SHORT STAYS / 暂停
3 Short Films by / 三个短片
Zhao Ye / Liu Jiayin / Peng Lei
赵晔、刘伽茵、彭磊

“It returns the child’s eye to the retinas of men. Emerging from subway, [taxi] or even hydrofoil, the visitor to the [Shanghai Expo 2010] feels that he is in a special world, full of runaway pylons, impossible cantilevers, and buildings that look like flowers or accidents of flowing lava.

Is it the future? Not exactly.”

This John McPhee surveying the 1964 New York World’s Fair in his essay “Fairs: The World of Already,” but he could just have equally been describing the Shanghai Expo. Some photos from the still-unfolding, barely-comprehensible spectacle.

Slideshow of May 1 (on Flickr):

Slideshow of May 2 (on Flickr):

A short review I did on “Light Streams,” the current show at Center for Cosmic Wonder in Tokyo, is up at Artforum.com. Read online here or in the vault. See some pictures from the show below.

Title: “Light Streams” Review
Publication: Artforum Online
Date: Oct 2009
Article Link
Full Text Below

Tokyo
“Light Streams”
CENTER FOR COSMIC WONDER
5-18-10 Minamiaoyama, Minato-ku
September 4–November 7, 2009

Since its debut in 2000, Cosmic Wonder has carved out a special place in the expansive gray area between art and fashion. Founded by architect-turned-artist Yukinori Maeda (who maintains a separate art practice under his own name), the project has two dedicated spaces in Tokyo and Osaka that serve as hybrid gallery-boutiques. Both present seasonal “collections” that are amalgams of clothing, art installations, and publications.

The entry corridor at “Light Streams,” the current exhibition in the Tokyo center, features a video shot in a Parisian gallery, in which beautiful models dressed in Cosmic Wonder wares “perform” as art viewers with subtly eccentric choreography. In the minimal main space, a few pieces of clothing are displayed on sculptural racks. (The rest are hidden behind the white wall panels or inside a mirrored cube.) The same garments, such as a gold lamé circle dress and a retro prairie shirt, also appear in the photographs that line the walls, captured in the slightly dated antifashion pictorial style popularized by Purple magazine. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, all the photographers are Purple alumni.)

While Henry Roy captures a gold-circle-clad man and woman trekking through a sun-dappled field, Takashi Homma disconnects the clothing from human usage and lays it out in a snowy forest like otherworldly debris. Laetitia Benat’s pictures aspire to portraiture of the apparel (not the girl in it), and Mark Borthwick applies his trademark sun flare to some half nudes in a garden. These works are most interesting when viewed as an extension of the Cosmic Wonder project, which itself is intriguing mostly for its unique definition of branding and endlessly reflexive dialogue between art and commerce. The photos, zines, and installations serve to sell the clothes, while the clothes further propagate the aesthetic of the photos, zines, and installations. Through it all, Cosmic Wonder’s guileless position seems quite simple––chasing the joys of lying down in a sun-dappled forest clearing in a gold lamé dress.

My rambling notes from the week of SHContemporary are up at Artforum China; read the full article online here or in the vault. They didn’t end up using all of my pictures, however, so here are a few extras below…

Also, just for reference, here are three other articles about the Shanghai Fair week:
“Shanghai Art Week Review,” The Art Newspaper, Chris Gill
“Chinese Art Scene at SHContemporary,” Artnet, Barbara Pollack
“Postcards from Shanghai No. 1, 2, 3,” Frieze Editors Blog, Jörg Heiser

Hurun Lounge - Nobody Knows China's Rich Better

Seeing One's Own Eyes: Middle East Contemporary Art Exhibition

Bourgeoisified Proletariat: Bicycle by Guangzhou's Borges Libreria

Bourgeoisified Proletariat: Wall destruction by Polit-Sheer-Form Office

Bourgeoisified Proletariat: MadeIn's Metal Language

Bourgeoisified Proletariat: MadeIn's styrofoam disco room

Title: “’Pawnshop’ at The Shop, Beijing”
Publication: Housevibe, the Opposite House Blog
Date: Sep 2009
Article Link
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What is a piece of art worth? Is it based on age? The value of the materials used? The reputation of the artist? Or something far more mysterious? In these recent years that have seen the art market in China and elsewhere bubble up and then burst, the timeless debate seems more relevant than ever. The new exhibition “Pawnshop” in Beijing is the perfect place to consider this question, with a playful twist.

