. Cummings and ancient Chinese mythology to look into the relationship between the world’s faster growth and artists’ creative practice.

The Shanghai Biennale has been actively interacting with the city where it is staged, tapping into the hinterland, and moving the exhibition space to streets and alleys. In 2012, the 9th edition “Reactivation” initiated the City Pavilion project, inviting more than 30 cities from all over the world to participate in the exhibition, and distributed their masterpieces to historical buildings along the Waibaidu Bridge—Yuanmingyuan Road—North Sichuan Road—East Nanjing Road. In 2014, the 10th edition “Social Factory” continued the concept of City Pavilion for the exhibition “City Workshop”. It selected the cultural and commercial representative “Huaihai Road” and the extended public space as a subvenue of City Pavilion, artistically activating the most dynamic art corridor in Shanghai. In 2016, the 11th edition “Why Not Ask Again” lasted for three months, when it discovered and observed personal stories in the City Project “51 Personae”. In 2018, the 12th Shanghai Biennale “Proregress” created various sections such as “City Exhibition Hall”, “City Cinema”, “City Archaeological Team”, which provided the public with a unique life perspective and further explored the distinctive humanistic charm of Shanghai.

“C” is the symbol of the current idol culture and a product of the values of the new era. “C”, in whichever configuration it is displayed to the public, will always forge a kind of energy that exists in the form of idols, music, art et cetera, with unlimited possibilities. Contemporary art also contains formidable energy.

The exhibition came into existence through the initiatives of ROCKET GIRLS 101 MENG MEIQI & RISE ZHOU ZHENNAN, and the creations for the theme “C” by artists CHENG RAN x MARTIN GOYA BUSINESS, He Xiangyu, Liao Fei, Shi Zheng, Tan Tian and XU ZHEN. The exhibition is fittingly presented at thevenues of TANK Shanghai which allows the audience to not only feel the energy from vvCn and the idols in the exhibition space，but also experience the energy brought by TANK Shanghai and the artists.

“C”: Digital Interactive Art Experiment promotes the communication between contemporary art and society in diverse ways in the hope of pondering, through this exhibition the value-role that art should be ascribed in the process of continuous social development. As a pioneering and multifunctional contemporary art institution TANK Shanghai believes that art and creative experiments are an essential driving force in the society as of today.

Wild Cinema: Reshape the city with youthfulness, and redesign it as your artwork

What can contemporary art do to battle against the COVID-19 pandemic? Here comes the answer: looking for the new definition of art to help people survive the epidemic, and having an art carnival in the city core to calm people. Guided by the enthusiastic young generation, we reorganize the virus-stricken art world and create its new rules with creative practice.

Wild Cinema, the first opening group exhibition of iag, is fiercely landing at TX Huaihai | Youth Energy Center on June 12th, 2020. The new concept of “Contemporary Art Cinema” has endowed the exhibition with the long-delayed city mission of contemporary art: reshape the city with youthfulness, and redesign it as your artwork. It aims to provide the city core of Shanghai with immersive art experiences. When surrounded by artworks, visitors can go beyond the physical boundaries of art gallery, art space and other art forms, and thus build their fresh inspiration into the system of contemporary art.

The contemporary art cinema hopes to answer the following questions: in concert with this generation of young people, how can contemporary art discover and publicize their experience, ideas and careers? What should it do for them? What can young people do when invited to appreciate art works? How can exhibition encourage young people to get energetically involved in learning and living, and take a leading role in the artistic business, thus incubating a new city core with their youthfulness.

Empower young people, and inspire the new force with freedom and crossovers, thereby creating the new art, new industry as well as the new business of the city core. To achieve that, we offer them the Wild Cinema to refresh their soul, reveal their lives, provoke their innovative thinking and exhibit their worlds.

The Wild Cinema exhibition will soon spread all over the country after the very first exhibition to be held at TX Huaihai | Youth Energy Center, where more than 20 artists will kick the tires of the decommercialized shopping mall for young people. Visitors are invited to engage in the large-scale interactive installations to construct their own art scenes, and create their own art. Also, Cc Art Museum will build a priceless, unique and exclusive contemporary art cosmos, placing an academic contemporary art museum into the city core to popularize the youthfulness and the contemporary art, so as to demonstrate that contemporary art is a reflection of the city’s space-time extension. It can awaken the city core with artworks and reinvigorate it by offering each citizen the appreciation of beauty:

• turn their individual space-time into artistic works；
• model artistic works after their city’s space-time；
• write their own lives in the city’s stories, like street musicians’ depicting their harsh time with grief or joy in their compositions.

New York, NY; December 3, 2019. The inaugural Asia Society Triennial—a multi-venue festival and first of its kind in the United States devoted to celebrating Asian contemporary art, ideas, and innovation—will feature as its centerpiece an exhibition entitled We Do Not Dream Alone, on view at venues across New York City from June 5–August 9, 2020. The exhibition will present approximately 40 artists and include more than 18 newly commissioned works by participants from Asia and the Asian diaspora, many participating in a major New York museum exhibition for the first time. Cocurated by Boon Hui Tan, Vice President of Global Artistic Programs and Director of Asia Society Museum, who is also the Artistic Director of the Triennial, and Michelle Yun, Senior Curator of Asian Contemporary Art and Associate Director of the Asia Society Triennial, the exhibition will open to the public on Friday, June 5, 2020.

The initiative seeks to gather artists who are confronting timely issues of global concern. “Societies have been splintered by forces, both natural and political, that are exerting pressure on the ties that historically bound individuals, cultures, and communities. These conditions challenge artists to dream and imagine worlds sometimes serene and sometimes nightmarish,” says Mr. Tan. “Asia is not an isolated physical realm. It is not ‘out there’; it is here and everywhere. We are interconnected, and artists are key actors in reimagining these ties and how they enrich and help us make sense of our lives. We chose these artists because of their engagement with international affairs and their ability to transcend borders and other divides. Art in this moment must demonstrate our common humanity and express our ability to dream together. We designed the Triennial to foster conversations in art, policy, education, technology, and innovation. The exhibition and programs affirm the power of the artistic voice and its critical role in society today.

“The Asia Society Triennial advances the legacy of the Museum as a cultural vanguard for artistic voices from and about Asia. This new international platform builds on more than six decades of institutional heritage of diplomacy and systematic engagement between Asia and America,” says Agnes Hsu-Tang, Ph.D., Executive Chair of the Triennial and Chair of the Triennial Steering Committee. “We are galvanized by the enthusiastic participation of leading thinkers, policy makers, educators, and partnerships with fellow New York institutions to further proliferate the ideas and innovations that form the intellectual core of the Triennial.”

Sorry, this entry is only available in 中文.

Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction, it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology.

—— Peggy Phelan

In the eyes of a performance fundamentalist like Phelan, once this medium degrades to the object of reproduction of images would be fully degenerate. Behind this, one would likely find its supporting position of “dematerialization,” advocated by the second avant-garde art movement.  Where the medium is isomorphic to capitalism – only that such ideology seems somewhat flimsy before the realities of a new medium. Since the 1960s, performance became integral to media art, in the swings of live experience and reproduction, presentation and representation, we come to realize that what was once referred to as the classic “performance art”  often preserved in a mediated form. Video art is undoubtedly one of the critical loops. Recorded performance or performance videos derived into many complicated forms, the interactions between the body and technological media bring together two different types of discourse, where the organic and the artificial, the immediate and the documentary, the flesh and the screen generate unavoidable friction and integration. These are the points of departure for this exhibition.  

What “Embodied Mirror” attempts to explore is the intimate exchange between video art and performance in the history of Chinese contemporary art. At its inception, video art in China was integral to performance art. With time passing through the camera lens, Zhang Peili’s 30 x 30 (1988) allowed the viewer to observe the body objectively, from which to arrive at the impact of its metaphorical effects. Thereon, in the development of video art in China, many artists have adopted strategic approaches to extend the mediums of video art and performance for one another. This exhibition presents five themes, “Autobiography,” “Event,” “Dancer,” “Speaker,” and “Theater.” Each topic will address an independent clue in combing through the diverse and complex phenomenon of this overlapping domain.

“Embodied Mirror” points to the fact that video art does not necessarily provide the “stage” for performance, but a “mirror” or “exit” to access the world. It does not necessarily emancipate the body or to isolate it from the confines of social and historical discourses, but provides new strategic device or decoder. Where the body becomes the embodiment of “eternity” and “transmission” in the context of moving image, and the medium becomes a new scenario of life. At the same time, the subject’s response to reality translates into a shared media sensibility.  

“Word”, either in its spoken and written form, is an ancient method of information transmission, a carrier of historical records, and is also considered as an invention in the history of technological evolution. In the general contemporary visual experience, the word comes in the form of subtitles, voice-overs, advertising slogans, plain texts, captions, prefaces, and curatorial statements. The words attach meanings, and so is of value, and helps communication. The word can be edited, typeset, bolded, italicized, copied, pasted, and is the name of Microsoft’s iconic software. In this exhibition, the viewer does not see the object pointed to by the “named” words, rather, words are just words and they proliferate. Here, the word is fixed. It can be without meanings, but it is placed in the foreground, like an image to make itself visible.

In 1976, American art critic and art historian Annette Michelson and Rosalind Krauss founded the journal October. The journal name was taken from Eisenstein’s film October in 1927, which commemorated the 10th anniversary of the “October Revolution”. This is also the year in which Trotsky was deported.

Eisenstein is the witness of the “February Revolution” and “October Revolution”. The film is full of his understanding and perception of these two revolutions. In an article entitled The Dialectic view of Film Forms, Eisenstein said that all new things are born in the struggle of opposite contradictions. The”October Revolution” is the turning point of the era that changes the history of the world and creates anew system. Montage can vividly reveal the belligerence of the revolution. The “February Revolution” is essentially different from the “October Revolution”. The former is the bourgeois revolution, while the latter the proletariat. And the “dialectic montage” on the screen exactly shows the break between the two.

Eisenstein’s October is a masterpiece of the Soviet silent films. It not only creates a new art paradigm, but itself can also be regarded as a political action. It is this moment of revolutionary practice,theoretical exploration and artistic innovation that has become the starting point for the thinking and action of Michelson and Krauss. For them, the art revolution that took place in Soviet Union more than half a century ago radiated to all areas of literature, painting, architecture and film. And the birth of this artistic revolution and historical movement is civil war, factional disputes and economic crisis. In the first issue of October, the two editors stated that their purpose was not to make the myths or Hadith of the revolution immortal, nor to share this self-verification sadness, but to revisit the relationship between several arts in their own culture at this time, and based on this, to re-discuss their meanings and roles at this important historical juncture.

In fact, before the publication of October, Michelson had published a paper on Soviet avant-garde film Camera Lucida/Camera Obscura in the Artforum (January 1973). The article mainly discussed the works of Sergei Eisenstein and Stan Brakhage in different periods, especially focusing on the film language of Eisenstein’s October. Michelson pointed out that for Eisenstein, film is the inheritance of philosophy. He embodied aesthetic principles as an epistemology and eventually led to ethics. Therefore, “montage thinking cannot be separated from holistic thinking.” October is a thinking paradigm that constantly repeats “Film Form” and “Film Sense”. Eisenstein’s active and profound involvement in his own consciousness (to attribute himself to the historical process of the revolution) makes us aware that his work is some kind of vector in the process of historical transformation. Here, Michelson has clarified the integral relationship between Eisenstein’s film language in October (or the “epic style”) and revolutionary politics. For Michelson, film is only part of it. She also mentioned in the article that Eisenstein was nourished by poetry, painting and drama at that time. These arts have successively appeared, following the complex path around Russia’s “October Revolution”, from futurism to cubism and to constructivism. Only by studying Tatlin and Rodchenko, and how they understand cubism, can we have a deeper understanding of Eisenstein. Three years later, the second issue of October in 1976 published Eisenstein’s notes for a film of “Capital” in 1927-28, as well as the introduction and commentary of Michelson. In her comments, Michelson also mentioned October, which reads, “October  is Eisenstein’s most delicate and complicated effort in moving toward a thorough art film. …by changing the time flow of events and the surrounding narrative structure …it attracts new attention and induces inferences about spatial and temporal relationships.” Here, “the power of montage exists in the ‘primitive’ fact, and the ideal image is not fixed or ready-made, but produced. It gathers in the perception of audience.”

Until today, the top right corner of the cover of October still marks the four key words “Art”, “Theory”, “Criticism” and “Politics” as its basic positioning and value. And from the beginning, they made it clear that October is anti-commercial, anti-college and anti-institutional, which is also the difference between it and the abstract expressionism and formalism that has been commercialized at this time. But it is no coincidence that the revolutionary avant-garde in the early 20th century constituted their common narrative starting point. The first issue of October mentioned the Party Review, a left-wing publication with Trotskyism. The two editors did not deny the political nature of Party Review, but they felt that it was increasingly “ignoring innovation in art and criticism,” and even “encouraging the development of new vulgarism in the intellectual world.” It should not be overlooked that the Party Review is also themain theoretical position of Greenberg in the early days. In the early 1940s, he worked as a journal editor for several years, and his early most important commentary, Avant-Garde and Kitsch (1939), was published in the Party Review. In this article, Greenberg clearly opposed the kitsch academicism, commercialism and socialist realism. For him, the real representative of the avant-garde is abstract painting. The abstraction here seemingly refers to formalistic painting, but in fact it represents the entire avant-garde art movement opened by the 1917 “October Revolution”, including Mayakovsky and the LEF group in literature, the formalism and constructivism genre in painting, Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Dovshenko in the film industry, Taïroff and Meyerhold in drama. The spiritual leader of the avant-garde art movement is Trotskyism. Pi Li has done a very clear combing on this background: In 1924, Stalin assumed leadership over the Soviet Union following Lenin’s death. Trotsky was expelled from the party by Stalin in 1927 and was in exile. In 1928, in order to eliminate the influence of Trotsky, Stalin strengthened his control over the Third International. Stalinism gradually replaced Trotskyism, which also aroused the vigilance of many European progressive intellectuals who had supported the “October Revolution”. In the same year, Mussolini took office with the left-wing socialist banner. He ended the parliament in Italy and abolished all political groups and suppressed progressive intellectuals and the Communist Party. The rise of Mussolini made progressive intellectuals see the danger of fascism in Europe. From the late 1920s to the mid-1930s, intellectuals also tried to pin their hopes of eliminating fascism on Stalin. Even after Hitler came to power in 1933, they did not give up. However, Stalin and Hitler signed the Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in August 1939 and then secretly divided Poland. The Treaty led to the complete disillusionment of European progressive intellectuals’ ideals of Soviet Union and Stalinism, which in their view was the confluence of fascism and Stalinism. When they thought of the exile of constructivist artists by the Soviet Union, they felt that Stalinism was almost synonymous with fascism. Thus, the honeymoon period of modernism and communism has come to an end at this moment.

Greenberg published the article Avant-Garde and Kitsch in 1939, which should not be a coincidence. Although Greenberg criticized socialist realism and fascist art, he did not give up revolutionary politics and modernism. In other words, Trotskyism is the background of his theory. At the end of the article, he said: “Today we no longer look toward socialism for a new culture-as inevitably as one will appear, once we do have socialism. Today we look to socialism simply for the preservation of whatever living culture we have right now.” Socialism here is not Stalin’s socialism, but Trotsky’s socialism. About 20 years later, in a footnote in New York Painting Only Yesterday (1957), Greenberg wrote: “Though that is not all, by far, that there was politics in art in those years; someday it will have to be told how ‘anti-Stalinism,’ which started out more or less as ‘Trotskyism,’ turned into art for art’s sake, and thereby cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come.” This has already clarified his relationship with Trotskyism, and the reason why it was placed in a footnote may be to “deceive the public”. After all, the entire United States has not yet come out of the shadow of McCarthyism.

As mentioned earlier, Trotsky was deported in 1927 and began his exile. In the same year, Eisenstein completed the film October which was to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the “October Revolution.” It is worth mentioning that Trotsky published an important long essay entitled Lessons ofOctober in 1924. He systematically combed and reviewed issues like “the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasants”, “July Days, Kornilov affair” and “Soviet’s ‘legality'” since the 1917 “October Revolution” (including the “February Revolution”) in the essay. On this basis, the need for the “Bolschevization” of the Communist International was reiterated – an indisputable and definitive task. He said: “The Bolsheviks are not just a doctrine but a revolutionary education system for the proletarian revolution……’This is Hegel, this is the wisdom in the book, and this is the whole meaning of philosophy! ……'” Trotsky finally mentioned Hegel. Coincidentally, Eisenstein’s so-called “dialectical montage”, that is, “contradictory opposites” and “natural unity” are consistent with Hegel’s dialectics, which both enters a new “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” by the “thesis-antithesis-synthesis.” By analogy, contradictions spiral up and develop in constant conflicts. I don’t know if Eisenstein’s October comes directly from Trotsky’s long essay, but there is indeed an intrinsic connection between the two. Half a century later, Michelson and Krauss chose it as one of their motivations to found the October journal. The “October Revolution”, Eisenstein and (early) Greenberg together formed the starting point for their actions. At this time, the United States and the Soviet Union are in the cold war. But it is clear that October doesn’t favor either of them. What it truly recognizes is the Fourth International: “Trotskyism.”

Although Greenberg also mentioned the practice part of modernism, from the end of the 1940s to around the 1960s, he rarely mentioned how modernism could be a revolutionary political movement, nor the criticism of the bourgeoisie and kitsch. An important reason that can’t be ignored is the cleaning of McCarthyism in the early 1950-54. In some sense, it was McCarthy’s purge that forced Greenberg to abandon revolutionary politics, but only committed to constructing a set of “closed” formalist discourses, which evolved into a set of monopolar hegemonic narratives. However, this discourse quickly colluded with the rising art market and somewhat echoed the neoliberal ideology that dominated the mainstream and expanded globally. It was also during this period that the voices of anti-formalistic hegemony accompanying the wave of civil rights movement, anti-war movement and anti-cultural movement were upsurging. In particular, the rise of conceptual art and its “dematerialization” movement eventually led to the withdrawal of formalism. The art world was looking forward to a new revolution, and October was undoubtedly part of it. As Greenberg said in the article Avant-Garde and Kitsch: “Where there is an avant-garde, generally we also find a rear-guard.” This sentence can also be said: where there is a guard, there is avant-garde.

Michelson died of illness at the age of 97 in September 2018, while old Krauss is still very sprightly. The October journal has gone through more than 40 years of history. Although today’s art criticism, art media and even the entire art ecology have changed from the past, October is still outstanding, as it’s not only a revolution in art criticism and art cognition, but also a political movement itself. If this is the meaning of the birth of the October journal, then today’s question is, can we find an identical or similar (or can we return to the) starting point for action? Perhaps we must also reiterate Trotsky’s question 90 years ago: “What is permanent revolution?”

At this new historical juncture today, our exhibition “Corner Square Montage” hopes to return to the avant-garde moment again. The exhibition was curated by the art director of Surplus Space, Lu Mingjun. We specially invited Tang Xiaohe, Wang Jianwei, Chen Chieh-Jen, Xu Zhen, Zhang Ding, Shi Qing, Gong Jian, Li Yu + Liu Bo, Lang Xuebo, Li Liao, Hu Wei and Wu Hao, hoping that through the collisions of their works with different medias, languages and styles from different periods, a new kind of montage and political power will be generated.

Rossi & Rossi is delighted to present Theatre of New Gods, a group exhibition featuring twelve artists from Taiwan, Hong Kong and mainland China. Each offers his unique perspective in observing the relationship between god and people, constituting a cultural kaleidoscope for a glimpse into the various developments of the same religious belief under different trajectories in history.

Theatre of New Godsis an idea inspired by a field trip to research the folk culture in Tainan by the curator, Chris Wan Feng. The rich diversity of folk religious activities, especially with their respective theatrical rituals and timeless architectonic environs, serve as a reminder that the research in religions can help trace the course of changes in human society and mirror the context where the culture of today is being constantly shaped, portrayed and re-interpreted. If we were to think that religion is rooted in the spiritual interaction between deities and the human individual or collective and in the constant re-imagination of such experience, we must acknowledge “divinity” as such is still being actively renewed and re-created. The “new gods” in this sense are being reshaped in the day-to-day theatrical performances, prompting us to probe into the humanity and the human life embedded in it.

Shanghai artist Xu Zhen®(b. 1977) often approaches contemporary Chinese social phenomenon in his signature witty and playful manner. The exhibition features one of his small bodhisattva sculptures placed diagonally across the puppet theatre stage.

The exhibition layout is reminiscent of the continuum of space in Chinese temples, indicating the return to and recurrence of history. The show will be accompanied by a series of workshops, seminars and publications, in an attempt to renew the discussion and the re-imagination of religiosity, beliefs and folk culture.

Joseph Beuys declared: “Everyone is an artist” and Andy Warhol said “In the future, everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes”, these masters are long gone but the predictions stayed. More than thirty years after, these two prophecies came to us and constitute our reality. Facing this diversified, tumultuous and ever-changing world, art is intensively seeking for new forms of expression. Curated by the artist Xu Zhen, and with the philosopher Lu Xinghua as academic advisor, the exhibition “Wild Metropolis” will showcase this continuously mutating reality, presenting the diversified status quo of the virtual digital world in relation to urbanization development, and will reveal a pure state of contemporary cultural imagination.

Here the term “Wild” not only refers to the barbarism of the surrounding reality, the cultural environment without notions of classes and borders, but also to the growth of a popular network culture. Therefore, “Wild Metropolis” observes and excavates status quo without restrictions through cultural investigations and social researches. At the core of this exhibition, various topics such as the reality of virtualization, the capitalization of culture, big data calculations, the consequences of national branding, individual fragmentation and more will be addressed, while hotspots that are modifying the directions and dimensions of life will be explored in depth.

“Wild Metropolis” not only features international artists standing at the forefront of new contemporary art trends, it also includes cross-disciplinary artists such as musicians and fashion designers. Installations, performances, video works, media art and digital art will be exhibited transcending traditions and reflecting youthful expression in a spectacle manner. During that specific period, the exhibition venue will be designed in a dynamic platform alternating between contemporary art exhibition and experimental music stage, proposing an unprecedented experience to the viewers. The show will trigger visitors to explore how mass consumer cultural products are being produced, how to become a member of a social civilization, how to influence other cultural developments and other themes.

“Wild Metropolis” will gather various groups of people, from the perspective of humanities and sociology, to show creation and imagination, it will constitute a forward-looking exhibition of mixed reality and vision of the future.

James Cohan is pleased to present James Cohan: Twenty Years, a special group exhibition celebrating the gallery’s twentieth anniversary. On view from November 1 through December 20 at James Cohan’s Tribeca and Lower East Side gallery spaces, the exhibition will feature new or historical works by every artist in the current program. James Cohan will host opening receptions on Friday, November 1 from 5-7 PM at 291 Grand Street and 6-8 PM at 48 Walker Street.

James Cohan opened on West 57th Street in the fall of 1999 with an exhibition of early work by Gilbert and George, followed by the gallery’s first exhibitions with artists Trenton Doyle Hancock, Robert Smithson, Fred Tomaselli, and Bill Viola. The gallery moved to 533 West 26th Street in 2002, where it mounted important exhibitions by artists including Spencer Finch, Beatriz Milhazes, Yun-Fei Ji, Yinka Shonibare CBE, Xu Zhen, etc. More recently in Chelsea, the gallery presented exhibitions by newer additions to the program such as Kathy Butterly, Federico Herrero, Mernet Larsen, Lee Mullican, and Elias Sime amongst others. James Cohan operated an additional location in Shanghai, China from 2008 through 2015. This space functioned as a locus of cross-cultural exchange, introducing American and European contemporary art to a Chinese audience.

In November 2015, James Cohan opened a second New York location at 291 Grand Street. Its inaugural exhibition in the Lower East Side neighborhood was a revelatory exhibition of early Robert Smithson drawings. This location has allowed the gallery to expand its dynamic programming with focused and experimental exhibitions of gallery artists and curated shows.

The gallery’s twentieth year marks an exciting new chapter in its history, beginning with the relocation of its flagship space to 48 Walker Street in September. This new location opened with an exhibition by Josiah McElheny, his first with the gallery. In this new space, James Cohan will present upcoming exhibitions of recent additions to the gallery roster, including Teresa Margolles, Firelei Báez, and Grace Weaver.

James Cohan: Twenty Years will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue that documents the achievements of the artists in the program, to be published in Spring 2020. Featuring an essay by Gregory Volk alongside contributions from several gallery artists, this major publication commemorates the gallery’s rich history and bright future, celebrating the artists who have made it all possible.

Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art is pleased to announce the launch of A Turning Moment: Urban Narratives in Chinese Contemporary Art, 1995-2019 from October 18 to December 15, 2019. Curated by Azure Wu, the exhibition, featuring the intersection of public space and contemporary art practice, responds to Chinese contemporary art practice themed on urban streets since mid-1990s. During the exhibition period, contemporary art works covering painting, photography, video, sculpture and installation from 17 artists are slated to be on display both inside the museum and outside the museum, on Duolun Road. The exhibition is free to the public.

Themed as A Turning Moment, the exhibition focuses on the artists’ progressive journey through the city streets, walking and wandering. Showing the artists’ critical thinking on social environment, urban space and people, their works present individual and collective memories and experiences, and bring changes to everyday life.

In the 1990s, with the acceleration of China’s urbanization process, artists started to pay attention and explore urban public space. They have changed the way they used to perceive and intervene in public space and further expanded the scope of cultural and aesthetic expression. When art enters into places or territories where people are familiar with, streets not only keep the record of tracks of artistic concepts and practice changes but also become the witness of city development and public culture, which highlights the peculiarity and significance of community life. The exhibition attempts to build a bridge between museum and community, artist and public with art.

A special project called Archives of Dial 62761232, A Portable Exhibition will be introduced to the public at the same time, which is its first time to be presented in the domestic museum. BizArt initiated a special take-out exhibition in September, 2004, in which 42 artists as well as 15 deliverymen took part. During that exhibition, Shanghai citizens could call express company to ask a deliveryman to bring the exhibition in a suitcase. 15 years passing by, we will review the inspiring art project through archives of that year to show the artists’ unique vision and foresight in times of great change and redefine the relationship among art, public and the city. Great thanks to Shanghart Gallery for the literature files.

The exhibition will participate in the joint exhibition of 2019 Shanghai Urban Space Art Season and 1+16 Sharing Program of Museums and Citizens. Aiming to upgrade art aesthetic education, this event is part of an ongoing effort to constantly improve the internal aesthetic and humanistic quality of citizens.

We hope to attract more citizens to participate in the interaction through the art works of various kind, expanding thinking space for the development of Duolun Road. Perceiving the texture of contemporary cities, digging into details of modern life, stimulating creative thinking, here, artists and visitors are all modern city walkers, making it possible to reshape urban space and public life.

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“Free Prism Video Wave” traverses the changes in Chinese video art over the past 30 years from beginning with the liberation of ideology and enlightenment since the 1980s to the global consumerism era nowadays, inviting 17 artists who active in different periods and influential as well as  representative in the field of video creation. The exhibition tries to pass through the longitudinal timeline and emphasizes the investigation of outstanding creative individuals, which not only traces back to the rich folds and facets of history, but also presents the refreshing and exciting ideas brought about by the current social and technological process.

Have you eaten?

For SGA`s re-opening and re-launch, for the first time in the history of Three on the Bund, a major exhibition will take place throughout the whole building – Pal(ate)/ette/.

From September 20th – October 31st, over 100 objects by 69 artists will be displayed in a salon-style exhibition within SGA and peppered throughout Three on the Bund`s restaurants and bars, in dialogue with the exhibits and their surroundings.

The exhibition also marks the debut of nrm`s curatorial project as Artistic Director of the new SGA.

Pal(ate)/ette/ will show artworks throughout Three on the Bund with the exhibition`s core display in SGA. Curated by nrm, Pal(ate)/ette/ reflects the spectrum of associations of the homonyms Palate and Palette; a synthesis of the senses – taste sight hearing smell and touch – and presenting Three on the Bund as a cultural whole.

The exhibition title relates to two homophones. While ‘Palate’ refers to the ability to distinguish between and appreciate different flavours related to food as well as relishing its taste, ‘Palette’ denotes a broad range of colours or simply the board upon which artists mix pigments. Both symbolise the most significant motif in Pal(ate)/ette/, both as metaphor and experience.

Pal(ate)/ette/ involves two distinct but intertwined worlds, those of taste and color. These worlds interact to create relations between the artists, artworks, and the halls and salons of Three on the Bund, and Shanghai itself. The exhibition explores the richness of aesthetics and materiality in colouration and the sensuousness of food and its ingredients, as medium, subject matter, in its devouring, and as communicative and social habits, experiences for which Three on the Bund is famous. The exhibition is a sumptuous journey that delights us into imagining anew the limitless ways to plunge into uncanny and alluring experiences that tease our senses of sight, smell and space, immersive experiences, encompassing and meditative. This fluidity brings the artworks to resonate with each other, adding to and ultimately enriching one another.

Pal(ate)/ette/ finally is a journey through synesthesia. Colour and taste are always elements of the experience of art and food, affecting the sensations of the person moving in and through the show as much as ordinary life. Pal(ate)/ette/ embodies this.

Wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling, in corners and cabinets, Pal(ate)/ette/ does not merely serve the cause of art, food and drink. It is a social organ with a life of its own, a meandering walk through Three on the Bund, its history, restaurants, and its gallery, to stimulate and engage a wide range of artgoers, eaters, drinkers and conversationalists, cultivating awareness from an amalgam of expressive invention and poetic association, memory and madeleine.

THEN celebrates the great adventure of White Rabbit’s first decade: ten exciting years of showcasing the creative energy, daring and technical accomplishment of Chinese contemporary art. The gallery’s tenth anniversary exhibition presents works by more than 60 artists, all produced during the first ten years of Judith Neilson’s private collection (2000-2010). Some were highlights of the very first White Rabbit exhibition, in 2009.

Sweeping social change at the end of the 20th century meant that Chinese artists at the start of the 21st century found themselves in a world that had been utterly transformed. The responded by embracing new influences from overseas and from within China. Re-examining and reinventing Chinese art traditions, playfully fusing them with the best of international contemporaneity, they created an eclectic mash-up of past and present, and east and west.

Their provocative work celebrated – and satirised – a society in flux. A fire-engine red, pig-like care with an 11-metre protruding tongue; a giant pair of pink, neon-lit underpants with a soundtrack of Shanghai love songs; a dusty minivan that ‘breaths’; an installation of 1500 knitted strawberries – the sheer inventiveness of artists revelling in new-found freedoms challenged cliched perceptions of China. From embroidered portraits of grinning world leaders to American and Chinese flags made of corporate logos, the artists in THEN examine the paradoxes of a nation on fast forward.

The first decade of the ‘Chinese century’ was the moment that Chinese contemporary art exploded into the international arena. THEN tells the story of White Rabbit’s first, boldly adventurous decade – a journey into the unknown that parallels the ambition and audacity of contemporary Chinese art.

THEN is drawn completely from Judith Neilson’s renowned White Rabbit Collection.

Conceived by leading Chinese Contemporary artist XU ZHEN® , XUZHEN SUPERMARKET is one of the artist’s most critically acclaimed works, which satirises consumerism and global capitalism. First exhibited in 2016, XUZHEN SUPERMARKET evolved from its predecessor, the SHANGHART SUPERMARKET, which debuted at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2007 and was exhibited subsequently at numerous locations across the world. An installation will be open for public participation during the auction previews in Shanghai (1 – 2 September) and Beijing (4 – 5 September), before the work is presented in Hong Kong (28 – 30 September) for exhibition only.

Artist XU ZHEN® commented: ‘This truly ground-breaking collaboration with Sotheby’s marks the first time in auction history a supermarket [concept] will go on sale. I am delighted that XUZHEN SUPERMARKET will be offered at an international auction, which escalates the work to a new level of breaking boundaries and disrupting preconceptions about art and daily life.’

A humorous yet subversive work, XUZHEN SUPERMARKET replicates a Chinese convenience store, housing a functioning cash register and an assortment of familiar merchandise available for visitors to purchase at normal retail prices. From tubes of Colgate toothpaste to bottles of local Kweichow Moutai liquor, each item lacks content, consisting only of its packaging. For visitors, each act of purchasing – or not purchasing – and corresponding thought-process, contributes to a playful yet penetrating critique on consumerism, advertising and global capitalism. The fact that the work is – for the first time – offered for sale at auction adds to the irony. The buyer of the XUZHEN SUPERMARKET will obtain the right to commission new physical recreations and enactments of the concept, to be executed by XU ZHEN® . The current work on offer is the first and only edition of XUZHEN SUPERMARKET to ever come to market.

Yuki Terase, Sotheby’s Head of Contemporary Art, Asia, commented: ‘We are thrilled about this innovative collaboration with XU ZHEN® , who has a significant career spanning from being the youngest Chinese artist to participate in the Venice Biennale, to showing at the Guggenheim’s major exhibition of Chinese Contemporary Art last year. A concept can be art, and with Conceptual Art like XUZHEN SUPERMARKET, we want to show the world a different, fresh, and stimulating side of Chinese Contemporary Art. This category is still new to auction – even on a global scale – and is therefore a testament to Sotheby’s creative spirit and our capacity to push new frontiers to expand the variety of art in the region.’

The works in this exhibition varied from paintings, sculptures, installations, to new media works.  Behind the different presentation ,curator reveals the similar explorations towards the concept of dreams. Artists with unique creation inspired viewers to think under context of current society, conflict and reconciliation. Through the exhibition, audience can make infinite and boundless imagination and reflections, and engage in the multi-dimensional experience.

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Art Basel brought together 290 premier galleries, presenting works ranging from early 20th century Modern art to the most contemporary pieces.While galleries from Europe continued to be strongly represented, the show featured returning and new exhibitors from across the globe, including Asia, Europe, North and South America, the Middle East, and Africa.

Extreme Mix – 2019 Guangzhou Airport Biennale, curated by Jiang Ning and Lu Mingjun with Xu Zhen and Fan Bo as art consultants, will officially open to the public on June 1 at Guangzhou Wings – Airport Cultural Town, a rising community of art and culture that builds upon Fenghe Village, Renhe Town of Guangzhou’s Baiyun District. The contemporary art feast will run for three months before it wraps up on August 31.

The biennale gathers 81 artists/collectives from both home and abroad, putting on display more than 100 pieces/groups of artworks that cover various genres like painting, installation, sculpture, videography and performance. Among them, more than 40 are specially commissioned for the exhibition by building on the exclusive local cultural landscape. The event will also debut 6 pieces/groups of large-scale installations by celebrated artists like Olafur Eliasson and Yayoi Kusama that have never been exhibited in China before. In addition, several pieces/groups of artworks will remain at Fenghe Village as a permanent scene, empowering contemporary art to involve itself with the community and the villager’s day-to-day life.

For the inaugural edition of the Guangzhou Airport Biennale, in hopes of creating a locally-based “cultural hybrid” and unique landscape, its curatorial team is committed to exploring a brand-new “biennale plus” mode, which promotes the organic integration between regional folk culture and contemporary art .

Extreme Mix: Empower the cultures in rural area with contemporary art

Picking “Extreme Mix” as the theme of the first Airport Biennale, curator Lu Mingjun notes: “Thanks to its suburban location and unique ecology, the Airport Cultural Town stands out as a ‘cultural hybrid’ in China’s urbanization process”. Being both a community with rich traditional culture and China’s first portal city that opened to the globe, Guangzhou, the city where the Airport Biennale will be held, is also featured by its hybridity.

Lu continues to point out that ‘hybridity’ has been a common discourse and feature in the global contemporary art scene, which has also risen to become a cultural logic of globalization. This is the reason why Lu hopes to re-convey avant-garde cultural dynamics against today’s dwindling globalization and mounting barriers by presenting Extreme Mix.

Jiang Ning, one of the curators of the Biennale, had a part of his life spent in Guangzhou’s Renhe Town during the 1990s. Compared with China’s economic take-off over the past three decades, many Chinese villages like Renhe Town have, however, been revealing an increasingly impoverished state regarding their cultural life. Therefore, Jiang believes that the Airport Biennale will help to instill cultural confidence into Renhe Town in the best possible approach. He says: “We hope that the biennale can help foster a cultural and artistic atmosphere for Renhe Town, make a positive impact on the locals’ way of thinking and transforms this place into a cultural landmark where art events keep taking place.”

Innovation of Exhibition Modes: A “biennale plus” approach

Cultural Inheritance: Respecting local customs and natural environment

Extreme Mix – 2019 Guangzhou Airport Biennale is also committed to exploring a new “biennale plus” mode – it offers four theme programs, namely “Site-specific Spatial Intervention”, “Creative Bazaar”, “Traditional Culture” and “Airport Elements”, to fully showcase the binding power of public art. At the same time, it also embraces a “3+365” timeline to ensure a truly long-lasting art event – “3” represents the months that the exhibition is set to last and “365” symbolizes the plans of art institutions, such as ShanghART Gallery, MadeIn Company and Zhang Ding Control Club, to sustain their presence at Renhe Town for at least a year. It demonstrates the curatorial team’s unremitting efforts to synergize local and non-local art institutions with the purpose of establishing an academic and cultural atmosphere for contemporary art in Guangzhou.

Throughout the installation process, the biennale bears in mind that the natural and cultural landscapes of Renhe Town shall not be subjected to any forced changes. It seeks to preserve the indigenous culture of Lingnan Area, including local sceneries, customs and dialects, while maintaining the integrity of artists’ creative threads. Given such a precondition that the right of local villagers shall be fully respected, the biennale has successfully stimulated a direct link between artistic creations and the features of local culture and space, which also renders a sense of continuum to these artworks.

