She works hard for a living…

Link to set on Flickr.

Title: “’Pawnshop’ at The Shop, Beijing”
Publication: Housevibe, the Opposite House Blog
Date: Sep 2009
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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: “Altered Ambiance”
Essay for Art Exhibition Publication
Publication: 1a Space Booklet
Date: Spring 2008
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1a Space – Altered Ambiance
Conversation with Magdalen Wong, Yuk King Tan, Nadim Abbas, YY Ma, Saturday February 16, 2008 (Anastasia Wong contributing by email)
By Samantha Culp

“Space” is one of those terms that is so commonly used (abused?) in art discourse, it’s hard to figure out what it even means anymore. Luckily for “Altered Ambiance”, curator Magdalen Wong and the four artists are taking a close, richly nuanced look at the subtle environmental changes that affect human perception of the space around them. It’s perhaps fitting that a few weeks before the exhibition, there are only rough outlines for what some of the works will be, as the show calls into question the relationships between work and venue, work and audience, and artists with one another. Many of the details will only be decided during installation, as artists are still negotiating their piece’s effects on the “ambiance” of the whole. All the same, the curator and artists (including Anastasia Wong, who was in the US but piped up via the magical space of email) gathered to discuss space, place and diffusion, with some interesting results.

SC: Magdalen, as the curator, can you talk a little bit about the origins of this exhibition?

MW: When this project started off, I was planning an experimental sound event, and was thinking a lot about ambiance in relation to sound, and how sound can really change a space. Later on it developed into an exhibition with the theme of “altered ambiance”— instead of focusing on sound, I really wanted to talk about space. Not just about how space is utilized or understood, but really how people act within a space, and how their actions are dictated by the changes within the space.

SC: Can the artists each tell me a bit about what they’re planning for the show?

YYM: Well, I wanted to do some kind of performance, but it’s a video performance… Actually I don’t like doing performance, I kind of hate it (laughs). I was thinking about the fact that when I went to the July 1 protest, everyone was shouting things but everyone was kind of out shopping as well. I just found it quite interesting, I had never seen anything like that before. You know, it was everyone going out for a picnic or something… At first I wanted to make this performance quite political, but I realized I didn’t have to, so all the words I’m going to shout are about pop culture in HK, like “Andy Lau” or the stock market, just random things like that.

SC: How did you decide to shoot it on site, and how does the design affect the meaning of the piece?

YYM: We do have time before the exhibition to build the walls, the room, shoot it and everything… the room will be completely white, because even though the piece is about Hong Kong, I want to dissociate it. It could be elsewhere.

SC: Nadim, can you describe your piece and your work process?

NA: For this I’m going to make use of the former cattle trough in 1a Space, and I’m going to fill it with liquid. I wanted to do some installation/sculpture on the theme of crying…. But that’s just a loose way of starting, for me to find some kind of focus. Basically, a lot of this happens when I pick up the objects— it only happens to me when I start to play with my onions or my little squishy bottles or whatever, and eventually it starts to come together, and it’s all based on an image in my head.

SC: So why did you choose onions for this show?

NA: The thing about onions as a metaphor is that, well, they make you cry, so there’s the crying theme, but also this identity thing as well. There’s this play about a giant and he’s thinking about his identity, and he’s got this onion and he’s peeling the onion, trying to find his identity. But he peels off layers and layers of the onion, and keeps peeling until he gets to the center, and there’s nothing there, because an onion has no core. So that has to do with putting yourself into the work as well.

SC: Anastasia, your animations also have to do with “identity” in a way—can you talk a bit about that?

AW: The animations are of objectified figures behaving in controlled situations; being formed together and struggling to be apart. The lack of individuality and the idea of a group or a ‘coming together’ are the main properties of these simple animations. There is no narrative, no story with a beginning and ending, no climax. All is one continuous behavior of being part of everyone and a muted desire to be separate from the togetherness.