This month, Vitamin Creative Space’s experimental art-space in Jianwai Soho has transformed into a “Pawnshop” for artists. Underneath a beaming neon sign, the normally open-plan gallery now has a wooden shop-front and glass cases with items by over 60 international artists on display. Some are clearly “art works,” others simple “objects” that demand we look closer and understand their significance in this new context. All were “pawned” by the artists in the traditional manner: they exchanged their pieces for cash ($99 RMB) and a claim ticket. If the artist chooses to reclaim their object within 30 days, they need to pay back the loan with interest. If not, the piece will go on sale to the public.

Whereas a real pawnshop just wants to turn a profit, “Pawnshop”’s goals are more complex. (And all profits of this project will go to charity, by the way.) By adopting this commercial framework, the organizers hope to start a dialogue about the nature of art, exchange, consumption, and money itself.

“Pawnshop” is the brainchild of e-flux founders Anton Vidokle and Julieta Aranda, New York artists and curators who successfully launched the experiment in a Lower East Side shopfront last year. Now transplanted to China, this new edition features more artists from Beijing and greater China alongside an edgy selection of emerging and established international names.

Some objects on offer are highly conceptual: New York-based artist Rene Gabri has pawned one hour of his time (represented by a small slip of paper, with the words “One hour of my time”). Others are humorous – Beijing’s own Cao Fei exchanged a cockroach trap entitled “Cockroach House from Cao Fei’s House.” Singapore’s Ming Wong contributes a vintage Chinese opera record, and Hong Kong’s Doris Wong Wai-Yin a 1960s pocketbook; each investigating the link between object and memory. The legendary Martha Rosler, American pioneer of both feminist and conceptual art, came to Beijing for the opening and panel discussion, and appears to have left behind one of her suitcases (a duffel bag filled with airport paperbacks and tagged with airline stickers).

And 50 unscratched lottery tickets supplied by Rutherford Chang could be seen as either a potential big win, or just colorful paper – a direct comment on the “gamble” of art collecting.

As so much of China’s contemporary art exists on an epic scale, the smallness and intimacy of “Pawnshop” are a delight. It’s easy to spend an hour crouched down next to the glass cases, examining all the objects on display, and contemplating which might make for a good purchase – as long as the artist doesn’t reclaim it first.

“Pawnshop” will be at The Shop September 16-November 16 2009; keep up with its transformations on Vitamin’s blog

The Shop (by Vitamin Creative Space)
+86108059004374
B1-1503, Building15, Jianwai SOHO, 39 East 3rd-Ring Rd,
Chaoyang District, Beijing, 100020, China
http://www.vitamincreativespace.com
http://www.e-flux.com/shows/view/7178

Title: “Jiang Zhi’s ‘Attitude’”
Publication: Housevibe, the Opposite House Blog
Date: Sep 2009
Article Link (English)
Article Link (Chinese)
Full Text Below (English and Chinese Translation)

This month, the international art crowds descended upon Shanghai for SHContemporary 09, the third edition of the city’s art fair. But the best parts of any art fair are usually the satellite events surrounding it, and Shanghai’s visitors had plenty to choose from this year. Word quickly spread that one of the not-to-miss highlights was “Attitude,” Osage Gallery’s solo show by Jiang Zhi, which features three brand-new works by the often provocative artist.