Works by artists Fan Bo and Qiao Xiaoguang will be kept as permanent experienceable exhibits, while Bi Rongrong’s Ideal & Useless Space (II) not only further extends her exploration over retail space, but also uses a new form of landscape to metaphorize the long-term fermentation beneath the specific architectural façade of handshaking buildings. Other artists that have contributed to the renovation of Fenghe Village’s handshaking buildings include Ding Yi, Lu Pingyuan and Li Naihan.

Meanwhile, the biennale wishes to throw light on the value of contemporary art by incorporating it with local buildings and commercial industry by means of presenting site-specific artworks for renovated spaces, aiming to promote and diversify the local economy. For example, GOLD CAN MOVE THE GOD, a provocative installation by artist Zhang Ding, not only inherits the artistic and experimental attributes of his creative series, but also creates sustained commercial values for the town as the bar will continue to run in the future.

40,000m² outdoor open space that presents artistic and cultural congregation for airport town

The majority of this year’s Airport Biennale will be hosted at the outdoor open space of Guangzhou Wings – Airport Cultural Town, where the curatorial team divides the more than 40,000-square-meter space into four area (A, B, C and D). The renovated Hongyi Ancestral Temple in Area A shelters works by celebrated artists; Area B stages around ten large-scale outdoor installations; Area C houses a concentration of site-specific installations, which belongs to the special curated “Site-Specific Spatial Intervention” program that takes the compatibility between artworks and space into consideration.

Area D is reserved for the biennale’s new media exhibits, where 14 new media spaces have been co-established by artists to renovate the village’s long delipidated houses. The contrast thus presented will not only impose visual impact upon the spectators, but also initiates contemplation and experimentation upon contemporary culture. Works from more than 30 artists, including Wu Juehui, Ge Yulu, Tatsuo Miyajima, Ryan Gander and emerging artist Steph Li, a former teamLab member will be on display. Exhibits installed at the new media area stands out by offering a young perspective into contemporary art forms, triggering new sensual experiences atop buildings that have witnessed the ups and downs of several generations.

The Airport Biennale will also present a special unit – “Fenghe Impression Exhibition” which features the cultural heritage of Fenghe village. Lingnan’s folk culture will be embodied through popular forms, creating a new linkage between the village and its historic heritage.

However, the Airport Biennale targets at not merely a short-lived art feast. It proposes disruptive and visionary imaginations that are well-aligned with local realities. In a macro-environment where art dynamics can be leveraged to revitalize regional economy, the biennale will take advantage of a mode that differentiates from other international art exhibitions. The unique concepts and organizational forms aim to establish a new, unique focal point that caters to the airport town’s history, function and characteristics.

Art collecting is a passion. The collector finds a work of art, falls in love with it, and cannot let it go. And that process repeats itself again and again. The role of collectors in western culture is complex. They explore art history in their own way, picking and choosing, taking a stance. Like artists, collectors act as individuals. It is their personal taste that determines the selection.

In recent years there has been an increasing desire among private collectors to build and establish their own museums that can rival not only other private collections but also public museums in terms of acquisitions, exhibition making and knowledge production. In fact, private collectors are now more than ever preoccupied with telling their own stories of contemporary art. Today, we have an interesting polyphony of voices that are creating diverse micro-narratives in a variety of formats, scales and structures, offering a range of different meanings for contemporary art.

Hans Rasmus Astrup, the man behind the Astrup Fearnley Collection, is one of these passionate collectors. His clear intentions and structured approach to building a group of international contemporary artworks have resulted in an ambitious, coherent collection that is both world class and complementary to those of other museums in Norway and the Nordic countries in general.

This exhibition will present a large and varied selection of Norwegian and international art works that have been acquired during the past few years.

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SHARJAH, United Arab Emirates–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, Member of the Supreme Council and Ruler of Sharjah, the 14^th edition of Sharjah Biennial (SB14) commenced on Thursday at the Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF) Art Spaces in Al Mureijah.

SB14, held this year under the title ‘Leaving the Echo Chamber’, will feature three distinct exhibitions; Zoe Butt’s exhibition Journey Beyond The Arrow; Omar Kholeif’s Making New Time and Claire Tancons’ Look for Me All Around You.

SB14 features over 80 established and emerging artists from around the globe, including over 60 new commissions, as well as many never-before-seen works that will displayed in various locations across the emirate of Sharjah, the Mureijah Square and the Arts Square, as well as in SAF’s studios in Al Hamriyah, in the East Coast city of Kalba and other spaces in Umm Al Quwain.

The Sharjah Art Foundation is also organizing the 12^th edition of the March Meeting 2019, from 9 -11 March, 2019 at the Sharjah Institute of Theatrical Arts in Al Mureijah, which will include panel discussions, performances, films and artistic productions, in line with the themes of the three exhibitions at SB14.

SB14 will also feature independent film screenings for film lovers in the UAE; as well as educational programs, aligned with this year’s theme ‘Leaving the Echo Chamber’.

Programs intended for adults and children include workshops on photography, drawing, writing and theatrical performance. Other workshops for ‘People of determination’ provide a variety of topics on photography skills, puppetry, drawing, musical instruments and Islamic art; while the schools and youth centers’ program offers a set of workshops and field trips on topics such as abstract art, architecture and storytelling.

SB14 is made possible through the generous support of Van Cleef & Arples (Gold Sponsor) and Crescent Petroleum (Silver Sponsor). In-kind support is offered by Sharjah Municipality, Sharjah Roads and Transport Authority; Sharjah Electricity and Water Authority; Bee’ah, the Dubai Economic Department; the Institut Français in the UAE and the Institut Français in France.

The Sharjah Biennial is the most important cultural event in the Arab world and, since its inception in 1993, has been instrumental in supporting the arts landscape in the UAE and the region.

“Whatever phrases you may pursue in your lyrical paths, please don’t forget that you yourself emanate from the ongoing ornamentation of the corpus of signs, that you are actually a sign within this corpus of signs, and that everything that you do becomes inscribed as a sign within the universal ornament. So if you’re getting blown around in a storm of signs, just hook yourself around the tendril which pleases you best.”

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This is the story of a dream.

Imagine a world crowded with old master portraits, ancient Roman marble heads, gold reliquaries filled with zombies’ hands and hearts, blooming carpets and colorful tapestry, baby dragons, and unknown creatures’ skulls.

This dream belongs to Gucci’s visionary creative director, Alessandro Michele. As the poet did, midway upon the journey of our life, he found himself within a forest dark. But he hasn’t lost the straightforward pathway: he simply never followed it, deliberately choosing the road less traveled.

On this path, there is a man, tall and lean in his jeans and a tight T-shirt, salt-and-pepper gray hair, and a long, puzzled face anchored by a propitious Roman nose: Maurizio Cattelan, tireless artist, affected by a serious image hoarding disorder. The perfect partner in crime.

Maurizio Cattelan is dreaming of hanging around Shanghai for inspiration. Their shared dream world is staged in the Chinese metropolis, homeland to “the copy is the original” thought.

On 10th October at the Yuz Museum in Shanghai the dream is becoming true: an exhibition project curated by Maurizio Cattelan, titled The Artist is Present, after Marina Abramovic’s celebrated solo show at MoMA. From its very first line, The Artist is Present is an act of appropriation. The least you can expect for an exhibition project curated by Maurizio Cattelan and powered by Alessandro Michele’s Gucci.

Both are very well aware that complex relationship between image and reality, representation and presentation have been one of the most important topics in art. And they both well know that it is truer today, as we all are at the same time the generous feeder and the avid consumer of a world of simulacra, in between illusion and reality. Rooted in this permanent visual deluge, The Artist is Present focuses on artists projects that propose simulation and copy as a paradigm of global culture. The title itself aims at demonstrating how the act of copying can be considered a noble act of creation, featuring the same artistic value as the original.

The Artist is Present features a selection of more than thirty artists, foreign and Chinese, that will show both site-specific and existing works that question the most hallowed principles of art in the modern era: originality, intention, expression. In an era where everything is reproduced, nothing really keeps the aura of originality, suggesting the urgency to overcome an old concept of counterfeit in favor of a new way to conceive copy as an indispensable tool for facing our contemporary society.

If it’s a fact that a life-size replica of the Sistine Chapel is travelling around Mexico, and it is visited as if it was a pop singer on tour, The Artist is Present might be seen as a manifesto based the concept that appreciation of a work relies on engagement with ideas rather than on simple visual gratification of an original artwork.

The show explores how originality can be reached through the act of repetition, and how originals themselves can be preserved through copies. It consists in a physical immersion in the reign of imitation, a land where the core values that used to identify with an artwork in the Western world, such as originality, intention, expression, and authorship, are dismantled. As Maurizio Cattelan said: “Copying is like a blasphemy: it could seem not respectful towards God, but at the same time is the significative recognition of its existence”.

In The Artist is Present the nature of the creative process itself results deconstructed, and with it, the idea of godlike creation: the only belief remains the conviction that originality is definitely overrated. Artists on show: John Ahearn (with Rigoberto Torres), John Armleder, Nina Beier, Brian Belott, Anne Collier, Jose Dávila, Wim Delvoye, Eric Doeringer, Sayre Gomez, Andy Hung Chi-Kin, Matt Johnson, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Kapwani Kiwanga, Ragnar Kjartansson, Josh Kline, Louise Lawler, Margaret Lee, Hannah Levy, Lu Pingyuan, Ma Jun, Nevine Mahmoud, Aleksandra Mir, Pentti Monkkonen, Philippe Parreno, Jon Rafman, Mika Rottenberg, Reena Spaulings, Sturtevant, Superflex, Oscar Tuazon, Kaari Upson, Gillian Wearing, Lawrence Weiner, Christopher Williams, XU ZHEN®, Yan Pei-Ming, Damon Zucconi.

The October Salon was founded in 1960 by the City of Belgrade. Originally conceived as a platform for Serbian fine arts, it has lately become the largest annual international exhibition of contemporary art in the country, staged on the basis of a curatorial concept selected by the Board of The October Salon. Since 2004 when it became international, the October Salon aims to profile Serbia and the city of Belgrade within the framework of the international contemporary art scene and to strengthen the collaborations between local and international art scenes, professionals and public. Among the curators of the international editions of the Salon we find professionals such as Anda Rottenberg, Darka Radosavljević, Réné Block, Lóránd Hegyi, Bojana Pejić, Branislava Andjelković, Johan Pousette, Celia Prado, Alenka Gregorič, Galit Eilat, Mika Hannula, Branislav Dimitrijević, curatorial group Red Mined, Nicolaus Schlafhausen, Vanessa Muller, David Elliott.

This is Shanghai

This is Shanghai, explores and celebrates the relationship between Liverpool and its twin city in China, to reflect urban and cultural evolution and transformation through ten leading and emerging contemporary artists from China. Presented by Culture Liverpool in partnership with Open Eye Gallery, the works are staged at locations across Liverpool’s iconic Waterfront. The Cunard Building plays host to the This is Shanghai gallery and pieces will also be shown at Tate Exchange Liverpool, Mann Island and the Museum of Liverpool. With select works also exhibited within the public realm, this project has been developed to explore and reimagine Shanghai’s everyday reality, within the city of Liverpool.

Taking place at the same time as the 10th Liverpool Biennial, This is Shanghai is the second of three chapters of China Dream, a festival designed to explore and understand contemporary Chinese culture, the celebrations for Liverpool 2018, marking the city’s tenth anniversary of holding the title of European Capital of Culture in 2008. Curator Jiang Jiehong is originally from Shanghai and has lived in the UK in 1998. Travelling regularly and working between the two countries in the last some twenty years, he has a unique understanding of cultural differences and exchanges. In this project, Jiang has invited artists Liang Yue, Lu Pingyuan, Shi Yong, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong, Yang Zhenzhong, Yu Ji, Yuan Gong, Zhang Peili and Zhou Xiaohu, who are either Shanghai natives or those who have migrated from the rest of China, to present an impression of Shanghai’s dynamic urban life and complex cultural identity to British audiences.

The exhibition introduces 43 international artists and represents the exploration of creative medium and artistic language of contemporary art. These artists reconstruct the relationship between subject and object in digital age through more than 60 pieces of visual arts, fashion, installations, sculptures, new media art, etc.This exhibition attempts to discuss the concept of physical substances,production processes, renewable forces , cycle of life and to re-examine the role of matter in everyday life.

In Beaufort 2018, curator Heidi Ballet highlighted the sea as an uncontrollable place, which at the same time connects us with the rest of the world. An underlying theme of this edition was the role of permanent monuments.

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A landmark can be a feature of aesthetic interest the natural landscape – ocean, mountain, temple, or an office tower within the cityscape. It can provide a wayfinding or gathering. Through the presentation of monumental installations, Lankmark speaks to both the literal, symbolic and social ways in which we look back on our histories, understand our present or envision our futures. The exhibition includes works from well-known artists such as Xu Bing, Huang Yongping, Sun Xun and YANG Fudong, and others b spanning different generations, perspectives and practices. Together, these works inspire dialogue about markers of time and space that has shaped our present.

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Tang Contemporary Art Beijing is proud to announce the opening of “Compounds of Aura,” a exhibition for artists He An, Xu Zhen-Produced by MadeIn Company and Zheng Guogu, and curated by Lu Mingjun on December 3, 2017.

Religious feeling and aimless movement do not resolve He An’s daily anxiety and impetuosity; they often collide, creating sparks of inspiration and almost-forgotten textures. Xu Zhen (MadeIn Company) unexpectedly transformed the four-thousand-year-old monument of Stonehenge into a stage for Chinese traditional martial arts performance. Giorgio Agamben called this an aura space—a mystery that cannot be expressed. However, the“compound” nature of this exhibition also tells us that this is not a personal mysticism, and not purely metaphysical.

“One could almost say that the 20th century was summed up a little early, in 1989, even as history since has proceeded apace.”
—Wang Hui, Historian

 

Art and China after 1989 presents work by 71 key artists and groups active across China and worldwide whose critical provocations aim to forge reality free from ideology, to establish the individual apart from the collective, and to define contemporary Chinese experience in universal terms. Bracketed by the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the Beijing Olympics in 2008, it surveys the culture of artistic experimentation during a time characterized by the onset of globalization and the rise of a newly powerful China on the world stage. The exhibition’s subtitle, Theater of the World, comes from an installation by the Xiamen-born, Paris-based artist Huang Yong Ping: a cage-like structure housing live reptiles and insects that coexist in a natural cycle of life, an apt spectacle of globalization’s symbiosis and raw contest.

For art and China, the year 1989 was both an end and a beginning. The June Fourth Tiananmen Incident signaled the end of a decade of relatively open political, intellectual, and artistic exploration. It also marked the start of reforms that would launch a new era of accelerated development, international connectedness, and individual possibility, albeit under authoritarian conditions. Artists were at once catalysts and skeptics of the massive changes unfolding around them. Using the critical stance and open-ended forms of international Conceptual art, they created performances, paintings, photography, installations, and video art, and initiated activist projects to engage directly with society. Their emergence during the 1990s and early 2000s coincided with the moment the Western art world began to look beyond its traditional centers, as the phenomenon of global contemporary art started to take shape. Chinese artists were crucial agents in this evolution.

Art and China after 1989 is organized in six chronological, thematic sections throughout the rotunda and on Tower Levels 5 and 7. For all the diversity the exhibition encompasses, the artists here have all sought to think beyond China’s political fray and simple East-West dogmas. This freedom of a “third space” has allowed for a vital distance, and a particular insight, as they contend with the legacies of Chinese history, international modernism, and global neoliberalism of the 1990s. Their rambunctious creativity can expand our ever-widening view of contemporary art and inspire new thinking at a moment when the questions they have faced—of identity, equality, ideology, and control—have pressing relevance.

This exhibition is organized by Alexandra Munroe, Samsung Senior Curator, Asian Art, and Senior Advisor, Global Arts, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; with guest cocurators Philip Tinari, Director, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; and Hou Hanru, Artistic Director, MAXXI, National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Rome.

SYDNEY, 8 MARCH 2017: In White Rabbit’s latest show, artists plunge into the darknessand emerge with brilliant new takes on tradition and modernity.

The ancient Chinese got their ink from smoky oil lamps, brushing away deposited soot and mixing it into a paste that hardened into “stones”. This black was pure, indelible and did not fade, and they fell in love with it. By adjusting the ink’s dilution, painters could create a multitude of shades, from jet black to palest dove grey. Black had always been the colour of mystery, night and the void. The better the artists got to know black ink, the more superficial, even gaudy, colour seemed. As the Daoist philosopher Laozi declared: “Colours cause the eye to go blind.” Black—utterly simple yet infinitely subtle—allowed one to see the truth.

Chinese artists no longer live in a simple, natural, orderly world. They get their blacks not just from ink stones but from printer cartridges, spray cans, propane torches, newsprint, polyester and steel. And they use blacks to convert realities the classical masters never dreamed of: oil spills, air pollution, megacities, mass production and political machinations.

The artists in this show don’t shun light or colour, but in using them they follow Laozi’s advice: “Know the white, but hold to the black.”  Containing more than ever, the dark also conceals more than ever. And it matters more than ever that we see.

THE DARK MATTERS features works by 34 artists; most are new acquisitions and most have never been shown in Australia. A sampling:

• Surreally playful photographs by the lateRen Hang.
• Lin Yan’s billowing ink-and-paper pollution cloud.
• The vast, waterfall-lined landscape ofJiang Pengyi’s Grace.
• Billennium Waves, a primordial slow-motion ocean by Tang Nannan.
• Grinding, Yang Mushi’s barbaric-looking ode to pointlessness.

Also on show: works by Feng Mengbo, Shao Fan, Lin Tianmiao, Cang Xin and Huang Po-Chih.

The White Rabbit Gallery was established in 2009 to share Judith Neilson’s private collection of 21st-century Chinese art with the public. The Gallery is a registered charitable institution funded solely by Judith Neilson.

The year 2017 marks the twelfth year since the establishment and sound subsequent growth of the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai. Since the start of this new year, the museum has started to display even greater vitality than ever before with its new vision to develop its customized and distinctive “Cross and Plus” operational model and foster such innovation within China and beyond its borders. Gathering Field – A Transmedia Art Exhibition is thus MoCA Shanghai’s starting event for the year, signaling its first step in realizing this vision as well as the museum’s prospective orientation toward such a transformation.

Yang Qingqing, a professor from Shanghai Theatre Academy’s College of Creative Studies, has been invited to act as the curator forMoCA Shanghai’s opening 2017 exhibition. With a selection of works from domestically and internationally renownedparticipating artists, this seasoned transmedia researcher and practitioneris expected to use a “Gathering Field” theme to reflect the core concept of the art form. According to Samuel Kung, director of the museum, “The prominence of ‘transmedia’ for this exhibition lies in the studies of humankind’s creative thinking as well as a broad exploration into artistic practice. Such an exploration may activate our inspirations and aspirations and break through the dichotomy between traditional and contemporary art.” It is worth mentioning that “I” Fantasie – Rencontre between Debussy and Du Liniang, a refreshing work that crosses the disciplinaryfields of theatre, film, and music, is included in this event to expand upon the oft assumed concept that a fine art museum is just a mere “white cube”, showing what such a venue can truly be all about.“This will also fully open the gates of MoCA Shanghai to a series of successive pieces of ‘Cross and Plus’ repertoire,” added Mr. Kung, “pooling the entirety of cultural and artistic variety within the dynamic fields of the museum.”

Yang holds that “Transmedia” is a high-level form of “artistic entanglement”. “Trans” here signifiesthe meeting and combination of artistic thought, theaccumulation of inventive energy, and the enhanced materialization of the human sensory experiencewithin either the real or virtual world. Many unprecedented forms of art havethereby made their wayonto the stage as a result, and these include the trans-narrative, trans-reality, trans-sculpture, trans-fixation, trans-behavior, trans-incidental, and trans-language, among many, many others.

“Transmedia” is a concept, a methodology, and, before anything else, “the free interchanges of the vast range of human senses”. Joseph Beuys once said, “Art is the only power to free humankind from all repression.” From my point of view, it is no exaggeration to sayart is a science deeply rooted in freedom.

From the perspective of Hegel’s definition of aesthetics, this exhibition presents a special formation of a field which gathers jarring yet mysterious expressions of sentimentality based on the transmedia conception.

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ShanghART is thrilled to present “20”, a special exhibition including 20 art works by 20 artists at Fosun Foundation opening on 20 December. The exhibition continues to 20 February 2017.

This exhibition showcases the works from the various periods throughout 20 years development of contemporary art in Shanghai. Every individual work as the pivotal representative that articulates correspondent artist’s characteristic concept, integrates with the brand new multi-functional space, which fulfills the mutual association and connection between works and the three-storey architecture. Specifically, an interactive atmosphere is sufficiently formed with Zhang Ding’s large-scale stainless steel cube and man-made crystal installation in the entrance hall. Nearly 600 square meters of the second floor presents the major works, including early classic works from Zeng Fanzhi, Ding Yi, Yu Youhan, Zhou Tiehai and Zhang Enli etc., and works in multi-media from Xu Zhen, Zhu Jia and Hu Jieming etc. In the top floor, viewers immerse themselves in appreciating Yang Fudong’s eight-channel video installation.

“20” sees the path of ShanghART as the platform to reflect the dynamic evolving process of contemporary art in China, also resonates the vision of Fosun Foundation that establishes a diversified international culture center combining the tradition and modernism. ShanghART and Fosun as the important participants and supporters both rooted in Shanghai which have been thriving throughout the history for more than two decades aim at disseminating art into a wider range of public life and concrete the foundation of the contemporary art on the promising new stage.

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ShanghART is thrilled to celebrate its 20th anniversary and the inauguration of its new gallery building located in West Bund with a major group exhibition titled Holzwege. Opening in November, the exhibition serves as a retrospection of the gallery’s role and contribution to the development of Chinese contemporary art, and at the same time looks ahead to the future of exciting collaborations with emerging Chinese artists and international artists.

Holzwege opens on 9 November, coinciding with the opening of the 11th Shanghai Biennale and ShanghART’s participation in two leading international art fairs in Shanghai.

“Wood” is an old name for forest. In the wood there are paths, mostly overgrown, that come to an abrupt stop where the wood is untrodden. They are called Holzwege. Each goes its separate way, though within the same forest. It often appears as if one is identical to another. But it only appears so. Woodcutters and forest keepers know these paths. They know what it means to be on a Holzweg.  Martin Heidegger

Inspired by German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s ‘Holzwege’ – a term which describes an overgrown, rarely trodden forest path only recognisable to forest keepers and woodcutters, the exhibition examines how ShanghART and its artists have been exploring and setting the paths of contemporary art in China for the past twenty years, with the perseverance of Heidegger’s woodcutters and forest keepers.

In the exhibition, ShanghART showcases works by renowned Chinese artists such as Zeng Fanzhi, Ding Yi, Zhang Enli, Yang Fudong and Xu Zhen alongside works by emerging artists from China, such as Sun Xun, Zhao Yang and Ouyang Chun, as well as overseas artists, such as Jörg Immendorff and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, initiating rich and diverse new dialogues between local and international art communities. Each work stands on its own, and yet the theme of the exhibition resonates through all of them, as each artist expresses his/her own way of finding the ‘Holzweg’.

Marked by its sustained growth and inclusive approach, ShanghART is recognised as a pioneer of and a witness to the contemporary art’s development in China, and has not ceased to innovate and carve out its own path since its establishment in 1996. Holzwege looks back on the ShanghART’s development in the past two decades, and signifies a new start for the gallery.

Occupying both floors of the gallery’s new West Bund building, Holzwege is a substantially sized exhibition showcasing works ranging from large-scale sculptures, installations, video installations and performances.

In recent years, large-scale exhibitions on the academic study, historical overview, and specialized exhibition of video art have been held in both western and non-Western countries. ZKM’s 2006exhibition entitled “Video Art in Germany From 1963 to the Present” is just one important example. The recent interest in the medium is intimately related to the development of contemporary art overall. The structure of contemporary art today is moving toward homogenization and focusing on mutually influential and related global events. However, in the course of rapid globalization, the art of non-Western countries is urgently searching for new ways of reconstructing and writing its own history.

In this context, CAFA Art Museum and the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum join up to organize “Time Test: International Video Art Research Exhibition”. In the axis of the development course of the video art, the project presents more than 60 domestic and foreign artists with two collateral exhibitions echoing with each other.
I. “Moving Time: Video Art at 50, 1965-2015” reviews and researches the greatly significant artworks in the last 50 years of western video art development.
II. “Screen Test: Chinese Video Art since the 1980s” focuses on organizing and reviewing the last thirty years of video art through representative Chinese voices in active in moving image art.
The project also includes a series of public programs such as a compendium of artistic and social events, extension reading materials for public enrichment, and lectures and discussions featuring the artists and invited scholars.

Moving Time: Video Art at 50, 1965–2015

Curator: Caitlín Doherty
Curatorial Assistant: Katja Rivera
Organized by the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University East Lansing, Michigan, U.S.A.

Participating Artists (In alphabetical order by surname):
Marina Abramović, Charles Atlas, Mark Brownlow & Ingrid Kvale & Anuschka Schofield, Valie Export, Harun Farocki, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelle Handelman, Joan Jonas, Sam Jury, Chris Marker, Anne-Marie Miéville, Nástio Mosquito, Luis Felipe Ortega, Nam June Paik, Julian Rosefeldt, Martha Rosler, Michael Snow, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Bill Viola, Andy Warhol, Weng Yunpeng

“Moving Time: Video Art at 50, 1965-2015” traces the impact various artists have had on the art form—from its birth in the 1960s with artists Andy Warhol and Nam June Paik, to the performative work of influential women artists such as Joan Jonas, to the lesser-known works of international emerging artists continuing to push the medium forward today. The exhibition is one of the final shows envisioned by Broad MSU Founding Director Michael Rush prior to his passing earlier this year, and is curated by Caitlín Doherty, Broad MSU Curator and Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs.

Rush was internationally recognized for his observations of, and pioneering publication on, video art (Video Art, 2003, 2007). His vision for “Moving Time” was guided by the belief that, given the ubiquity of all manner of videos in contemporary society, it is of growing importance to focus on the history and progress of video as an art form, as practiced by visionary artists from around the globe.

“The trajectory of video art is expansive and the form has the unique ability to embrace a kaleidoscope of artistic ideas—from the abstract to the performative, the conceptual to the documentary. Video art has become one of the most significant mediums to emerge over the past half-century, and artists across the globe are constantly moving it forward—evolving and departing from the innovative and experimental work of their predecessors,” said Caitlín Doherty. “Video pervades our daily lives as never before and so now, it is perhaps more important than ever to distinguish video art as an art form and celebrate the artists who use it to explore the world we live in. We hope this exhibition both honors our Founding Director Michael Rush’s vision and provides our visitors with insight into a medium that proliferates throughout the art world today.”

Video technology—once dominated solely by the film and television industry—first became accessible to visual artists in the mid-20th century, in the form of more affordable and easy-to-use portable devices. In just 50 years, the medium has been leveraged by artists across the globe to blur the boundaries between traditional artistic practices and inventive new methods of storytelling. “Moving Time” will ask visitors to both contemplate the progression of video art over time and simultaneously put works from various time periods in dialogue with one another. It will also feature five works from emerging, international contemporary video artists—including Sam Jury, Michelle Handelman, and Weng Yunpang. Each artist will showcase his or her work alongside one ‘historic’ work they cite as having been of particular influence to them during the course of their career.

Additional highlights of the exhibition include:
 Seminal works by early pioneers—including:
 Andy Warhol’s first double-projection film Outer and Inner Space (1965), one of the earliest examples of video installation art capturing actress and factory girl Edie Sedgwick interacting with a video recording of herself; and
 Nam June Paik‘s earliest video tape Button Happening (1965), recorded on the day he first acquired his Sony Portapak camera.
 An installation dedicated to the performative videos of women artists, exploring the role of the body, complexity of the mind, and inequalities fostered by both gender and political prejudice—including Marina Abramović’s AAA-AAA (1978), Joan Jonas’s Vertical Role (1972), and Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975).

Screen Test: Chinese Video Art Since 1980s

Curator: Dong Bingfeng, Wang Chunchen
Curatorial Assistant: Yi Yue
Organized by CAFA Art Museum, Beijing, China

Participating Artists (In alphabetical order by pinyin of surname):
Cao Fei, Cao Kai, Chen Chieh-jen, Cheng Ran, Feng Mengbo, Jia Zhangke, Jiao Yingqi, Hsu Che-Yu, Li Yongbin, Lin Ke, Lu Yang, Mao Chenyu (filmfarm), Miao Ying, Qiu Zhijie, Song Dong, Wang Bing, Wang Gongxin, Wang Jianwei, Wang Jun-Jieh, Ming Wong, Xu Tan, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong, Yuan Goang-Ming, Zhang Peili, Zhou Xiaohu.

“Special Unit: Hong King Video Art” organized by Videotage

The study of video art, or to use the recently popular term “moving image,” is still concentrated in core countries in Europe and America that are considered the source of modern art and its development, but the influence of this artistic form has increased in the Chinese-speaking world. Video art has developed in mainland China for more than twenty years; the medium rose earlier in neighboring Taiwan and Hong Kong, which were influenced by Western modern art at an earlier date. Beginning in the late 1990s, there has been a marked increase in the number of exhibitions of Chinese video art, and exchange and discussion regarding the medium is becoming more common. It is particularly worth nothing that video art, a form that is rising in the Chinese-speaking world, came from the West, but Chinese video art has not simply imitated the Western historical, aesthetic, and cultural context. Instead, Chinese video artists have brought the practice into their unique cultural contexts, with a close focus on their own realities. They have actively and strategically intervened in discussions of social issues, launching a moving image movement with a more organic critical awareness and reflective spirit.

As a part of CAFA Art Museum’s “Time Test: International Video Art” exhibition, “Screen Test: Chinese Video Art since the 1980s” focuses on organizing and reviewing the last thirty years of video art through representative Chinese voices in active in moving image art. Within the title “Screen Test,” the “screen” refers to the framed vehicle for the projection and presentation of the moving image, while “test” refers to the practice and manifestation of the medium in the multiples spaces in which art museums hold public education and discussion events. This concept attempts to break away from narrow understandings of video art and the excessive focus on the forms, techniques, and development of the medium. Instead, this art form is re-examined with the context of the art museum and broader public places, which also allows for the investigation of the closely-related media of documentaries, film, and new media art, proposing a renewal of artistic ideas and posing a challenge to the sites of culture.

“Screen Test: Chinese Video Art Since the 1980s” is divided into three sections. The first section, entitled “The Infancy of Video Art,” introduces the occurrence of video art in greater China and how it became an independent artistic medium and cultural theme. Participating artists include Zhang Peili, Wang Gongxin, Song Dong, Xu Tan, Xu Zhen, Li Yongbin, Wang Jianwei, Wang Jun-Jieh, Yuan Goang-Ming. In the second section, entitled “Media Experiment,” video art developed in 1990s with spread of personal computers and new media technologies and the rise of the independent film movement and experimental films. Video art became an expanding aesthetic experiment and a radical transformation. Artists include Feng Mengbo, Jiao Yingqi, Qiu Zhijie, Cao Kai, Lin Ke, Cao Fei, Lu Yang, and Miao Ying. The third section, entitled “Transition to Film,” encompasses films shot by artists or spatial film installations produced by film directors; both are becoming increasingly important themes in moving image art today. Film has become more than a medium of contemporary art; it is an important tool and methodology for witnessing, recording, participating, and acting in society. Participating artists include Jia Zhangke, Yang Fudong, Wang Bing, Ming Wong, Zhou Xiaohu, Mao Chenyu, Chen Chieh-jen, Cheng Ran, Hsu Che-Yu.

The Exhibition also includes the special unit of Hong Kong video art “Simultaneity – Reframing Hong Kong I”. It is a program that proposes (historical) re-readings of artists’ moving image from Hong Kong. By selecting video works of art, animations and documentary films produced by Hong Kong artists from 1989 to 2014, the program will reinterpret the experience of here and now by looking into the potentially excluded and forgotten images of Hong Kong. Participating Artists include Ellen Pau, Man Ching Ying Phoebe, Angela Su, May Fung, Jo Law, Choi Sai Ho, Lai Chiu-han Linda, Chan Chui Hing Nose, Chow Chun Fai, Mak Hoi Shan Anson, Silas Fong, MAP Office, Law Yuk Mui, Cheng Chi Lai Howard, João Vasco Paiva, Leung Chi Wo, Eric Siu, Art Jones, Wong Ping, Morgan Wong.

MadeIn Gallery is pleased to present Information Sculpture Superhighway opening on September 8, 2016. This exhibition will inaugurate the new space of MadeIn Gallery since its move from M50 to the West Bund area. Information Sculpture Superhighway presents works of artists achieved using a variety of forms. It is intended to show how the whole human society on the information superhighway is sculpturing its self-integrity. “Sculpture” here does not refer to a narrow definition of plastic art, but alludes to Joseph Beuys’ definition of “social sculpture”, in which everyone is considered to be an equally creative individual, and has the potential to reshape the future of society through art.

In this exhibition, the strength of the notion “the medium is the message” – as an echo from the last century – has gradually been consumed and turned into a disused formula. In fact, what we see here is: “the message is the medium”, and modifications in scales and models caused by digital media are relegated to the back. The information released by the medium becomes a real force that impacts social status. Information already is the final state of all media. However, with the loss of its physical characteristics, media of various kinds can no longer distinguish one from another. It is also the source of such disordered use of media among most of the exhibited works. This confusion is not only reflected in the form of chaotic combinations or random collages, but also in the destructive attitude towards the medium as an icon. Image resolution and dimensions are no longer primordial, similarly, beauty of forms and material stability in sculpture lost their importance; these aspects became insignificant compare to the information they intend to convey. During the process of creation, medium has been considerably mistreated, and information became the core of expression.

Information is a scourge rampaging on the highway. As all superhighways have a bottom speed, information also shapes its speed to a certain extent. Substance – two-dimensional surface – pixel – information – alternate with one another on the highway within the snap of a finger. The information generated by such high speed leads to a social symptom, a compulsive obsession with always being above the bottom speed. Not only does it pressure us in terms of speed, but also it permeates the whole society in the form and content. “Highway”, whose imagery in the first place evokes decentralization, confers information with the most powerful right of expression, within the illusion of rights to equality. In Information Sculpture Superhighway, artists – as human beings who possess the identities of evolution and innovative vitality – offer their own proposals to social sculpturing, within such symptomatic context.

“Studio” brings together twelve of China’s most prominent contemporary artists: Ding Yi, Jia Aili, Liu Jianhua, Liu Wei, Liu Xiaodong, Mao Yan, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong, Yan Pei-Ming, Zeng Fanzhi, Zhang Enli, & Zhang Xiaogang. By exploring their studios and working conditions through each artist’s own lens, the source of their creative output is put on display, and the unique personalities of these artists and their artworks become tangible.

“Every year, I spend a lot of time visiting artists’ studios. Studios are wonderful places to visit – you get an insight into the way an artist works, the conditions they work in, and you can see their newest pieces. It’s somewhere you can really get a comprehensive understanding of an artist. Artists are a perceptive, eclectic group, and through their studios you get to see the various characteristics of different artists: some appear cluttered and homely, others clean and sterile; some have books strewn about, others bottles; in some, the sound of music drifts through the air… Art should be about more than just aesthetic images or objects. From their studio, we get a glimpse into an artist’s pursuits and creativity; we can awaken our awareness and understanding of their world. We believe that this is an extraordinary and unusual exhibition, one that will be written into art history. ” － Qiao Zhibing (Collector, Exhibition Organizer)

“Another Wave” can be interpreted as the “New Wave”, which implies the everchanging nature of the world. The 1st Daojiao New Art Festival was not only a “wave” – which indicates the creation of contents – but also a “light year” that indicates the creation of history.
As a cultural event held outside of the 1st Tier Cities, Daojiao New Art Festival focuses more on the concept of “locality”. With the emphasis on locality and extension, loof interfered the visual system by introducing the strong presence of modernity to all of the exhibition materials including the website, the poster, the leaflets, the dynamic screen display, the invitation, the ticket as well as the stickers.

Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum is pleased to present “Turning Point: Contemporary Art in China Since 2000”, a group show of contemporary Chinese art. Professor Yi Ying, renowned art historian and critic, will take the role as the academic moderator of the exhibition. Featuring 52 artists/artist collectives in total, the exhibition will occupy the whole first floor of the museum and present work ranging from painting, sculpture, installation to video and animation. The exhibition will open to the public on July 23 and run through September 4.

Highlighting the year 2000 as a key time concept, the exhibition intends to probe into the various changes, emerging trends of thought as well as social problems ever since then and to cast light on the responses contemporary art has made. The exhibition focuses mainly on two “turning points”, or say two types of “transition”–that from easel art to conceptual art and from form to social significance. To be more specific, the former refers to the fact that in the wake of the development of the linguistic nature of contemporary art, the linear evolution of art since mid-80s came to an end. Compared to art back in the 90s which featured painting mainly, it has now become more diverse and conceptual. The latter stresses on the changes of the writing of contemporary art. Attention has been shifted from the logic embedded in the form to social movements, social significance, social problems (i.e. urban space, land and ethnic groups) and the demonstration of the different experiences. In the meantime, with the increasing involvement of the internet, films, televisions, high-tech and new media, the art form has witnessed continuous development as it is equipped with the capacity to present new visual forms of expression in line with the development of the society.