SC: Yuk, you’re planning to stage an installation on the topic of domestic helpers, and their unusual position in Hong Kong’s “space”. Can you talk about your view on the politics of installation art itself?

YKT: I’m really excited by the idea of “altered ambiance” or altered space, because as an installation artist, and I do call myself that, it seems to be about being incredibly sensitive to other artists and to the environment in the process of doing an intervention or transformation, or something between all those different aspects. I quite like the political idea about making an installation because you need to think beyond the idea of your own self or the role of the institution, and deal with the politics of how it all works out–artists working together or not working together, what a curator is…
Once I was invited with a group of other artists to do a show in a New Zealand museum, connected to this idea of “reinvigorating the dead space” of the museum, the idea of getting more visitors in. I did this work that I really loved, where I put strip lighting on the top of a vitrine, and blacked out the vitrine glass with black adhesive. The lights would go strobing on the top and then go strobing on the bottom, and every so often the whole vitrine would light up as well. But unfortunately the museum was annoyed that there were so many lights reflecting on other things, and that it was antagonistic to the other artists because it was so overwhelming. So they closed the show down early. So it’s about being sensitive and being not sensitive; I’m kind of playing around those lines.

SC: How do the other artists feel about these issues of sensitivity, fairness, and distraction that go into exhibition planning? For instance, what do you think is the ideal spatial condition for your work to be presented?

AW: Lots of space. I like lots of space, but I don’t have a specified idea of how my works should be displayed. Being able to show and share the works are more important. I prefer working with the unpredictable, because that’s just more natural and realistic. Not everything can be planned, although organization and visual communication are important in ways to reach the public. The world kind of runs in a chaotic but organized way; society needs control, and sometimes people need to be told what to see or do.

YYM: My stuff always gets put in the corner, I don’t know why… At a graduation show, mine was even put in a separate room with a door. A lot of my pieces have sound, so it’s kind of hard to put together with other pieces.

SC: Well this gets back to the basic theme of “ambiance”, which you normally think of as referencing sound or light. Even with film or video-making, ambient sound is a big issue, of how much there is that you can’t “get rid of”—it’s the bottom layer. Within an exhibition space, if there’s something that has sound and the others don’t, and you’re looking at a photograph but hearing this sound, does the sound become a part of that work, or your experience of that work? It’s an interesting issue.

YKT: That’s a HUGE issue. The people who say, “I’m working with sound or moving image,” they always get first-go (much laughter). I mean with the organizers, to figure out where to put them, but also for with the viewers, because they go first to something that moves or has sound because that’s the most exciting thing.

AW: Video projection is a significant element added to a space, as it changes the tone or the mood of the space. It also changes the way the space should be viewed; it gives instructions to the audience, and guides them into seeing the space. It tells whoever is in a space that there is something happening; there is light and movement and you should look at it.

MW: For this show, however, I really wanted to use the word ambiance not just about sound or light… ambiance is not really about sound; it’s basically about space. How we feel in space, the relationship within the space, the mood. If it’s just a space, there’s actually no ambiance. Why? Because we’re not there to feel anything. If the tree falls and there’s nobody to listen to it… right? Ambiance is a reaction of us towards a space, which could be changed because there’s a sound, there’s a light, there’s a smell. Ambiance is always changing us to react in the space.

Yuk: I also don’t want the show to be only that “ambiance” is something really subtle, because that limits ambiance as well…
N: Basically it’s the human factor. It’s space with the humans in it, so it can be as extreme or as subtle as humans are.

EXTRA BOX: Space vs. Place

SC: What would you say is the difference between space and place—how would you define it, and is it a useful distinction in relation to the “altered ambiance” theme?

MW: A place is something that’s already been measured whereas—space… is just a space. When you say something is a place, I consider it already known or categorized or measured– I don’t know, it’s like time, time is like measurement, place is a space that’s been measured.

NA: Or you can say that a place is a space that has time…

MW: Maybe, yeah.

NA: Well that’s history right, history is a place that has time?