Like many Chinese artists of his generation, Jiang is known for his being somewhat of a renaissance man, and his pieces have appeared equally in art festivals like the Venice Biennale, and film festivals from Hong Kong to Torino. Born in 1971 in Hunan Province, he was based in Shenzhen for several years as he began creating distinctive works across photography, video, and installation. For his landmark quasi-documentary “The Moments,” he carried a hand-held DV camera around Shenzhen every single day from 2000-2003 to capture random snippets of city-life: an old man cursing at traffic, two kids learning how to kiss. In the controversial video and photographs of “Our Love,” he profiled the morphing bodies of two individuals: a female ballerina battling breast cancer, and a male nightclub dancer undergoing gender transformation. His more recent photographs and videos have become less raw, more polished, but his basic concerns remain the same – unflinching observations of a changing society, via the microcosm of human emotions, expressions, and bodies.

In “Attitude,” he deeply investigates artifice and reality in how we perform our emotions. “Maiden, All Too Maiden!” is an installation of 100 photographs, all of young women posing against pink backdrops with an expression of “coyness.” The total effect is disturbing rather than charming, suggesting how even this cute and innocent look is a mask we can never see beneath. Upstairs in the 7-channel video loop of “Tremble,” a diverse line-up of naked individuals stand upon vibrating platforms, their flesh shaking at a high frequency as they attempt to hold a rigid pose – simultaneously vulnerable and fierce. But the most striking attempt to peel back these layers of perception and reality is perhaps “0.7% Salt.”

Presented in an intimate alcove at the very top of Osage’s beautiful 1920s villa, this single-channel video shows a beautiful young woman staring straight into the camera, her face gradually shifting from a shy smile to controlled tears. The fact that the woman is Hong Kong starlet Gillian Chung is an extra surprise, and makes the cinematic nature of her crying more beguiling. Though the tears are staged, they’re very much real – the “0.7% salt” solution rolling down her cheeks remains the same, regardless of her “true” emotions. Jiang suggests that in a media-saturated world, perhaps the artificial surface is all we can trust.

Jiang Zhi, “Attitude,” in Shanghai Sep 08-Nov 08, 2009, travelling to Hong Kong December 2009 and will finally hit Beijing April 2010

Osage Gallery Shanghai
93 Duolun Road, Hongkou District
Shanghai, China 200081
Tel: +86 21 5671 3605
www.osagegallery.com

(Chinese Translation)

蒋志的“表态”

上个月，上海09年第三届上海艺术博览会国际当代艺术展开幕，很多国际艺术团体来到上海。但是艺术节最令人兴奋之处还是在于卫星转播，上海的游客选择范围非常广泛。传说万万不能错过的就是奥沙画廊蒋志的个展“表态”，这位激进的艺术家展出了三幅新作。展览到 11 月份，所以还可以安排时间去看。

和许多同年代的艺术家一样，蒋志也多少有些文艺复兴的味道，他的作品在威尼斯双年展、香港电影节和托里诺电影节上展出过。1971年出生于湖南，他现居深圳数年，进行摄影、影像和装置作品的创新工作。从2000年到2003年，为了他那里程碑似的类纪录片“ The Moments” 他每天都带着他的手提DV在深圳的大街小巷抓取这个城市生活的零星碎片：老头儿咒骂交通堵塞，俩小孩儿初试接吻……在那极具争议的视频和摄影作品 “Our Love” 中，他描绘了两个变形的个体：一个女性芭蕾舞者与乳腺癌抗争，一个男性夜店舞者接受变性手术。他近期的摄影作品和影像作品已不如先前露骨，而是更加精致，但是他所关注的东西并没有改变——-通过人类情感，面部表情及肢体的微观世界来直观社会的变迁。

在“表态”这个系列作品中，他对我们在真实或是虚伪的表现情感的问题上深究了一番。Maiden, All Too Maiden 是一件由100张照片组成的装置作品。均为年轻女性在粉红的背景下展现出“羞赧”的表情。而这件作品产生的整体效果不是妩媚可爱，而是令人心烦。暗示着这些可爱的纯真面庞不过是一张张无法透视的面具。而在楼上7频影像输出的“tremble”,一排形态各异的裸体人物站在振动台上，尽管他们想保持静止的姿态，他们的身体还是剧烈的抖动着—-既敏感又激烈。然而这一系列剥离感知和现实层面的作品中最具有冲击力的当属“0.7％的盐。”