With a focus on the status quo of the Chinese contemporary art and the driving force behind it, Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum will present a selected groups of works produced since 2000. These works cast light on how artists think about art, the evolution of social concepts as well as the progress and destiny of Chinese contemporary society from a variety of perspectives. Collectively, they form a big picture illustrating the transition witnessed in the Chinese contemporary art scene since the new century.

A themed symposium will be organized during the exhibition and scholars from different disciplines will be invited to share their views upon art, philosophy and various social issues. Public educational programmes accompanying the exhibition will include talks and a series of workshops.

Group exhibition The uncertain, or the shelved… is showcased in ShanghART Gallery both Main and H Space from 16th July. The diversified perspectives have been finalised after sourcing through numerous artists’ studios. Works are exhibited in various media ranging from paintings, installations, sculptures and manuscripts etc. . The exhibition is on view through 31st August.

The uncertain, or the shelved… “The uncertain” is the hesitation, exploration or experimentation of the concept, thoughts, creativity etc. in the extent of thinking logic; “the shelved” is the statement of behaviour positioned in pause, reserve, lingering etc.. Both scenarios are connected as well as mutually influenced each other. This exhibition aims at revealing that those works or ideas are initiated due to momentary inspirations but temporarily/permanently halted because of self-struggling with distracted clues or directions. The mysterious circumstances that how works are conceived and why they’re suspended have become flowing riddles between artists and audiences. Not only does the exhibition challenge the viewers’ cognition by presenting the seemingly divergent creation clues which enrich the possibilities of artists creative contexts, but also reflects the extended associations which are hidden beneath the differentiated creation practices.

“The unfinished is an interesting beginning or a recurrent idea after repetitious recording then forgetting it.”

“I’ve always liked woodcarving, but never followed through… One day sculpting out the rough shape but was difficult in further detailing it, I helplessly left it there…around 2012, had several attempts in carving it again but still ended in a meltdown…now, just look back again, it appears more perfectly after shifting through time, and has become my cherished object.”

“Problems like many traditional craftsmen in churches or temples might confront, how to create an intangible spirit by deploying tangible materials. I wanted to exercise some tactile painting sometimes, I’m sensitive about the surface texture of paintings, therefore, I have processed several experiments violently on some most simple materials. ”

Above narratives excerpted from Artists’ oral statement

In a live exhibition that unfolds over 18 days, the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam is proud to presents Ensemble sin órganos (Ensemble without organs), the first international performance-based exhibition to take place in the museum, an intergenerational exhibition that explores the simultaneous histories and trajectories that have shaped what has been termed “artes vivas,” live actions, “acciones,” and performance art across different geographies. The exhibition utilises duration as a format to connect and activate different spaces in the museum, bringing together emerging and established international and local artists alongside a variety of media, historical and archival material and documentation.

Rather than trying to define what performance art and “artes vivas” are today, the exhibition brings together artists and collectives from different generations representing a diverse range of practices dating from the 1960s to the present. The show has been conceived as developing over time, and is divided into five constellations that are networked throughout the galleries of the museum. These constellations are: Instructions and Language; Living Technologies and the Body; Ritual and Dance; Social Engagement and Audiences; Reenactments and Live Histories. By utilising networks, the show seeks to open up a dialogue between practices and movements that were happening concurrently, with international links to the present; each, however, represents unique local conditions and environments with different lineages and influences. Many of the artists and artworks in the exhibition are being presented for the first time in Cuba.

These networked themes will be reflected in the design and layout of the exhibition, in which time and space have been allocated for these terms to be further explored and contested. For example, constellations such as Reenactments and Live Histories will consider the relationship between the historicising of performance, how performance is remembered, collected and archived, and its connection to the present: how can museums then exhibit and revisit earlier performance works for new audiences? The constellation will also feature historically significant Cuban artists and collectives such as Grupo Enema and Ana Mendieta.

A leading sculpture foundation in England will display the first major exhibition of outdoor sculpture by contemporary Chinese artists to be shown in the UK.

16^th June 2015, Chichester, UK: Cass Sculpture Foundation is delighted to present A Beautiful Disorder, the first major exhibition of newly commissioned outdoor sculpture by contemporary Chinese artists to be shown in the UK. From May 2016, fifteen monumental outdoor sculptures will be on display throughout the grounds of CASS.  These artists employ a variety of ambitious sculptural techniques across a range of materials including bronze, stone, steel and wood.

The historical relationship between English and Chinese landscape aesthetics is the starting point and inspiration for these contemporary Chinese and Greater Chinese artists. The title of the exhibition, A Beautiful Disorder, is a quote from an influential letter written by the Jesuit missionary and artist Jean-Denis Attiret in 1743 that had a tremendous effect on English garden culture. Attiret used the term to describe the ability of the Chinese garden to provoke violent and often opposing sensations in the viewer through a series of theatrical framing devices. The exhibition invites the viewer to reflect on China’s past, present and future relationship with the world at large, and provides valuable insight into the state of Chinese culture, politics and society today from the perspective of some of its most dynamic and engaging artists.

Cass Sculpture Foundation’s Executive Director, Clare Hindle, says:

“To date, Cass Sculpture Foundation has commissioned over 400 works – A Beautiful Disorder is a landmark moment for the Foundation as it is the first time we are commissioning works for a major exhibition by international artists. The exhibition will showcase contemporary Chinese sculpture by some of the leading Chinese artists.”

Participating artists for A Beautiful Disorder include: Bi Rongrong, Cao Fei, Cheng Ran, Cui Jie, Jennifer Ma Wen, Li Jinghu, Lu Pingyuan, Made in Company, Rania Ho, Song Ta, Tu Wei-Cheng, Wang Sishun, Wang Wei, Wang Yuyang, Zhang Ruyi, Zheng Bo and Zhao Yao.

This exhibition focuses on the “problems of exhibitions” in contemporary Chinese art, including the goals, organization, conditions, and challenges of exhibiting contemporary art in China. These problems inspired experimental artists, art critics, and independent curators during the 1990s, leading to many interrelated activities and discussions. During this process a large number of original exhibitions were planned and staged, while many influential works were conceptualized and created for special exhibitions. Prior to the normalization of contemporary art in the early 2000s, these activities constituted an “exhibition moment,” with a force and concentration rarely seen in world art history.

Today, nearly twenty years later, contemporary art exhibitions have become a vital part of the Chinese art scene, with numerous museums, galleries, and exhibition spaces constantly producing new shows. Yet the negotiation between experimentalism and public agendas still determines the identity and social significance of contemporary art. The historical experiences from the 1990s are still useful in thinking about this problem. Such experiences also constitute an important topic in studying the development of contemporary Chinese art.

This exhibition consists of two parts. Part One displays materials related to contemporary art exhibitions of the 1990s, focusing on twelve exhibitions organized between 1997 and early 2000, whose venues included a large public museum, a private museum, a mall, a fashionable bar, a convention center, a zone between city and countryside, an ancient building, basements in high rises, and other types of non-exhibition space. Entitled “Canceled: An Exhibition about an Exhibition,” Part Two is an exhibition within an exhibition. Through re-presenting the space and content of one of these twelve historical shows, it reflects on the interaction between the organizer, artists, and audiences of experimental exhibitions in the 1990s.

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Huang Yu, a Sichuanese born 1981, is one of the most competent, professional Chinese collectors to have emerged in recent years. Beginning with ancient Buddha images and porcelain, his collection has gradually shifted towards contemporary painting, sculpture, installation and video. His work experience at Minsheng Art Museum deepened his understanding of the system and values of contemporary art in China. As a Buddhist believer and beneficiary of the collecting process, he has donated Buddha images to his home district’s locally-supported monastery; he has also established a scholarship fund for his alma mater. Among his other dreams are to establish an art museum and an art expo in Chengdu, in order to sustain and enhance a contemporary art environment in the Southwest.

This exhibition gathers 100+ works by 65 important artists, spanning various media and types. It can be seen as an encapsulation and guide to Chinese contemporary art that is underway at present. In particular, it showcases the collection’s remarkably systematic coverage of conceptual painting. The list of artists ranges from Yu Youhan and Li Shan down to Xie Xingnan and Duan Jianyu, along with even younger innovators. The curator engaged to handle this exhibition is Zhu Zhu, winner of the 2011 China Contemporary Art Award in Criticism and currently one of the most important curators rooted in the native Chinese context. By the title “New Doctrine of Capital,” he raises discussion of a consumerist context in which art creation moves toward self-determination of art capital. What is more, the exhibition will hold a coterminous summit forum for young collectors. At the same time, several hundred important personages from the Chinese art world will be invited to attend, including museum directors, gallerists, collectors, corporate figures and participating artists.

Foreword by Huang Yu

Sometimes, in certain settings, I sense, with more than a bit of joy, that others see collecting as a wonderful thing, and view the collection of art as a noble task. But when I sit back and really think about it, I can’t help but think that collecting is a disorder, one that leads you to want to have all good things. It is a grave case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. My obsession with collecting began in my early years with bubblegum. In my second year of middle school, there was a popular brand of bubblegum called BigBabol. There were a hundred pieces to a box, and each box had a toy inside. There were sixteen different toys in the series, and in order to collect them all, I bought over fifty boxes of BigBabol bubblegum in a span of three months. That’s over five thousand sticks of gum. I was handing it out to everyone I saw. This was my first experience with collecting. It was then that I discovered my love for collecting. I found I had a powerful desire to possess the things I loved. It was just natural to collect them.

My propensity to collect has been a part of my life ever since. I have also been plagued by obsession-compulsion ever since. In everything I do, I demand perfection. I worked out in order to develop six pack abs, and along the way, I won a national bodybuilding championship in 2004. I studied finance, and in 2003, I naturally entered into the family business, into the art auction system. I began by researching classical art. I started collecting porcelain in 2004, and particularly enjoyed the products of the Ming and Qing dynasty imperial kilns. I wanted to have a specimen from the royal kilns of each dynasty. I was fascinated by all kinds of antiquities. Much of the richness of classical Chinese art is embodied by these traditional artworks. Without planning to do so, I had begun training myself. I was on a quest for perfection. In 2006, I grew intensely interested in researching and collecting Buddhist sculpture. This can, of course, be traced back to my mother, a devout Buddhist. Under her influence, I have been passionate about Buddhism since I was a child. I also clearly remember that I first began collecting Buddhist sculpture out of devotion. This continued until 2007, when I began dabbling in the research and collection of contemporary art. I had entered into the Minsheng system, which was at that time actively getting involved in the research and collection of contemporary art, planning a system of Chinese contemporary art systems, and I was involved. I was quite enthusiastic about approaching an entirely new field, and I diligently studied it. I auctioned many outstanding specimens from my collection of over one hundred antiques so that I could collect works of Chinese contemporary art. I did not, however, sell any specimens of Buddhist sculpture. Those I still keep today. Because of my faith, I will preserve this Buddhist art for the rest of my life. But beyond this, all of my passion and faith since 2007 have been concentrated on the research and collection of contemporary art, and this will continue into the future.

Before I knew it, I had spent twelve years as a collector. I quit my job at Minsheng in late 2015. It was then that I realized my collection had grown and matured alongside me. These contemporary artworks are inextricably linked to my own history, encounters and experiences over these past twelve years. I chose to hold this exhibition of my collection in Chengdu for good reason. I am from Zigong, here in Sichuan Province. I chose to return to my home province to hold this exhibition in hopes of bringing some positive energy to the local art industry and Chinese contemporary art.

Inspired by a comment by science-fiction author William Gibson, the title of the twentieth Biennale of Sydney, The future is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed, suggested that technology had already surpassed our ideas of the future, and served as a reminder that access to information, the internet and other more basic resources is not universal. The 2016 edition took place across seven distinct ‘embassies of thought’, designated as safe spaces for thinking, and reflected on immigration politics. Named after themes emerging from Rosenthal’s conversations with artists, the embassies were titled ‘Spirits’; ‘Non Participation’; ‘Translation’; ‘the Real’; ‘Transition’; ‘Disappearance’; and ‘Stanislaw Lem’. Twelve ‘in-between’ spaces – ranging from a library to a cemetery and a gap between two walls – provided further avenues through which to explore the distinction between the virtual and physical worlds, one of the key ideas of the exhibition. Performance featured strongly, with highlights including the Australian premiere of manger, 2014, by Boris Charmatz; Victory Over the Sun, 2016, a revisioning of the legendary 1913 Futurist (anti-) opera by Justene Williams with Sydney Chamber Opera; and Here, an Echo, 2016, a series of performances Agatha Gothe-Snape presented with dancer and choreographer Brooke Stamp. The project is now installed in Wemyss Lane, Surry Hills, as the second legacy project of the City of Sydney.

Commissioned by Qatar Museums, contemporary artist CAI Guo-Qiang has devoted three years to the curatorial research and development of the large-scale exhibition What About the Art? Contemporary Art from China. The exhibition will open at Qatar Museums’ 3,500-square-meter Gallery Al Riwaq on March 14, 2016 featuring works by 15 living artists and artist collectives born in Mainland China: Jenova CHEN, HU Xiangqian, HU Zhijun, HUANG Yong Ping, LI Liao, LIANG Shaoji, LIU Wei, LIU Xiaodong, Jennifer Wen MA, SUN Yuan & PENG Yu, WANG Jianwei, XU Bing, XU Zhen, YANG Fudong, and ZHOU Chunya.

Recent critical reception of contemporary Chinese art has focused largely on sociopolitical issues and record market prices. In response to the lack of detailed consideration given to contemporary Chinese artists’ artistic value and originality, the exhibition confronts the contemporary art world with the questions: What about the art itself? How do these Chinese artists contribute to the creativity of contemporary art?

What About the Art? Contemporary Art from China examines the issue of creativity—a topic rarely touched upon in the multitude of exhibitions on Chinese contemporary art. The exhibition aims to illuminate a set of current practices by Chinese artists that attempt to challenge the Chinese traditional aesthetics and the Western art historical canon. By presenting each artist’s works in an independent gallery space, the exhibition highlights their individual pursuit of artistic expressions, concepts, methodologies and attitudes. Their diverse bodies of work cross the media of painting, sculpture, installation, video, performance, and interactive video game design. This exhibition offers a unique perspective to the contemporary art world, shifting an emphasis from its idiomatic language of criticism, biography, and context, to a focus on the artworks themselves.

CAI Guo-Qiang has also invited scholar WANG Mingxian to curate Timeline, a gallery display featuring archival documents, images, and data of contemporary Chinese art covering the period from 1949 to present. This gallery will provide visitors with a rare glimpse into the historical and cultural development of contemporary Chinese art by revealing its parallel and conflicting relationship with mainstream Chinese culture.

The exhibition catalogue, to be published in Chinese, English, and Arabic, is conceived and edited by CAI Guo-Qiang. It crystalizes the three years of field research, over the course of which 250 pivotal exhibitions on Chinese Art were surveyed and over 20 art historians, critics, and curators were interviewed. The catalogue includes essays by internationally renowned scholars Terry Smith, Jerome Silbergeld and WANG Hui in addition to contributions by featured artists, along with a timeline reviewing major events in the history of contemporary Chinese art.

What About the Art? will feature a 60-minute documentary film under the same title, directed by Shanshan Xia and produced by 33 Studio NY. The documentary examines the pursuit of creativity in our contemporary society – both in and outside of China. By recording the curator’s dialogues with artists, critics, and scholars, the film reveals the exhibition’s curatorial concept. By combining the artwork and exhibition production process with China’s encompassing cityscapes the film offers a window into contemporary Chinese culture and society.

As a key program in the 2016 Qatar-China Year of Culture, the exhibition has received generous support from China National Arts Fund, Beijing Municipal Bureau of Culture, and Shanghai International Culture Association.

A metric ton of fake marble. Two tons of leather. Three tons of compressed paper. Five thousand porcelain leaves, 10,000 identical books, 130,000 minute photographs, 600,000 painted dots. In these artworks, mass and scale are as important as media. Gigantic statues of Mao erected in the 1960s still dominate town squares all over China. But for contemporary artists, monumentalism is a way to express new realities and new ideas. It reflects confidence and ambition, a sense of China’s rising power, and the desire to make a mark. As photographer Guo Jian puts it: “I wanted my picture to be huge to have an impact.”

Artists go big to grab the attention of fickle audiences and position themselves in a crowded marketplace. They also do it to convey large ideas, about life and death, technology and nature, change and eternity. In China they have an additional reason. Contemporary art is a Western import, and many Chinese artists name European and American masters as their greatest influences. Now, mixing what they have learned from the West with China’s classical culture and crazy commercial zeitgeist, the former students are taking contemporary art in bold new directions. Whether they enlist computers and teams of low-cost workers or rely on their own patient skill, they are making works as hefty as their nation’s profile, and as hard to ignore. Their creations may embrace, confront, intrigue or enthral, but all are intended to stop viewers in their tracks.

Legendary pioneer and art collector Uli Sigg has been following the development of contemporary art in China since the late 1970s, collecting many artworks along the way. Now you can see more than 100 of these works in a new exhibition at MAK in Vienna, featuring prominent artists such as Ai Weiwei, Cao Fei, Duan Jianyu, Feng Mengbo, and He Xiangyu.

Chinese Whispers: Recent Art from the Sigg Collection will focus on objects from Uli Sigg’s Swiss private collection, which he has continuously expanded. With techniques such as calligraphy, painting, photography, sculpture, installation, and video, the presented objects open up a wide spectrum of works ranging from traditional analog to digital production.

The title refers to the eponymous children’s game in which messages are whispered secretly from one person to the next and distorted in content and meaning by the permanent repetition. This idea of communication, of reproduction and distortion regarding his exchange with China reflects the atmosphere of the show.

“Chinese contemporary art is a phenomenon without parallel. Even after the Cultural Revolution, the effects of Socialist Realism and restrictions due to censorship remain noticeable,” explains the Gallery. “Nonetheless, contemporary art in China has experienced a drastic change of direction since the increasing political openness in the 1980s. During that time, a new generation of Chinese artists have picked up modern trends from the West. The contents can often be seen as a reaction towards the politics and social change.”

Chinese Whispers: Recent Art from the Sigg Collection will run from 30 January – 26 May 2019 at MAK in Vienna.

“Plastic Myths” talks about Asian mythologies as the subject of ‘now, here’ also the subject of ‘future’ by exceeding the custom to judge myths only as the stories from ancient times. The exhibition hall of 28 cells can work both independently and collectively to capture Asia as collective of different identities rather than all lumped together in one identity. This exhibition presents the current Asian mythology from Asians’ own perspectives instead of objectified views by others.

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15 Rooms, is a major live-art exhibition curated by Klaus Biesenbach— Director of MoMA PS1 and Chief Curator at Large at The Museum of Modern Art—and Hans Ulrich Obrist—co-director of the Serpentine Gallery—the exhibition features performative works by artists spanning different generations and continents.

For the 2015 edition, one more work than the previous edition at Art Basel will be presented in the architectural environment conceived by Herzog & de Meuron. For the 2015 edition, curators will invite 15 international and Chinese artists to activate a room each, exploring the relationship between space, time and physicality with an artwork which uses human beings as ‘material’. Giving visitors an insight into a more performative and interactive practice, visitors encounter a new situation inside each of the 15 rooms, engaging in a diverse series of immersive and intimate experiences. By bringing to Shanghai this singular project, the Long Museum West Bound reflects on the blurring of the line between audience and artwork, while embracing the belief that visual artists can just as well create their artworks by working with human beings as by deploying bronze, canvas, inkjet, oil paints, video or any other method of physical production.As the curators declared, the concept for the show developed from the idea that live art can also be sculpture and have a duration similar to that of a physical object; that is, last from morning to night, throughout the opening hours of the museum. But when the last visitors leave, when the gallery closes its doors for the evening, the sculpture will all walk out as well. 15 Rooms also reflects on how performative art can create the possibility of an exhibition that might be restaged later, of something that can be reproduced endlessly. Art can travel over time not just through objects and not just through documentation. Paintings have always been a lasting, valued art form. Instructional art creates a valid possibility for art to travel and last. 15 Rooms is like this: from the basic text it can be restaged in different places all over the world and it can also take place again in 50 years’ time, or when we will all be dead in 100 years time.

Slowness it is not only important for the curatorial process but also for the experience of the 15 Rooms exhibition. The experience of 15 Rooms creates the opposite of the acceleration that characterise the way in which visitors pass through exhibition: it is a deceleration. Movement is slowed down by the fact that you have to open the door—it’s like entering into somebody house.It is an intimate encounter.

Herzog & de Meuron’s purpose built architecture plays a crucial role in shaping the exhibition, serving as the interstitial structure tying together a series of intimate experiences in the space of the Museum. The idea is not only focused on what happens in the exhibition, but also on what occurs around an exhibition. What interested the curators and the architects was the idea of opening up towards the outside, the creation of public spaces, and how it is possible to create such spaces.

First presented as 11 Rooms in July 2011 as part of Manchester International Festival, the exhibition was originally commissioned by Manchester International Festival, the International Arts Festival RUHRTRIENNALE 2012-2014 and Manchester Art Gallery. The project was then shown as ‘12 Rooms’ at the International Arts Festival RUHRTRIENNALE 2012-2014, as ‘13 Rooms’ by Kaldor Public Art Projects at Pier 2/3 in Sydney’s Walsh Bay in April 2013, and as ‘14 Rooms’ by Art Basel in June 2014. For each edition, the artists list partially changed.

The 6th Moscow Biennale will be a 10-day gathering from September 22 to October 1, 2015, at Pavilion No.1 in Moscow’s VDNKh (the Exhibition of Achievements of the People’s Economy).

Curators: Bart De Baere, Director of MUHKA, Antwerp; Defne Ayas, Director of Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; Nicolaus Schafhausen, Director of Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna.

For the duration of 10 days, the 6th Moscow Biennale aspires to be a think-in involving all participants and visitors present, hosting art and cultural workers to provide a means for artistic and critical reflection to be exchanged through thinking in action. Driven by the questions of how to gather, how to live together and how to activate new capacities for the future, in collaboration with more than 70 Russian and international artists and thinkers on site, the program aims to re-articulate current dimensions of art presentation.

The 6th Moscow Biennale is a declaration of intent and an invitation to engage. It unfolds as a space of gathering, in which diverse forms of thinking enhance the understanding of what art can be. Counting on the commitment of its participants, the program invites visitors to fully and actively participate in a common undertaking to articulate their experiences of creative and intellectual practice. Using an infrastructure developed for this purpose at VNDKh Pavilion No.1 (designed by Fedor Dubinnikov (MEL | Architecture and Design), participants and visitors are to engage in an exchange between individuals and commonality, Moscow and the world, the so-called East and the West.

The biennial includes a media machine as part of its infrastructure to document, edit and reflect upon on the spot. After the 10-day gathering, different archival formats will follow up on the biennial, including a feature documentary by Singaporean film director Ho Tzu Nyen, a website with annotated documentation, a book, and a documentary exhibition from October 3 to November 1, 2015 at the biennial’s site.

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A great exhibition selecting the masterpieces of the UBS Art Collection from the ‘60s until today. The UBS Art Collection consists of over 35,000 objects and includes thousands of contemporary works by artists ranging from the newest emerging talents to some of the most important artists of the last 50 years, such as Hiroe Saeki, and some of the most important artists of the past 50 years, such as Anish Kapoor or Thomas Ruff. It reflects the many paths UBS’s business has taken as it has grown to become one of the world’s largest financial institutions. This esteemed and globally diverse corporate art collection incorporates key works from around the world – mirroring the businesses that have become a part of UBS.

The artworks will be presented for the first time to the Italian public in the beautiful halls of Galleria d’Arte Moderna (GAM), i.e. Modern Art Gallery.

In 2013, the Daimler Art Collection began adding a significant new aspect to its international profile, with the acquisition of more than 40 artworks by about 20 Chinese artists. From this year on, these new acquisitions will be presented to the public in an exhibition series in Berlin. These works by Chinese artists relate well to the Daimler Art Collection’s areas of special interest: the area of abstract and conceptual tendencies, and the “new media” area. At the same time, they form a new complex of their own within the fabric of the collection, which is culturally and aesthetically distinctive. In choosing which artists and which movements to incorporate, the Daimler Art Collection focused on art trends in the major centers: Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong (incl. Hong Kong). A forward-looking purchasing strategy was adopted, aided by in-depth research on location. Major artworks by artists who are already internationally well-known were acquired, and artworks by members of the younger generation of artists (born circa 1980) who are as yet unknown in our country were also discovered. Taken together, these new acquisitions for the Daimler Art Collection offer an insight into a country – a country that is both fascinating and the subject of controversy – that will be of great critical and global significance to the 21st century: not only because of its thousand years of tradition, but, above all, because of its rapid economic and cultural development.

This exhibition series in Berlin will present the recent Chinese acquisitions in the context of the Daimler Art Collection. This “dialogue” with international artistic concepts will bring out the unique qualities of the new acquisitions, but it will also bring out parallels and relationships in the form of shared artistic concerns. The first part of the exhibition – From a Poem to the Sunset – is primarily devoted to conceptual tendencies, which first became observable in contemporary Chinese art in the mid-1980s but which, notwithstanding this, form the basis of the working methods of many younger artists.

The prelude to this exhibition is provided by poems, chosen either as linguistic inspiration or as an artistic means of expression: Natalie Czech (*1976, D) often references lyric texts. In her artworks, she explores the ways in which words can evoke images, and how minimal interventions in the text can create new meanings. In some respects, her working method is akin to traditional calligraphy, the ‘methodology of writing’. In a series of artworks entitled Calligraphy of Written Backward, Qiu Zhijie (*1969, CHN) investigates the wider possibilities inherent in the backward writing of Chinese calligraphy, giving it something akin to a filmic visual language and combining it with a melancholy subject matter in the form of the thoughts of the banished poet Su Shi (1037-1101). The Irish artist Sarah Browne (*1981, IRL) is represented by an artwork in several parts that the Daimler Art Collection commissioned her to create, in which she evokes memories of the designer Eileen Gray. For the conclusion of her artwork From Margin to Margin (Looking for Eileen), 2010/2015, the artist herself commissioned a poem. At every presentation of the project – this time in Berlin, for instance by the inclusion of carrier pigeons – this poem will take a new and autonomous form.

In his artworks, the artist Zheng Chongbin (*1961, CHN), who was born in Shanghai and lives in San Francisco, achieves the suspension of the polarity between the Chinese and Western art worlds. One way in which he does this is to work in ink and acrylic paint – in parallel and with equal intensity. He shares with the Dresden artist Max Uhlig (*1937, D) a fascination with ink painting (both artists have spent many years engaging with this art form); additionally, both artists’ artworks feature gestures with a pronounced actional character, oscillating between abstraction and representational, readable content. The works of the young, Berlin based artist Sibylla Dumke demonstrate an intensive activity with structures of nature. Her intuitive strokes and the delicate tracery of the ink reflect the artist’s abilities of sensitive observations, interpreted in “a rhythmic movement” (SD).

Alongside artists who are concerned with what are regarded as the classic artistic media, the exhibition presents a number of complex installations in the area of new media. In the main space of the Daimler Contemporary, there will be a choreographically structured coming together of selected works by Yang Fudong (*1971, CHN) and Philippe Parreno (*1964, DZ/F); there will be showings of the films Continously Habitable Zones aka C.H.Z. (2011) by Philippe Parreno (commissioned by the Daimler Art Collection) and Yejiang/The Nightman Cometh (2011) by Yang Fudong. Both artists analyze the properties of their chosen media and formats: Yang experiments with film and photography, whilst Parreno makes the “exhibition” format itself the theme, designing “choreographies of bodies in space” (P.P.).

The next part of the exhibition presents current conceptual tendencies in Chinese contemporary art, in the form of a group of artworks by Liu Ding (*1976, CHN), and single works by Pak Sheung Chuen (*1977, CHN) and Lee Kit (*1978, CHN). Zhang Peili (*1957, CHN) was undoubtedly a pioneer of Chinese conceptual and video art; his documentation of one of his early “mail art” projects – Brown Book No.1, 1988 – appears in the exhibition. The artist Zheng Guogu (*1970, CHN) is similarly interested in modern China and its society. He is also known internationally as a member of the Yangjiang Group. His artwork is brought face-to-face with a work by Japanese-American artist couple Shusaku Arakawa (1936-2010) and Madeline Gins (1941-2014). Both artists are fascinated by the idea of a multifaceted Gesamtkunstwerk that incorporates society, architecture and the human body, poetry and philosophy. In the cabinet space of the Daimler Contemporary, Mont Saint Victoire, 2012, by Li Ran (*1986, CHN), an installation in several parts, is presented. The artist seeks and formulates his own individual point of entry to the modernism buried by the Cultural Revolution by combining questions relating to the theory of art with his own personal experiences.

For the artists in the subsequent part of the exhibition the internet is the source and arena of study: Both Katja Davar (*1968, GB) and Guan Xiao (*1983, CHN), who is represented in this exhibition by a 3-channel video and by the eponymous sculptural ensemble Sunset, construct and deconstruct their own real and virtual worlds and collect their references from different areas of knowledge, cultural contexts and epochs. A fundamental preoccupation for both artists is the question of how we, in our age, can evoke the past, the present and the future in thought.

The first part of the exhibition concludes with the Physique of Consciousness Museum, a kind of ‘artist museum’ by Xu Zhen produced by MadeIn Company (founded in 2009 by Xu Zhen [*1977, CHN]) that is dedicated to “human thought and action, and its body language”. The way that the thinking behind this artwork spans cultures, religions and contexts makes it symbolic of the whole exhibition and its ethos; amid the diversity and individuality of the exhibited artworks, it tries to highlight unifying and meaningful analogies. In all sections of the show, one can make out ongoing arcs that trace the course of recent tendencies in art and in current events.

The exhibition series is accompanied by an extensive program of supporting events. At the heart of this is a series of talks: an autonomous forum on specifically Chinese themes that will bring together a selection of art protagonists from China, with the hosts acting in the role of moderator. The talks will concern the artistic background and ethos behind the presented artworks, alongside fundamental issues and current themes of cultural and social development in China. The discussions, lectures and performances will give the artists featured in the exhibitions the opportunity to speak. Furthermore it is planed to host a multi-day symposium in Berlin, which will bring together some of the most knowledgeable protagonists on this subject from the international academia. The insights arising out of these events are going to be published online, and in an accompanying publication, which will be released at the beginning of 2016.

It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of the current order or capitalism. – Michael Hardt BANK presents The BANK Show, Vive le Capital an exhibition that explores, celebrates, and critiques the omnipresent power of global finance through its site-specific venue, the former Bank Union building in Shanghai’s historic Bund district (est. 1925). In the past, political ideology and religious conviction shaped the conduits of power, but as the world accelerates into the 21st century the fate of human sustenance is more and more dependent on the ebb and flow of capital. Over the past decade the divide between the haves and have nots, global south and north, have become less tenuous while national identity and borders have become more tenuous. Through this exhibition we aim to flush out some perspectives from artists and others that examine the momentous and intimate experiences with multi-national capitalism: its virtues and vices, catches and loopholes, what it renders visible or precarious along a discursive discourse from Marx to Piketty.

At the outset of the 20th century BANK’s home was at the epicenter of global commerce. Shanghai played host to banks from throughout Europe and the United States as an outpost for Asian manufacturing and trade. Shanghai’s Bund essentially incubated what we know today as modern market globalization. Taking BANK’s distinct location and historic context as a departure point The BANK Show considers creative practices as impressed in the world of global capital and finance, rather than reducing them to vapid gestures of political correctness or over-simplifying dichotomies of morality.

Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum is pleased to present The System of Objects, a group show by Chinese contemporary artists. Featuring 44 artists whose practice varies from painting, sculpture, installation to video and animation, the exhibition shown on the ground floor of the museum will be open to public on March 29 and run through June 28, 2015.

During the past few years, object has triggered more and more discussion among the realms of cultural theory and contemporary philosophy. Such discussion could be generally categorized into two patterns. One is a cultural and political pattern, according to which the contemporary society has entered a stage of massive accumulation of objects. Being the most prominent sign of the consumer society, objects due to its strong autonomy are imposing substantial pressure on man, leading to the emergence of a new kind of fetishism. Under the influence of commodity fetishism by Marx, Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukács in early 20th century and Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard in late 20th century all treated object as an important topic of study. The other is a philosophical pattern. For long philosophy has considered objects as a realm intricately and inevitably connected with man. When talking about objects, we refer to objects from the perspective of man. It’s pointless to talk about objects if not taking man into consideration. Such is the simplest description of the relation between man and object since Kant and Heidegger. However, today’s young and radical philosophers put forward “Speculative Realism”, advocating that objects have their own domain and can be liberated from man’s perspective and its connection with man. Objects have the domain, destiny and noumenon of their own. An object-oriented ontology is under formation.

In the light of the above theory and with an insight into the development of Chinese contemporary artistic practice concerning “object”, Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum selected some of the most representative object-related artworks created by Chinese contemporary artists during the past two decades. Collectively they compose the “system of objects” of Chinese contemporary art, casting light on artists’ pondering on objects, changes in people’s view about objects, the development and destiny of objects in contemporary Chinese society, and most fundamentally, how man manages to establish his own image through his connection with objects.

In conjunction with the exhibition, talks and lectures under the theme of “object” will be presented. Moreover, an international symposium under the name of “Theories of Objects” will be organized during the exhibition.

Founded by China Minsheng Bank and open to the public in 2010, Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai is committed to the promotion of Chinese contemporary art and the presentation of the trends and status quo of Chinese contemporary art. The exhibition intends to further the development of contemporary art in China and present a big picture of the ongoing evolution of today’s contemporary artistic practice.

Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) presents The Subtle Triangle as its first exhibition of 2015. This exhibition, co-organized by SeMA and the Korea Foundation, is presented in relation to the Asia Colloquium: The Subtle Triangle, which was held at SeMA in November 2014. Following academic discussions among directors and curators of private/public museums in East Asia as well as practitioners who work actively in the international art field, the exhibition focuses on the artists: Yangachi (Korea), Xu Zhen (China), and Koizumi Meiro (Japan). The Subtle Triangle attempts to escape Western-oriented analyses of Northeast Asia as well as nationalism, regionalism, and statism, focusing rather on the art world of the artists who are leading the upcoming generation. This exhibition will further examine the current state of Northeast Asia and thus propose change and development.

Yangachi, Xu Zhen, and Koizumi Meiro were all born in the 1970s. They not only lead the Asian art world, but also actively participate in international exhibitions and art events. Yangachi presents his new production Sea Salt Theatre for the current exhibition. Sea Salt Theatre is an experiment within his recent interest in researching geographical elements and temporalities that are based within Asia. Yangachi aspires to greet and re-appropriate new audiences through his work. Koizumi Meiro from Japan is presenting a series of works that explores moments of human emotion and control. For The Subtle Triangle, he reveals how the disappearance of historical facts are witnessed and reestablished, thus presenting a critical perspective of distinct historical circumstances of Japan. Xu Zhen from China founded the MadeIn Company in 2009, and has continuously presented works that question the limits and meaning of art. Xu has recently been invited to exhibit at diverse international museums as well as Art Basel Miami and the Biennale de Lyon. Xu and Koizumi both present their large-scale works for the first time in Korea.

The Subtle Triangle also provides a research lounge organized by meeting room on the third floor, which presents a history of cultural exchanges among Korea, China, and Japan since 1989. The lounge offers an opportunity to examine the sensitive and interesting sociopolitical history of the three countries alongside its art history. Additionally, an education program co-organized by the education department of SeMA and the Trilateral Cooperation Secretariat will invite youth from Northeast Asia who live in Seoul to discuss and share ideas on the past, present, and future of the three countries based on the exhibition and historical records, and further share their opinions on the potential paths the countries should take. Instead of observing one another with a contemplative attitude, The Subtle Triangle strives to construct a new discourse on Northeast Asian contemporary art by materializing their topics and enthusiastically engaging one another through psychological expansion.

Xu Zhen’s work, Eternity series, is selected to be presented in Unlimited sector at 2014 Art Basel, Switzerland.

Unlimited is curated by New York-based curator Gianni Jetzer this year. Unlimited is Art Basel’s pioneering exhibition platform for projects that transcend the limitations of a classical art-show stand. The innovative work includes out-sized sculpture and paintings, video projections, large-scale installations, and live performances.

Fondation Beyeler, Art Basel and Theater Basel will present 14 Rooms, a major live-art exhibition to be staged in Basel from June 14 to 23, 2014. Curated by Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist, the exhibition will feature performative works by artists including Marina Abramović, Allora and Calzadilla, Ed Atkins, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Damien Hirst, Otobong Nkanga, Roman Ondák, Santiago Sierra, and Xu Zhen. With an overall exhibition design by Herzog & de Meuron, 14 Rooms is a collaboration between Fondation Beyeler, Art Basel and Theater Basel.

Curators Klaus Biesenbach, Director of MoMA PS1 and Chief Curator at Large at The Museum of Modern Art, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery, have invited 14 international artists to each activate a room, exploring the relationship between space, time and physicality with an artwork whose ‘material’ is a human being. Giving visitors an insight into a more performative and interactive practice, visitors will encounter a new situation within each of the 14 rooms, engaging in a diverse series of immersive and intimate experiences.

Conceived specifically for Basel, Ed Atkins, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Otobong Nkanga will create new works for the show. Alongside these world premieres, historical and rarely seen works by acclaimed artists from around the world will be brought to Basel.