YYM: A place is a location, quite literal in a sense, where you can sit. But a space is something you can’t really see.

AW: Space is infinite: it can be time that tells duration; it can be distance, area and volume; it doesn’t have to be physical; it is boundless. There’s deep-space, dead-space, breathing-space, blank space, etc. Place is a physical environment; it can be pinned down and specified. It can be a location, a region, a surface and so on. It can be a position, or status. A status of a state of mind, or a status of a species in the world.

YKT: A place assumes something inherently quite localized, has its own inherent history, and works within a sociopolitical context. While space could be something quite abstract.

SC: It’s interesting that everyone’s defining it in their own way.

YKT: I always think that “site” is such an interesting word; it implicitly contains the idea that something will happen there, that there will be drama or that there is a situation or that something will change.

NA: Now we have to find a word to compare site with—site and kite? (Laughter.)

Title: “i.e.llusions”
Essay for Art Exhibition Publication
Publication: 1a Space Booklet
Date: Spring 2008
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I.E.llusory Diagrams
Samantha Culp

What would a Venn diagram of the I.E. group look like? A nest, a scribble; a logician’s nightmare, a graphic designer’s masochistic joy.
Countless circles overlap and diverge, starting with the separate spheres of seven individuals that first converged in Chicago. Other geographic tags must be added in: Hong Kong, various American hometowns, current cities of residence, show locations near and far. Varying materials, forms, and themes further complicate things. Does a circle labeled “sculpture” simple cross over part of the drawing, or does it surround the whole thing? Do the subtly different concerns of “humor”, “wit”, and “comedy” each receive their own circular field, or must they share a single one?
Somewhere in the midst of these intersecting elements exists a space called I.E. To call it an artists’ group is possible, however, as the verbal graphing above illustrates, too simplistic. But the slippery nature of this grouping is part of the point, and connects to other concerns within the works of each individual artist and their association as a whole.
I.E. is nothing if not mischievous. A sense of sheer mischief pervades most of the group’s work, and their very being. The artists have openly alluded to the “marketability” of being a group instead of mere individuals, which could be seen as the first of many tricks being pulled (turned?) in a given show. The style and concept of the trick, the game, the joke and the con are regularly employed, most notably by Ross Moreno who performs deliberately awkward magic tricks combined with equally awkward comedy. Magdalen Wong’s “vapor”, a small jelly heart, slowly disappeared during the span of the “Illusion” show (a trick in slow-motion). Static visual puns can be found in Justin Cooper’s “Fin”, in which a real shark fin bought in Hong Kong points up toward a tiny JAWS logo, and in Benjamin Bellas piece plugging a Hong Kong light into a Hong Kong outlet… but with more than a dozen power converters in between. This unnecessary “excess” is matched by Bellas’ characteristically long title, which begins “There are nights” and goes on theatrically, almost uncomfortably, for several lines. His titles are almost poems, and walk the line between moving and over-the-top, which seems again to be a conscious strategy, common to many of the artists, to test humor through awkwardness, discomfort, or the boldly inappropriate.
Noelle Mason presents a video (“Redman”) which is confrontational both in its text, chanted by the artist (a rather offensive but childlike song about Native Americans) and the shocking slaps from an opponent that redden Mason’s face and cause a nosebleed. Her crashed chandelier shows a more abstract violence, but is lightly absurd in its destroyed beauty; her X-Ray of an ivory Buddha about to be smuggled back to the States within her own body is blasphemous and cartoonish at once. The sped up visuals and beyond-chipmunk voice of Justin Cooper’s video “Studio Visit” make it goofy, but gradually grating, and finally nauseating.
Besides humor in the more hysteric, confrontational mode, there is also the softer humor of dissipation, crummy structures and systems, loss and ruin. Clinton King’s “Rug Burns” is a small sculpture made from wrapping paper tubes, and fluorescent lights, and is about to fall down at any minute—his cactus wrapped in Silly String (“Why do they call if sobering up when you’re coming down?”) similarly droops like the proverbial hangdog. Justin Cooper presents a tiny TV screen that plays a nature documentary on the floor—epic dreams and adventure fantasy reduced to pop-up ad-size. Ross Moreno’s “Cuddly Pig” head barks out electronic noises from the floor and has the same deflated look as King’s cactus.
Humor, in all its varieties, seems to be an essential circle in the I.E. diagram. And somewhere in the middle of all the crosshatching, there is still that space that creates the group. Fractured in style, but inching toward a common horizon of sculpture: the curated show that is “the new sculpture object”. Individual pieces that do have relevance in the whole. Alone but together. Pulling the good trick, for the sake of what is revealed in the process.