呈现在奥沙画廊1920年精美别墅顶端的壁橱内，这幅单频视频表现的是一个漂亮的女人直视着镜头，她的表情渐渐由羞涩的笑容转变为强忍泪水。而作品中此人正是香港影视明星阿娇，这不得不令人格外惊讶。而正是这点也使得她影像性质的哭泣更具迷惑性。尽管眼泪仅是舞台效果，却非常真实。不管她心理感受如何，这些0.7%的盐溶液照样从她的脸颊上滚落下来。蒋志暗示的是在这个媒体浸泡的世界中，我们能相信的也许也只有虚假的表面了。
蒋志作品“表态”，2009年9月8日至11月8日，在上海展出。巡展于12月到达香港，并最终将于2010年来到北京。

上海市虹口区多伦路93号 奥沙画廊
邮编：200081
电话：+86 21 5671 3605
www.osagegallery.com

Title: “Postcards from SHContemporary”
Publication: Artforum China Online
Date: Sep 2009
Article Link
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If the Shanghai clichés weren’t already clear in my mind, reading Lynn Pan’s 2008 book Shanghai Style: Art and Design between the Wars on my Air China flight to Pudong was a good refresher. The obvious: Shanghai’s style has always been “style” itself. (Luckily, Pan focuses instead on the micro-evolution of this stereotype and its realities.) So perhaps it was unavoidable to view most of the events of ShContemporary week through this lens, starting with Duolun Museum’s In the 1980s kicking off the marathon on Monday (September 7th).

Day One:
For those of us who haven’t previously seen many materials from Wen Pulin’s archive of the Chinese avant-garde, the Duolun show was an eye-opening introduction. The museum’s three stories were filled with lovingly preserved photographs, letters, notes, videos, posters, exhibition stills, and other ephemera from this momentous decade of underground art activity in China. The halls reverberate with the weight of history, innocence, and nostalgia—not to mention fantastic haircuts. As the 80s seem to be in a state of permanent revival as a fashion inspiration, the cumulative aesthetic effect of these documents seems the most striking. Several monitors play grainy, fixed-camera VHS Betacam interviews of young artists in their studios, seriously talking and seriously smoking, their oversize glasses and shaggy or close-cropped hair adding to their intensity and unintentional chic. Several walls are dedicated to the 1989 China/Avant-Garde show in Beijing, including an enormous version of the famous Xiao Lu gunshot photo, which suddenly looks more like a cult film still or Nan Goldin portrait. To top it all off, the third floor features a black-and-white video from a 1988 art opening where sneaker-clad hipsters do wildly original dance moves to the strains of a distorted rock band. (In the spirit of punk, I decided to bootleg a |clip|http://www.drop.io/wenpulinvideo| for a wider audience to enjoy – I bet these kids would have approved.) Viewed today, their awkward anti-fashion becomes irrevocably fashionable, and I found myself wishing for a similarly weird oversized windbreaker and tapered pants.

If Wen Pulin’s archives express an accidental style through appealing to authenticity/nostalgia (ever interrelated), the new show at Osage Gallery opening later that day down the block contains a more explicit connection to this theme. Attitude a series of brand-new works by Jiang Zhi, and fits nicely in Osage’s elegant all-white 1920’s building.

In glossy photo and video portraits of individuals, Jiang explores artifice and reality in human expressions and identity. The first floor contains the sprawling Maiden, All Too Maiden!, 100 photos of women in varying poses of “coyness” from the playbook of femininity; the second floor’s 7-channel video Tremble captures seven nudes vibrating at a high speed, simultaneously comic and disturbing. The top floor features the debut of 0.7% of Salt, a video loop of a beautiful young woman crying. Of course, the fact that the performer is Gillian Chung adds an intriguing layer – the Hong Kong starlet’s career was basically destroyed by the Edison Chen sex scandal in 2008, and Jiang cheekily plays on this backdrop of public disgrace in her performed tears, and our reactions to it. Her weeping feels genuine enough to be uncomfortable, but aestheticized enough to be entirely artificial, all with the slightest hint of a smile playing at her lips in some moments. Jiang Zhi’s Attitude uses the polish of pop media not to criticize the essential “falsehoods” of representation, but rather to suggest that this shiny layer is the only one we can trust.