14 Rooms will include Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s Revolving Door (2011), in which a group of performers spontaneously form a line and begin to rotate around the room in a circular motion, sweeping up visitors as they move around the space.

In his exploration of social boundaries and socio-cultural inequalities, Santiago Sierra places a succession of war veterans, from varied past conflicts, standing facing one corner of a 5-5-meter room and instructed to only move from their post once solemnly replaced by another veteran mimicking the changing of the guard.

Damien Hirst’s largely unkown early work Hans, Georg(1992), consisting of a rotating cast of identical twins sitting below two of his own identical dot paintings, will be restaged at the show.

Marina Abramović’s Luminosity (1997) places a performer on a bicycle seat fixed onto a wall bathed in harsh light, exploring themes of loneliness and spiritual elevation.

Roman Ondák’s Swap (2011) asks a performer to choose an object as they sit behind a table, and when visitors enter the room they are then able to swap the object with anything else they are willing to exchange, while in Chinese artist Xu Zhen’s In Just a Blink of an Eye (2005) a body floats in midair as if frozen, defying both time and gravity, and making the audience question reality and reflect on the work’s seeming impossibility.

Originally commissioned as 11 Rooms by Manchester International Festival, the International Arts Festival Ruhrtriennale 2012–2014 and Manchester Art Gallery, the project was shown as 11 Rooms at Manchester International Festival in July 2011, as 12 Rooms at the International Arts Festival Ruhrtriennale 2012–2014 and as 13 Rooms by Kaldor Public Art Projects at Pier 2/3 in Sydney’s Walsh Bay in April 2013. For each edition, the artists list partially changed.

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Sorry, this entry is only available in 中文.

The Yuz Museum Shanghai, located at the Xuhui Riverside, will mark its grand opening with the exhibition Myth / History: Yuz Collection of Contemporary Art, featuring many of the significant contemporary works in YUZ collection. Curator for this inaugural exhibition is Prof. Wu Huang, the world famous art critic and Professor at the University of Chicago. The exhibition runs through November 18, 2014. The museum’s opening date of May 18, 2014, also International Museum Day, was chosen as a gesture of support for international art and cultural activities as the YUZ foundation brings the fresh Chinese art scene to the people.

The curatorial team of Yuz Museum Shanghai has gone great lengths to showcase the foundation’s collection in both a systemic and academic style. This exhibition focuses on the dialogue between “myth” and “history” with all works coming from the Yuz Foundation. Myth / History: Yuz Collection of Contemporary Art reflects the distinctive characteristics and directions of this important contemporary art collection, and further aims to explore some basic tendencies and logic in contemporary art, and how we construct its narrative. Comprising of more than 100 distinct works, the exhibition showcases a vast range of YUZ art collection – ranging from paintings and photography, to large-scale installations and sculptures. The exhibition will include a unique visitor experience, giving a firsthand view of Mr. Tek’s large-scale works. This exhibition promises to make a big impact in the China contemporary art community and will announce the establishment of a new public contemporary art space in China. Furthermore, through the vision of the YUZ Foundation’s academic committee, led by Professor Wu Hung the Yuz Museum will play an important guiding role in the Museum’s academic and educational program.

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Conceived by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, do it began in Paris in 1993 as a result of a discussion with the artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier about how to make exhibitions more flexible and open-ended. The conversation developed into the question of whether a show could be made from “scores” or written instructions by artists, which could then be openly interpreted every time they were presented. How would an artist’s work be transformed if others made the artwork?

At the beginning, Obrist invited twelve artists to contribute instructions that were translated into nine different languages and circulated internationally as a book. Soon afterwards, do it exhibitions were being realized all over the world, from Reykjavik to Siena, Bangkok to Mexico City. New instructions were added for each incarnation, so that today nearly 400 artists have contributed instructions to the ever-evolving project, offering infinite creative possibilities for the participants who enact them. Twenty years after its conception, do it has become the longest-running exhibition ever.

For Garage, staging do it Moscow creates new opportunities for involvement by and with local communities. The generative and democratic nature of the project enables the institution to continue exploring ways to broaden access and participation in contemporary art, which is central to Garage’s mission.

Intensive collaborative work started in January with various communities across Moscow, resulting in more than 80 instructions being interpreted by people who live and work in the city. These include the publics that visit the Center and the park, students in art, design and performance, fashion designers, fashion-store employees, staff of museums and art institutions across the city, young and established Russian artists as well as Garage staff and Gorky Park administration.

Visitors will find “do its” everywhere at Garage, whether in the form of “fortune cookies” in the cafe, a performance at the reception desk, a workshop in the lobby, or a noisy bazaar on the lawn. On leaving Garage, one can still be part of do it Moscow by participating in events such as the “planetary dance” procession staged at the Krymskaya Embankment based on instructions by renowned choreographer and dancer Anna Halprin, or by responding to the challenging task set by Japanese artist Shimabuku to “make an animal smile” or one can dance with a large piece of chalk at the Park of Arts “Muzeon”, as instructed by American artist Joan Jonas.

Garage is also pleased to announce that PUMA Social Club has become an official parallel venue of do it Moscow. Located in Gorky Park, it offers an alternative recreation space, a place for sport contests, exhibitions, film screenings, and many other entertaining activities. Within the exhibition do it Moscow, PUMA Social Club will present street performances, installations and interactive objects as interpretations of various artists’ instructions.

Do it Moscow also includes exclusive new instructions by Russian artists such as Yuri Albert, Nikita Alexeev, Valia Fetisov, Oleg Kulik, Andrei Monastyrski, Anatoly Osmolovsky, Alexander Petrelli, Sergey Sitar, Electroboutique and Konstantin Zvezdochetov.

A number of the artists’ instructions are performed by other artists or theater actors within the main exhibition space. These live events occur at different times throughout the period of the show and have no fixed location, popping up alongside the more permanent enactments.

The end of the year 2012 witnessed the opening of Long Museum Pudong, inaugurated with its opening exhibition “Through All Ages”. On March 28th, 2014, Long Museum West Bund will be officially open to the public, thereby establishing a unique ecosystem of art – “One City, Two Museums.”

For the opening exhibition, Long Museum has invited Mr. Wang Huangsheng to be the chief curator and Cao Qinghui and Guo Xiaoyan as co-curators. Taking the lineages in art history as the thread and leveraging the features of Long Museum collection, we proudly present “Re-View: Opening Exhibition of Long Museum West Bund” in three sections: “Ancient / Contemporary,” “Chinese Paintings / Western Paintings,” and “Cases / History.” The exhibition will show more than 300 artworks by over 200 artists, covering contemporary, modern, and traditional Chinese art.

Contemporary art refers to the art of the “current” age. How contemporary art converses with, extends, and transcends ancient art and the past becomes the entry point of the opening exhibition and the layout of Long Museum West Bund. As an old saying goes, “we shall usher in the current times by deriving from our ancient heritage” (jiegukaijin): to create new ideas based on old traditions. But our starting point is to create, explore, and experiment at the very present times, as we shall relate to, converse with, challenge, and surpass history. The exhibition tries to narrate “history” and expound “views” by creating a structure of contrasts: stating “views” with “history” as the thread and integrating “views” into “history.” We take the exhibition as an opportunity to offer a perspective for interpreting the art history that exists and is taking place, as well as a context in which the status quo and the future of contemporary art can be reviewed (Quotes by Wang Huangsheng).

The exhibition „Room Service“ will gather works from 1833 to today in a two-part project, consisting of a historical exhibition and a tour through the major hotels of the city. The exhibition project devotes itself to the topos of the hotel in the history of art and culture. The historical exhibition in the Kunsthalle will feature works by artists such as Joseph Mallord William Turner, Max Beckmann, Diane Arbus, Andreas Gursky, Martin Kippenberger.

In the second part of the exhibition, to be shown directly in six of the Grand Hotels in the immediate vicinity of the Kunsthalle contemporary works will be installed in a variety of different spaces, in lobbies, rooms, parking facilites etc. These works will either be existing works, for example by Cindy Sherman or Florian Slotawa or be new works developed for the setting by Ian Wallace, Christian Jankowski, Armin Linke and others.

Furthermore Hans Ulrich Obrist is invited to build on his legendary curatorial project, „Hôtel Carlton Palace: Chambre 763“, from 1993, where he hosted a show with 70 artists in his 12 square meter hotel room. As an exhibition within the exhibition he furthermore showed the „Armoire“ exhibition inside the cupboard of the hotel room, thus testing the overall interest in making a large scall show in a very tight physical frame at its most extreme. At the same time he played with the notion of showing art where it was not expected.

On the following page you will find the list of all artists participating in the 1993 version of the „Armoire“ and of the entire „Chambre 763“ exhibition. A seperate publication documenting the original exhibition will be published on occasion of „Room Service“ alongside the overall exhibition catalogue. Furthermore a room in the exhibition at the Kunsthalle will de devoted to a documentation of the exhibition.

However, it was the explicit wish of Hans Ulrich Obrist to make a re-intepretation of the „Armoire“ by combining some of the artists from the original with other younger and more experienced artists, whom today work at the crossroads of design and art. In all 11 artists/groups have been invited for this section. You will also find the names of all artists invited on the following pages.

The exhibition will take place in a room of the Parkhotel Atlantic. The room is located at the very top floor of the charming historical Hotel Atlantic directly across from the Kunsthalle. The exhibition in the cupboard will work like the original exhibition in that visitors are welcome to take the pieces out of the cupboard and use them at their discretion during their stay in the room. There will be information about the „Armoire“ exhibition available in the room. If the individual pieces need specific information for the visitor to use them, we will see how to make this available. The cupboard itself will be a regular old fashioned „armoire“, measuring approximately 150 x 55 x 200 cm. The room will also feature a work from the original exhibition by Rainer Ruthenbeck laying on the middle of the bed, a black square object titled „Leckerli“, that was exhibited in a second adjacent room by itself in 1993.

Since China Avant-garde, its iconic German debut at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 1993, Chinese contemporary art has shown a completely new face to the contemporary art world. After 1979, when the first avant-garde art groups showed their work after the Cultural Revolution, Chinese art has undergone a transformation from demanding artistic freedoms to a more complex and nuanced response to both its domestic and global context.  This year marks the 35-year anniversary of the beginning of this transformation.
Zhang Peili started his first experiments with video art in 1988, moving from painting to an engagement with the specific aesthetics and politics of new media. Video art in China today not only contributes to the mainstream of new media art and aesthetics, but has also rooted itself deeply in practical research into technological development as well as into the experience of daily life.

PANDAMONIUM, the title of this exhibition, suggests two conflicting ideas: the soft, cuddly, diplomatic, almost clichéd, image of the Panda, one of the great symbols of China to the outside world, and the wild, fertile, noisy disorder of pandemonium, the place of all demons in Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’. The birth of this new word represents the chaotic energy of Chinese artists’ efforts and experiments in new media art over the past decade. Furthermore, it highlights the fact that Chinese contemporary art has not yet, other than through the art market, engaged globally during this time.  This lack has been veiled by the speed of Chinese social and economic development and further masked by the impact of politics and the media.

PANDAMONIUM focuses on the work of Shanghai artists who work openly, distant from the country’s political centre in Beijing. The group of artists shown here are all engaged in experiments with new media introducing into Chinese art new creative ideas and aesthetic approaches. This exhibition addresses the first three generations of media artists in China. Starting with pioneers like Zhang Peili and Hu Jieming, working since the 1980s to break new ground with the technologies of media art, to the successes of the next generation, such as internationally acclaimed artist Yang Fudong, and moving on to their students, who are developing their own visual languages in response and in contrast to their pioneering teachers. The work of this youngest generation of artists will be premiered in Berlin for the first time. Berlin-based artists Thomas Eller and Ming Wong have also been invited to contribute to PANDAMONIUM by responding to these themes.

The work selected for the show is largely on single screen projections, minimal and subtle expressions that will allow the Berlin public not only to see some of the strongest work now being made in Shanghai but also to sense the scale of transformation that is now running through the whole of Chinese contemporary art. PANDAMONIUM is especially proud to premiere new works by both Yang Fudong and Qui Anxiong.

NEW YORK – The Armory Show is pleased to announce that Xu Zhen has been chosen as the commissioned artist for the 2014 edition. Xu Zhen, a “chameleon of concept,” has built an extensive body of work that includes video, installation, performance, and photography. From theatrical merry pranks to quieter works playing on human sensitivity, Xu Zhen has developed a repertoire confronting social-political taboos within the context of contemporary China and beyond.

“I am very honored to be named the The Armory Show 2014 Commissioned Artist. The fair offers an strong platform for exchange, and for dialogue around art, the market and its many interrelated institutions and ideas,” says Xu Zhen.

Armory Focus: China, curated by Philip Tinari, Director of The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, aims to illuminate the strength, dynamism, seriousness and originality of the Chinese art scene and system today. Tinari notes that “Xu Zhen’s participation will further activate many crucial questions meant to be raised by Armory Focus: China. Throughout his career, Xu Zhen has been at the forefront of critical thinking about the role of art and artists in contemporary China, engaging smartly and humorously with many of the big issues facing cultural production there today. It is also particularly thrilling that this year’s Armory Focus: China coincides with Xu Zhen’s major mid-career survey exhibition at UCCA.”

Experimenting with the possibilities of curatorial education and its potential to impact cultural development, CAFA Art Museum has invited six leading curatorial programs from the U.S.A., Europe, and China to join in the organization of the Biennale. Representing California College of the Arts, San Francisco; China Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing; China Academy of Art, Hangzhou; de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam; École du Magasin, Grenoble, and the Royal College of Art, London, faculty members and alumni have collaborated on the overall conception and execution of this unique project as well as worked independently to present six distinct but related exhibitions that feature artworks from 70 artists and groups.

The title of the Biennale—The Invisible Hand—refers to Adam Smith’s metaphor describing the self-regulating behavior of the marketplace. In the context of the six respective exhibitions the metaphor is extended to intimate something of the histories, methodologies, and theories that inform curating, without leaving visible traces of their impact.

While they offer a variety of interpretations of the overarching theme, Smith’s presence is directly acknowledged in artistic gestures of political, social, sexual, and imaginative resistance to dominant modes of liberal politics and capitalist economics.

At the same time, the museum is revealed as a theater of objects, which despite the mechanisms of display and interpretation yet enact their own tales. Its dense acreage of its storage areas is additionally understood as humanity’s cellar, the contents of which mirror our histories, while temporary displays in the galleries only reflect our prevailing ideologies. Curatorial and the artistic gestures of selecting, arranging, organizing, and displaying overlap and collide. Modes of classification favored by modern museology are usurped by artistic acts of selection and sorting which eschew order in favor of rupture.

Through the exhibition and its associated conference and publication, the Biennale will thus highlight and promote the role of curating as a practice that constructs knowledge as part of an expanded ecology, which is integrated with academic education and social practice.

Participating artists include Ding Yi, Geng Jianyi, Hu Jieming, Wang Youshen, Xu Zhen,Yang Fudong, Yu Youhan and Zhang Enli, those works are barely displayed in public and never displayed in ShanghART Beijing.

Since ShanghART Beijing founded in 2008, till 2013 we have experienced for five years. From the number to say, “5” is a figure that is easy to be amplified, this number puts people on the axis that can both looking back over the past and expecting forward for the future. If we say “5” is a time concept unit, then the “+” represents a clear attitude rather than a physical definition. “5+” is a start of a new page, is an inheritance and a continuation. “5+” is the expectation for the next five years, and a beginning of a new journey. “5+”is a opening formula, when the time drifting away, the unfinished keep been pursued, there will be a new number appear behind “+”. As the first exhibition of ShanghART Beijing in 2014, “Possibility” is a keyword to be stressed, be hoped for.

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This December, the international art crowd convened in Miami again for the 2013 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, the goliath art fair along with a myriad of satellite fairs and events. For any fair-goers who might feel interested or even just curious about Chinese contemporary art, “28 Chinese” at the Rubell Family Collection is a must-see.

As the culmination of the collector couple Don and Mera Rubell’s six research trips to China since 2001, “28 Chinese” features paintings, sculptures, photographs and video installations by 28 Chinese artists, and occupies the majority of galleries in the foundation’s 40,000 square-foot building. A quick skim through the artist list begins to reveal the unusualness of this show. Among the 28 artists, the only generally familiar names to American audiences are Ai Weiwei, Zhu Jinshi, Zhang Huan, Huang Yongping and Zhang Enli, all of whose work have seen more widespread representation and circulation in the Western art system. Here, Ai Weiwei and Zhang Huan are represented by several classic pieces from their most important series, with two iconic works by Ai Weiwei—“Ton of Tea” (2005), a minimalist cubic sculpture of compressed tea leaves, and “Table with Two Legs” (2008), a wooden sculpture reconstructed from two Qing-dynasty tables—and Zhang Huan’s “12 Square Meters” (1994), “1/2” (1998), “To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain” (1995) and “To Raise The Water Level in a Fishpond” (1995), all relatively older but still some of the most important performances in Zhang’s career.

While Ai and Zhang’s pieces delineate some popular themes and ethos common in the early works of Chinese contemporary art—traditional aesthetics and the spirit of collectivization—powerful works by Huang Yongping and Zhang Enli are absent in this exhibition. Huang Yongping’s disturbing installation “Well” (2007), with several ceramic pots of decaying snake, bat, goat head taxidermies posing as if they are looking out of the pots, is his only piece in the show. This work is meant as a metaphor for the power relations between East and West—the former constantly and involuntarily observed by the latter as “cultures of otherness”, while people feel scared but too powerless to escape from this awkward situation. Even if we leave out its necrotizing smell, in reality, the work does not serve the artist’s original intention well. As viewers step onto the wooden platforms in front of the pots and peer inside, the dead animals’ unexpected stares alarm the viewers instead, removing the meaning from this work. As for Zhang Enli, his four works depicting a wooden crate, two toilets and the back of people’s heads in this show are slightly disappointing, as they are neither the most sensational nor the most introspective pieces made by the artist.

“CLUTCH”, ShanghART’s first exhibition in its newly renovated H-Space, opposes older, lesser known or rarely seen works by 18 artists with most recent pieces from the same artists. «Clutch» normally means a mechanical device that helps a car run smoothly by providing the transmission of power from one component to another. However, it is easy to likewise find the so-called «clutch phenomenon» in the art world. From an intermediate perspective, it can be observed in the relationship between the artists and the gallery. The power transmitted promotes the artists’ creations, while at the same time lifting the gallery to new heights. Meanwhile, one can also find the phenomenon to be present in different periods of each of the artists’ works, as well as in the contrast or links between their old and new pieces. Through each transmission of motion and power the connection forms a clear relationship between the various works.

On May 18, 2013 the PinchukArtCentre (Kyiv, Ukraine) will present “China China”, a major group exhibition including eleven Chinese artists of different generations, focusing on the tension between individuality and collective thinking. A subject, which not only defined Chinese history and continuously shapes contemporary society but equally gains importance in the West.

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Artworks invite us to read them over and over again, because good artworks will constantly create new dialogue ways or content together with viewers. For example, people may obtain new interpretations or opinions towards the same work when the context changes.

“Re-Reading”, ShanghART Gallery’s group show in Singapore, attempts to inspire visitors to explore and experience novel receptions from the artworks in different time, space and cultural contexts; it tries to stimulate visitors to be more sensitive towards the relationship between artworks and context.

Taikang Space cordially invites you to the group exhibition,“Pessimism or Resistance?”This exhibition consists of more than 30 artworks by27 artists that span a period from the late 1980s to the present,with a focus on politics.These artworks include photographs, video, paintings and installation. Moreover a few artists will display their precious manuscripts.

Today,all ispoliticized”However,the exhibition “Pessimism or Resistance?”focuses on politics of reality and of the visible.Here “pessimism and resistance”neither refers to the categories of the artworks,nor to the artists’creative intensity,or are those the keywords in understanding this exhibition.This title is a question thrown to the artists and the audience,asking ourselves as artists and the audience. what can we do and how to go about politics on a visual threshold?The exhibition attempts to present the artist’s creative process in dealing with this subiect matter. by focusina on the artists’subiects ofinterest and their semiotic shifts.as well as the artists’interpretation and representation of the subiect.and the reationship between the two.The exhibition aims to provoke further discussions and enthusiasm on this topic in the artistic world.

These artworks are centered on five main topics,“spiritual axis”,”great portraiture””the everyday and the collective”, “rehearsal”, “local affiliation and international imaaination”Due to various setbacks and limitations.many wonderful artworks will not be displaved in the exhibition space. To compensate. the exhibition will be divided into the visible and the invisible. and the latter will be converted to 2D codes and dispersed throughout the exhibit.While visiting the exhibitionwe encourage you to use your smart-phone to scan these codes, through which to open a channel in understanding the exhibition and the works on display. We would like to extend our most sincere respect and aratitude to the artists and their artworks that may not be exhibited at the space. We look forward to your presence.

With over one hundred performers presenting new and reimagined works by some of the world’s best-known contemporary artists, 13 Rooms ran for eleven days at Pier 2/3 in Sydney’s Walsh Bay to great acclaim and attendance. 13 Rooms included previous and future Kaldor project artists Marina Abramović, Allora & Calzadilla, John Baldessari, Xavier Le Roy, Roman Ondak, Tino Sehgal and Santiago Sierra, alongside major international artists Joan Jonas, Damien Hirst, Simon Fujiwara, Laura Lima and Xu Zhen, and emerging Australian artist duo Clark Beaumont.

The project was conceptualised by Klaus Biesenbach, then-director of MoMA PS1, New York, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, then co-director of London’s Serpentine Galleries, as an innovative group exhibition of “living sculptures” in purpose-built rooms. 13 Rooms was originally commissioned by the Manchester International Festival in 2011 as 11 Rooms, and grew to 12 Rooms at the 2012 International Arts Festival Ruhrtriennale in Germany.

Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, John McDonald described the works of 13 Rooms as “a celebration of performance art that conceives the human body as a portable sculpture”.

The opening exhibition at the Sifang Art Museum designed by Steven Holl Architects re-considers the utopian tradition of philosophical gardens in China. Within this evinced context the exhibition connects a variety of subject mater, such as the meaning of monuments and folly gardens, or the body, hedonism and experience economy.

The exhibition will include works made especially for the occasion by acclaimed international artists such as He An, Gabriel Lester and MadeIn Company / Xu Zhen, and emerging Nanjing-based artist Li Jingxiong. Next to these site-specific works, the exhibition features works on loan and from the permanent collection of the Sifang Art Museum by important international artists like Olafur Eliasson, Liang Wei, Yutaka Sone, Danh Vo, Duan Jianyu, Marlene Dumas, Kan Xuan, Anselm Kiefer, Mao Yan, Lucy Raven, Luc Tuymans, Yang Fudong, Zhang Enli, Zhou Chunya, Zhang Peili etc.

The opening event will also feature the first viewing of the architectural masterpieces designed by award winning architects including Steven Holl, Irata Isozaki, Wang Shu, David Adjaye, Ai Weiwei, Matti Sanaksenaho and many others.

SHANGHAI SURPRISE is curated by Shanghai‐based Leo Xu and Azure Wu who have spotted and experienced much of the city’s metamorphosis from 2000 to present, during their curatorial stint at local museums and later positions in curating, art dealing and publishing. Inspired by an empathy with a film’s title, this eponymous project is envisioned as a capsule of time and space rather than an encyclopedic gesture.

SHANGHAI SURPRISE comprises two parts, one is an group exhibition featuring works by defining artists, young generation of Chinese and expat authors who bear a strong tie with Shanghai – be it geographically or culturally – and the other a mobile library that captures the transformation of the city’s cultural landscape.

Central to the exhibition is a selection of works that are rarely seen in Shanghai or less exhibited and possibly fading into oblivion after premiere. Being less iconic, this body of works is deemed by the two curators as a distinctive narrative to unfold the last ten years’ production of contemporary art in Shanghai. These works will be complemented by a presentation of recent output by younger Shanghai‐based artists.

Titled THE SUBSCRIBERS #1: ARCHIVING CONTEMPORARY ART IN SHANGHAI SINCE 2000, the mobile library is scattered across the entire exhibition space and provides access to a rich collection of printed matters and digital resources both documenting the activities of Shanghai‐based artists, collectives, and programs of institutions, galleries, alternative spaces and cultural councils of foreign consulates in Shanghai.

Seoul’s Gallery Loop houses the Moving on Asia collection of Asian video art—hundreds of single-channel videos selected by the Asia Curators Network. It is the centrepiece of Loop’s programme of exhibitions, events, and publications promoting artistic exchange in and beyond Asia.

The show features forty-five works from the collection, and is divided into three instalments: New Town Ghosts (22 February–24 March), Movement No. 2 (25 March–21 April), and Who Cares About the Future? (22 April–3 June).

Made In Company’s Physique of Consciousness (2011) sets the tone for the second instalment, Movement No. 2. A middle-aged instructor presents a series of exercises to improve physical and cultural fitness. The routine combines movements drawn from different cultures and ideologies, promoting commonality over historical difference. This instalment stresses that unilateral belief systems, established boundaries, and traditional cultural obligations are no longer fixed.

The project also includes an Artist Focus section, highlighting major artists, and special screenings focusing on the activities of Hanoi Doclab and the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival—small, mobile artist collectives with strong political and social agendas. The complete Moving on Asia digital collection is also available for user-directed viewing.

We are immersing in the world of reality constructed by media, or even, the media today are able to refresh reality in a “hyperreal” way, whereas, the new does not necessarily upgrade or contain the old, vice versa. Neither the old nor the new media are replaceable, for each medium crystalises a certain way of perceiving the world. Thus, the question we are facing at together now is: what is the space, which is between media and the reality?

Distance Produces Beauty is a display co-curated and created by GUEST, MadeIn Company and TOF. Here, “distance produces beauty”, the famous aesthetic discussion is planned to occur again under the name of painting, which now develops into an action of display about how to appreciate painting. “Beauty” becomes the “distance” which attempts at liberation. The surface of that appearance is altered by reverse thinking, which also converts it into a new field of perception.

GUEST is a new collective that comprises three of China’s most convincing young talents: Zhao Yao, Xu Qu, and Lu Pingyuan, all of whom have also begun promising solo careers. Project: Standing on the Shoulders of Little Clowns, UCCA, Beijing 2012(Curating by MadeIn Company). Xu Qu was born in 1978 in China, Works and lives in Beijing. Recent solo exhibitions include: Xi Sha, South China Sea Projekt1#, Hemuse Gallery (Beijing 2011); Taikang Space, 51m2 11# Xu Qu,Taikang Space(Beijing 2010). Zhao Yao was born in 1981 in Luzhou, Sichuan Province, China. Works and lives in Beijing. Recent solo exhibitions include: 2010 “51m2: 3# ZhaoYao”, Taikang Space, Beijing (China 2010); Zhao Yao: I AM YOUR NIGHT, Beijing Commune (Beijing 2011). Lu Pingyuan was born in 1984 in Zhejiang,China. Works and lives in Shanghai. Recent solo exhibitions include: Capsule, Gallery Box, Gothenburg (Sweden 2011); Autonomous breathing, M50 Creative Space, Shanghai (China 2010).

Since TOF (DING Li, JIN Feng) established in 2011, considering to provide service for “special” customers, fully using artistic producing experience as well as technique and learning the experience of expansibility from some certain samples become its starting point. It also draws out the possibility from the daily super real experience. TOF’ s exhibitions include: 27-pamphlet, Taopu Contemporary Art Centre (Shanghai 2012); “Prevent 2012” Doomsday Party，Taopu Contemporary Art Centre (Shanghai 2012); The escape plan，Taopu Contemporary Art Centre (Shanghai 2011). Jin Feng was born in Shanghai in 1967, He graduated from the China Textile University, Shanghai Arts and Crafts Professional (now Donghua University) in 1991. Now works at Fudan university, Shanghai institute of visual art institute of new media. Ding Li was born in Shanghai in 1979, and graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts in Paris in 2008. Now Works and lives in Shanghai.

MadeIn Company was established in 2009 in Shanghai by Xu Zhen, it is a contemporary art creation company, focused on the production of creativity, and devoted to the research of contemporary culture’s infinite possibilities. MadeIn Company’s exhibitions include: Seeing One’s Own Eyes – Middle East Contemporary Art Exhibition, ShanghART Gallery & H-Space, Shanghai (2009), S.M.A.K., Gent, Belgium (2009) and IKON Gallery, Birmingham, UK (2010); Physique of Consciousness, Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2011), Long March Space, Beijing (2011); Action of Consciousness, ShanghArt Gallery, Shanghai, China (2011). MadeIn company also participated in the 8th Shanghai Biennale and the 7th Busan Biennale, Korea (both 2010), and group exhibitions at UCCA, Beijing (2009) and Rijskakademie, Amsterdam (2011), among others. Curatorial projects in Shanghai include the group show, Bourgeoisified Proletariat, Shanghai Songjiang Creative Studio (2009), besides exhibitions at MadeIn Space (2010) and TOP Contemporary Art Center (2011).

The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) is QAGOMA’s flagship contemporary art series. Since 1993, the APT series has drawn more than three million visitors with an ever-evolving mix of exciting and important contemporary art by more than one thousand artists from the region.

The APT takes over both QAG and GOMA every three years with an exhibition, film programs, learning initiatives, Children’s Art Centre projects and a dedicated public program of talks and workshops.

The series has seen the Gallery develop long-standing partnerships throughout the region and helped build one of the world’s most significant collections of contemporary Asian and Pacific art.

The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) Exhibition Archive includes an extensive collection of material for each APT from 1993.

For this landmark tenth edition, QAGOMA’s Asia Pacific Triennial looks to the future of art and the world we inhabit together. It’s rich with stories of how to navigate through time and space, reimagine histories and explore connections to culture and place.

‘The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ (APT10) included 69 projects with new and recent work by emerging and established artists and collectives, together comprising more than 150 individuals from 30 countries. It includes works of art that are by turn highly personal, deeply political, and full of joy.

Including major new and recently commissioned works, APT involves a great depth of research by the Gallery’s in-house curators working collaboratively with a network of artists across wide and diverse geographies from Australia and the Asia Pacific region.

As visitors to past APT’s will anticipate, the expansive onsite exhibition experience across both our galleries, QAG and GOMA, features a great wealth of materials and techniques, from large-scale installations and immersive multimedia artworks to sculpture, textiles, paintings, photography and video. APT10 includes three curated cinema programs, interactive artist projects for children and families, plus a closing weekend Festival.

Contemporary Art has been developed in the last two decades as a matter of business, of economic assets, objects and tastes. Treated as a targeted status symbol, it has kept on flourishing despite the economic crisis, engendering transactions and attracting aficionados and collectors worldwide. This is not an issue that necessarily implies a positive or a negative connotation, nor it is set apart from the traditional modalities by which artworks have been produced and sold in the past centuries. The proportion and the inflation of the market of the last 20 years though, are indeed to be considered as a new phenomenon.

In the Asian bourgeosified society, Contemporary Art is still positioned in a grey zone, a certain bleary place located in between the decorative taste, the investment and a certain self-image building process. It is also a blending of layers, composed by a long collectivism tradition that is now clashing with the up-and-coming globalized internationalization. Contemporary Art in Asia is strictly engaged with a superficial spectacle of the Western world, perceived in the East as the product of a baroque-like golden past, mixed with contemporary sophistication. This perception is then expressed by the aim of self-awareness and the aspiration of achieving a mature artistic taste, typical of nouveau riche societies.

The acceptance and absorption of modernization and its symbols has been mirrored over the last decades by the rapid development of venues featuring contemporary art, most of them highly influenced by the Western white box concept. Hence the artworks are presented in abstract architectural constructions that somehow alienate them, or, as some people would say, allow them to be displayed in a professional environment.

For several years now I have been flirting with the idea of exhibiting art in an alternative kind of space, not per se a gallery or a museum. The Chinese and the East Asian tradition in general, share a very particular way of showcasing artworks. It is a matter of private spaces, intimate places for the small community of friends and family members. It is conceptually thought as a place where furniture, decoration, art, books, tea and music are all part of the same empirical experience. This consideration is of course general and quite superficial, but certainly describes an extant situation that is worth highlighting, especially in China where the cultural sphere is still touched by the legacies of a millenary culture.

This exhibition curated by Rudy Tzeng in collaboration with Davide Quadrio (Arthub Asia) and with the curatorial assistance of Jenny Lee is an attempt to transport contemporary art from China within this context, making it sharing a world of “intimacy” and private space, far away from the white box experience.

To challenge this even more, the exhibition is divided in two main sections/spaces: Yi&C located in the heart of Taipei city that presents works by MadeIn, Yang Fudong, Charwei Tsai, Julika Rudelius, Yang Zhenzhong, Heman Chong, Liu Jianhua, Li Jun, Geng Jianyi, Qiu Zhijie, Jiang Pengyi, Chen Zhou and Zhou Xiaohu. These artworks are directly related with the home space, trying to challenge and powerfully engage with this place of decoration. The War Art Company, in charge of the installation, has been invited by the curatorial duo to interfere in this process as far as they could together with the artists who are in some cases (Zhang Enli and Chen Zhou for instance) producing site-specific works.

The second venue, Artrans, a new stunning facility located in Neihu that will be used Fine Art storage, it is the place to comment to the previous section via monumental works by Yang Zhenzhong and Zhang Peili and minimalist works by Li Ran, Jiang Pengyi, Heman Chong and Francesco Simeti. The works presented here deal with issues connected to private, social, transitional and psychological spaces that bring the exhibition to a much abstract and universal level of interpretation.  Some of the works will be presented in this venue as a continuation of the furniture shop experience, decontextualized from the previous existence in the shop and presented in the white box space here to defy even more their artistic value and existence.

The exhibition will be later recorded in a complementary catalogue that will develop further and critically the above questions, and hopefully bring art from and within China into a much diversified context, more human and closer to the Asian sensitivity for art and its fruition.

This exhibition is an occasion to present three generations of artists from China but also international artists who are connected to this cultural world via multifaceted experiences of China in a broader sense. So, this show is not a Chinese show, it is a show on China and its diversified artist developments and directions. It is China as a platform of artistic experimentation, a place that is still under construction and, for this reason, open to new models, ideas and structure of the contemporary and its perception and value.

I would like to take this occasion to thank all the artists and the galleries that have been supportive of this project and that took the challenge of presenting their works (some) for the very first time in Taiwan together with Rudy Tseng, Jenny Lee, Lorries Chang, Angela Yi, Amber Hsieh, Mao, Guang Ming Lin and etc., for their professionalism and continuous support.

Davide Quadrio, Shanghai, October 2012

Many predictions are that we are living at the end of days. Nosferatu, the Mayan calendar, Kalki Bhagavan, The I Ching, Dresden codex and many others all point to the imminent and immediate Apocalypse (the year 2012) But this impending doom, also brings with it a demented sense of curiosity, elation, dismissal and relief from the conundrum of contemporary reality. I mean Just what is it about the end of the world that makes it so appealing?

Furthermore the Apocalypse has been anticipated since the birth of humanity and more recently by Hollywood films, books, media spectacle and general public chatter. Is it even worth considering anymore? Has it already happened and we aren’t aware of it? Shall we celebrate it? Is it something that we will watch from the comfort of our living room couches via satellite TV much like we watch the films that preceded it or news casts of man made catastrophes, or the world cup? For a global culture spinning further towards the secular with every hamburger sold or fundamentalist war fought, does it really matter?

The title of the exhibition riffs off Richard Hamilton’s seminal work Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? which was ironically produced for the exhibition This is Tomorrow, an early cross-disciplinary exhibition that explored pop and consumer culture’s impact on the world. Today, in a global culture fully swayed by popular and consumer trends how do we confront the final spectacle? This exhibition presents some artistic responses to this query.

The theme of this exhibition is straightforward, despite its suggestion of obscurity. Its title, the Unseen, a simple term with easy access, is a point of departure for a vast range of possible meanings that touch on the complexity of ways of seeing, blindness and envisaging, especially with respect to visual art. The Unseen, focusing our attention on the invisible, or even the uncertainties of their existence, by no means precludes the visible. In Chinese, it can be translated as jian suo wei jian, literally, ‘to see the unseen’. The Unseen refers to the limitations of our sensory organs, the narrow confines of human perception on the one hand; on the other, paradoxically, it gives rise to observations that transcend familiar experience.

The Unseen is apprehended as a visual journey through both space and time. Concerning the former, it might refer to distance – something perhaps light years away or, simply, hidden behind a wall – or that which is veiled, wrapped, or confined. It can signify slippage between different political and cultural realms, so that what is easily seen in our milieu is unseen in others, and vice versa. In order to pursue the Unseen, we are obliged to communicate through cultural diversity, whereby politics, class, race, and identity can be reinterpreted or misinterpreted, with accuracy lost in translation. Furthermore, it asserts a present tense and provides instant space for imagination. Neither the past nor the future presents itself in reality, and so each generation is bounded by its own Unseen.

The Unseen has been appropriated to create a variety of versions of history, which lead to different ideological, moral and cultural propositions, simultaneously to shape anticipation and anxiety with respect to the future. Beyond our grasp of the material world, the Unseen resides in impulses that resist representation, in realms of desire. For those with a spiritual tendency, towards ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’, it constitutes faith in an infinity beyond the finite, in an eternity beyond the ephemeral.

The Unseen has wide appeal, embracing and belonging to each of us. The exhibition provides a space for reflection, visually-led thinking, practice and reading, a platform to be shared by artists and others for creative dialogue around sustainable, extendable and transformable philosophical positions. It is about what we know and about the unknown; it is about our belief, the rationale of incredulity, and the assurance of hope. The Fourth Guangzhou Triennial is set in three different areas, each area serving a different function: the Guangdong Museum of Art, as an exhibition space, the Guangzhou Opera House, as a performance space, and the Grandview Mall – one of the largest shopping centres in Southern China – as a public, non-museum space.