(still from a video by Beatrix Pang)

TAKE SOME REST: New Videos from the Edge of Hong Kong
Curated by Ashley Wong and Samantha Culp for VIDEOTAGE
Presented at the Asian Art Biennale 2007, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan

Artists: Chi Jang Yin, Kwan Sheung-Chi, Warren Leung Chi-Wo, Beatrix Pang, Eric Siu, Wong Wai-Nap, Doris Wong Wai-Yin & Project Big Bang (Amy Cheung, Bo Zheng, Erkka Nissinen, Joseph Chan, Kwan Ng, Mark Fell)

Videotage started more than 20 years ago as a collective and platform for independent, challenging video works from Hong Kong. Decades later, many have said that “Hong Kong has no more video art.” But perhaps this is not the whole truth. The program “Take Some Rest,” curated by Ashley Wong and Samantha Culp for Videotage, aims to explore the current state of video and works in the city and its complex borders. Who are the new pioneers, and how might they continue to surprise, especially in an age where video itself has become “old media”? With 2007 marking the 10th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover from Britain to Hong Kong, how are artists and cultural agitators playing with real and symbolic time, and blurring the lines between traditional genres and identities? In an ever-changing city(-state) born of an unprecedented historical situation, how are themes of transformation, loss, and marginality reflected? Perhaps Hong Kong video art has not disappeared—it’s just been in hibernation. In TAKE SOME REST, current Hong Kong video art comes out to play… even in the form of a waking dream, where slumber can be seen as a state of subversion.

Title: “Harmonious Works are Out of Site″
Publication: South China Morning Post
Date: Oct 2007
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In her video installation Out of Place: Hong Kong Version, Beijing Version, and Taipei Version, local artist Leung Mee-ping follows three vagabonds in these cities to investigate personal loneliness against the backdrop of globalisation. The piece, comprising three eight-minute videos to be projected onto a wall, fits the theme of HarmoNow 3D, an exhibition at Artist Commune and the Hong Kong Central Library.
The group show, featuring 39 local artists, focuses on the expansive nature of contemporary “three-dimensional” art in Hong Kong and embraces a wide range of 3D works. It will also include seminars and a workshop in the coming weeks.

HarmoNow 3D is the first of six visual arts thematic exhibitions initiated by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council and Leisure and Cultural Services Department in public venues around the city, and portions of the show will move to Central Plaza next month.
HarmoNow 3D explores the idea of harmony – among diverse media, between art and the city, and between art and commerce, says
co-curator and Artist Commune director Eric Leung Shiu-kee.

The English title doesn’t quite convey the same meaning as the Chinese, he says. The Cantonese title Dong Doi Gung Yung has a definite political subtext, and implications of a “harmonious and integrated” society, a subject Leung broaches in her installation.

But is video truly “three-dimensional”? Leung says it’s all about “how you use the space. There is invisible space and visible space, so the installation here involves invisible space”. The experience of time and simultaneity of all three videos is crucial, she says. She doesn’t worry too much about verbal definitions. “When I make a work, I never think about the medium; I think about the content and how to present it in the most interesting way… afterwards people put labels on it.”

HarmoNow 3D investigates harmony through the diversity of sculptural styles and the works’ content. The crafts of ceramics and wood-carving are considered out of fashion in much of the mainstream art world today, but both are included in the show alongside the more popular contemporary sculptural forms of fabricated design, found-object assemblage, installation and video.