Related to this, it’s impossible to ignore the Osage gallery space– like so many art venues in Shanghai, Osage takes advantage of a beautiful vintage building to offset the works inside. Drinking wine on the upstairs terrace, or sitting cross-legged on the gallery steps, smoking cigarettes with famous artists in a high-school fashion, it did seem for a moment that, at the very least, style is something to be trusted.

Day Two:
On Tuesday, two other small shows were opening in two other gorgeous, historic buildings. The first was The Shape of Things to Come at 140sqm Gallery, a literally 140 square-meter space on the second floor of a grand old apartment house, currently under noisy renovation. Curated by Beijing-based Beatrice Leanza, the group show of four young artists had a casual low-fi energy, and seemed more about highlighting some cool new stuff than any particularly resonant theme.

The front room prominently featured Liang Shuo’s eye-popping I am fucking beautiful No. 4, an installation of makeshift balustrades (with plenty of fake marble and colored stickers) that evokes the slapdash aesthetic of even the most corporate architecture in Chinese cities. At the other end of the spectrum, Elaine W. Ho’s piece was almost intentionally easy-to-miss; she covered the gallery windows with red and blue film, creating a 3-D glasses effect, and offered a pair of perforated paper spectacles for visitors.

Qiu Xiaofei contributed a Kienholz-y open refrigerator overflowing with fabricated beer bottles; Sun Xun, a corridor hung with ink-painted canvas curtains entitled Ceausescu’s Airship that riffed on weaponry, language, Victorian-era science, etc. As all text was in English and the referents heavily European, the piece wouldn’t have seemed out of place in a steam-punk-oriented indie gallery in San Francisco’s Mission District. This geographic slippage was easily corrected, however, by having a drink on the gallery’s balcony overlooking the afternoon traffic on Fuxing Lu (bonus: some classic Shanghairen pajamas hanging up to dry).

In another part of the French Concession, Art + Shanghai was inaugurating their move to a new location with Wuwei: Being and Nothing, a glossier group show in a glossier restored villa. Making my way up three stories to see the mostly monochromatic and obliquely-“Taoist” works on each floor, it finally dawned on me what makes Shanghai’s art scene truly distinct: stairs. Every exhibition in one of these spaces becomes narrative in an extra dimension.

This journey entailed a pause in the middle to contemplate Shi Zhiying’s black-and-white sea paintings (best quote of the week: “Ni hao, this is beautiful!” from a gesticulating older French gentleman with a heavy accent), and then the surprising revelation of a bedroom on the top floor. Then the trek back downstairs to watch Macau’s Cindy Ng Sio Ieng create one of her spilled-ink works live on video, with ambient sound mixed by Ben Houge. While in an upstairs room, Ieng’s video and Houge’s sound were randomly paired, here each hypnotically fed off of the other, and kept guests sipping their G&T’s and looking on for some while. The only problem was that darn un-turn-off-able data display that seems to plague every video projector in China…

Day Three:
In a circus of a week, by Wednesday it was time for the bigtop. The delicately-Stalinist halls and plazas of the former “Sino-Soviet Friendship Building” made a majestic setting for some pretty predictable content. The vernissage crowds shuffled along through the booths, confronted with many of the same works shown at ArtHK and other fairs this year, but luckily the Discoveries section was a bit more fun.

While featuring many artists that could hardly be called “discoveries” (Who’s that “Marina Abramovic” I’ve been hearing so much about?), the high-arched space gave plenty of room to see works, something art fairs usually lack. Personal highlights included Li Yongbin’s sprawling carpet installation (a painstaking flower-pattern rendered in loose powder, gradually being smudged into nothingness by countless feet), and Liu Wei’s cleverly confusing booth: Designed to look like a trade-show display for a luxury kitchen appliance company, it’s the most convincing I’ve ever seen in an art context, and I assumed it was some bizarre corporate cross-over until spotting the black-and-white photo on the wall of Richard Nixon inspecting a similar model-kitchen. My art vs. commerce radars momentarily scrambled (the proof of an effective ready-made, to me), when I came across the sponsored booth “Hurun Lounge: Nobody Knows China’s Rich Better” upstairs, I was certain it had to be an installation.