‘How to Escape the Light’ celebrates the legacy and ethos of American artist Dara Birnbaum. Recognized for her early adoption of and insistence on video as an artistic medium, Birnbaum has maintained an active artistic practice marked by radical innovation for over three decades. Curated by Karen Archey, “How to Eclipse the Light” traces the influence of Birnbaum’s work, examining how aspects of her practice have proliferated and evolved in subsequent generations of artists’ work. Artists showing alongside Birnbaum include Cory Arcangel, Bernadette Corporation, Simon Denny, Aleksandra Domanovic, Cecile B. Evans, Ilja Karilampi, MadeIn Company, Pamela Rosenkranz, and Kate Steciw. Subjects considered by the exhibition emblematize and build on Birnbaum’s oeuvre, to include the critique of television, the deconstruction of female stereotypes in popular media, appropriation as strategy, the metaphorical containment of the body, and the sculptural use of the television casing, while honoring Birnbaum’s studied approach to politics and feminism.

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International alliances. To crack open this power relation Surplus Authors looks at a group of artists whose work traces and delineates several fault lines inherent in the act of collaboration from (art) historical and social indebtedness, to trust, generosity, incentives, antagonism, and even cooption. Without laying claim to any illustrative narratives, Surplus Authors presents itself at a time of a growing call for institutions to work together as a promised means to alleviate the reasons for austerity.

As a possible retort, Surplus Authors begs another question: is collaboration an end in and of itself, or is it a tenuous and unfolding process in which psychological, intellectual, and political dynamics are contested and reconstituted?

From September 5th to December 9th, 2012, Hayward Gallery will hold a living, breathing exhibition that presents ground-breaking Chinese art that refuses to sit still.

This is the first major exhibition to focus on contemporary installation and performance art from China. It brings together the work of some of the most innovative artists from the 1980s to today. The exhibition traces their artistic development, showing outstanding early examples from each artist alongside recent works and new commissions.

Change, and the acceptance that everything is subject to change, are deeply rooted in Eastern philosophy. The exhibition focuses on works that deal with transformation, instability and discontinuity, looking at how these themes are conveyed through action or materials.

Each of the artists presents works that alter their appearance over time or convey a powerful sense of volatility in some way. These include a person magically floating above the gallery floor, and sculptures that are tossed up and down in the gallery. See a wildly thrashing hose pipe dancing through space and structures made by live silk worms.

Artists in the exhibition include CHEN Zhen, Yingmei DUAN, GU Dexin, LIANG Shaoji, PENG Yu and SUN Yuan, WANG Jianwei, XU Zhen and MadeIn Company. The exhibition is curated by Stephanie Rosenthal, Chief Curator, Hayward Gallery.

Ever since photography pushed Western painting away from its reliance on realistic representation over a century ago it has taken over society’s desire to represent their lives and surroundings as a form of facsimile. Today’s non-stop hurricane of photo-images in print and web media is so much part of our physical and psychological landscape that we have almost ceased to recognize them as photographs. Within this field of image saturation, the quest for visual arts photographers has been to create images that stay. This is attested by the millions of spectacular images created in the media everyday that are quickly forgotten compared to images created by artists such as Jeff Wall or Wolfgang Tillmans that are remembered despite their seemingly mundane imagery. For Western artists, their own art history allows access to concepts and techniques going back two thousand years, but the same cannot be said for Chinese contemporary artists. Unlike Western art, Chinese traditional art was not based on realistic depiction, and as such does not offer a vast back-catalogue of visual ideas for artists to access from their own cultural memory banks. Consequently, the ‘weaker’ imagery that Western photography based artists can explore is far harder to exploit for Chinese artists. Instead, they need to find formal or subversive conduits between the worlds of photography, conceptual art, and the media.

Dada achieved this by exploding the materiality of photography and media with conceptual bombs and to use the debris in creating hybrids called collage. While collage is now an established art form in the West, Chinese artists have seldom explored this territory even though it appears to be a language that can resonate with the chaos of Chinese contemporary urban existence. In order to explore new possibilities more actively, a group of Chinese artists not exclusively engaged in photography have proposed a new approach in an attempt to open up a broader vision of photography: Instead of inviting photographers to re-imagine contemporary photography in China, the proposal is for artists working in other media but who explore their visual world using a kind of editorial visual logic can transpose their ideas on to a photo based plane. The result is the exhibition EDIT, for which a curatorial group of four Chinese artists have invited 14 leading artists including art teams working in installation, film and video, painting, and photography to search for new ideas in photo based imagery.

AN INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION OF CONTEMPORARY ART DEDICATED
TO HUMAN RIGHTS

More than sixty years after the Declaration of Human Rights, the protection of human rights is still an urgent global issue. NEWTOPIA: The State of Human Rights is a major international contemporary art exhibition dedicated to human rights. It will chart the development of the human rights movement and its evolving discourse since the post-war era. NEWTOPIA will explore the numerous, complex, and multi-faceted issues pertaining to human rights. The exhibition will be divided into several thematic chapters that trace the development of human rights and their rise, particularly since the 1970s. It will negotiate the different and complex facets of human rights: from civil and political rights, social, economic and cultural rights, to the right to sustainable development, to peace, and to a healthy environment, while emphasizing the indivisible, interrelated, and interdependent nature of these rights.

NEWTOPIA will be on view in Mechelen, Belgium, from 1 September to 10 December 2012, and will feature a satellite exhibition in Brussels. NEWTOPIA will present more than 70 acclaimed and emerging artists working in diverse media. Many of them come from countries and regions where human rights have been or still are a particularly contested issue such as the Arab World, China, Latin America, and the former Soviet Republics. Half of the artists come from non-Western countries.

There will be two new commissions in public space, a large-scale video installation by the internationally renowned Polish artist Krysztof Wodiczko and a mural by the Egyptian artist Ganzeer, who has been the driving force behind the visuals in public space for the Egyptian revolution. Finally, there will also be a curated exhibition within the exhibition itself; South African, Brussels-based artist Kendell Geers decided to open up his solo invitation to NEWTOPIA and invite guests and friends to share their personal visions and interpretations of the complex subject of human rights. His project includes, among others, Marina Abramovic, Barbara Kruger, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, Nedko Solakov, and Zapiro.

NEWTOPIA is curated by Katerina Gregos, who is currently on the curatorial team of Manifesta 9, and was curator of the exhibition Speech Matters for the Danish Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011).

NEWTOPIA coincides with the opening of the new Kazerne Dossin Memorial, Museum and Documentation Centre for the Holocaust and Human Rights and is configured as a parcours in various cultural institutions in the city-centre of the historic Flemish city of Mechelen—only 20 minutes from Brussels.

NEWTOPIA also features a satellite exhibition at ING Cultural Centre in the heart of Brussels—a solo exhibition of the internationally renowned artist Alfredo Jaar (Chile).

NEWTOPIA is part of the exhibition cluster Visual Arts Flanders 2012, which comprises five international exhibitions in the region of Flanders.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are both partners of the project.

Ruhrtriennale and Museum Folkwang will be teaming up to present the 12 Rooms exhibition from 17-26 August. For this live-art show, curators Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist have invited 12 international artists to explore the relationship of space, time and body. The result is a total of 12 independent rooms in the main exhibition hall of the new Folkwang building. The museum will be transformed into a stage, the black box of the theatre into a white cube.

Visitors will encounter different situations in each of the 12 Rooms, presented, activated and animated by performers whom the artists have instructed, choreographed and staged accordingly. Each sculpture offers the visitors a direct, intense experience, something that theatre usually prevents with the distance between spectator and stage. Body sculptures and formations arise that take shape before the eyes and in the minds of the viewers. A fleeting glance, a brief chat, a surprising gesture, a disconcerting observation: Each of the 12 Rooms touches the visitor in a different way. Whereby it is entirely up to each visitor to decide whether to stay, to return, and to see what has changed.

Live Art is an immaterial form of art that relies on but a few means: space, voice, body, movement. Interest in historical and contemporary performance has soared in an age in which the concept of the artwork has lost much of its aura. Many artists experiment with new forms of Live Art as a mirror of social phenomena. They thus ingeniously set firm relationships in flux: those of art and the market, of space and time, man and woman, mind and matter. These minimalist works are universally comprehensible and with their directness are at loggerheads with the digital society. At the same time, they find marvellous expressive guises for our permanent temporary and fluid forms of existence in the 21st century. Ruhrtriennale is co-producing 12 Rooms together with the Manchester International Festival, where the exhibition was realised in July 2011 as a group show in progress called 11 Rooms. For the rendition in Essen, some of the pieces have been advanced, others adapted, and new ones included. A Ruhrtriennale coproduction with Manchester International Festival and Manchester Art Gallery presented in collaboration with Museum Folkwang, Essen. The plan is to continue the collaboration with Museum Folkwang in 2013 and 2014.

Calligraphy, ink painting, architecture… these zombie-like ancestors from the Chinese cultural heritage have been taken over by nowadays’ people, and we remain perplexed on how to deal with them: should we “contemporize” them? Or leave them where they are?

What is for sure is that numbers of exhibitions, which attempted to use contemporary language to explain traditional spirit, appeared as superficial and exasperating. It is almost the same as the recent “Ancestors and Relative Fraternity”, which gathers descendants from the Eight Literary Masters of the Tang and Song Dynasties, wearing the Han costume. Therefore, this topic progressively became taboo, and beat about it became the correct attitude.

This exhibition attempts to use the most powerful material restrictions to lead artists to the most incorrect edge of this Truth balance: how to get free of this embarrassing feeling when facing these unrecognizable ‘forefathers’ that have been disguised, embroidered and labeled ‘quintessence of the Chinese culture’?
Should they be killed, so they can live with dignity? Or should they be half-killed half-kept alive?

ShanghART Gallery proudly presents the oncoming group exhibition from July 13 – Aug23, 2012. This exhibition will bring you various art pieces from ShanghART artists including DING Yi, LI Shan, LIU Weijian,MadeIn Company, SHEN Fan, SUN Xun,YANG Fudong,  YU Youhan, ZHANG Enli, ZHOU Tiehai, etc.

One hundred new sound works have been produced by artists from all over the world. Selected by our curators and art institutions worldwide, the artists have been invited to submit a sound work, taking its stimulus from themes evoked in Bruce Nauman’s Days, presented concurrently in the lower gallery, as part of our season on sound.

SOUNDWORKS embraces the ephemeral nature of sound, and presents an online platform that doubles as a virtual exhibition space. This site aims to make the works internationally accessible, a place to explore the genre as a medium which is simultaneously inclusive, interactive, and subversive. It includes a wide range of audible approaches by artists who have been working with the medium for many years, as well as artists taking their first venture into the sonic arts.

Please note: we will be temporarily closed for the Olympics Monday 23 July – Friday 17 August, reopening Saturday 18 August.

Our SOUNDWORKS online project: www.ica.org.uk/projects/soundworks will be accessible for the duration.

“Move: Art and Dance Since 1960s” explores the interaction between art and dance from the late 1950s to the present. The main focus of the exhibition is on visual artists, dancers and choreographers who create sculptures and installations that directly affect the movements of exhibition-goers, turning spectators into active participants – perhaps even dancers.

In works from the 1960s and ’70s by artists like Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Lygia Clark and Franz West, sculptures or installations guide sequences of movement. These works – made during a historic moment of dialogue between visual artists and dancers – intensify the relationship of the body to its surroundings, heightening viewers’ self-awareness and their perception of gravity and balance. More recently, artists such as Mike Kelley, Pablo Bronstein and TinoSehgal have exploited choreography to focus on or mirror socio-political structures and mechanisms of manipulation. In their works, choreography becomes an analogy for the external powers that control the physical, psychological and spatial aspects of our actions.

In its layout and contents, Move encourages visitors to perform certain movements and so in effect to be choreographed themselves. Viewers are invited to engage physically with most of the works and to discover, through thoughtful participation, a new awareness of the bodily self and of sensory and imaginative perception.

The installations and sculpture which form the nucleus of Move are complemented by programmes of live dance. Some of these are woven into the exhibition itself, whilst others take place as separate events. An interactive digital ARCHIVE, located at various points within the exhibition, documents other dance events, performances and happenings – a crucial part of the relationship between the visual arts and dance since the late 1950s. This contextual ARCHIVE offers visitors opportunities to explore the history of art and dance in an individual, active and playful way.

“Trans media” is realized when a medium breaks out of old boundaries to become a new form of media. The “2012 Trans Media Fashion and Art Show” is a transposition of art and fashion, which turns the desire for the new and creative into consumption, and cutting-edge artistic experiments into market demand.

“Trans” means a process of repeated transmission. Contemporary art and fashion today are inextricably bound up together. How does fashion draw inspiration from contemporary art? How can contemporary art borrow from the techniques of fashion to create more impact? This large-scale exhibition encourages visitors to reflect on this question and offers them endless possibilities.

The exhibition asks what exactly can contemporary art bring to people? What inspiration can it give to fashion designers? What happens when fashion designers interact with artists as contemporary art continues to explore the psychological, physical and conceptual realm? Will they be able to learn from each other and break through the boundaries?

This exhibition will showcase many forms of “contemporary art trans(formed) into fashion design”. The key elements in the exhibition will be about 50 video works by established contemporary artists, 200 videos from our contemporary art database, 200 inspirational works of video art from exciting new artists, and 200 examples of creative fashion design. The exhibition will combine playback of video, static exhibits and fashion show elements, incorporating video projection, video installation, image matrix and material design. It will vibrantly present the possibilities for contemporary art to become a fashion element and the inspiration for design. And it will offer a new way for contemporary artists to present their works. It can be considered an artistic fashion show, and also a fashion-driven art show. The exhibition will therefore create a channel through which the audience can enter, interact with the fashion, and begin contextualized interaction.

“Trans Media” is a new concept initiated by the Shanghai Theatre Academy – a historic and renowned art institute. Works by teachers and students from oversea art academies including University of the Arts London Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, école nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris, Antwerp Royal Academy of Fine Arts, CAFA(China Central Academy of Fine Arts), China Academy of Art, SIVA(Shanghai Institute of Visual Art), The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, National Taiwan Normal University、Dong Hua University etc. The exhibition will be accompany by “Trans Media Workshops” from international renown masters and designers, and a series of “Trans Media Forum” with lectures and seminars.

An exhibition about art and life in the world today.

Echoing the first words of A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Charles Dickens’ famous novel set at the time of the French Revolution, this exhibition jumps forward to the present to consider how contemporary art and aesthetics use the past to express the future. The ideals of Human Rights developed during 18th Century European Enlightenment found their first political expression in the American and French Revolutions. Combining ideology with action, these initiated a continuing wave of national uprisings that still continue to form the world. Yet in spite of good intentions Human Rights have been constricted and each revolution has contained at its core the worst as well as the best of human thought and action. This exhibition reflects on utopian dreams of freedom, equality, and security that are very much at the heart of our lives today, as well as on their opposite: terror, inequity and war. It is the destructive forces of both man and nature that seem to make a more ideal life impossible.

In one way the “best” and “worst” may be understood as opposites, as part of the dialectic of rational, western materialism, in which existence is formed by both choice and circumstance. Yet, in another sense, the best and worst are embedded within the same cyclical motion in which the finest dreams are crushed by seemingly uncontrollable forces, the worm of individual greed consumes collective balance or the green shoots of hope grow out of the most sterile wasteland. Within the “worst” redemption lies dormant, while the “best” may be an illusion that harbours the seeds of its own destruction. This latter view is found in many facets of Eastern philosophy and religion.

Kyiv, the site of this exhibition, is an historic Slavic city and state located on routes of trade and migration between East, West, North and South. It absorbed Vikings from the North in the 9th Century CE and strengthened its international significance and at different times Huns, Khazars, Greeks, Mongols, Pechenegs, Scythians, Tatars and other nomadic peoples, many of whom originated in the Far East, have passed through and sometimes settled there. The diasporic heritage of the vast Eurasian landmass is reflected in the choice of works for this exhibition in which artists from the Ukraine and CIS states are shown with those from the North, South, West – and particularly the East.

As well as reflecting the culture, history and genealogy of this region, this approach refers particularly to recent cataclysmic changes in the balance of wealth and power in which the mixed legacies of the European Enlightenment have been challenged. The crisis in Socialism and the whole idea of a public space, Allied adventures in the Gulf and Afghanistan, corporate greed and the virtual collapse of capitalism, the Jasmine Revolutions in northern Africa and elsewhere, have all clearly revealed that the now challenged hegemony of the West has been fatally compromised by its unenlightened self-interest. Today world poverty has reached record levels in spite of there being the resources to alleviate it. Environmental despoliation continues although it is obviously destroying our future. The ideals of freedom, democracy and Human Rights have been cynically regarded as adjuncts of power – commodities, dispensed sparingly like aid, scattering silence or compliance in their wake. One pattern emerges: the rich get richer and no one wants to give anything up. But out of this maelstrom it is by no means clear what acceptable alternatives can be found.

The intelligence, intuition and humanity of the artists who have made the work in this exhibition is not directed towards providing solutions to such questions as these but rather gives inspiration by its example. Their critical, sardonic, sometimes humorous or iconoclastic views of the world, their ability to think and see outside the cages into which we are so often willingly confined, and their clarity and commitment to truth in art, energizes us to go a step further – to experience and analyse more keenly for ourselves the causes and effects of life, the very fountainhead of art. And this is a necessary prelude for action.

The exhibition will comprise the work of about 100 artists and be organised around four hub ideas:

The Restless Spirit
Looks at the way in which we derive strength from beliefs, myths and concepts of the universe that are not governed by material need;
In the Name of Order
Examines how under the pretext of rationalism power attempts to dominate culture through the creation of self-serving hierarchies;
Flesh
Takes the human body, its appetites, desires and limitations as its central theme;
The Unquiet Dream
Focuses on nightmares and premonitions of disaster, without which we are unable to change.

From April 2-29, 48Sheet from EC Arts transformed 100 billboards across Birmingham into public art, featuring world-renowned conceptual artists. The project has been named 48Sheet following the 2010 pilot project that explored using the 48Sheet traditional billboards as platforms for art. Madeln Company (Shanghai) and Raqs Media Collective (Delhi), famous for their innovative and inspiring artwork, have been selected to create new work for 45 billboards by the Fourth Guangzhou Triennial Co-Curators and 48Sheet project partners Jonathan Watkins, Director of the Ikon Gallery and Dr Jiang Jiehong, Director of Centre for Chinese Visual Arts and Birmingham Institute of Art & Design. The project has been sponsored by The Arts Council England and generously supported by outdoor advertising company JCDecaux and NEC Graph Fix.

Established in 2009, MadeIn Company is an arIsts’ This raises quesIons of authenIcity and the way art is collecIve founded by Shanghai-based arIst, Xu Zhen (b. experienced today through ‘advanced media’, materialism 1977). Exploring noIons of idenIty, authorship, ethics and the art market. Each piece is accompanied by a label and commerce, MadeIn’s pracIce embraces a wide range with a Itle, which are quotes from various philosophical of formal and conceptual strategies. In the ‘True Image’ or cultural sources, alongside the ‘original’ artwork’s series (2010-12), five sculptures were created by the medium and size, creaIng a further conceptual deviance. collecIve, photographed and then destroyed following Suspended in the gallery space, ‘Play – 4’ (2012), features their documentaIon. The only record of the ‘original’ a naked figure, wearing ceremonial headdress, hung from artworks are in this series of large-scale photographs, and the ceiling by a form of tradiIonal Japanese ‘Kinbaku’ or in doing so, the photographic representaIon subverts the bondage apparatus. A sculptural montage of different ‘aura’ and physicality of the ‘original’ piece (as discussed ethniciIes, including Asian and African, ‘Play – 4’ by the cultural criIc Walter Benjamin in his 1936 essay, examines the problemaIcs and contenIous nature of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical ReproducIon’.) cultural poliIcs.

Upon the arrival of Jingzhe (the 3rd of 24 solar terms in traditional Chinese calendar, literally “Awakening of Insects”), creatures are startled to wake up from dormancy after long and chilly winter, indicative of beginning of new activities in forthcoming time. The energy produced by germination renders intoxicating vitality. Unlike bold and stretching movements, revitalisation during Jingzhe is accompanied by rustling and murmuring with a delicate and predicting appearance. Signalled by A Gathering upon Awakening of Insects, we would love to transfer such rejoicement into observation on art creation, presenting a bunch of newly created works or those rarely displayed before.

Infused with profound “revitalisation”, it is an exhibition introducing painting practice like no other on the artists’ records, bizarre scenes that replace poetic narration, as well as metal and readymades installation that suggests diversified attitudes in art production; or installation model fashioned by an ideal creation, implementation of creation theory stemming from botanical system, attempt at easel painting stepping into public space and magnificent conversion of uselessness in a dialectic manner. Comfortably, the display encompasses new possibilities and developments, simultaneously foretelling another round of artistic activities.

RijksakademieLIVE is a series of public events curated by Philippe Pirotte, advisor at the Rijksakademie, independent curator.RijksakademieLIVE #4 focuses on performance, this year’s emphasis during RijksakademieOPEN. Discussion and performances featuring at the 4th issue of RijksakademieLIVE evolve a.o. around the ideas of direct actions, re-enactment and dance.

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ShanghART gallery is pleased to present an autumn group show from October 18 to November 5, 2011. The works in this exhibition are oil on canvas, acrylic on canvas, ink on paper, integrated installation and others come from artists and art teams included BIRDHEAD, HUANG Kui, LU Chunsheng, MadeIn Company, Mao Yan, SHI Qing, SUN Xun, WU Yiming, YANG Fudong, YU Youhan, ZHANG Enli, ZHANG Qing, ZHOU Tiehai, etc.

ShanghART gallery was initiated in 1996 for 15 years till now. Meanwhile, SWFC enters its 3rd anniversary in October 2011. With the warm invitation from SWFC, ShanghART gallery is so honored to present the exhibition GROWING UP to celebrate both anniversaries.

Through 15 years development of ShanghART gallery, the exhibition GROWING UP presents the selected major art works from dozens of Chinese contemporary artists with great influence to Chinese contemporary art development. With various ideas and media, it becomes pieces to show the growing of Chinese contemporary art and artists in generations.

In a heart warming atmosphere for anniversary, we ShanghART gallery and SWFC are so pleased to experience and witness the growing!

In October 2011, Alfred Dunhill Shanghai Home is going to meet its glorious third anniversary. Alfred Dunhill again extends the advanced concept of Home, and has invited four famous Chinese contemporary artists namely Liu Jianhua, MadeIn Company, Yang Zhenzhong, and Zhang Ding, and the famous book designer Les Suen to respectively create a work of art for Alfred Dunhill Shanghai Home based on their own artistic perspectives and unique understandings of “Home” so as to complete the artistic interpretation and sublimed experience of “Home”. This dialogue between Alfred Dunhill and the Chinese contemporary art has promoted the brand new trend of “Home” in consonance with arts and enriched the unusual experience of Alfred Dunhill Shanghai Home. The ceremony celebrating the third anniversary will light up Alfred Dunhill Shanghai Home of creativity and originality, and the following art exhibition named “Homework” will retain the brilliant radiance of art at Home in the next month.

In 2008, Alfred Dunhill Home unveiled their mysterious journey from London to Shanghai and has added a place of taste on Huaihai Road ever since. With its tradition of masculine disposition, outstanding function, unusual quality, and British style, Alfred Dunhill Shanghai Home combines the taste appeal of men and the experiential retail concept with the luxurious third dimension of “experience”. Home is not simply an exquisite retailer; in the past three years, it has provided VIP customers various opportunities of tasting, shared with them the stories of travelling to mysterious countries, heard the delegates of Victoria and Albert Museum talking about art collection, exchanged with guests on bespoke and custom leather service and trends in the events of Home…. Alfred Dunhill Shanghai Home has set up a venerable example of modern gentlemen’s life style in an all-around manner:

The “Travel and Discovery Room” on the ground floor is filled with all kinds of dedicate and fine leather, masculine and elegant jewelry and accessories, attractive gifts, just like the quiet flowing of time; the first floor is menswear section, custom room, and bespoke tailoring room, defining the clothes and images of a gentleman at various occasions; the membership KEE Club and bar on the third floor provide fine food and wine for tasty gentlemen; the VIP room of Alfred Dunhill on the top floor is a great place to relish a sip of wine and have a rest, and the balcony provides a wonderful view of an elegant English-style garden. Only being there can one experience and understand the “Art de vivre” that the luxurious and comfortable Alfred Dunhill Shanghai Home serves to the successful Chinese men.

Art is rooted in life but is not limited to life.  The creative  and artistic platform “DAY 8” in dunhill.com, and the cooperation of Alfred Dunhill Shanghai Home and the Chinese artists and designers all reflect Alfred Dunhill’s creativity, elegance, travel, culture, and intelligence that constitute the support of the brand. Alfred Dunhill and its Shanghai Home, with the eternal love and pursuit of art, give men the inspiration to chase their dreams.

Living as Form provides a broad look at a vast array of socially engaged practices that appear with increasing regularity in fields ranging from theater to activism, and urban planning to visual art. The project brings together twenty-five curators, documents over 100 artists’ projects in a large-scale survey exhibition inside the historic Essex Street Market building, features nine new commissions in the surrounding neighborhood, and provides a dynamic online archive of over 350 socially engaged projects.

Art production in Long March Project including the following forms:
1. Curate projects for multiple individuals to participate in, producing works with collective authorship.
2. Commission artists to produce works.
3. Long March Project as curator to invite artists to create works as part of the project.
4. Long March Space is a commercial gallery to produce exhibitions for artists as a incubator.

The above forms has different relationships, some of them are vague, some are limpid, some of them are reasonable while the other is contradictory… these are reality and it inspires more possibilities in the art production and organizational building, and nevertheless, it’s also provokes questions and reflections.

MadeIn Company is a creative, production, dissemination identity.Among which, the relationship between Long March project and the MadeIn Company is quite complex one. It is based on this premise, Long March Project selected the Physique of Consciousnessproduced by MadeIn Company for Creative Time.

Living as Form will culminate with a book, co-published by Creative Time Books and MIT Press, that will highlight projects from the exhibition archive, as well as commissioned essays from noted critics and theorists in the field, including Carol Becker, Claire Bishop, Teddy Cruz, Brian Holmes, Maria Lind, and Shannon Jackson. Detailing some of the most important socially engaged projects from the last twenty years, this unique archive will provide key examples, allow insights into methodologies, contextualize the conditions of site, and broaden the range of what constitutes this form. Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011 will be out in January 2012.

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N Minutes Video Art Festival will land in Shanghai on Sept.8th, 2011. With the theme “Urban Skin”, It is the first grand public-space project in Shanghai by Li Ningchun, the curator. N minutes Video Art Festival integrates art with urban spaces. From September to October, there will be a series of night events on Nanjing Road, Huaihai Road, many city plazas and creative spaces. It will draw both international and domestic attention and participation.

This first series consists of video shows in urban spaces, N-minutes video art  substituting commercial ads. Its aim is to influence the public, and promote interaction of the city with art, entertainment. More than 40 famous video artists both from home and abroad will bring nearly 80 works into the city – that urban skin. Thus, video art will be available for the public and enrich Shanghai urban skin.

The events content:
CITIC square, 1168 West Nanjing Rd   Sep 8th – Oct 8th
50 Moganshan Rd    Sep 8th – Oct 8th
Time Square Shanghai  Sep 15th – Oct 5th
Foundry gallery   Foundry gallery    Sep  17th, 18th
Goethe-Institute Shanghai”    Sep  19th – 26th

The exhibition will fill the entire 1730 square meters of Arario Beijing and Arario Cheonan Space with approximately 72 works by 13 young Chinese artists born in the middle of 1970 or 1980’. It will span mediums and encompass painting, drawing, photography, film, animation, performance and installation. It will be showing at Beijing space from September 10 through November 20, 2011 and at Cheonan space, Korea from September 8 – October 30.

The word “Daybreak” means the first light in the morning of one day and it indicates breaking through the darkness to get reborn and the symptoms of the vanish of decay. Inspired by the fact that some of the most influential and enduring gestures in art and history have been made by young people in the early stages of their lives. The participating artists of the show are also on the historical passage. Based on the history of predecessors who imprinted Chinese contemporary art in international art scene, they are questioning about social issue or the symptom of human society around them and creating their own history. Instead of radically breaking from the past, the artists draw from a myriad of influences across historical movements and the current events happened in Contemporary China to highlight the intergenerational dynamics that drive contemporary art. This age artist group has yet to be described in any way beyond a number of concepts to define them such as individualism, consumerism, urbanization and so on but they are exploring the visual culture of Chinese contemporary art.

We hope that ‘DAYBREAK’ will offer a look at our world as reflected through the 72 works of the 13 artists belonging to the same time of contemporary China and yet representing entirely different perspectives on their problems and beauties. We hope that this exhibition addresses the Chinese art history of the present and maps out their artistic journey for the future of Chinese contemporary art.

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September 5th will mark the third session of “TOP Events” in Shanghai. After two waves of art exhibitions and other cultural activities, “TOP Events” will present one large group show, “Poster Exhibition”, turning the building into one collective movement. This exhibition will gather almost fifty artists (including international artists), who will present more than a hundred posters.

Why posters? Why re-use this propaganda function of art? The organizers of “TOP Events” pointed out that this poster exhibition doesn’t pursue a standardized classification, nor is it an ideological propaganda event, but a collective return to an utopian memory, rethought and re-expressed in the contemporary context.

Poster is the most common propaganda media used by ideologies, it provides symbolic “positions and standards”, and holds a special place in people’s collective memory as well as individual experiences. As a traditional, nowadays declined promotion media, it is generally considered that posters have an explicit topic and a defined standpoint, possessing a standardized reproducibility. However, “Poster Exhibition” presents non-standard, individual opinions, displaying “multiple voices” all at once. It is a collective, powerful publicity, which responds to the idea of “propaganda” itself, it questions targets and enemies of contemporary art. “Poster Exhibition” with this sense of power, can hopefully create a group conjecture on the mental map of collectivist society.

In “TOP Events”, this art project will build in a contemporary space a library of heterogeneous utopian symbols, images and language.

“Picture·History·Existence —— Artworks Collection Exhibition for 15th Anniversary of Taikang Life Insurance Stock Co., Ltd” is jointly held by Taikang Life Insurance Stock Co., Ltd and National Art Museum of China and is the first exhibition of Taikang Life to artistic field and social various circles in big scale. The exhibition is divided into three parts the past, the present and the future and shows representative works of tens of China’s modern and contemporary artists concentrating on Taikang Collection Systems, of which the special part of Youth attracts most attention and shows the strategy and foresight of Taikang Life on artistic collection. Through the exhibition, the public may know the development trace of China’s art history since 1942.

In a series of 11 identical white rooms at Manchester Art Gallery, a space more usually associated with glowing Pre-Raphaelite paintings, curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Klaus Biesenbach gave 11 artists a space – and time – to fill. The result was, in Obrist’s words, ‘like a sculpture gallery where all the sculptures go home at 6pm’. Audiences travelled around the gallery interacting with performers and pieces that were resolutely ‘live’. Ambiguous and affecting, 11 Rooms was a major hit with the international art scene and local audiences alike.

‘The questioning, individual intelligence motivating each piece seems almost palpable. It adds up to a resonant experience’ The Times.

After the documentation of “Express Delivery Exhibition Dial 62761232” in 2010,  “Let’s Talk about Money—1st International Fax Art Exhibition in Shanghai 1996” is the second Contemporary Art Exhibition Documentation project by ShanghART Taopu. The “Fax Art Exhibition” was held 8 years earlier than the “Dial 62761232”. And the participants, artworks and their contexts vary enormously. However, there is something similar between those two exhibitions. In concept, both fax and express delivery are mailing ways. They are both solutions to transfer information in human civilization, and they try to discuss the relationship between art and medium in different directions. In form, they are both concentrated in the concept of exhibition with small sized artworks at low cost. In terms of participants, both two exhibitions are involved with lots of people. During the “Fax Art Exhibition” in 1996, more than a hundred artists, designers and students from 17 countries participated in it. While in “Express Delivery Exhibition”, besides 42 artists and their artworks, 15 couriers who delivered and displayed the exhibition, and the viewers who telephoned to book the exhibition were all the participants. Thus, the “Fax Art Exhibition” will be interestingly compared with the last “Express Delivery Exhibition” by both researchers and viewers.

In 1996, when Canadian curator Hank Bull and Shi Yong, Ding Yi, Zhou Tiehai and other Shanghai artists discussed to hold such an exhibition, using fax as the core medium was soon accepted by the team since fax was the most inexpensive and instant global communication media at that time. Since 1970s when fax machine was invented, it was spread all over the world in 1980s. Meanwhile, it became a medium of art creation. Let’s Talk about Money—1st International Fax Art Exhibition in Shanghai 1996 was held in the age of economy globalization when fax was the most popular communication media. It was an exhibition with low cost but the topic was “Money”. Definitely, people have always talked excitedly about money in this economic world. Then, Hank Bull sent out the invitation of “Fax Art Exhibition” from Western Front Art Center in Vancouver, Canada. From March 1 in 1996, artists from different countries sent their works to Ding Yi’s and Zhou Tiehai’s fax machines (which were the only two fax machines among all the Shanghai artists at that time). The fax copies were then displayed one by one in Shanghai Hua Shan Art School Gallery. The exhibition was opened on Mar 15. Until the end of the exhibition Mar 25, the gallery was displayed full of images and texts about concept of currency and the relationship between money and politics.

After 1996, PC and internet came to China and replaced fax in communication. The 1st Shanghai Fax Art Exhibition became the only one in China. After 15 years, the images and texts on the heat-sensitive fax paper are disappearing day by day. It became a task to save the missing memory of art through scanning, preserving, reading and filing. There are two steps for our work flows. Step 1, we try to reproduce all the fax copy and relevant documents including posters, pictures on the scene, invitations, press releases, catalog scripts and so on. Step 2, in this coming September, we will show some original artworks (The original artworks for fax at that time and unfortunately some of them could not be found any more) and some interviews and researches of relevant curator and artists.

We realize that we can’t reproduce the past in 100% through researching in the old files. In fact, unlearning and losing are a part of history. And the limited document collection, record and preservation are not just to figure the incomplete outline. We would like to consider it as a new start of an interesting art journey.

June 25, 2011-August 28, 2011

Selected recent video, photography and other multimedia works by artists Chen Chieh-Jen, MadeIn Company, Huang Ran, Liu Wei, Xu Zhen, Wang Jianwei and Wu Shanzhuan collectively construct a visual dimension evoking reinterpretation of their works.

This group of artists is well established and highly respected in the Chinese contemporary art scene, communicating with their works in a language their audience is familiar with. In ACT►TION, an exhibition focusing on the mediating quality of multimedia, the viewers are provided with a fresh perspective to rediscover the complexity and dynamism obscured by the prescribed interpretation of the work. ACT►TION attempts to inspire new possibilities by reconfiguring the relationship between the past (previously created work) and the eternal present (the ever-changing subjectivity of the author/artist).

The works are linked not by the “medium” of video (the physical carrier of this transmission), but rather the artists seek to re-understand, re-use and raise questions about the extension of human thought and action itself – “media”. An effective “extension” must solidify and promote a unified value and judgment. This closed power system is omnipresent and could be seen as an apt description for how the contemporary art world functions.

If ACT►TION is merely regarded as a multimedia exhibition,an environment only for the visual communication between the artist and the viewer, the symbolism and performativity derived from the curatorial narrative, organization and adjustment are at risk of being overlooked. Possibilities brought about by this performativity may far surpass anything we could currently imagine. Therefore, expressions and acts carried out for various purposes and objects should be transformed into the bearer and executor of the action in order “to act”.The ongoing process is precisely the authentic “action”.

Artists who take themselves as the creative subject are artists in the broadest sense, daring to challenge the singular narrative and exploring the possibilities of untapped human cultural and social resource through the subtle experiences of the contemp orary social condition.

“Move on Asia” is an Asian Video Art project which has been held for one decade from 2004 to 2010, coming from Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan and Vietnam. It is the first time that a selection of these characteristics is shown in Spain with the collaboration of the Alternative Space LOOP in Seoul, where five editions of this project gathering the most representative works with materials took place, managed by Jinsuk SUH. These productions emphasize local stories of global culture, products of mobility and denials of time. The end of Video Art, such as titles are announced, corresponds to an expended video incorporating new instruments by means of which culture of images in movement has changed radically our habits of perception and creation.

“Eye see you as I see you” is the first collaboration project between MadeIn Company and cutting edge artist, Edison Chen. Using video surveillance system, pictures of eyes, graffiti culture and other elements, they created a series of works analyzing the fact of “ovserving” as a social phenomenon. What does exactly emphaxize, “Eye see you as I see you”? It might be a certain irrepressible passion ,or it could be an intense quest for the future. All of these happen in people”s eyes, and are embodied in these creations. In today’s world, what elso do we have left?

Famous Hong Kong movie star, Edison Chen, has always shown a profound interest in art creation and urban street culture. In September 2010, after organizing an exhibition with two famous artists and friends Jahan and Jakuan in Singapore, he developed a passion for art. This time, after receiveing CIGE’s invitation and collaborating for the first time with MadeIn Company, Edison Chen ( Etalier Des Chene), will pursue his creations using various media and art, to stimulate people’s mind on these controversial topics.