The works of some artists appear to be concerned with form in itself, from those of Rosanna Li Wei-han – known for her Botero-chubby ceramic people – to the more abstract pieces of Man Fung-yee such as pillow-like shapes in wire, clay and metal.

Others are better known for pushing conceptual boundaries, with material merely the vehicle. Fo Tan artist Wong Tin-yan uses scrap wood to make his unwieldy animals, while Stella Tang Ying-chi’s woven fabrics are often used as props, costumes and environments instead of simply textile objects.

The Central Library space will hold more than 60 works, but it can’t host large installations such as site-specific pieces by Kacey Wong Kwok-choi and Jaffa Lam Laam. These will go on show at Artist Commune’s Cattle Depot site. “There is a limitation in space and a limitation in lighting, so all the major installations will be at Artist Commune,” says Leung.

Wong, for example, will present a piece constructed of wood taken from garbage, forming a chair viewers can sit on, only possible in a less restricted space.

Given curator Eric Leung Shiu-kee is also responsible for the Prison Art Museum project at Victoria Prison last April, it’s clear that a harmonious use of old and new 3D space within the city is a prime concern. In a set of seminars on November 4, artists, designers and arts administrators will address topics of “harmonising” art with the city, with culture and with business. Sculptor and Chinese University Professor Kurt Chan Yuk-keung will discuss opportunities for public art and within the realm of urban development, and relate his own experiences in such projects. “You have to deal with bureaucrats at the same time as the business sector – sort of serving as a mediator between parties,” Chan says.

Curator Leung hopes HarmoNow 3D audiences will get a “conclusive picture of 3D and installation art in Hong Kong”. But perhaps any look at the unruly genre of three-dimensional work is more a snapshot of an ever-changing shape. Sculpture, in Hong Kong and elsewhere, is still mutating.

HarmoNow 3D, Artist Commune, Unit 12, Cattle Depot Artist Village, Tue-Sun, 12pm to 8pm; Hong Kong Central Library, daily, 10am-8pm, Nov 6, 10am-4pm

Title: “Steps into Space″
Publication: South China Morning Post
Date: Aug 2007
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A group of artists are creating fresh perspectives on the significance of place, and what makes a local. Samantha Culp visits their turf

Art, like real estate, is often concerned with location. The provenance of an ancient vase, the nationality of an artist and the site of an exhibition all have a bearing on a given work – or at least our perception of it. But some art takes location itself as a subject, and questions the nature of here, there and the strange territories in between. For the exhibition Locale: British Artists in Residence, opening this Saturday at 1a Space in Cattle Depot Artist Village, six visiting artists aim to explore these themes in new ways.

Emma Rushton and Derek Tyman, a couple from Manchester known for their collaborative partnership, have often worked with space and place, and helped to orchestrate this special programme.

Last spring, they were 1a Space’s first resident artists when they created Turf: Garden in To Kwa Wan, a site-specific project for which they invited locals from the neighbourhood around Cattle Depot to contribute plants to a collaborative sculpture.

After some positive responses, 1a Space wanted Rushton and Tyman to return, but they wanted to bring along another four artists from their extended network in Britain.

Rushton says the turf project was about ‘addressing the local community’, whereas Locale deals with the idea of the local in a different way. ‘The artists draw on their own environment, and the way they understand the local, which is today very global,’ she says.

This local/global overlap appears explicitly in much of the work, such as Melanie Jackson’s Root Entry. Jackson, whose multi-channel video Made in China screened at Videotage in 2005, took an image of a woman planting a seed from the UN website, and wanted to see how it would ‘grow’ if she invited others to animate her drawings for a commission of GBP200 (HK$3,200).

Companies from around the world quickly responded, and the piece is composed of their results.

‘I was interested in the idea of outsourcing, and what happens if an artist outsources an idea,’ says Jackson. ‘So many of the artifacts and products we live with are made in places we’ve never been to.’