Abandoning commerce for academia, many folks next headed across town for History in the Making: Shanghai 1979-2009. Curated by Biljana Ciric, the multi-building exhibition is billed as “the most complete overview of contemporary art practices in Shanghai over the past thirty years,” which is hard to argue. The history lesson traces from rough experiments and emulations of Western-canon classics (ironic takes Kosuth’s chairs by Shi Yong, and Richard Hamilton’s Just What is it collage by Yu Youhan) to new conceptual mischief (Zhou Xiaohu’s excellent “To Chase One’s Tail,” in which he hired 10 different detective agencies to successively follow one another). With a show of such scope, the catalogue seems crucial to filling in the gaps, but sadly the English edition won’t be available for another year. (At least they promised to send a copy to the address on my business card when the time comes.)

Day Four:
Thursday saw most art-fair pilgrims making the hour-long trek to Songjiang for the Bourgeoisified Proletariat exhibition, but for those of us who missed the bus (literally), there was plenty to catch up on at 50 Moganshan Lu. At ShanghArt, Xu Zhen’s new incarnation/company “MadeIn” (short for “Made In China,” get it?) presented Seeing One’s Own Eyes: Middle East Contemporary Art Exhibition. Ostensibly works by Middle Eastern artists “curated” by MadeIn, the heavily symbolic pieces were actually created by Xu Zhen/MadeIn to satirize the expectations of art from this region. Two camels stand in bathtubs, their abnormally-long necks intertwining up to the ceiling; upon closer inspection, they’re revealed to be made from small stuffed animals and packing tape. A set of large styrofoam blocks have been strategically incised with the shapes of Islamic architecture. But the cards of humor, earnestness, offense and politically correct accusation are shuffled so fast that even postcolonial theory-heads are forced to just admire the little palm-lined pond and wish they were allowed to float for a while on the Persian-rug innertube.

Coincidentally, some of these same consciously “problematic” threads continued in BizArt’s solo show by Zhou Xiaohu, Military Exercises Camp – Rescue Plan 10.18. Zhou’s installation design at first glance evokes “Africa” by the same means that Xu Zhen’s Impossible is Nothing show in Beijing earlier this year: copious straw (here in bales suggesting guerrilla bunkers) and a slightly heated, windowless room. But the story is richly complicated by the video re-enactments of a hostage rescue situation (based on the real-life kidnapping of a Chinese oil worker by militants in Sudan), played out by African and Chinese actors in Shanghai, and extended into an interactive video game in the center of the labyrinth (unfortunately malfunctioning the day I visited). The set-up is now revealed to be, in a sense, a stage-set – consciously artificial, yet altogether “real,” as the shattered mobile phones and crumpled military uniforms are the documentary-evidence of an actual performance. In Zhou’s “Camp,” war becomes theater, and moreover, a participatory role-playing game, and viewers need to “exercise” their perspective in locating themselves within it.

After basking in this effective liminal space for a while, it was time to head over to another dislocated locale – the outer-space of Pudong, and the Oriental Pearl Tower. Thursday night saw the inaugural segment of Shanghai eArts festival kick off inside the iconic building; the other main portion would open at Shanghai Moca on Saturday. This section was titled “base target=new”, after a common HTML design tag, but similar to ShContemporary Discoveries, presented more greatest hits (Nam June Paik, Marina again, Bill Viola) than media-art underground. As seems common for new-media art openings, visitors milled around, shyly attempting to interact with works that bleeped and pulsated, never sure what the intended effect was supposed to be. Upstairs on the 78th floor (or the floor that was 78 meters from the ground; it was unclear which), the dark circular hall held works to be experienced more passively (phew), like Joseph Kosuth’s numerical neon, and the digital-glitch videos of Takeshi Murata. But we had to rush a bit, as the diligent Tower staff were eager to herd us back out into the Pudong night. Standing on the street again, it seemed that no new media art project in the show could compare to the space station itself.