ShanghArt Gallery held the exhibition A Pile of Passion from February 28 to March 20, 2011. Participating artists include, MadeIn Company, Shi Yong, Xiang Liqing, Yang Zhenzhong, Shi Qing, Zhang Ding, Zhang Qing, etc, who warmed this cold beginning of Chinese New Year.

This gathering is composed of real and fictional, calm and animated, complex and subtle forms, all related by a feeling of passion, presenting a view on artists’ working process, a fragment of their creations. This art invitation is embodied into a poem on happiness and illusion, a colorful game on pressure liberation, a proletarian plant and bird installation, a traveler from cyber ruins, a naked bullfighter, even a fatal virus, all these thoughts spread out from the artists’ mind passing through their studios to arrive the show. Let’s forget for a moment Jean-Paul Sartre statement “Man is a useless passion”, we are still a pile, filled with passion to be exteriorized.

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Marking the end of the first decade of this millennium, ’21st Century: Art in the First Decade’, occupies the entire Gallery of Modern Art and focuses exclusively on works created between 2000 and 2010. It includes more than 200 works by 140 artists and collaborative groups from more than 40 countries.

Over the past decade, technological, political and environmental issues have been directly reflected in contemporary art. This exhibition examines current directions in art practice and the conditions surrounding art and exhibition making in the 21st century.

The exhibition highlights the Gallery’s extensive contemporary collections, and showcases works acquired over the past decade from Africa, the Middle East, Europe and North, South and Central America, Asia, the Pacific and Australia.

Recent acquisitions being shown for the first time include a work in neon by Tracey Emin (England), sculptures and photographs by Romuald Hazoumè (Benin), playful sculptures of camp dogs by Arukun artists including Arthur Pambegan Jr and Craig Koomeeta (Australia), powerful photographs by Mitra Tabrizian (Iran), Guy Tillim (South Africa) and Olaf Breuning (Switzerland), a suite of drawings by Frédéric Bruly Bouabré (Ivory Coast), and striking video works by SUPERFLE X (Denmark) and Sharif Waked (Palestine).

The exhibition also features a group of outstanding new commissions that introduce audiences to key moments in recent international contemporary art that would have been unthinkable in previous decades.

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In the beginning of year 2010, a bunch of black suitcases have been sent to ShanghArt Warehouse in the Top art district. These seemingly common suitcases were holding six years ago the artworks of “Dial 62761232”, following couriers in their trips around Shanghai, and delivering a contemporary art exhibition to more than a thousand people. Six years later, these suitcases were reopened: the clever, fanciful ideas and spirit they contained reappeared as before. “This portable exhibition space” unconsciously opened a new way of thinking in the contemporary art archives space ofr ShanghArt – collecting projects and research themes, adding to the history –constitutes our main working direction.

This exhibition is based on the idea of “delivery”, the title consists in the telephone number of a courier company. People just had to dial this number to view an “exhibition” delivered by a courier, who would show each of the works one after the other. People could have this “courier exhibition” delivered in any places (within Shanghai).
Each artist were asked to make a portable work that couriers could carry with them. Then 10 to 15 couriers were delivering these works everywhere in Shanghai. Artists had to make 15 copies of one same work so each courier could have one.

The 8th Shanghai Biennale defines itself as a “rehearsal” and as a reflective space of performance. “Rehearsal” is not only a strategy or a special form of exhibition. It’s travelling art and opening to all the audience. “Rehearsal” focuses on the full process of exhibition and on creativity itself. The exhibition hall is not only the medium for the artworks, but also a changing space that can trigger creativity.

The “Rehearsal” of the 8th Shanghai Biennale unfolds across five acts and an interlude: The past Decade of Chinese Live Art. The five acts are, ActⅠ. Ho Chi Minh Trail, in cooperation with the Long March Project; Act Ⅱ. A Guiding Light, in cooperation with PERFORMA; Act Ⅲ. Rehearsal, in Shanghai Art Museum; Act Ⅳ. Theory and Practice of Socialist Self-Management: Yugoslav Case, in cooperation with the radical curatorial group WHW; Act Ⅴ.West Heavens: India-China Summit on Social Thought.

Though the Five Acts, the Biennale brings together around 80 thinkers, artists and curators in an attempt to bring about a convergence of discourse and visual production. For the 8th Shanghai Biennale, “Rehearsal” is not a metaphor for a form of exhibition, but a way of thinking and operating strategy. What the Biennale aims to achieve is to invite a wide range of participants – artists, curators, critics, collectors, museum directors, and members of the audience – to rehearse in Biennale, a fertile theatre to reflect on the relations between art experimentation and the art system, between individual creativity and the public domain.

If it was possible, anything on Earth could be tagged with a validity period, starting at a certain point and ending at another. Each of these validity periods, variable and of uneven importance implies two metaphors: an obvious validity period of life, and a reminder of destiny’s uncertainty. For Xu Zhen (MadeIn), Yang Fudong and Yang Zhenzhong, these extended meanings form a common but free way of understanding the world.

In 2000, “Useful Life” reflected three young artists’ impulsions, enthusiasm, desires and dreams. Their experimentations and explorations of visual works, their brimming energy and excitement, seem to have crossed the barrier of time and remain in our memories.

“Useful Life 2010” is more a challenge rather than a continuation. The art environment, artists’ creative concepts, their ways of expression, even their identities, all changed. How to face a new context, how to find one’s place? The exhibited works represent these artists’ responses to these issues. They present each other’s thoughts, forms and rhythms, in an analogous way to their creators’ different life attitudes.

Established in 2010, ShanghART Taopu is a new kind of warehouse-style art museum. ShanghART Taopu’s ample space, adequate roof light and generous floor height provide good conditions to explore new possibilities of using space more reasonably for display, preservation, study and education of contemporary art. While exploring more possibilities of fully making use of ShanghART Taopu as a new art platform, we will closely work with art schools, research institutions, art professionals and hope ShanghART Taopu can play its unique role as a new form of warehouse style art museum.

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The “Jungle” is here. Hence, Jungle becomes a metaphor, an image to describe the patterns of an entire show, it indicates an ongoing investigation into the state of Chinese contemporary art trends, it introduces the mature tendencies of a more and more optimistic youth art.

Each single artist has already reached national and international recognition, however the development of Chinese contemporary art trends is still in the process of growth, it is somewhat of recessive. We hope that through this project we can show the status of the trends of this ecosystem. This show doesn’t attempt at forging a general panorama on current artistic tendencies, it wants to present a close-up view on a tiny slice of these artistic expressions. We hope that with the staging of a leading art movement we can investigate the potentialities of constructive trends, whilst surveying the reasons of their recessiveness.  The process of creation of “Jungle” comes from the artists themselves, from their self-identification with it to their acceptance and participation; this is a show whose structure is that of an ecosystem. There is not a particular theme for this exhibition; a part from displaying artists’ artworks, the show gives artists an opportunity to present their documentation, information and links to their websites or blog. What the artists will display through this show is their individual system. More precisely, this different modality of self- displaying has shaped a macrocosm whose semblance and characteristics are those of a “Jungle”. We hope that through the process of showcasing a whole range of trends we will be able to illuminate deeper analyses.

Organization of the Show

“Jungle” is a project launched and co-curate by Platform China; the participating artists are those that have self-identified themselves with the concept of the show or that have been recommended by others. The modes and format of the show have been discussed by the artists themselves and are still under discussions.

the artworks will be completed prior the opening of the exhibition, however, if the situation requires, the artists will be free to continue to implement or add elements during the exhibition period. There might be some artists that will continue to produce works during the show. Possibly the show will be exhibited at different times in diverse cultural context so as to let it fully constitute it’s trend and continue to grow.

comprising artists’ artworks and information, art organizations (in the development of artistic trends, there are some important and eligible no-profit organization that contribute to this artistic environment), art institutions, art groups. “Jungle” could thus be divided into three important sections: the first comprises on site works that express individual trends; the second is an area dedicated to the display of all the material and documentation related to the artists; the third is a website that also constitute an archive for each artists and links to their websites and blog.

Breaking Forecast: 8 Key Figures of China’s New Generation Artists is a groundbreaking exhibition presenting new and recent works by the most compelling emerging and mid-career artists working throughout China today: Cao Fei, Chu Yun, Liu Wei, MadeIn, Qiu Zhijie, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, Yang Fudong and Zheng Guogu. The first of its kind, the exhibition affirms UCCA’s dedication to supporting the development of Chinese art. Combining genres of painting, performance, photography, video and installation, this exhibition will define the future of Chinese contemporary art for years to come.

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Representations of Shanghai and Its Contemporary Material Culture examines the city of Shanghai and its development into one of the global economy’s most productive cities in the new millennium. Shanghai is known for its impressive population growth, the increasingly rapid rate of its cultural and environmental transformations, and the tension between Western and traditional Chinese values, lifestyle, and work habits. In addition, the city is caught between a not-so-distant communism and a late-arriving capitalism, between a world founded on its labor force and the world of new technologies. Within this environment, the role of the arts becomes ever-important as artists look to interpret the experience of inhabiting a city and a time that is in the process of defining itself, struggling with the contradictory natures of its past, present, and future. The participating artists in this exhibition take various approaches to capturing a city that seems to continually transform before our eyes.

The role of the arts becomes ever-important as artists look to interpret the experience of inhabiting a city and a time that is in the process of defining itself.

Reversed Images is divided into three thematic areas. The first looks at the romantic notions of Shanghai’s past and how it flourished as a center of commerce for trade between the East and West—represented by the illusion of Shi Guorui’s large-scale camera obscura photograph. It also examines the city’s shift from the past to its development into a hyper-modern city. This theme is represented in the exhibition’s sub-sections: Upside Down/Progressing and and Glorifying the City Present/Future. The second theme, titled Artist: Urban Comments, explores how Chinese artists are interpreting their role in Shanghai, living within a contradictory environment that imposes limitations while also producing an extraordinary stage for artistic exploration and visual/conceptual research. The third section, simply called Interiors, describes the secret spaces and unexpected privacy in a city of eighteen million people. The exhibition includes architects, urban planners, and graphic designers, as well as artists using photography.

In the context of europalia.china, M HKA will be presenting a key exhibition in the development of contemporary Chinese art, which it has acquired in its totality for its collection.

The Useful Life exhibition comprises important work by three leading Chinese artists and was created in the ShanghART Gallery at the Shanghai Biennale in 2000. It was during this Biennale that for the first time artists were given hope of more openness from the government and also the first time that foreign artists were allowed to participate.

The MUHKA’s intention in acquiring and showing this exhibition is to spotlight this crucial moment.

This exhibition would encourage discussion around three aspects, and the curatorial framework will help to clarify the sequential role the Shanghai art groups have played within the larger framework of the development of Chinese contemporary art in general. 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. We can comfortably say that History in the Making: Shanghai 1979-2009 will be a 3-dimensional historical analysis of the Shanghai contemporary art scene.

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The Conspiracy brings together work from an extensive group of local and international artists. They were invited for the diversity of their artistic production and participative models they propose. Together they span different generations, so that various strategies for public interaction engage one another. The Conspiracy is an investigation into the perception and reception of art in the public debate and seeks out strategies by which artists enter into connections with various understandings regarding the public.

As a basic characteristic of a cultural object is its (supposed) significance or ‘meaning’ beyond its physical fact, art regularly encounters difficulties of legitimisation. Since a structural split between this meaning and the physical fact became part of our way to perceive the world and its representations, there is a possibility to consider the ‘meaning’ of cultural objects as arbitrary. Modern and contemporary art have been subject to the suspicion that ‘the meaning of art’ is somehow conspiratorial in nature. This ‘critique’ is as old as the avant-garde, but it was Jean Baudrillard who infuriated the art world with his text Le Complot de l’ Art, published in the French newspaper Libération in 1996. In the article, Baudrillard claimed that art exists everywhere but in art, and that it has become a case of insider trading (the term is frequently used to refer to a practice in which an insider or a related party trades based on material non-public information obtained during the performance of the insider’s duties at the corporation).

He also expressed concern that art has become tainted with the close and oppressive relationship between artist and consumer, with the obscenity of interactivity, and with the lack of formal difference between art and reality.

This takes us to the core of Baudrillard’s dissatisfaction with the art world – art’s task is to help us cope with our vital illusion – the fact that we do not know the real, merely the appearances behind which it hides. All good art for Baudrillard appreciates this vital illusion that encompasses our existence. In recent years, art has become entangled with notions of reality and attempting to think the real. According to Baudrillard, art has lost all desire for illusion. It feeds back endlessly into itself and it has turned its own disappearance into an art unto itself. Hovering between aesthetic insignificance and commercial frenzy, Baudrillard considered art trans-aesthetic: a pornography of transparency that one can only experience with irony and indifference.  Moreover, Le Complot de l’ Art strongly questioned art’s privileged status, attributed by its practitioners, and although Baudrillard sought for an art experience freed from the mediation of curators and gallery owners, his call for distance and his appeal to a ‘proper to art’, is added today by populist politicians and cultural brokers as one of the main characteristics of a conspiracy of art.

It is exactly because of its combination of preciseness and ambiguity that art is suspicious – not because of the transparency of messages and feelings. As Jacques Rancière wrote, art doesn’t become political by representing structures of society, conflicts or identities of specific social groups. Art is political because of the distance it can take from these functions, by the type of temporality and space it constitutes and by the way it tailors this temporality and populates this space. That what is ‘proper to art’, according to Rancière, is exactly this reorganisation of a material and symbolic space towards the creation of a disaffirmation.

Exposing the conspiracy theories via a radical identification of art’s secular thought with a defiant, ruthless materialism, with scepsis and godlessness, a necessarily refusal of all superstition, transcendence, magic and mystery, was the emancipatory project of the Enlightenment which inspired different avant-gardes… It is great time this (unfinished) project of disenchantment should be re-ignited in times we far too enthusiastically plunge back into the dark abyss of obscuring and foggy beliefs. But even if since Goya’s apocalyptic visions we all know that the ‘sleep of reason’ produces monsters, we also know he had to visualise them in order to convince himself of his ideas.

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We are  pleased to bring  you the new  group exhibition MUTE. The works seemingly peaceful  remind us the situations we up against and handle. Silently waiting for the unknown future,we still plan for it. That’s how they represent themselves—theworks in MUTE may not be noticeable in other occasions, whereas they tend to ‘keep in touch’ with audiences here, somehow,in MUTE mode.

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The China Project’ is consideration of contemporary Chinese art practice in three parts.’Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection’ presents 150 extraordinary works by 50 contemporary Chinese artists from the 1980s to the present.

James Cohan Gallery Shanghai is pleased to present Matters of Faith, a group exhibition featuring works by German painter Anselm Kiefer, video pioneer Nam June Paik, American video artist Bill Viola and Shanghai-based conceptual artist Xu Zhen.

Artists have always been the agents of change. In the exhibition Matters of Faith works by four prominent international artists from both the East and West make reference to the sacred and spiritual by borrowing imagery from their respective traditions and by giving material presence to the myths and metaphors of their cultures. As transformed in the framework of contemporary art, these symbols and iconography take on the role of talismans that pave the way for a world where tolerance, compassion and harmony can reign.

A newly commissioned work for this exhibition, Untitled (2009), by the Shanghai-based conceptual artist Xu Zhen is a parody of the Potala Palace in Lhasa (initially the winter residence of the 14th Dalai Lama and later converted into a museum and tourist attraction). Built with more than 3,000 decks of playing cards, the sculpture becomes a sensational effort to break The Guinness Book of World Records.

Mahjong presents over 100 works from the famed Uli Sigg Collection — one of the world’s most significant and comprehensive collections of contemporary Chinese art. Encompassing a range of media, from paintings, drawings and photographs to video and installation, this exhibition charts China’s artistic transformation over the last 40 years and offers a unique vantage on China’s rapidly evolving art market. The Peabody Essex Museum is the only East Coast venue for Mahjong, which includes works by groundbreaking artists such as Liu Wei, Ai Weiwei, Yue Minjun, and Zhang Huan.

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The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery and MISSION 17 present imPOSSIBLE!, an exhibition in two locations featuring eight renowned Chinese artists who engage absurdity and theatricality in video and photographic works that respond to recent sociopolitical and economic circumstances in China. In addition, the SFAC Gallery and MISSION 17 have created a series of events to support this groundbreaking exhibition and have partnered with the San Francisco Chinese Cultural Center in order to present an evening screening of longer video works by participating artists. (Special events info. below)

In 2007 San Francisco-based artist Michael Zheng organized a group of Chinese artists. They first met in Beijing, and later on in Shanghai, to discuss both the common threads in their work and how their various points of view, when assembled, might create an exhibition that would reveal distinct perspectives on contemporary Chinese art and life.

Zheng, a primary coordinator of this exhibition, recounts, “We reflected on recent developments in Chinese history and how they have created a social reality that is changing at a dizzying pace. The current economic boom has inspired a euphoria that fills Chinese citizens with hope, and everybody seems to be madly rushing to some grand vision of success, however illusive this success might be. The large population and exponential need for better systems of transportation has created an impossible daily traffic deadlock. The extreme polarity created by the early successes of capitalist experiments; the absolute corruption that leaves most people gasping for air; the inundation of media, the non-stop all encompassing noise created by traffic—all seem to be driving everybody to the edge. How have we, as Chinese artists, responded to such rapid and dramatic changes?”

The artists in imPOSSIBLE! engage strategies that include using humor that is slightly dark and often times ironic that create absurd or impossible scenarios, and confront highly exaggerated aesthetic and conceptual sensibilities. In a situation where radical change becomes an everyday experience, the artists found that by engaging these strategies they were able to create works that reconcile the past with the present and highlight the pace of contemporary life in China. Biographical information about each artist is available.

PIN – group exhibition, as an extension of the ShanghART Videotheque project which was launched last September,was the first show to be presented in ShanghART Beijing space in 2009.

In Chinese writing, the character of PIN is composed of 3 squares (one on the mid-top and two at the bottom), which visualizes three old television in the center of the exhibition hall. With ‘PIN’, visitors are free to select video works from our exclusive list to play. While watching ‘PIN’, visitors also can appreciate some derivative works from artists’ video works around the hall walls.

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ShanghART Videotheque features over 200 video works by 20 Chinese artists. The videos can be viewed (by appointment or luck) at Shanghart Shanghai (main gallery) and Shanghart Beijing.

A pdf with short descriptions of the videos can be downloaded . excerpts of thevideos can also be viewed on this website .

“The time for small productions has finally come!!”
“Small Production – Great Era!!”

The enchanting environment of Hangzhou attracts and traps people in a comfort that turn into an obstacle when organizing events. With the growth of the art market, the artistic community hardly gathers and collaborates, everyone being busy working on individual project. In addition, lack of financial support and exclusive interests for ambitious projects paralyze artistic activities. Under these circumstances, Shao Yi, Zhang Liaoyuan and others decided to change this reality and opened a dialogue with artists in Hangzhou . It occurred to them that “it’s not that there are no good exhibitions in Hangzhou , but there are no exhibitions at all, no one is enthusiastic in organizing a common event, there is too much focus on the exhibition itself and not enough on the communication, etc.”.
It is then that the first project was established, it was called Small productions (August 2008) and was held in Shao Yi’s studio.

“Small productions is a big theme, from the exhibition point of view, it is incomparably crappy, but this kind of “crap” make people feel relaxed, free, everyone is very happy. A crappy personal experience, a crappy confrontation with a fizzy taste which make it different from a bad exhibition. Soon afterwards, some participants said too much content would reduce the quality of the event, but Shao Yi and I tacitly understand each other, this is the basis, what we want is that everyone communicate freely, we don’t want to curate an exhibition. Everyone shows its real mood and presents what they don’t want to show in other exhibitions, they submit it to everyone’s eyes. […]

“Don’t stop”, this is our activities’ main request, we force ourselves to produce, think, participate, communicate under pressure, maintining a creating attitude within the limits of the individual resources. There’s no good or bad, participants express their ideas in a fast and direct way, without time for doubts.

The show is going on, just wait and see! .” (Zhang Liaoyuan)
“Small Productions” is an event gathering artists from all over China to produce works with individual resources. It includes videos, drawings, installations, photographs and any other kind of media chosen by the artist. The 5th Small Productions Event will be held at the Shopping Gallery from December 23rd 2008 to February 15th 2009.

The generation relation between artists is being concerned as the theme during the last exhibition of 2008 in Shanghart. Those young artists who gain skills and concepts of art, following on apprenticeship of their masters, recalls the old school memories. Yet the “Generations” here emphasizes the inheriting the spirit with strength, personal fascination and consistently energy of creating. The generation branches include Yu Youhan, Geng Jianyi, Ding Yi, Yang Zhenzhong and Xu Zhen etc. You may discover some implied clues through the experience of the distinguished arts, and the unchanged ambition since 85’ New Wave shall be suggested as well.

ShanghART Gallery is pleased to announce its participation at this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach art fair taking place in December. ShanghART will be in Booth A4, Hall A.

ShanghART Gallery is pleased to announce FORGOTTEN BAR PROJECT – Secret Edition at ARTissima.

Initiated in Berlin, the Forgotten Bar Project launches its newest edition in collaboration with ShanghART Gallery at ARTissima featuring a fabulous selection of artists from China, Europe, and the States.

Julieta Aranda, Tjorg Douglas Beer, Tobias Bernstrup, Amie Dicke, Andreas Golder, Christian Jankowski, Stefan Morsch, Rothstauffenberg, Costa Vece, Malte Urbschat, Xu Zhen, Sun Xun and more…

ShanghART is pleased to present works by Yu Youhan, Zeng Fanzhi、Sun Xun, Ding Yi, Xu Zhen、Yang Zhengzhong、Liang Shaoji LI Shan, WU Yiming, Zhou Tiehai.

Can art help us to understand complex three-dimensional configurations of nature better? The exhibition Life? Biomorphic Forms in Sculpture investigates organic, biomorphic and anthropomorphic forms and offers an extensive exploration of the subject, with pictures of life that are rampant and threatening as well as cosy and friendly.

Biomorphism represents transformation and fluidity, evolution from one state to the next. It is governed by processes operating on fundamentals, determining all works in different ways. Etymologically derived from the Greek words bios (mode of life) and morphé (form), the term seems to have come into use in the 1930s, when it described the visual style of the Surrealists. The artists in the present exhibition follow the same tradition, sharing an interest in (and drawing their visionary creatures from) the archaic and fundamental. An odd accumulation of magic realism is the result that creates myths and triggers off discussion about mankind’s manipulation of organic tissue.

Particularly Berlinde de Bruyckere’s fragmented Laocoön, Louise Bourgeois’s embryonic exhibit, Georg Herold’s paraphrase of faith in science and Xiao Yu’s shocking fabulous flesh creature go directly and corporeally to extremes, opening up a debate on topical subjects such as genetic manipulation, cloning and research into the creation of artificial life. Lee Bul’s over-artificial winged creature gropes similarly towards biomorphism. In a dialogue between a Frankenstein sci-fi monster and a mystic creature, Transcription (Drift & Scatter) is also reminiscent of the celebrated Nike of Samothrace. Wolfgang Flad sets up a rather ironic link with art history in making his bone sculptures in an unusual arrangement of constellations from pulped art books, meantime evoking parts of the body that are fortunately rarely visible but familiar to everyone. The works of Gabríela Friðriksdóttir oscillate between waking and sleeping, the worlds of travel drawn from the imagination and plunging into a warm spot smelling of fresh hay. Julie Hayward also speaks with the language of the unconscious, and like Siobhán Hapaska creates forms in the vein of utopian 60s’ design. In the ur-forms of eva helene stern*** (a Grazer by adoption), American artist Ruth Asawa and Brazilian Ernesto Neto, whose works are about metamorphosis itself and growth and decay, we are taken back to the origins, to cells and condensates. Neto’s outsize objects are sensory objects of self-experience and, like the works of Agnieszka Kalinowska, Liz Larner and Xu Zhen, open up sculptural space to bring in the biomorphic architecture of the Kunsthaus Graz itself. Franz West’s psychotic distortion is a form of metamorphosis constantly disowning itself in irony, though like Pino Pascali and Jill Spector it does not lose its touch of oppressive menace. Carsten Nicolai’s cluster moves at the interface of science and art, making it clear – though not even here without an undertone of ironic doubt – how art can help us understand complex three-dimensional phenomena better.

We are please to announce that preparations for the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial (GZ Triennial) is nearing completion, and we now look forward to welcoming our friends and professional colleagues at the exhibition opening on September 6th in Guangzhou.

For the curatorial discourse of this Triennial, we propose to say ‘Farewell to Post-Colonialism’. This represents the theoretical basis from which we hope to explore our critical vision. The Triennial attempts to open new frontiers for creativity with a critical review of the role cultural discourses of Post-colonialism and Multi-culturalism has played in contemporary art. While affirming Post-colonialism’s achievements in exposing hidden ideological agenda in society and inspiring new art, this Triennial also critically examines its limitations for creativity, and calls for a fresh start.

We hope to uncover elements of the paradoxical reality veiled by contemporary cultural discourse, to make contact with realms that slip through the cracks of well-worn concepts such as class, gender, tribe and hybridity. We hope to think together with artists and investigate through their practices to find what new modes and imaginative worlds are possible for art beyond those already heavily mapped out by socio-political discourses.

GZ Triennial will host 181 artists from over 40 countries around the world, including 50 films/videos from the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Africa under the projects “Middle East Channel”, “East-South: Out of Sight” and “Africa: Personal Poetics”.

Forums in Motion

The 7 “Forums in Motion” of the 3rd Triennial is a long expedition that traverses across a wide terrain of ideas which focus on Farewell to Post-Colonialism，Limits of Multi-Culturalism, Thinking Through the Visua，Artists’ Questionnaire Session, Unpacking Projects-in-Progress , Anxiety of Creativity and Possible Worlds and Farewell to Post-colonialism — Towards a Post-Western Society?

The Triennial Exhibition

The Triennial Exhibition is structured into 4 sections:
1.Projects in Progress
2.Thinking Room
3.Free Radicals
4.Independent Projects:
1. ‘Middle East Channel’, curated by Khaled Ramadan.
2. ‘East-South: Out of Sight’, curated by Sopawan Boonnimitra.
3. ‘Now in Coming’, curated by Guo Xiaoyan and Cui Qiao.
4. ‘Tea Pavilion’, curated by Dorothee Albrecht.
5. ‘Mornings in Mexicos’, curated by Steven Lam and Tamar Guimaraes.
6. ‘Mapping Currents for the 3rd Guangzhou Triennial’, curated by Stina Edblom and Asia Art Archive.
7. ‘Organising Mutation’, curated by Leung Chi-wo and Tobias Berger.

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The National Art Center, Tokyo
August 20, 2008–October 20, 2008
The National Museum of Art, Osaka
December 9, 2008–March 22, 2009
Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art，Nagoya
April 3, 2009–May 24, 2009

In the late 1970s, when China　started its “open door” policy, social realism in painting emerged in the Chinese art scene.  In 1979 the Star Group, insisting on the freedom of artists, organized an ambitious exhibition which marked a new stage for modern art in China.  From the mid-1980’s, artists in various parts of China started forming avant-garde groups.  This movement, which is known as the “’85 New Wave”, created a great cultural impact on the Chinese art scene.  Deriving from the Western modern art and　discourse as their main source of inspiration, the ’85 New Wave artists expressed their social concerns not only in their paintings and sculptures, but also by embarking on new forms of expression, i.e. performance and installation.  It was also around this time that some artists such as Cai Guoqiang and Huang Yongping emigrated abroad to further pursue their interests in this area.
The avant-garde movement peaked in February of 1989, when these artists’ works were exhibited in the “China/Avant-garde” show at the National Art Gallery, China.　The exhibition was marked by the police intervention followed by the use of live ammunition. This incident, portending the Tiananmen Square Incident that occurred only a few months later, forced artists to go underground for a period of time.  But from the early 1990s, those working in styles of political pop and cynical realism emerged and put China on the map of international art scene. Performance art, video art, and other forms followed. From the 2000’s onwards, Chinese contemporary art, together with the booming art market and rise of international exhibitions in the age of globalization, has become China’s symbol of its open door policy and the authority has remained a silent observer.

In Japan, introduction of Chinese contemporary art became more common from the mid-1990’s, through artists working in cynical realism and performance art.  From the 2000’s, young artists’ works have been shown in several exhibitions, including the Yokohama Triennial. But a comprehensive exhibition, covering the span of about twenty years of rapid development in Chinese contemporary art scene, is yet to be organized in Japan.

This exhibition traces the historical lineage of contemporary art in China, by introducing significant artists, ranging from the established to the promising young artists. It aims to investigate and reveal which artists were influential and what activities took place in China, while the Japanese art scene was experiencing the bubble economy in the 1980’s and economic stagnation in the 1990’s. The works in this exhibition are representations of the powerful and attractive contemporary art that have emerged in China.

With these factors as the context, UCCA presents: Our Future: The Guy & Myriam Ullens Foundation Collection. The exhibition will display a significant selection of the contemporary pieces from the Ullens Foundation collection. This will mark the first time that such a large selection of the collection is presented in China, including sculpture, painting, video, photography, sound and installations as well as new acquisitions and specific commissions. The selection presented in the exhibition includes groundbreaking works that explore how these artists are developing critical responses to the coexistence of many diverse experiences in China, such as the small gestures that are significant in daily life, or the mass media’s blurring of reality, fantasy, expectations and history, as well as the urban construction and destruction cycles.

Featuring 60 Chinese artists, including six new commissions, two performances and four recent acquisitions, the exhibition will present no less than 92 works by such artists as Chen Zhen, Gu Wenda, Huang Yong Ping, Wang Du, Wang Guangyi, Zhang Xiaogang, and feature new commissions from Amy Chueng, Cao Fei, Chu Yun, Qiu Zhijie, Shen Yuan and Wu Jicong. Our Future will also present site specific performances by He Yunchang and Yang Jiechang, and offer new acquisitions from Wang Jianwei, Xie Nanxing and Yang Fudong.

Viewing the exhibition is anything but static; it has been curated with a dynamic, experiential approach in mind. Visitors will discover the exhibition through an open space, in addition to platforms, tunnels, shadows and light for an overall playful experience.

This is the first in a series of exhibitions at UCCA that will explore key themes and artworks in the Ullens Foundation collection.

A comprehensive program of educational activities and events will run throughout the exhibition period, including international conferences during the opening weekend and the Olympics, as well as courses conducted in Chinese on the ‘hows and whys’ of collecting art. During the Olympic season, UCCA’s restaurant and terrace will provide a creative dining experience with a twist, with regular events hosted by musicians, artists and DJ’s.

A catalogue of Our Future: The Guy & Myriam Ullens Foundation Collection will accompany the show. The 200 page catalogue, written in both Chinese and English, will reflect the active spirit of the exhibition, featuring Jér？me Sans in dialogue with Guy and Myrian Ullens, essays from curators Kate Fowle and Guo Xiaoyan about the exhibition, a letter from Fei Dawei on the story of the Ullens Foundation and its relationship with artists, as well as quotes and presentations from the artists themselves.

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Curated by Philip Tinari

The exhibition CYLWXZ takes as its starting point the consciously made-invisible. A wall divides the gallery space exactly in two geometric halves, only one part is accessible. This radical intervention is a collaborative gesture authored by the three artists in concert and resonating with strands in each of their individual artistic practices: Liu Wei’s series of “cutting” works, Chu Yun’s post-minimalist architectural interventions, Xu Zhen’s 2002 exhibition cutting of a Shanghai warehouse space into equal and identical halves.

The wall inside the gallery is painted with a white pigment that refuses to dry. Wet Paint (2008) by Xu Zhen creates a cramped and unpleasant atmosphere in the space that is already minimised. There are two historic works presented on the wall: Liu Wei’s six-channel video Difficult to Restrain, first exhibited in the original Post-Sense Sensibility show in 1999, and Xu Zhen’s The Last Few Mosquitos(2005) in which insects suck the blood of the exhibition wall.

The artists presented in the exhibition are an unwilling sample of a particular moment and generation in the development of contemporary aesthetic practice in China. Coming from three distinct urban perspectives (Chu Yun from Shenzhen, Liu Wei from Beijing, Xu Zhen from Shanghai) they began their careers in distinct relationships with the wave of avant-garde exhibitions in Beijing and Shanghai in the late 1990s. They have matured against the background of an ever increasing skepticism about the relevance of this very category. The naming of the exhibition using simply the initials of the three artists in alphabetical order as well as the basic gesture of a largely empty main gallery space, are responses to the quandary of what exactly it means to present art from China internationally at a moment when the multicultural imperatives that drove the “China shows” of the 1990s have evaporated and yet a real and tangible gap between “Chinese” and “international” discourses lingers awkwardly.

In the upstairs rooms of the galleries, a selection of historic works from the past decade presents a fuller picture of the divergences and convergences in these three artists’ practices.

Countering the eulogistic tone of grand survey shows, Mellow Fever is a contemporary art exhibition of eleven Asian artists held at Galeries des Galeries, an art gallery supported by the commercial venture of Galeries Lafayette, the nineteenth-century mecca of haute couture and its historic flagship department store. The exhibition, commissioned to curator Simon Castets, is caught up within the framework of a two-week Asiatic frenzy promoted by the store as a marketing campaign popularizing a cultural bonanza from gastronomy to architecture from the Far East. The gallery, accessed independently from the department store, is the site of Castets’ wellconceived conceptual statement that defies conventional and market-favoured choices of artwork, and succeeds in bringing together an authentic grouping of creative personalities rather than countries that, as the curator states, evokes a subtle, unexpected, and complex vitality originating from Asia. The selected artists do not necessarily represent national or geographic characteristics yet, overall, Castets’ selection remains sensitive to aspects of their Asian origin that signify a specific territorial reality and transcontinental expanse. With a few exceptions, most of the artists are in their thirties and at a mid-career stage, and their artistic paths reveal an intricately subtle yet composite subjectivity: while the immediate encounter with the visual impact of the seemingly sober, complacent, and quiet artwork might temporarily leave a lingering sense of blandness, it is only through further contemplation that the depth within its apparent simplicity presents itself as a perceived experience.

Centred within the spatial architecture of the exhibition is On Kawara’s Today’s Series No.12 (Feb. 8, 1982) displayed conventionally in its own handmade cardboard box together with two newspaper clippings from the same year. The quiet and cryptic temporality buried beneath the messages in the artist’s oeuvre embodies a quintessential quality that is found in each of the works exhibited, a discrete yet intrinsic connotation of time consciousness. As with On Kawara’s poetic interventions that stretch life and death onto the self-imposed, proportionate surface of the painted texts—of what he himself calls “pure consciousness”—the other younger artists in the exhibition seemingly manifest a propensity for methods of depiction that convey the discrepancy between the real and our actual experience of it, regardless of their aesthetic object.

With social readjustment, economic disparity, ideological confusion, and political unrest incessantly present and offering no promise of abating, the fatal course of uninterrupted transformation that characterizes Asia today is the reality of our contemporaneity, a flexible non-cumulative form of existence, and a new chapter in the history of modernity. Whether intended as documentary or fiction, the artworks in Mellow Fever reflect the nature of alternative transformative gestures, and in their resistance to power, hierarchies, style, and taste, they evade the quick formulas of historical narrative, popular conventions, and myths of genre.

Appearance: Yishu Journal, July 2008

The Exhibition “Community of Tastes” is the inaugural exhibition of Iberia Center for Contemporary Art. The art center is based in Beijing and established by the International Art & Culture Foundation (IAC) of Spain. The inaugural exhibition of Iberia Center for Contemporary Art consists of three sections: The Main Exhibition, The Independent Films section and the section on Spanish Art. The exhibition includes 29 Chinese artists and 10 Spanish artists, all of whom are currently active in the international art world.

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En prenant comme point de départ neuf animaux emblématiques – l’ours, le cerf, le cochon, la vache, l’âne, le chat, la poule, le papillon et la mouche –, animaux qui nous sont (qu’on le veuille ou non) « proches », l’exposition déclinait des images tantôt banales, tantôt surprenantes voire spectaculaires, qui sont autant de clés de lecture des rapports complexes de l’homme à l’animal.

Comme des bêtes faisait découvrir que la représentation animale fonctionne à travers les âges et les civilisations comme un révélateur de nos états d’âme, de nos désirs, de nos inquiétudes, de notre imagination, de nos besoins (naturels ou maladifs) de contact avec l’animal ou de distanciation d’avec lui. Nous parlons en effet de nous-mêmes quand nous parlons d’animaux, nous les montrons à travers nos yeux quand nous les représentons : « [la narration] met en scène [les animaux], c’est vrai, mais en tant que représentants de l’espèce humaine ».