Jackson is also commissioning local printers to create a poster for every place where the piece is shown, to continue this international growth of her concept in non-virtual space.

Artist and gallery director Kwong Lee also deals with this paradox of foreign/domestic with his piece Mr Francis, Mrs Lee and Me, a two-channel video featuring a British man who has lived in Hong Kong for 18 years, and a Hong Kong woman who has lived in the Britain for 30.

Hong Kong-born Lee, who moved to Britain as a child, wanted to examine ‘people who as adults have made their lives away from their places of birth’.

Questions of international identity and commerce are muted in the works of Becky Shaw and Paul Rooney, who approach space and place through the lens of everyday life and detached fantasy.

Shaw’s Killing Time uses text and slides to examine the belongings of a woman who has recently died, while Rooney’s Dust (Room 302) is a sound/image piece centred on a hotel room in Liverpool. His works ‘use specific places or localities as their starting points’, from a field in West Yorkshire to an abandoned circus school in Cuba.

Although they take the view- point of the people who use the spaces every day (hotel maids, for example, in Dust), his pieces are also ‘historical, poetic or imaginative encounters with place’.

Ironically, most of the works are being altered in some way to fit their new surroundings. However, Rushton and Tyman are creating a site-specific piece: a set of entry gates, inspired by the tacky facades now seen on many old Manchester council houses. Constructed of local materials such as white plastic pipes and fittings, but with aspirations toward grandeur, the gates will call attention to their own temporary artificiality. They’ll also be plastered with posters of recent exhibits of Chinese art across Britain, to reference the cross-flow of culture and commerce today and, more indirectly, in the past.

Locale opens after a handover-related show, but the artists don’t feel any special resonance with the event. As Cornelia Erdmann, director of 1a Space, says: ‘My interpretation is that it gives a sign that this is normal now – back to normal life. British and Chinese artists work next to one other, and there’s no statement.’

The participants of Locale hope to bring Hong Kong artists to a reciprocal show in Manchester next year. Despite difficulties with funding, all agree on the value of such residencies and exchanges. Erdmann says Hong Kong should have more residency opportunities, and that ‘art made for the site, presented in relation to or discussion with the space’ could be exciting.

Locale – British Artists in Residence, 1a Space, Cattle Depot Artist Village, Aug 11-Sept 2, Tue-Sun, 2pm-8pm (closed Mon and public holidays)

If art biennials were rock stars, Venice would be Mick Jagger, and Documenta would be Leonard Cohen. Strictly speaking, Documenta is a quinquennial—occurring once every five years—but it is indeed the somber tweed-jacketed poet of the European summer art circus,
considering questions like “What is bare life?” instead of simply “Which way to the Prosecco bar?”

This year’s edition (Documenta 12, for those keeping track) was characteristically ambitious, with overarching leitmotifs such as the aforementioned “Bare Life,” four massive exhibition venues, an avant-garde Spanish restaurant as outpost (Ferran Adria’s El Bulli), and a
somewhat confusing magazine project. But the exhibition itself was a truly exciting mix of old and new, the familiar and obscure.
In the Museum Fredericianum, Graciela Carnevale’s 1960s archives of Argentinian political art confrontations shared space with Taiwanese artist Tseng Yu-Chin’s video Who’s Listening? which documented two hours of a mother trying to kiss her little boy (to his shrieking delight and/or discomfort). Lush and sometimes disturbing images from Nigeria-based photographer George Osodi flickered by just beyond large abstract geometric paintings done by Dierk Schmidt about Germany’s colonial legacy in Africa. Just upstairs from dancers reinterpreting an old Trisha Brown piece (atop a spiderweb of ropes, pictured) was Canadian artist Luis Jacob’s dense installation of video, sculpture, collages, and booklets inspired by the choreography of Françoise Sullivan (the video features people in furry helmets dancing in the snow).