Day Five:
On Friday, I finally took my field trip to Bourgeoisified Proletariat, the enormous show inaugurating the new “Songjiang Creative Studio” on the outskirts of Shanghai. In plain terms, it’s another strangely-located steel and glass complex with no discernible future purpose besides this four-day extravaganza of cool new work by over 40 artists. But that’s just fine.

Organized by no fewer than 10 curators (most of whom also appear in the show as artists), Bougeoisified Proletariat deliberately avoids an “overarching thematic” (though the title could be read closely in relation to many pieces) – instead aiming to cut a diverse cross-section through contemporary art production in China as a whole. The five main halls of the show took about two to three hours to get through, and remarkably, I was never once bored.

In the entrance, Yang Zhenzhong’s disturbing Fatality machine continues to spit orange ping-pong balls onto the floor, each printed with something you can die from, such as “Carcinoma of the Anal Canal” and “Cerebral Hemmhorage.” An installation by Shi Qing recalls a frontier church, and stretches his elegant approach to domesticity and emptiness onto a bigger frame. Gleefully juvenile pieces by Liao Guohe and Hangzhou collective Small Productions share space with a surprisingly sober installation of cardboard boxes by neon-sign-stealing He An. Representing for the south were the Yangjiang Group (the collision of calligraphy and soccer), Chu Yun (the ubiquitous lucky-star box), and Borges Libreria (an oversized bicycle equipped with mobile library). And Xu Zhen’s insanely prolific MadeIn (no doubt with the help of many insanely sleepless assistants) had virtually its own wing, presenting four elaborate installations that ranged from a psychedelic styrofoam room to dozens of cigarettes that smoke themselves. My personal favorite was Metal Language, a set of English word-bubbles formed from metal chains on the floor, each illuminated by a tiny flashlight. The phrases were of such pitch-perfect, Twitter-lifted American vernacular (“Hey, those were my college years in Hawaii!”) that I almost expected the piece’s title to be “Art by United States Artists.” Finally, Polit-Sheer-Form Office gave a preview of what may be this structure’s future (and by extension, the tenuous nature of any cultural space vying with industrial forces). On the opening night, they began breaking down one room’s drywall with axes. The axes remain hacked into the plaster for now.

Day Six:
Saturday was a relaxing coda to a seemingly endless week in transit: two afternoon book launches at Three on the Bund’s Glamour Bar. However the pink-tinted lounge featured incredibly comfortable vintage furniture and incredibly strong drinks, which may have made the audience a bit too chill for serious art/culture discourse.

After artist-curator Mathieu Borysevicz premiered Learning from Hangzhou, his lavishly visual study of the urban symbols of the rapidly-developing city, Philip Tinari and Hans Ulrich Obrist took the stage to discuss Hans Ulrich Obrist: The China Interviews. Obrist described the progression of his involvement with Chinese art, tracing back to Cities on the Move and other events that, shocking to remember, took place in the nineties. But “Little Hans” (as his Chinese moniker goes) lives very much in the now, so much so that his default autograph in the books handed to him after the talk all began with a beautifully operatic recording of the day’s date (“On the 12th day, of the 9th month, of the 9th year…”).

Much of the crowd reconvened later at the Shanghai branch of Kee Club, set predictably in an opulent old mansion off Huaihai Lu. It seemed a world away from scruffy Songjiang the day before, but was perhaps just a variation on the same style. Like many Shanghai venues cultural and non, Kee Club is an awkward recreation of the past, while the Songjiang show was a very skillful recreation of the “present.” It was a surprisingly historical week, and a good refresher on the various forms of Shanghai Modern. But after a while, my newly-acquired art books got heavy, and it was time to hop in a taxi back to the only place we can ever really go: the future (aka Pudong).

Click here for full set.

Wandered around ART HK 09 (lamely attempting to play paparazzi for Scene & Herd), saw friends, drank on rooftops, went to the track… the usual.

Full set here.