Domestique ou sauvage, utile ou purement nuisible, sublime ou grotesque, triomphant ou tragique, l’ours, le cochon, le chat et les autres, tels que représentés par des artistes, sont de fascinants médiateurs dans nos rapports avec la nature. Les animaux ont en effet souvent une fonction d’intermédiaire ou même d’intercesseur : « […] l’animal permet, avant tout, un élargissement du contact avec le monde naturel dont tant de sujets sont gravement frustrés en milieu urbain. Contre ses soins et sa nourriture, il a été conditionné à répondre à l’attente des hommes, véritable “compromis” entre eux et les choses. Au milieu d’êtres humains souvent incapables d’aimer, isolés et inadaptés, l’amateur d’animaux réalise un équilibre privilégié. » Les images d’animaux – qu’elles soient positives ou négatives – finissent toujours par se retourner contre nous en nous interrogeant avec insistance : qu’est-ce qu’un être humain ? Question philosophique classique. Qu’est-ce qu’un animal ? Question biologique. Cependant « L’animal n’est pas seulement un organisme auquel s’intéresse la biologie ; il renvoie aussi à une figure de l’altérité par rapport à laquelle l’homme définit son identité spécifique. » Que signifie « animalité » ou « bestialité » ? Question éthique. Qu’est-ce qui relie homme et animal ? Question touchant à l’éthologie, à l’écologie, à la biogénétique et à la phylogenèse. Et surtout, qu’est-ce qui différencie l’homme de l’animal ? Question dont on attend des réponses rassurantes (les philosophes en proposent) : selon Descartes, c’est la raison ; selon d’autres la conscience, le langage ou l’âme ; selon Rousseau, la liberté de choix. Dans la première partie du Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755), il écrit : « Quelques philosophes ont même avancé qu’il y a plus de différence de tel homme à tel homme que de tel homme à telle bête ; ce n’est donc pas tant l’entendement qui fait parmi les animaux la distinction spécifique de l’homme que sa qualité d’agent libre.

La nature commande à tout animal, et la bête obéit. L’homme éprouve la même impression, mais il se reconnaît libre d’acquiescer ou de résister ; et c’est surtout dans la conscience de cette liberté que se montre la spiritualité de son âme : car la physique explique en quelque manière le mécanisme des sens et la formation des idées ; mais dans la puissance de vouloir ou plutôt de choisir et dans le sentiment de cette puissance, on ne trouve que des actes purement spirituels, dont on n’explique rien par les lois de la mécanique. ». D’après Giorgio Agamben, ce qui définit l’homme c’est la conscience de ce qui le différencie de l’animal : « l’homme est l’animal qui doit se reconnaître humain pour l’être » ou qui « se reconnaît ne pas l’être ». Jean-Christophe Bailly adopte un tout autre point de vue, basé sur une destinée commune du vivant, sur la constante animale à l’intérieur de laquelle l’homme n’est qu’un épiphénomène. Il se livre à un exercice philosophique consistant à penser l’animal comme quelque chose qui existe en dehors de l’homme, de sa pensée, de son langage, de son monde.

Comme des bêtes réunissait des œuvres – peintures, sculptures, photos, vidéos, installations – du XVIIe siècle à aujourd’hui, provenant des fonds du musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne ainsi que de nombreuses collections publiques et privées.

Building Code Violations’ is a conceptual metaphor….

The concept of a “Building Code Violation” comes from the legal lexicon of modern urban planning and management targeting those specific individual actions that are in contravention of a normalized and unified social system. In this exhibition, “Building Code Violations” is a cultural approach directed at a “universal” modernity. This type of “top down” approach, while revolutionary in nature, has resulted in not only overturning local epistemological systems, but also a displacement of nature and space, a distortion of bodily experiences, and a heightening of class tensions. The expression of “violations” is built upon offshoots of individual needs, and underneath the surface of these acts resides a critique towards the construction of a particular idealist aesthetic or social construction.

The definition of a ‘Building Code Violation’ is officially classified a ‘fact’ in China, a breach of civil code. What is crucial to this understanding of a ‘building code violation’ is that what may be considered a violation one year, may be approved in the next, and vice-versa.? Building code violations, constructed in daily life should be understood as a process in the society, rather than the basis for social statistics. Such violations can be formless, hidden or undetectable; it could be an individual experience or an unconscious collective perception accumulated in the process of an action. Are we “building” in response to a “violated code”? Or are we consciously “violating code” in response to the “building” around us. Such conundrums are at the heart of this project. This exhibition interprets the concept of “Building Code Violations” as a conflict between social reality and aesthetic ideals. It highlights the contradiction between globalization’s advancement of a single cultural value system, and the reality of societies whose functional systems of existence are thrown apart by its imposition.

The creation of a ‘building code violation’ responds to an existing situation that is deemed dysfunctional or inherently opportunistic in its approach to cultural, social, or political value – hence individuals and collectives are seeking to pose new methods of action and in turn propose new methods of existence.?? Consequently, “Building Code Violations” reflects the power of the “self-built” environment, it points to a necessary force motivated by local contexts, which cannot be overruled by global standards.? The existence of such violations, in a cultural sense, demands that we ask what conditions brought about this breach of code; what circumstances drove an individual or group to take a situation into their own hands in an attempt to improve or adapt; why did they feel so compelled to act in this way? In other words, the shape of the ‘violation’ matters.

‘Building Code Violations will be an exhibition that presents a series of solutions which are in progress, created in response to the reality of social frameworks of today.

In this global world, there are numerous actions and creations that could be considered violations within the fabric of society and social behavior. These various violated codes possess the power to change what may be considered temporary circumstances into permanent and functional entities. This is a never-ending cycle of intervention and approval.

Everything is built in violated codes.

In spite of the proliferation of exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art all over the world, The Real Thing Arte Contemporáneo de China (The Real Thing. Contemporary Art from China) stands out from others because of the depth and variety of the works displayed, which represent the most suggestive and relevant art produced since 2000, and for the degree of collaboration between the curators Simon Groom, Karen Smith and Xu Zhen and the artists Ai Weiwei, Cao Fei, Geng Jianyi, Gu Dexin, He An, Li Yongbin, Qiu Xiaofei, Qiu Zhijie, Wang Gongxin, Wang Peng, Wang Wei, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong, Yangjiang Group, Yang Shaobin, Zhou Tiehai, Zhou Xiaohu and Zhuang Hui.

Most of the works that comprise The Real Thing are shown here for the first time outside China or have been specially commissioned for this exhibition. The title, The Real Thing, can be taken literally as a clear sign that the exhibition is a faithful reflection of contemporary art in China today. There is sincerity in the works of many artists which was clearly lacking in the style of Cynical Realism of earlier generations. These predominantly young y artists, mostly based in Beijing and Shanghai, have chosen to remain in their country unlike many members of the generation that went before them. These artists are moving towards a self-confidence and maturity that arises from their understanding of the world today and the place China occupies in it, as well as an awareness of their own individual situation in society at a time of profound and rapid cultural change. The Real Thing can also be interpreted ironically, for humour and irony characterise a great deal of the art currently produced in China.

The scale, variety and ambition of the pieces, which include some spectacular installations, are a token of these artists’ vivacity, energy, skill and imagination. The Real Thing is an exhibition organised by Tate Liverpool in collaboration with the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM).

pressrelease: ShanghART Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Selection at H-Space. The show presents a diversity of mostly new works ranging from painting and photography to installation, all characterized by their strong formal qualities. Projects by established and celebrated practitioners such as Yang Fudong, Zheng Fanzhi and Wang Guangyi are shown along with mid-career artists like Zhang Enli, Zhou Tiehai and Ding Yi, and young stars Xu Zhen and Yang Zhenzhong.The exhibition is begin on January 3th, 2008, and it lasts until Feb 20, 2008

The first part of Selection is devoted to, what might be termed, ‘aesthetics of politics’; here, Zhou Tiehai displays two large-scale paintings Libertas, Dei Te Servent (Giuliani) (2002) and Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet!  along with the sculptural research project Judge, Diplomat, Minister  where the titles alone indicate a critical acknowledgement and attitude to society’s powers.

The paintings being juxtaposed to Yang Zhenzhong’s Litterbins (2006) is a subtle, but provocative, comment to the fatigue of today’s political climate. Also on display are Wang Guangyi’s extensive series Aesthetics of Cold War (3 out of 9) that deal with memory, propaganda, iconic social realism and its iconoclasm. Themes that are also recurrent in Wang Youshen’s Announcement Board I-III (1991-2006) depicting imagery dating back to the revolution era, such as the ideal communist hero Lei Fang.

The second part of the exhibition is themed around the ephemeral and the poetic with centerpieces such as a series of photos from Yang Fudong’s stunning video epos No Snow on the Broken Bridge (2006) and the series Honey (2003). Also characterized by their idiosyncratic notion of beauty and stillness are Zheng Fanzhi’s Untitled (2007,) Zhang Enli’s paintings Double Happiness (2006) and Drawer (2007). The fragility of Liang Shaoji‘s silk-sculptures’ further emphasize the importance of quiet contemplation. Other paintings in the exhibition include Ding Yi’s Appearance of Crosses, Li Shan’s Reading (2006), and Liu Weijian’s Crossroad (2007) and Properties (2007).

At this exhibition, Xu Zhen presents works using modified workout equipment, Untitled (2007).
Using workout equipment controlled by remote control that lead people to do repetitive movements; Xu Zhen expresses the relationship between control and being controlled, games and exercise, and the future and the present. For this purpose, the artist proposes an extremely insensuous and impractical installation. It is an installation that represents the modern man, mindlessly repeating routines that are set out by the social structure and the media. Through this piece the artist criticizes the loss of individual identities in midst of social control. It is interesting that he chose to use familiar objects, like workout equipment, to show the role of art in society.

(David A. Ross, Tomorrow Exhibition, Artsonje Centre, Seoul)

Following various successful art exhibitions in the last year, Today Art Museum is now presenting the 1st Today Documents. This exhibition will happen regularly in parallel with various international Biennials and Triennials afterwards, gradually create a platform for the international art dialogue based on Chinese context. With the theme of “Energy”, Artistic director of this year’s Today Documents, Mr. Huang Du, hopes to reveal the dynamic and transformation of contemporary art world. Over fifty artists will be presented in this exhibition with their strong creativity and imagination. The exhibition will be a leading showcase for the most avant-garde, experimental and creative talents of China.

The first event of Artissima Cinema, devoted this year to the city of Shanghai with a review of videos by a group of international artists, will take place at Mirafiori Motor Village, on November 9: preview of the project and conference “The OFF story of the contemporary art revolution in Shanghai.”

Alexander Brandt and Davide Quadrio will offer an untold vision of Shanghai. A journey through three exhibitions that have made their mark in the Shanghai art-world. A group of artists who challenged the city of Shanghai from the suburbs. Pictures from the city’s past, when negotiations with the government for a “proper” visibility were at the heart of the art work of an avant-garde group headed by Xu Zhen, Yang Zhenzhong and Alexander Brandt, supported by BizArt.  “Art for sale”, 1999 : “Fang Mingzhen and Fang Mingshu”, 2004; “Solo exhibition”, 2006. Shanghai’s aspiration and desire to once again become the legendary place it once was, the need to be an international and modern China, together with the idea of power which Shanghai is seeking between local identity and globalisation: these are the themes to be explored through a collage of documents, catalogues and documentaries.

A part and backdrop of this evening will be the presentation of Hipic.org, an image for all time: an online project as a place of the ephemeral, where a photo sums up in 1 minute the need for vision before disappearing into a cybernetic void: forever.  Art without an artist, art without economic value, art that disappears and re-appears, the quest for attention and observation, knowing that this is the sole possibility in the world and the only simultaneous moment in the world. Hipic, a democratic archive location with no hope for the future, is very fitting in the case of today’s China, with specific reference to Shanghai: this idea of the continuous move towards something else, with no past and possibly no idea of the future either – this impertinent, optimistic and flattering present that leaves no time other than for a cursory glance at reality, like so many others: totally useless.

Saturday, November 10 during the contemporary arts night, the spectacular building of Museo del Cinema will host a selection of art videos devoted to Shanghai including new works produced especially for the event.

“The years fly by in Shanghai and each month changes the one that follows. In just a few years, we went from technological pre-history to the digital era. LED screen and LCDs are everywhere – in taxis and skyscraper lobbies, in the subway and on entire facades of buildings, or on huge screens taken out at night on barges on the river Pujiang, so bright that you just cannot help but look at them. What I’m trying to get across in this latest version of Shanghai is its inevitable contradictions, for it is bent through the eyes of artists until it becomes a fictitious, distorted reality that nevertheless conceals extravagant details somewhere in between poetry and drama, revealing once again the true face of Shanghai.” (Davide Quadrio)

We will see the Shanghai through the eyes of local artists such as Zhang Ding, Liang Yue and Song Tao and the well-known video by Yang Fudong, Robber-south, 2001; the animation video by Melanie Jackson Made in China; a multimedia installation, The Next Second, be Alexander Brandt, a German artist who lives in Shanghai. And more: the video clip Hero by David Cotterrell, the historic Shouting video of 1998 by Xu Zhen, Yang Zhenzhong’s work subtitled Na Xiong Na Er: the city as a phallus, in which architecture is no more than space snatched away from the sky.

The city then decomposes into an avalanche of pictures without a guiding thread: Huang Kui’s Go away, Pierrre Giner’s latest creation and the Mattia Matteucci+Patrick Tuttofuoco duo with The Green Sky. The review starts and ends with Olivo Barbieri’s A silent story and Riverscape #1 Night, China Shanghai 07.

Sunday, November 11 during the opening hours of the Fair, the public will have the opportunity to review the artists videos in an unusual location: a special bus parked in front Artissima pavilion, the ideal finale of an amazing and fascinating urban trip in the true Shanghai, the Shanghai beyond dazzling lights, “the city of the people who live there and who trade their own survival.”

In Just a Blink of an Eye
Curated by Lu Jie & David A. Ross and Defne Ayas (PERFORMA)
Co-presented by PERFORMA, Long March Project, and James Cohan Gallery as part of PERFORMA07, the second visual performance biennial (October 27 – November 20, 2007)

In Just a Blink of an Eye, at first sight, this work by leading conceptual artist Xu Zhen seems to defy possibility. In an empty room at the gallery are people completely tilted, as if ready to topple, but frozen as if in time or in space. Although the optical illusion can be surmised to be accomplished through a metal frame upon which the model lays upon, the work nonetheless serves to create an anxiety within the viewer that is at once exhilarating, as if the viewer has been liberated from the constraints of time and physics, as well as debilitating, in the failure to see the action resolved.

The work is performed by migrants recruited from Chinatown, and other communities within New York, pointing at their liminal status within an undefined space. Their migration has been frozen and trapped, at the same time, the relationship of the viewer is also called into question; their subjectivity both exercising the power to freeze and create a snap shot, as if in the blink of an eye, at the same time, filled with an anxiety with the need for resolution. Will the person stand up, or will they fall over – or will they remain stuck forever?

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The 10th International Istanbul Biennial will not be a conventional thematic exhibition, rather; it will emphasise artistic production based on collective intelligence and the living process of negotiating with physical sites. The Biennial will focus on urban issues and architectural reality as a means of exposing different cultural contexts and artistic visions regarding the complex and diverse forms of modernity.

More than 100 artists and artist groups from 35 different countries will exhibit more than 150 projects throughout the 10th International Istanbul Biennial.

10th International Istanbul Biennial will explore the venues through titles implying the venues’ role in Istanbul’s political, economic and social aspects of its modernisation process.

The Salon of the Rejected or Salon des Refuses was an exhibition that started in 1863 in Paris.  The concept was to show works that were submitted to Salon de Paris but were rejected by a selection committee.

This exhibition continued its life for few years until the government cancelled funding. Today these same issues are still being questioned. What are the selection criteria of large-scaled exhibitions like biennales, museum shows, artists’ curated exhibition etc? Each exhibition carries it’s own nature and parameters, curatorial structures, changing roles of artists/curators and institutional policies.   These all determines what will be shown in the end as a completed project. What we actually see at the end is already selected outcome.

Today in China with the growing interest in contemporary art, institutional infrastructure and curatorial models still happen under different criteria. In the nineties, curatorship, as a profession started to be repositioned in China.  Especially within established institutions and museums, curators become key figures.  As they gained importance, they also faced problems of institutionalization.  On the other hand some of the curators turned to gallery spaces and artists started getting involved in the curating process bringing their own unique strategies.  The frequent presence of Chinese artists in foreign art institutions and their expectations towards exhibitions from China also provide criteria that artists try to question.

Due to different procedures of approvals, institutional exhibitions each have their own criteria.  Gallery organized exhibition carry their own, artists curated exhibition again have their own criteria.

How do individual artists deal with these changing modes of critique?

Most of the rejected proposal usually stay in artists computer, some of them may get the chance to be realized, but most, not because the artists changed their proposal or ideas. From another point of view, these rejected proposals actually are reflection of art practice today and it’s complex directions.

This project, Rejected Collection aims without my curatorial criteria to show proposal that artists are willing to show without any selection of the projects.  All rejected projects that the artists are willing to exhibit will be part of the project.  At the same time, artists also can invite other artist’s rejected projects to be included in the project.  The project will be shown as an alternative archive of artist’s rejected proposals.

Through viewing this rejected project phenomenon we get the chance to get a closer look into contemporary art practice, curators criteria of artists work, and the re-positioning of artists in the triangle of institutions-market and experimentation.  On the other hand project represents the history of Chinese contemporary art development and it’s slow turn into the public sphere though institutional infrastructure, the laws of the art world and public acceptance.

These rejected projects are not judged based on their artistic quality but in most of the cases on their sense institutional critique or curatorial approach.  At the same time project aims to investigate the artist’s creative process of giving proposals, discussing them and finally being accepted or not. If they are not accepted then the artist either continues submitting proposals or just doesn’t take part in the exhibition at all. A certain sense of self-censorship will determine what works will take part in the final exhibition.

This exhibition marks the beginning of a project that will develop into an archive of rejected projects in Chinese contemporary art.

Everyone is talking about China. Reports on the development of the economy, the political situation, and also about the booming Chinese art market feature almost daily in the media and serve as a kind of attractant for curious Westerners. One major point of interest is the question of the other, an emerging image of this unknown, massive, new player on the global field.

Beyond this general question, the exhibition China Welcomes You … at Kunsthaus Graz presents a selection of some fifteen artists, setting out to explore new identities that present China from very different perspectives, confirming some stereotypes and refuting others. At the same time, the exhibition sets out in search of the roots and precursors, bridges between here and there, between such a rich heritage of major historic upheavals in the twentieth century and the dynamic present situation. The exhibition, that fills the whole Kunsthaus Graz up to the panorama terrace Needle, features a broad spectrum of very different genres from installation to projection, painting and ceramic art that display and challenge their origin, sometimes subtly, sometimes unexpectedly ostentatiously.
All of the exhibits are on show in Austria for the first time, indeed most of the projects were created specially for Kunsthaus Graz.

A little more Shangri-La anyone? Extend your stay in the “Country of the sacred and of peace”, on the heights of Everest, with the show’s little red book. The artists guide us along paths leading to the ideal city and invite us to see whether Utopia is still alive and well there, and peace flourishing.

However, watch out for clichés: the artists rethink and take over this Asian, historical and philosophical heritage, up to and including the recent utopian and revolutionary offshoots, confronting us along the way with the ideological and exotic dimension of our view, thie eternal western model through which we seek to interpret the world.

Artists: Kimsooja, Qin Ga, Su-Mei Tse, Xu Zhen, Qiu Zhiije, Hamish Fulton, Marco Godinho, Laurent Tixador & Abraham Poinceval

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Is NONO a double refusal and rejection, or is it the rejection of refusal? Is it saying no, or not saying no? Perhaps the phrase accurately presents the current contradiction in contemporary art, both large and small. The exhibition, curatorless and themeless, is nonetheless linked with each artist’s personal perspective and their attitude towards the contemporary. In a period accustomed to the enfeebled iscourse of the curator, is the lack of a curator an inadequacy or a new type of artistic flamboyance? In contrast to naming a curator for the sake of having a curator, the act of refusing a curator is a direct and raw reality and experiment. The artist’s have done it all DIY, the exhibition itself is spontaneous, autonomous and naturally occurring exchange of experiences as well as a collective game. There is a consensus among the artists, one that is premised upon the ability to amuse one another. One can conflate it to a metaphysical artistic ideal, or a mundane and profane experience. This is a presentation of this reality, a self-referential packaging of artistic intelligence, and an artistic sincerity restricted by its own freedom. Is there an illusion of swampy marshes from which contemporary Chinese artists must rescue themselves? Is a “bottle neck” among art and artists a hypothetical exercise, or a sign of imminent disaster? To what degree can an artist’s social idealism incite response? Can the work be engaging, or will it merely exist as the artist’s self-delusion? Do these conflicting realities point at a deficiency in the practice of contemporary art, or in the artists themselves; or perhaps it is the “exhibition” which is the site of the problem?

The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China brings to Liverpool art from one of the world’s most dynamic and culturally sophisticated countries at a time of unprecedented interest in the country.

Despite the proliferation of exhibitions internationally of contemporary Chinese art, this is the first major exhibition in the UK to demonstrate the depth and range of work from China, and presents some of the most interesting and important art to be made since 2000, as well as an opportunity to see the latest work by China’s leading artists. The Real Thing comprises a majority of works that are either shown for the first time outside of China, or were specially commissioned for the exhibition.

The title, The Real Thing, can be taken straight, as an indication that the exhibition is a true reflection of contemporary art in China today. These predominantly young contemporary artists, largely based around Beijing and Shanghai, have chosen to remain in China, unlike many of the generation before them, and are moving towards a self-confidence and maturity that stems from an understanding of the contemporary world, China’s place within it, as well as the contemplation of their own individual positions within a society at a time of rapid, and profound cultural change.

The Real Thing can also be taken ironically – humour and irony characterise much of the art currently made in China. The sheer scale, range and ambition of many of the works, demonstrate the vivacity, energy, skill, and imagination of these artists.

What is appealing about ‘normality’? This utopian ideal of mass equilibrium conforms social habits, interpersonal relationships, and even the carnal act of sex. A fictitious point that lies somewhere on the social map, plotted by the pundits and faithful alike, as the Bermuda triangle with its mysterious center. To become a consenting consumer following the collective trend and fashion or reside stationary watching the drama of life unfold in a parallel safe dimension on reality shows, it is has a force beyond the crossing of the event horizon.

This presentation at points functions as a dialectic opposing the normal and the abnormal at home or in public space, and at other times as an ontological critic, merely replaying reality the absurdity of normality becomes apparent. Though in every instance it is the position of the artist, placing him/herself outside of the ‘main stream’ through the self-conscious action of art, that he/she becomes an archivist of the normal.

The idea of organizing the contemporary art exhibition, “It’s all right”, was suddenly decided as we found the perfect exhibition venue: an old factory of the Hu Qing Yu Tang Museum of Traditional Chinese Medicine about to be demolished in the town center. The new media art department of the China Art Academy and BizArt Art Center took this decision in July and maintained the same dynamic attitude since then: from the concept of the show to its accomplishment, although the whole process lasted six months only. This wouldn’t have been possible without the efforts of each of the participants. The main problem the exhibition has to face now is the unforeseeable elements. The new media art department of the China Art Academy and BizArt Art Center always focused on each artist’s progression in the production of their works. Each show include some risks: it is sometime uncertain for the artists themselves to know what the last shape of their works will be as they enter the exhibition room. The artworks projects were severely selected on the basis of various criteria of quality: the selection was sometime cruel to the point that it nearly violated art rules. This constitutes a particular aspect of this exhibition that can be seen before its opening.  Here again, each artist showed their understanding and their responsibility sense when collaborating. This conscientious attitude exceeded all our expectations. Until now, the exhibition’s process and preparation was fully synchronized, which reveals the efforts of each of its participant.

The Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo continues its year dedicated to Asia with the group show Alllooksame? / Tutttuguale?, Art from China, Japan and Korea, at their centre for contemporary art in Turin. The exhibition, curated by Francesco Bonami, unites forty artists with Asian roots, seemingly bound together by history and language yet culturally and creatively frequently at variance from one another.

The title of the exhibition has been borrowed from the web site www.alllooksame.com, set up by a youngster in Japan, partly as a joke and partly to rejoice the stereotype of “diversity at any cost”, while also inevitably highlighting the contrasting characteristics of prejudice and racism.
Alllooksame? / Tutttuguale? humours the way Westerners may have difficulty in distinguishing the features, traditions and lifestyles of Chinese, Japanese and Korean people. Contrary to its title, the exhibition attempts to break through the generalist lines of thought about these countries and reveal new, multiple visions of three countries that have seen and are still seeing breathtaking change and development both socially and politically. The show aims to illustrate the contrasting and experimental sides of Asia and, especially in the light of the many exhibitions about China in recent years, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo hopes to provide a more complete picture of contemporary art in Asia through bodies of work by the new generation of artists from China, Japan and Korea – none of whom will have grown up with a feeling of inferiority towards the Western world that would have affected the people of these countries in the past. Together, the artists from these three countries are able to offer multiple views of the entire landscape in which they live, rather than a detailed one-sided one.

The fa？ade of the Fondazione’s centre in Turin will be part covered with a giant photograph, by the Chinese artist Jiang Zhi, of people on a beach shadowed by a luminous rainbow made up of brand names and product labels as a symbol of mass consumption. Again, on the exterior walls of the centre, visitors are greeted by a neon ideogram of the words China, Japan and Korea, created by the Chinese architect Ma Qingyung. This work has also been accepted as part of the circuit of the renowned international artists’ lights show Luci d’Artista, produced by the City of Turin.

In a cooperation with the National Museum of China (NAMOC), MUMOK is showing around 200 works that provide insight into current art in China. At the centre of this concern is the question of the relationship between realist art and social reality. Realistic means of expression run like a recurrent theme through Chinese contemporary art which has generated an immense media and thematic pluralism as a result of globalisation and the rapid urbanisation and mediatisation of society since the 1990s. The exhibition begins with works of the ‘cynical realists’ – who began to work in a climate of cultural openness after the death of Mao Zedong: Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun and Zhang Xiaogang are regarded as three important representatives of this form of realism in which the tension between the individual and the collective, between social liberalisation and political powerlessness, is thematised.

Alongside painting and sculpture the dominating media of a young generation of artists who, in the midst of globalisation and commercialisation, also turn to the obverse of this progress are digital photography, video, film and computer animation. Works by Liu Xiaodong, Shen Ling, Chen Wenling, Cui Xiuwen and Jiu Jianhua thematise questions about one’s own identity in a society determined in equal parts by tradition and innovation; communism and capitalism, with all its contradictions, insecurities and potential. On the outside facade of the MUMOK Wang Jianwei’s larger-than-life figures indicate a new conception of humankind that oscillates between anonymity and individuality.

The central content of a series of photo and video works by artists such as Miao Xiaochun, Song Tao, Song Dong, the group They or Yang Zhenzhong is the city as a rapidly changing place to live. From here on the transition between real and fictive is fluid: the works of someone like Tang Maohong or the Unmask Group with their science fiction-like and fantastic, traumatic motifs thematise fairytale-like, utopian, escapist worlds in which the archaic and the ultramodern permeate one another.

Participating artists
Chen Wenling, Chenke, Cui Xiuwen, Fang Lijun, Ji Dachun, Li Hui, Liu Jianhua, Liu Quinghe, Liu Xiadong, Liu Ye, Miao Xiaochun, Shen Ling, Song Dong, Song Tao, Tamen, Tang Maohong, Unmask Group, Wang Jianwei, Xiang Jing, Xu Zhen, Yang Jing Song, Yang Zhenzhong, Yin Xiu Zhen, Yue Minjun, Zeng Hao, Zhang Xiaogang

For five weeks this autumn, the Serpentine Gallery will take up residence in Battersea Power Station with a presentation of Chinese culture. This is the first chapter in an on-going series of exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art, architecture and sound, presented by the Serpentine Gallery and co-produced by The Red Mansion Foundation in collaboration with Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo.

China Power Station: Part I is a unique opportunity to visit the iconic Battersea Power Station before it is redeveloped. It will also be the first chance to see the work of an extraordinary and vibrant new generation of Chinese artists and architects installed at this remarkable site.

Battersea Power Station echoes post-industrial art venues in China and the works on show have been chosen to activate the enormous scale of its spaces. The exhibition will be filled with sound and moving images, arguably the most prolific and strongest type of work being created in China today. There are three floors to visit and the art will engage with each of these distinct areas. The unmissable and outstanding view from the third floor will offer a rare perspective of London. Two celebrated Chinese architects will define the space, demonstrating the potential of the building.

This is the Serpentine Gallery’s first large scale, off-site exhibition project. It will embrace and celebrate the power of the building as well as the buoyant developments in Chinese contemporary culture.

The exhibition is part of the Serpentine Gallery’s ongoing collaboration with the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo. China Power Station: Part I in London marks the first phase of the project. Part II will be developed for Oslo in 2007 and Part III for Beijing in 2008. The project will propose a new model for showcasing developments in Chinese art and architecture and will be updated annually from 2006 to 2008.

This exhibition heralds the continuation of the Serpentine’s ambitious expanded programme, devised by Julia Peyton-Jones, Director, Serpentine Gallery and Co-Director, Exhibitions & Programmes and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director, Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects. China Power Station Part I, II and III are curated by Julia Peyton-Jones, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Gunnar B. Kvaran, Director, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art.

China Power Station: Part 1 includes works by artists Ai Wei Wei, Cao Fei, Chen Liaoyu, Chen Shaoxiong, Gu Dexin, Huang Yong Ping, Jia Zhang Ke, Kan Xuan, Liang Yue, Liang Wei, Liu Ding, Lu Chunsheng, Qiu Anxiong, Song Tao, Wang Jian Wei, Xu Tan, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong, Yang Zhenzhong, Zhang Pei Li; architects Ma Qingyun and Yung Ho Chang; and curators Ou Ning and Pi Li.

Since the post-Mao reform era began in 1979, China has seen the emergence of an extremely diverse and dynamic art scene, a development that has taken place within a short space of time and in spite of the continuing difficulties faced by those involved in independent art production. In recent years, contemporary art from China has also been attracting great interest in the West.

Chinese artists have quickly found their place in the international art scene, and skilfully employ media, techniques and forms of expression that were developed in the West. Nevertheless, their specifically Chinese roots – pre-modern tradition on the one hand, the requirements of the Socialist Realist style prescribed by the Communist Party until the late 1970s on the other – are evident in many of the artists’ works; in comparison to Western art, for example, greater emphasis is placed on figurative painting.

Some of these artists consciously address the issue of their national identity by adopting the techniques and formal language of traditional Chinese art and placing them in a new context. Another significant trend is to parody or reflect upon the art and art history of the West from a Chinese perspective. Above all, however, Chinese avant-garde art has to be viewed in the light of the tremendous social and economic upheavals that have taken place in recent decades; a large number of works specifically reflect the tension between the socialist ideals which are still officially valid and the wave of consumerism that has swept the country as a result of the capitalist reforms.

Swiss collector Uli Sigg, Vice-Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Ringier Group, has taken a keen interest in China and its culture since the late 1970s. Together with his wife Rita, he has been building a collection devoted exclusively to Chinese art since the mid-1990s, and can justly be regarded as a pioneer in this field. Having initially concentrated on the acquisition of new art, Sigg soon began to extend his collection to include ‘historic’ works of Chinese avant-garde art from the 1980s and early 90s. The result of this systematic approach is a collection of contemporary Chinese art that is unparalleled in its scope and quality. All the leading positions and important trends are represented here by major works, many of which have now achieved iconic status in the Chinese art world.

The exhibition in the Hamburger Kunsthalle gives the German public the opportunity to view a representative selection of works from the Sigg Collection. It provides an overview of a quarter of a century of Chinese avant-garde art (1979–2005) and surpasses all previous exhibitions on the topic in terms of its focus and quality.

The recent Western upsurge of interest in all things from China —as the country undergoes massive urban renewal and its sphere of influence spreads—is also reflected in the attention directed at Chinese contemporary art. Recent exhibitions throughout the world have highlighted the creative activities of young Chinese artists. This creativity is especially apparent in video, a medium whose accessibility allows artists from different backgrounds to experiment, free from the constraints of other more traditional forms of art such as painting or sculpture.

The thirteen artists in this exhibition are all based in mainland China , in the cities of Beijing , Shanghai and Guangzhou . Two are represented by galleries in London and New York , and some have shown in group exhibitions outside China . For many, this exhibition was the first time their work has been seen in New York . The exhibition includes a cross section of video art that has a real intimacy with the social dimensions of urban China . It is diverse, ranging from the lyrical to the satirical, from documentary to fantasy. Together these artists provide fascinating insights into some of the concerns and values of modern China .

The Thirteen in no way represents a grouping or a particular category of contemporary video art in China other than presenting artists who have readily taken up the accessible technology of the digital video camera and DVD. The immediacy and flexibility of these tools allow artists to make works than run from a few minutes to half an hour, stretching from ambitious studio productions to low-budget hand-held camerawork.

This exhibition was first showed in P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York from the 26th of February to the 29th of May 2006. The exhibition has been organized in collaboration with Platform China Contemporary Art Institute, a recently formed multi-functional arts organization based in Beijing , whose aim is to develop and promote contemporary art from China . The first-hand knowledge of the Chinese art scene and the expertise provided by Platform China has been invaluable in ensuring that the content of The Thirteen: Chinese Video Now provides a challenging and completely up-to-date program of new art.

As the co-organizors of this exhibition, Platform China will tour the exhibtion to Beijing and show the works to Chinese audience at its main exhibition spaces(1100sqm) located in East End Art District ( Caochangdi area) from 22nd of July to the 13th of August 2006. The opening party will be hold at 3pm on the 22nd of July.

The exhibition is organized by P.S.1 Adjunct International Curator David Thorp and Platform China Contemporary Art Institute Director Sun Ning.

The lives of many world citizens are affected by forced migration, while numerous others can travel freely and frequently. The harsh reality of people who do not move by their own choice is at odds with the lives and liberties of the privileged, like artists, who are invited to exhibit their work all over the world. Yet, many artists are pre-occupied with their fellow men: and in their work migration and mobility, assimilation and translation, are key issues today. Alongside cinematic and documentary approaches the essentially visual discipline of contemporary artists seems even to be a conditio sine qua non to analyse and deconstruct the complex imagery and semantics concerned.

The ‘On Mobility’ project explores various views of the subject and it shows works made by artists who examine mobility in the broadest sense. The project exists of five relay-exhibitions. The first exhibition will be in Amsterdam, in De Appel. In November BüroFriedrich in Berlin will organise a show consisting of a choice of artworks shown in Amsterdam plus four new artists added to this selection. Next, ‘On Mobility’ will travel to the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius (February 2006) and to Trafó / Stúdió Galéria in Budapest (May 2006). These institutions will also add work of four new artists to a selection from the previous collection. The fifth and final exhibition will again be in De Appel (June 2006), now showing a completely different group of artists – all those who were added by the partner institutions.

A joint initiative of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and the Nederlands fotomuseum in Rotterdam. This first interdisciplinary overview of China’s contemporary art, architecture and visual culture including television, photography, newspapers, magazines and blogs also provides a platform for a new critical voice from the People’s Republic.

The People’s Republic of China is undergoing a phenomenal transformation. In just a few years, the country has developed into the mecca of the market economy, a place where existing and new cities are mushrooming into modern metropolises at breakneck speed. But is this all just a glossy image? Three Rotterdam arts institutions have teamed up to show the work of contemporary artists, photographers, architects and designers from China from 10 June 2006 onward to have them answer this question with provocative, critical, ironic and beautiful work.

China Contemporary is a joint initiative of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and the Nederlands fotomuseum in Rotterdam. This first interdisciplinary overview of China’s contemporary art, architecture and visual culture including television, photography, newspapers, magazines and blogs also provides a platform for a new critical voice from the Peoples Republic.

The exhibition presents in five different themes (Chineseness, Critical Urban Renewal, Urbanscape, Public Domain en Informal China) more than forty remarkable projects by eighteen talented young Chinese architects. They cherish the cultural tradition and attempt to improve the changeable urban landscape by using new concepts. The installations, models, computers animations, documentaries, photographs and films that are being exhibited here for the first time offer the public a penetrating insight.

In two presentations – the New Urban Realities group exhibition and the Xu Zhen solo exhibition at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen – shows how the latest generation of Chinese artists is reacting to these spectacular changes.

Xu Zhen (b. Shanghai, 1977) is one of the most controversial artists of his generation. He was instrumental in establishing the independent art centre Bizart in Shanghai and was an inspiring force for many young artists.

The exhibition shows the room-filling installation, 8848 – 1.86 which documents the artist’s brave venture to literally saw off the top of Mount Everest.

In this exhibition, UniversalStudios-beijing shows five artists from China and Europe. Zheng Guogu, winner of Chinese Contemporary Art Award 2006, shows photography, cloth and needlepoint works. Charlotte SCHLEIFFERT shows paper works. Erik van LIESHOUT’s video installation Fantasy Me is installed, and Xu Zhen shows his video and photography work Temporary Expansion. Last but not least: Xu Tan shows the first part of his new video work 100 key words. From different perspectives, all of these works express the artists’ intention to focus on contemporary aspects of social reality. Without a preoccupied critical attitude or judgment, without obvious historical, ethical and political correctness, they ‘take things as they come.’ As in a shopping mall, the world and its attributes are taken at face value. Commercial brands, daily objects, but also people’s daily speech, cultural differences and the (im)possibility of translating them. It is the artist who transforms these forms of reality into art by her or his imaginative impetus.

Reflection of daily living conditions is also central to Xu Zhen’s recent work Temporary Expansion. In this work, consisting of a video and seven series photography, the artist documents his actions, which entail the occupation other people’s private spaces. For this work, the artist made a rental contract to use parts of their apartments for a set period of time. In one case he asked the people to wash his clothes and hang them to dry in the front garden of their middle-class home; in another he put a skeleton in the window, or hung a traffic light in one of the rooms. From the artistic point of view this project shows the unlimited possibility of expanding ‘exhibition’ space into the direct, private spaces of people. From a more socio-political perspective, it pinpoints the conflicted and alienating power relations of private and collective property and the relevance of money in this context. It also tiptoes around the typical Chinese legal problems of the dwelling process, in so far as according to PRC law, individuals from outside can claim only the temporary right of residence by owning or renting property.