By far the most buzzed-about piece was Ai Wei-Wei’s Fairytale, which sees the renowned Chinese artist bringing 1001 Chinese people to Kassel, Germany for the duration of Documenta. Though they will arrive in shifts over three months, they will doubtless change the fabric of Documenta’s tiny, “fairytale” host town (it was home to the Brothers Grimm) even more than the art festival normally does.

Many no doubt criticized the show for its insanely eclectic scope and deliberately challenging structure. But astounding threads connected the disparate works in unexpected ways, and, like Trisha Brown’s dancers, kept on tugging at the greater web of art and life.

Title: “Splashes of America″
Publication: South China Morning Post
Date: May 2007
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The two major exhibitions on American art running in Shanghai are more than a diplomatic drive to promote the country’s culture on the mainland.

One digs deep into its psyche and asks questions about its identity, politics and culture.

Running until the end of June, Art in America: Now is an offshoot of the mammoth project Art in America: 300 Years of Innovation, which was organised by New York’s Guggenheim museum.

A decade in the making, the largest survey of American art in China opened at Beijing’s National Art Museum in February, and has now moved to Shanghai in a slightly altered form at two venues.

The main exhibition opened last week at the Shanghai Museum, and covers the colonial era through to the present, with an emphasis on the giants of American art such as John Singer Sargent, Georgia O’Keefe, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons.

But a few of the most contemporary pieces, along with 30 new works, were selected for a second show at the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art.

The Guggenheim’s senior curator, Susan Davidson, ran the Art in America project, but when the contemporary section expanded in Shanghai, curatorial assistant Helen Hsu researched the new works, especially those by emerging talent such as Hong Kong-born activist-artist Paul Chan.

As an Asian-American and a woman, Hsu says she felt it was important to show the diversity of voices and visions within American art today, to further frustrate the ‘official narrative’ of American history.

Some works reference recent events, such as Hong Kong-born Chan’s Baghdad in No Particular Order, a video of the daily life of average Iraqi people before the US invasion.

Others adopt materials from the social and political upheaval of the 1960s and 70s. Kelley Walker’s Black Star Press; Black Star, Star Press Star is a diptych of two stock vintage photographs of a white police officer and black civilian, now painted over in dark brown squiggles. Cady Noland distresses a silk-screened photo of Patricia Hearst (SLA #4).

Some works reach back further in American history, such as Kara Walker’s Insurrection! (Our Tools Were Rudimentary, Yet We Pressed On), which places colour projections over her trademark stark silhouettes of antebellum racial stereotypes and bodily horror. Others are more abstractly concerned with violence, consumption and the surreal media presence in American culture.

In the photography section especially, the legacy of Diane Arbus can be felt in photos such as Untitled (Baltimore, MD) by Anthony Lepore, or Mattie with a Bourbon Red Turkey by Laura McPhee that capture odd subjects in real life, or Charlie White’s The Americans, US Gymnastics Team, an artificial restaging of an American gymnast’s injury in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics that emphasises the plasticity and ominous undercurrents of the American mainstream. As Hsu says: ‘I feel that a lot of American artists are like, ‘American culture is gross’.’ Grotesque, violent, imperialist, naive – these adjectives could describe the way much of the world views the US. It’s fitting then that Art in America: Now engages these criticisms, internally, and also challenges knee-jerk anti-Americanism by taking a more complex look in the mirror.

Certain pieces, such as Kehinde Wiley’s Defend and Develop the Island Together, open up possibilities for a more global American viewpoint. Produced during time Wiley spent in Beijing, it shows two young African-American men in the poses of retro mainland propaganda posters. In a turn on the famous John Donne phrase, it seems to imply that no country is an island, or can afford to be any longer.

Hsu says she wanted the show to be a roller coaster, because it seems to parallel the American experience at present. ‘That’s what it’s about right now, because we’re in troubled times,’ she says.

Art in America: 300 Years of Innovation, Shanghai Museum; Art in America: Now, Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art. Ends Jun 30