继2002年9月在广州艺术博物院举办首届中国艺术三年展之后，第二届中国艺术三年展将于2005年5月在南京举办。

本次中国艺术三年展以“未来考古学”为学术主题，聚焦于中国实验艺术中的青春体验及其表述方式，以此应对转型时期的中国社会和文化的新变化，勘探和测绘未来中国艺术发展的精神地图。

进入新的世纪之后，经济全球化进程与文明间的激烈冲突相伴生，技术进步的速度和群己伦理的紊乱相交缠，上个世纪九十年代初福山式的乐观主义的历史终结论在纷乱的世相中化为碎片。在当代中国，大众意识形态的关键词已经由“革命”转为“成功”，人们却越来越多地需要保险。未来预测的冲动在今天已经大为稀薄和虚弱，未来再一次变得扑朔迷离。人类退守个人经验，退守游戏和虚拟的世界，退守局部的族群认同，来勉强重构其日常生活所必需的未来意象。这样一个未来意象可能是破碎的、暧昧的、对焦不清的、处处玄机的、百感交集的、到处是黑洞和乱码的超现实主义的迷宫。但也就是在这样一个未来意象中，今天的青年孤注一掷地生活着，并在这样的生活中表现着他们的创造力。要廓清这样一种未来，需要考古学一般的信念与方法，也正像考古学一般充满风险和迷雾。对于未来的考古学测绘是今天的青年文化的使命，也是我们这次展览的学术主旨。

在“未来考古学”的学术主题之下，我们将以“透支”、“转基因”、“失忆”和“未来日记”这样一组概念来整理青年艺术家们的超现实主义生活和美学策略。它们将分别指涉当代的经济生活经验；技术和身体的快感模式；对于文化和身份的定位；以及日常生活中的依赖与迷恋。

展览将全面关注年轻艺术家的创作，其中有近年来在中国艺坛上咄咄逼人的新锐明星，也有新鲜出炉的新面孔。展出的作品将涵盖绘画、影像、网络、装置、表演等各种媒体和跨媒体试验。

展览将以南京博物院为主场馆，同时使用南京各当代艺术空间举办专题特展。同时将出版同名图录。

本次中国艺术三年展策展小组由邱志杰、左靖、朱彤组成。负责学术主题的确定和阐释，参展艺术家和作品的遴选，相关图录的编撰的展场规划。

On March 31 MoCa will celebrate the opening of the New Exhibition: Restless, Photography and New Media. Curated by MoCA Shanghai’s two young female curators Ella Liao and Wenny Teo, “Restless: Photography and New Media” comprises nearly thirty intriguing artists born in the 70’s and 80’s, who through experimentation and innovation, express the ambivalent emotions of contemporary life and the complex layers of metropolitan existence in a variety of challenging ways, posing the question: In this age of frantic visual and sensory over-saturation, what is it that catches our eye?

Every summer, the frenetic and continuous activity of the ‘Nadam’ can be observed in the pasturelands of Mongolia under clear blue skies, with the events, contested over a couple of days, including competitions in horsemanship, wrestling and archery. For each participant, the events–which do not place any restrictions on age, weight or competitive ability–are surely a special test of individual’s agility, patience, strength and technique. Nadam means ‘game’ in Mongolian, and can be traced back to ancient times. Through Nadam an individual’s identity is established by conquering ‘rivals’ like Nature; Nadam also demonstrates how each individual can establish his own independent existence in the perpetual universe through his own efforts.

‘Game’ has always played a special role in the development of human civilization. Pertaining to the question of how a person with ‘perfect’ qualities may be shaped, Confucius answers, “Focus on the Way, live virtuously, lean upon benevolence for support and take recreation in arts.” (The Analects VII. 6.) In the mind of this ancient philosopher who lived 2,500 years ago, “focus on the Way”, “live virtuously” and “lean upon benevolence” are necessary requirements for attaining the ideal personality, while “take recreation in arts” suggests that people should maintain a casual attitude in the practice of skills, and join in shaping and cultivating one’s inner emotions through appraisal of arts and art creation in order to reach emotional tranquility and harmony, thus restoring the unity of one’s emotions and rational thoughts.

In the West, game is also greatly valued. The renowned German writer, poet and philosopher Friedrich Schiller once remarked, “A person plays only when he is a complete person; he becomes complete only when he plays.” At the same time, he said “If a person pursues an ideal path to aesthetics because he would like to fulfill his impetus to play, this could absolutely not be wrong.” [Schiller – Idea of Aesthetic Education] According to this observation and to those artists who pursue imagination, individuality and unique performance skills, creation per se is a process in a game. Hence, the natural and casual ink bamboo paintings of Wen Tong; the playful painting of fish and shrimps of Qi Bai Shi; the ‘Haystacks’ of Monet; ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ of Picasso – they are all evidence and traces of an artist’s personal game that remain in this world. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, the advocates of minimalist art, which stresses subjective ideas, promoted that artistic expression is driven to extremes when artists justify their own creations with the idea of creating art for art’s sake, cold minimalist art forfeits the quality of ‘game’ which entertains oneself and others.

In the realistic nature of modern society, individual values is gradually diminishing in complicated cities full of soaring skyscrapers, and the autonomy of an individual’s behaviour is also being unconsciously deprived at different levels in our huge societies. Even the most simple and innocent personal game which originally surpasses personal utilitarian considerations may be confronted with irrevocable changes in nature. The Central University of Nationalities of Beijing–far distant from the Mongolian pasturelands – has, since 1981, held annual Nadam activities. Horsemanship is replaced by javelin, and prior to the start of a contest the national flag is ceremoniously raised, the national anthem is played, the athletes march past, speeches are delivered by the leaders and spokesmen of minority races, and a list of sponsors are announced over the public address system. In general, after the end of such a Nadam, the host will arrange events such as group dinners, arts and cultural performances, and screen movies, etc. As one can imagine, the autonomy of each participant has become hazy and unclear. One’s identity in the social network, for example, may be as a student athlete in a certain Beijing college or one may be a regional representative of a minority race or even a member of a political party that has multiple special identities. Thus, one’s motivation to join a ‘game’ may be inevitably sophisticated and somehow not according to one’s will. Each individual, including you and me and each single artist, can hardly escape from such contemporary social circumstances constructed against a backdrop of organisation, system, tradition, power, wealth and human relationships.

In the special political and social conditions of the 1980s and 1990s, China’s contemporary artists tried their best to express their concerns about society, politics and the human environment, employing myriads of special symbols interacting with each other to represent that moment of time but leaving people with an impression of idealism. In their artistic language and implementation of concept, they symbolically attained their criticisms with regard to traditions, systems and reality.

In the 21st Century, as the familiar surroundings of artists rapidly change, the collective values and personal values about life are transforming quickly, too. The art of the new generations has always been closely connected to personal experiences and the development of life: as art critic Yin Shuang Xi says, they “have employed personal life and public culture and visual images as important sources for artistic expression, and they have taken a heterogeneous perspective in observing objects in ordinary life… reflecting the drastic era and social changes through a microscopic perspective.”

Nowadays, many contemporary artists utilise features–dispersed, casual, peripheral and multi-diversified copying – in order to resist the control induced by collective volition, rendering sensational pleasure and a multi-meaning personal game free of disturbances caused by blind compliances and different levels of power in such a complicated social network. Thus, they can reveal the division and heterogeneity of contemporary social humanity by means of a strategy of microscopic self-discovery that also enables the writer himself and his works to attain independence and free existence in a flash of time.

The Macao Museum of Art of the Civic and Municipal Affairs Bureau is honoured to cooperate with the China Academy of Art in planning and organising this Microcosm – Chinese Contemporary Art exhibition. The objective is to give local and foreign tourists the chance to encounter the important masterpieces of 26 Chinese contemporary artists. In addition, by convening an academic conference, we have provided the opportunity for many prominent artists, critics and academics from home and overseas to gather in Macao to discuss and analyse the current and future development of China’s contemporary art.

In the two-storey gallery and exterior of MAM, artists from Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao have utilised their personal and special experience in daily life to combine with a game spirit that surpasses rational control to accomplish the individuality and self-awareness of subjective expression. Undoubtedly, this ‘Microcosm’ exhibition event will be an epochal note to the development of contemporary art in China.

When the exhibition finishes, some of these excellent works will become part of Macao Museum of Art’s collection, while others will be moved elsewhere. Maybe we should not be too upset about this, as when the Nadam finishes, all those big and small temporary tents disappear in the wide horizons, and because of this, we will cherish each upcoming encounter and anticipate even more passionately to join and cheer in the exciting games again.

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents The Thirteen: Chinese Video Now, an exhibition featuring a young generation of Chinese artists working with new media and responding to the great socio-economic changes that are taking place in the country. The thirteen emerging artists and artist teams—most of them born in the 1960s and 1970s—will show twenty-three video works. The Thirteen: Chinese Video Now is on view from February 26 through April 24, 2006.

Their choice to work with video—a relatively cheap medium that produces rapid results—underscores the heady times they face. Unlike the earlier generation of Chinese artists who gained recognition in the 1990s, the majority of these young artists choose to remain in China, living and working in major urban centers like Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai. In these cities they experience first-hand the growing consumer culture and rapid urban development.

Though most of these artists have presented their work internationally, many of them have not exhibited in the United States. This exhibition will present, and in many cases introduce, some of the most exciting work produced in China today.

Artists in The Thirteen: Chinese Video Now are: 8gg (multimedia duo Jiang Haiqing and Fu Yu, based in Beijing); Cui Xiuwen (b. 1970 in Heilongjiang, lives and works in Beijing); Dong Wensheng (b. 1970 in Jiangsu province, lives in Changzhou); Cao Fei (b. 1978 in Guangzhou, lives in Guangzhou); Hu Jieming (b. 1957 in China, lives and works in Shanghai); Huang Xuaopeng (b. 1960 in Shanxi, lives and works in Guangzhou); Li Songhua (b. 1969 in Beijing, lives and works in Beijing); Liang Yue (b. 1979 in Shanghai, lives and works in Beijing and Shanghai); Lu Chunsheng (b. 1968 in Changchun, lives and works in Shanghai); Ma Yongfeng (b. 1971 in Shanxi, lives and works in Beijing); Meng Jin (b. 1973 in Chong Qing); Xu Tan (b. 1957 in Wuhan; lives and works in Shanghai and Guangzhou); and Xu Zhen (b. 1977 in Shanghai, lives and works in Shanghai).

The Thirteen: Chinese Video Now is co-curated by David Thorp and Sun Ning, Director of Platform China in Beijing.

This exhibition is made possible by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art.

Exhibitions at P.S.1 are made possible by the Annual Exhibition Fund with support from Peter Norton and the Peter Norton Family Foundation, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Gerrit and Sydie Lansing, Kathleen and Richard S. Fuld, Jr., David Teiger, Michel Zaleski, Christopher Daly and Sheldrake Organization Inc., Sue & Edgar Wachenheim Foundation, The Broad Art Foundation, Dennis W. LaBarre, Lawton W. Fitt, L. Matthew Quigley & Elizabeth Quigley, Mathis-Pfohl Foundation, SilverCup Studios, Brandon Paul Coburn, Sholom & Zuckerbrot Realty LLC, Yellow Book U.S.A., The Friends of Education in honor of Peter Norton and Gwen Adams, and The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art.

To the exhibition of Contemporary Arts Singapore

The Haudenschilid collection is, for me, exemplary of good art collecting practices. It is not noly impressive for the way the Haudenschilds have bulit up such a significant and focused collection during a short period of time, it is also exemplary for the attitude they have adopted in their support of the artists whose work they collect. By exhibiting their collection in Singapore, it was also my intention to draw attention to the way the Haudenschilds go about their collecting activities, and raise awareness of the role and responsibilities of collectors.

As the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore is committed to showcasing significant trends as well as the best examples of for us to organize at the gallery. Not only does the exhibition highlight of video and photography, many of the artists in the exhibition are also internationally renowned, theereby probiding audiences in Singapore a rate opportunity to see their works…

It was also a first for Singapore to have and exhibition of this kind, a major exhibition of contemporary Chinese photography and video.

Eugene Tan
Director of the Insttute of Contemporary Arts Singapore
Earl Lu Gallery LASALLE SIA College of the Arts

Sala 1, piazza di Porta San Giovanni,
VIDEOZOOM. Videoartisti cinesi. La città: il miraggio e il riflesso (VIDEOZOOM. Chinese video artists. The city: mirage and reflection)

Nine Chinese artists from different cities (Peking, Shanghai and Canton) present videos inspired by their urban surroundings and social context. The city becomes an immense container in which to pour everything that makes up our imaginary. Though remaining a real and extremely concrete space, it becomes an ideal world, a metaphor for the present, and a dream of the future.

On Nov. 18th, 2002, the first Guangzhou Triennial organized by Guangdong Museum of Art was held in Guangzhou City, China. The theme then was Reinterpretation : a decade of experimental Chinese art, which aimed at a historic review and academic interpretation of the experimental Chinese art since the 1990’s. This first Guangzhou triennial has produced considerable influence in both Chinese and overseas artistic circles. Now the second session of Guangzhou Triennial is ready to unfold in Nov, 2005 as a regularly-held international art event.

The theme —— BEYOND : an extroardinary space of experimentation for modernization

The curatorial team of the Second Guangzhou Triennial consists of internationally renowned curators Hou Hanru, Hans Ulrich Obrist and the museum’s in-house curator Guo Xiaoyan. They have come up with an extraordinary title for the event: Beyond.

“Beyond” refers to various forms of special cultural and artistic phenomena and methods developed under new social and economic circumstances that are unique, flourishing and full of vitality. These phenomena and methods embody the exciting and complicated imprints of globalization; they represent those specific solutions and patterns created and adopted by China and other non-western countries in their own process of modernization; they are an ever-changing dynamic phenomenon.

“An extraordinary space of experimentation for modernization” takes the Pearl River Delta (PRD) as one of the typical developing regions to study the contemporary art within the extraordinary modernization framework that is full of possibilities and confusion. Pearl River Delta (PRD) stands for new space strategies, economic patterns and life styles. We regard this “extraordinary space” as a platform for artistic experimentation and practice. At the same time, this also evokes a unique and inventive experimental sample.

Therefore, the second Guangzhou Triennial focuses on the research and reflection on those “extraordinary” modern developments, and presents the “extraordinary” expression of artists, architects, and scholars. To achieve such a vision, we have established a new structure, the cross-space, cross-time, cross-cultural, and inter-disciplinary Delta Laboratory (D-Lab). It guarantees a platform for sustainable and evolving research, creation and cultural exchanges. Tens of international and Chinese artists, architects and cultural activists have been invited to the PRD area to carry out studies and exchanges, and further realize specific projects for the Triennial exhibition. As the core of the Triennial, “D-Lab” has already held 3 major labs with over 10 public presentations. The related documents will also be edited and published. This strategy emphasizes expansions and continuations in both time and space. It fundamentally subverts conventional exhibition curatorial models and allows the globalised contemporary art activities intimately fused with the local context and deeply influencing its future development. Thurs, this Triennial has become a process of creating new realities for the very locale itself.
Besides D-Lab, The second Guangzhou Triennial also consists of the Main Exhibition, Self Organization, and Special Projects. They will be opened on November 18th 2005 in Guangzhou with Guangdong Museum of Art as the main venue. The event will last till Jan. 15th, 2006, while the D-Lab Project will go on at the same time.

As we gave the project to the Guangzhou Triennial, we intended to change this theme anywhere at any time in “How to turn Guangzhou into Shanghai”. For us, the most important isn’t to have this city turning into that one, but the “transformation” process itself. We don’t know what it will turn out to be, but it is changing. We admire the motivations which guide these changes, and take some kind of pleasure in others’ misfortune.

First exhibition of Chinese New Media Art in the National Art Museum of China, Beijing

To the exhibition at the National Muesum of China

It says in Books of Poems, “When feelings flood, one heaves a sigh; if a sign is still not enough, one could sing a song; when songs still quench the emotions, one dances.” Nowadays, contemporary artists found video records and photography as new media to express their passion.

In the image age, with the widespread circulation of newspapers, magazine, mobies, and the Internet, the impact of the new media arts on our daily lives cannot be ignored. These “images” reflect modern people’s insights towards the world and the universe, and at the same time reflect our living environment. The camera has become the carrier of these most important visual expressions. Compared with the paintrbrush, it also becomes a more accepted and natural tool. Furthermore, it leads creative art activities to the new media art tide.

Sincethe 1990s, Chinese artists have made noticeable achiebements in new media art such as photography and video, which have attracted much attention from the art community inside and outside China. “Zooming into Focus: Chinese Contemporary Photography and Video” features the collection from the Haudenschilds of San Diego, USA. As the first retropective show of Chinese contemporary photography and video ever held  by the National Art Museum of China, it reveals the changes of social notions and technologies in Chinese contemporary art from a totally different angle. The exhibition showcases the most outstanding and symbolic works since the end of the last century, which directly reflect the changing culture, social environment and values in China’s booming economy.

I wish that “Zooming into Focus: Chinese Contemporary Photography and Video” could draw some attention from Chinese artists and audience to new media art. Finally, I with this exhibition great success.

Feng Yuan
Former Director of National Art Museum of China (NAMOC)

Regarded as an artist provocateur, Xu Zhen attempts to arouse and unease his audience, testing their personal boundaries and the workings of social conventions.

XZ 8848 first time shown

Tadashi Kawamata, the Artistic Director of the Triennial, has envisioned an exhibition that continually moves and changes, showcasing art that is related to the passage of time, to people’s lives, and to place rather than being a static object of contemplation. The function of art and the power of art are Kawamata’s foremost concerns. Thus, instead of organizing the exhibition around issues of policy and economic benefits from “cultural tourism”, Kawamata prefers “to give priority to a rationale that will allow the viewer or participant (the audience) to grasp the fundamental power of art, itself, to arouse the human spirit.” He emphasizes the participation of viewers, collaborative works, site-specific interaction and the idea of the exhibition as a “work-in-progress”.

The catalogue of Yokohama 2005 International Triennale consists of two volumes. The present volume includes mainly images of works. With foreword by the organizers, and artist biographies.

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Contemporary China is characterized by an incredible dynamism. Things seem to be transformed everyday, fuelled by astonishing economic growth, frantic urban development and the preparations for the 2008 Olympics. Of course these changes are reflected in art. Throughout the 1990s Chinese artists slowly emerged into the international art world and were invited to take part in numerous exhibitions across the world. Now, at the threshold of the new millennium, interest in Chinese contemporary art is peaking again, as a new generation of artists – born in the late 1960s and 1970s – appears on the scene.

This new generation presents us with an accurate and complex picture of a culture in transition. They take as their subject matter the country’s disappearing traditional landscape, its new urbanism and rapidly changing social values. They are also concerned with the ways in which Chinese people are adapting their lifestyles to contemporary realities, freeing themselves from traditional stereotypes while actively utilizing new technologies.

“Follow Me! Chinese Contemporary Art at the Threshold of the New Millennium” introduces over forty works by nineteen artists of this new generation. The title of the exhibition is taken from Wang Qingsong’s photo-tableau “Follow Me,” included in the show, which shows the artist as a teacher seated in front of a blackboard covered in Chinese and English writing on which the logos of famous American and European brands can be seen – a sideways comments perhaps on China’s recent wave of privatizations and opening up to foreign markets. But the words at the center of the board – “Let China walks towards the world! Let the world learns about China!” – suggest that they should not slavishly follow the developed world. In fact, the artist seems to be asking who, in the future, will be doing the leading.

In confronting the many faces of the new China there can no longer be any single point of view or message in the art. One thing is sure though, the influence of this country’s artists is certain to grow in the future.

To the exhibition of Centro Cultural Tijuana

Zooming into Focus was the first contemporary Chinese photography exhibition that took place in the Centro Cultural Tijuana. The fast growth that has characterized our city is also one of the characteristics of the society in which these wide interest from the artistic community, art and design students of the state, as well as an important amount of articles in the local press.

Teresa Vicencio Alvarez
General Director of the Centro Cultural Tijuana, Mexico

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For this exhibition, Ralph Rugoff invited over 50 international artists to devise proposals for a monument for the United States of America. Freed from contextual, budgetary, or practical constraints, the proposals reflect each artist’s ideas about the type of monument the people of the United States currently need or deserve.
Their proposals may address particular values or ideals, group or individual histories, institutions or places. The nature of these hypothetical monuments, meanwhile, may be material or immaterial, permanent or ephemeral, practical or whimsical.

The exhibition title “Shanghai Constructions” is referenced from a foreign language magazine “China Constructions” which was inaugurated by Madame Song Qingling during the 1950’s. This publication introduced socialist constructions from China to the world with different languages. Inside the magazine, you can find propagandistic reproductions of healthy and robust workers and factories, consciously promoting socialist values and flourishing people’s lives.

After almost 50 years, today’s Shanghai, as a symbol of China’s development, proposes another optimistic scene — one that differs greatly from the scene as depicted in the magazine of the 1950s’. However, the significance of culture and its need for intellectual support remain a pressing issue for the formation of a new and coherent society.

Many emerging artists in Shanghai thrive in an environment where economy and culture are undergoing drastic changes. Some of these artists translate their subjective experiences in a rather open manner, while others consciously critique the social and art systems in hope of capturing the sensibilities of our time. Known for innovative uses of time-based media like video and photography, their experimental practices ponder the many contradictions of urbanization and give substances to the very existence of an alternative yet highly diverse culture. This is their contributions to Shanghai as a unique metropolis.

“A l’Ouest du Sud de l’Est” / “A l’Est du Sud de l’Ouest”.

a double exhibition of Chinese contemporary art

curated by Hou Hanru, Lanrence Gateau and No？lle Tissier, Villa Arson, Nice, Centre d’Art Contemporain.

Chinese contemporary art is certainly one of the most significant elements in today’s global art scene. Like the speedy modernisation in China, the Chinese art world is doubtlessly one of the most dynamic and developing at incredibly rapid paces. In the meantime, Tens of artists have been presented in major international art events such as Documenta, biennales and triennales in Venice, Sao Paolo, Gwangju, Yokohama, Shanghai and other cities while numerous thematic exhibitions focused on Chinese contemporary art have been organised throughout the world for the last decade. It’s not exaggerating to say that a new global centre of contemporary art activities is being formed around the Chinese art scene.

The Chinese art scene is extremely diverse and complex. Different generations of artists, living in different parts of the country, have been influenced by different cultural, historic, geographic, social and economic traditions and conditions although they are sharing a considerable amount of elements and dealing with an increasingly open reality, the rapid modernisation of the country. Chinese art has never existed as an entity. It’s only a denomination for convenience. The energetic and speedy development of contemporary art in China today is a result of the very dynamics and tension of interactions between a common social background and individual imaginations. In the mist of the tension, artists are producing huge amount of works, ranging from painting to video, from performance to installation, from multimedia to conceptual interventions…, to express their reactions to the theatrically changing reality and their commitments of inventing new identities of those who take part in the tide of mutation. In the process, it’s essential to emphasize the importance of individual stances – the motivation of seeking individual freedom and refusals to be seen as “representative” of any national culture is one of the common engagements and strategies shared by the artists in their negotiations for spaces of creation in the turbulent change of the country. The diversity of today’s contemporary art works and activities in China proves perfectly such a tendency.

China is increasingly integrated into the global system of modernisation in all domains, including art creation. Global perspectives are an inherent part of the making of the contemporary art scene in the country. Being international is another aspect of the artists’ identities organically related to their efforts of taking individual stances. It’s of course an essential part of their artistic languages. Contemporary art in China has always been a product of international exchanges. Living in the unprecedentedly globalised world, Chinese artists are often great travellers. Many of them have also emigrated to other countries. Participating with their particular languages in the reconstruction of a truly global art world is now a common task for them while the global dimension is even more rapidly absorbed into the making of new Chinese art. With their unique and rich experiences of surviving and conquering the harsh reality of being immigrants, many Chinese artists living abroad, especially in traditional centre of modern cultures, namely the West, are now becoming an indispensable force of the local scenes of their adopted localities. In other words, their highly inventive works, of fully charged of critical power facing their realities and destinies, play major roles in the mutative process of remaking of Western societies. Artistic creations of the Chinese Diaspora are becoming a particularly focus of attention in the international art world today. France is no exception.

It’s equally considerable that the internal situation in China is also encouragingly shifting towards further openness. Some major events like Shanghai Biennale, Shenzhen International Public Art Exhibition and the upcoming Guangzhou Triennale are now among the most significant international events in the Asia-Pacific region while numerous smaller scale exhibitions with Chinese and international artists are booming across the country.

No doubt, this process of opening towards the outside world brings the artists to face directly the reality of globalisation and its problems. Testifying the current geopolitical events such as wars, terrorism, global economic struggles, ecological crisis, human rights crisis and so on, they are working in depth to question and comments on key issues such as geopolitical power, capitalism and democracy, etc.. Thanks to the exercises of confronting with the world, their exploration of questions raised from their own everyday lives and personal universes are brought to totally fresh insights while their artistic languages are radically innovated. The immense sense of humour and idealist criticality expressed in their works are probably the most impressive sign of their vitality. This continuously helps them opening new spaces for imagination and creation in the country as well as in the world.

Chinese contemporary art is entering a period of reorientation. This reorientation is no longer oriented into one main movement or tendency as many may expect. Instead, it’s leading to a multi-oriented complexity that is merging into the entire world. In the meantime, new universes are given birth out of this dynamic, seemly chaotic and complicated process. These universes are highly personal, accurately context-related, constantly moving and developing like guerrilla forces and actively contributing to changing the outside world.

In Nice (Villa Arson) and Sète (Centre d’Art Contemporain), on the occasion of the year of France-Chine cultural exchanges, we are presenting some of the most significant Chinese artists under the banner – reflecting to the multi-orientational nature of today’s Chinese art – “A l’ouest du sud de l’est” and “A l’est du sud de l’ouest”. These artists can be roughly divided into two groups: those living in China and those living in Europe, notably in France. However, as the title suggests, they are sharing commonly a way of living, and working – travelling around the world, talking to everyone en route and embracing all the upcoming surprises. The double exhibition respectively happening in Nice and Sète will certainly be a memorable trace on their incessant trajectories.

Entitled “Techniques of the Visible”, the 2004 Shanghai Biennale aims to examine the relationship between media and human existence, between technology and culture. The exhibition brings together artists both home and abroad to explore the creative potentiality of the cross-fertilization of various media.

The Biennale consists of 8 parts: Thematic Exhibition, Virtual Fields, Videos, Chinese Photography History Museum Plan, Image Ceremony, International Forum, Biennale at Home and Academic Lectures. 108 (or groups of) artists from 35 countries and regions participated in this Biennale, exhibiting in total 108 pieces (sets) of works.

Participating artists: Shao Yi, Yang Qingqing, Fei Pingguo, Liu Jianhua, Jiang Zhi, Yang Fudong, Hu Jieming, Ding Yi, Mao Dou, Fan Mingzhu, Lao Mao, Chen Shaoxiong, Zheng Guogu, Liu Wei, He An, Zhu Yu, Chen Xiaoyun, Fei Dawei, Geng Jianyi, Xiang Liqing, Zhang Ding, Xu Tan, Liu Weijian, Zhou Tao, Lao Jinfeng, Yu Ji, Ba Zhennong, Jin Jiangbo, Zhang Qing, Wang Xingwei, Ni Jun, Song Tao, Zhou Zixi, Jia Bu, Shi Yong, Shi Qing, Kan Xuan, Zhou Xiaohu, Le Dadou

“62761232 is the telephone number for a courier in Shanghai. From September 10 to September 20, from 10a.m to 10pm no matter were you are in the city you will be able to have an exhibition brought in front of you. (Shanghai center is free; if you live outside the central ring you need to pay for the courier fee)

What is the position of contemporary art in Shanghai? In this landscape of economic and social changes, contemporary art is under a continuum change.

With this unusual art event, we breack the common exhibition mode and will solve a problem that public face when confronting with an exhibition.

This exhibition is curated by a team of artists from Shanghai and will collect artworks from 40 artists from all around china…”

Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China, the first comprehensive look at the innovative photo and video art produced since the mid-1990s in China, will be presented jointly at the International Center of Photography and the Asia Society and Museum from June 11 to September 5, 2004.

Over the past five years, Chinese media artists from Beijing and Shanghai to Hangzhou have gained access to the latest cameras and computer technology, and are producing vivid, original work. Their startling actions performed on crowded Chinese city streets, diaristic works with the flavor of “reality TV,” and narratives caught between tradition and utopian dreams portray China now. Although media art has received official acceptance in China, with prominent exposure in the Shanghai Biennial and the Guangzhou Triennial, work continues to flourish in an extensive alternative network that does not receive government endorsement. The tapes selected for this exhibition include works from what has traditionally been China’s underground art network, as well as from biennials in Venice, Istanbul, Havana, and Cairo.

Organized by Barbara London, Associate Curator, Department of Film and Media.

Sorry, this entry is only available in 中文.

Sorry, this entry is only available in 中文.

Sorry, this entry is only available in 中文.

China is no doubt the most attractive centre of attention for the world today, not only in terms of it’s economic development, but also in terms of its cultural and social mutations. Accordingly, China’s contemporary art is becoming a new emerging force in the global art scene today. The presence of Chinese artists in major international art event is spectacularly increasing while more and more people from the international art world are visiting and acting in the Chinese art scene.  It’s no surprise that one can talk about a genuine fever for everything Chinese.

This year, Chinese contemporary art has become the main part of the cultural events under the umbrella of l’Année France-Chine.

It is in this situation that one should ask the question: what’s the real significance of Chinese contemporary art in the Chinese society and in the globalising world today. One can also raise the question, through exploring the “boom” of Chinese art, of the significance of contemporary art in general in the world.

Contemporary art activities in China has been developed along with the speedy modernisation process of the country. It’s fundamentally a movement of experiment and “avant-garde”. The ultimate motivation is to achieve freedom of imagination and expression although the cultural, political and economic conditions are constantly changing and evolving towards further opening. However, the rapid modernisation and integration into the global market economy and geopolitical restructuring imply new and increasing pressure coming from the demand of the economic growth and transformation of the nature of cultural activities into exchangeable “objects” in the global market and communication systems. This provokes a kind of unprecedented collective fever of development. Ironically, this tendency pushes further the uniformisation of the society and leaves less and less space for individual freedom and independent intellectual positioning.

It is in this urgent context that we should articulate on the importance of re-examining the independent and individual positions and expressions in the arts, as a concentrated reflection to the necessity of rethinking China’s and the world’s intellectual and cultural maps.

Covering an extremely immense territory and different contexts, contemporary art in China is a highly diverse and complex scene. The opportunities of frequent presences in the internal and international art world have not only excited the artists. For many, it’s also a crucial moment for critical reflections on reality and consolidation of personal stances and independences. These artists, by further profound researches and persistence on their own thoughts, imaginations and creativities, reaffirm that very essential vocation of art is open spaces for freedom, freedom of imagination and creation. Instead of manipulating superficially “social and political signs” to satisfy the expectations of institutions and market, they refuse to be instrumentalised by either national or international establishments. They resort to the most diverse and personal languages and references to express their ultimate fantasy. Often with great senses of humour and distant but pungent comments, they fabricate their own heavens, their own paradises, of imagination, fantasy and ideals. Incorporating experiences navigating between memories and dream, between personal desires and philosophical reflections, between everyday, “minor” initiatives and revolutionary projects… they are constantly developing their works in the most unpredictable, unfathomable and even uncertain ways. Using all kinds of imaginable media, they open their works and lives to the most risky intellectual and cultural adventures.

This is the strongest resistance to the pressure the real. In the meantime, it’s also the most powerful involvement with the real.

The artists selected in the project are among the most representative ones struggling in such a particular but indispensable realm. Their works not only reveal their own projects of “fabricating paradises” but also provide the public with direct experiences in sharing moments of living in the paradises, moments of jouissance.

Sorry, this entry is only available in 中文.

Sorry, this entry is only available in 中文.

Sorry, this entry is only available in 中文.

The space was organized as a “mirrored” gallery. Spectator could choose between one of the two exhibition halls, going from one hall to another, discovering then that exhibited artworks were all the same, except for small differences… This happening has been self-supported and put together without corporate sponsors and it has been possible through a huge economical and emotional involvement by the artists and by BizArt organization. Freshness, irony tinged with a dramatic solution of the space made the success of this happening in Shanghai: hundreds of visitors came during the two days of exhibition.

The ten years from 1990 to 2000 represented a crucial stage in the development of Chinese experimental art. Thoroughly internationalized, this art also responded to tremendous changes in Chinese society. Many artists devoted themselves to experimenting with new art mediums and forms, exploring new territories in artistic expression and representation. Their experiments attracted worldwide attention among art critics and curators, and played an increasingly important role in shaping a domestic visual culture in Mainland China.

Since it was opened to the public in 1997, Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou (Canton), China, has been promoting the research and presentation of Chinese art of modern and contemporary periods. Hence, it has initiated the Guangzhou Triennial, beginning with the current exhibition entitled Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (1990-2000).

As the first comprehensive survey of Chinese experimental art of the 1990s, The First Guangzhou Triennial features the most significant works created in these ten years. The title, Reinterpretation, highlights the organizer’s intention to provide a systematic introduction to and explanation of these works in their artistic, cultural, social, and political context. The main part of the exhibition includes three thematic sections — Memory and Reality, Self and Environment, and Global and Local. An additional section, titled “Experimentation Continues,” features works by fifteen invited artists that indicate new directions in contemporary Chinese art after year 2000.

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According to Luigi Settembrini, the Valencia Biennial is the first Biennial dedicated to communication between the arts. It is an attempt to reflect the dialogues and interaction established between the various disciplines of contemporary culture, such as visual art, fashion, cinema, photography, music, theatre, architecture, design, dance, literature, and advertising. By putting the emphasis on communication, rather than on individual artistic disciplines, room will be made for the mental openness, capability and creative resources of the different participants. Images of works are accompanied by short articles and interviews. The catalogue also comes with a CD with music from the Fanfare show.

Sorry, this entry is only available in 中文.

Sorry, this entry is only available in 中文.

Video Circle 2000 composes of a video art installation exhibition and a live performance programme. Live performance programme involves performing artists from European, Asian, American cities to have exchange performances inside the installation. The whole project involves participation of 108 artists from all over Asia-Pacific. The installation is composed of 32 sets of televisions and video players arranged in a circle with the monitors facing inward. A same video image were shown on each monitor with a three-second delay to the previous screen in a counterclockwise sequence. in-between the monitors are gaps approximately the width of monitors, making the circumference composed of 64 “elements”. The 64 criss-crossing of the “Real” and “Virtual” arrangement is derived and inspired from one of the oldest Chinese classic on communication: Book of Change (Yi Ching).

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In today’s art, the “alternative” is playing the role of revising and criticizing the power discourse and mass convention. In an uncooperative and uncompromisable way, it self-consciously resists the threat of assimilation and vulgarization. A cultural attitude that stands against the power and makes no compromise with vulgarization is, together with independent individual experiences, feelings and creations, is what extends the pursuit and desire of art for spiritual freedom – an everlasting theme. Such a cultural attitude is obviously exclusive and alienated. It aims at dealing with such themes as cultural power, art institution, art trends, communications between the East and West, exoticism, post-modernism and post-colonialism, etc. “Fuck Off” emphasizes the independent and critical stance that is basic to art existence, and its status of independence, freedom and plurality in the situation of contradictions and conflicts. It tries to provoke artist’s responsibility and self-discipline, search for the way in which art lives as “wildlife”, and raise questions about some issues of contemporary art. Allegory, direct questioning, resistance, alienation, dissolution, endurance, boredom, bias, absurdity, cynicism, and self-entertainment are aspects of cultur as well as features of existence. Such issues are represented here by the artists with unprecedented frankness and intelligence, which leaves behind fresh and stimulating information and traces of existence.’ – Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi (Curators).

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As a way to mark a century of artistic film and video production, Chisenhale transforms itself into a cinema. Twenty curators from around the world have been invited to submit their choice of five artist film or video works each. Over 100 films have been sorted and ordered by the gallery and will be shown on a large scale screen.

EXIT brings an international context to artist film and video, whilst not being prescriptive. Chisenhale asked curators to draw on their knowledge of a ‘local’ scene and to select films that represent something to them personally. Questions raised by EXIT contribute to the debate surrounding film and video practice, its relationship to cinema, its political and global implications and its future and influence as a cultural manifestation.

Comfortable sofas and an endless supply of coffee bring an alternative cinema feel to EXIT, and the accompanying Reading Room provides an artist-made resource for the audience to dip in and out of.

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‘“Supermarket” was one of the most innovative experimental art exhibitions to take place in China in recent years. It not only used a public, commercial space to display art, but deliberately produced works that were at once art objects and commercial goods. Every detail of this exhibition catalogue was carefully planned. The exhibition catalogue, for example, was designed to look like a sales catalogue, thus further blurring the division between art and merchandise… It (the exhibition) consisted of two sections ― a small “supermarket space” in front and a much larger “installation space behind”. The second exhibition resembled a more conventional art exhibition, but works in this section acquired new meaning because they were framed by the “supermarket space”. This “supermarket space can be considered a large installation/performance piece in itself: it not only displayed but sold the “merchandise”, as in a supermarket’ – Wu Hung (‘Exhibiting Experimental Art’, p.173.) There is a section (in Chinese only) in which the participating artists gave their views on the theme of the exhibition:’沒有拒絕發言’ (We Have Not Refused to Make Comments).

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