Sunday Morning

Snowing lightly in Beijing as the bombs pound away over the city.
It's the last day of Chinese New Years and as the gracious city government has recently lifted restrictions on fireworks usage, the place is ablaze like I imagine Baghdad might be at this very same moment.

I, slightly hung over from a casual baijiu soaked reunion with my old artist buddies Zhang Dali and Liu Xinhua, now attempt to piece pictures together for all to see of my studio visits yesterday. The photos above not in the order that they should be - the blog has limited design capacity.

These are photos of folks that will be in the show, as of yesterday (but maybe not forever) entitled pastforward, nodding to the many ways in which these artists revision history, both communal and personal.

I also include some documents of my rain soaked wait for a late date in which no exhibitions were going on in Beijing's East Art District - save another dark glimpse at Shi Jinsong's beautiful Harley Davidson inspired, stainless steel peasant mobiles, outfitted with all the accoutrements of a luxurious life and some fine dragon engravings too.
and then these big tits on the lawn outside of CAAW
and yet another new Courtyard gallery annex under construction, making the Courtyard by far the gallery in Beijing with the most, mostly defunct, gallery spaces

anyway more incoming bombs outside the window


Zhang Dali - besides casting unsuspecting migrant workers into fiberglass figures in effort to describe, ironically enough, the abuse of China's underprivileged masses, he does these clever before and after studies of communist propaganda images - comparing originals to their manipulated published versions. It's a fascinating study of deliberated media manipulation that is ever so relevant in the age of digital disinformation.

Sheng Qi - the guy who chopped off his left pinky finger in a fit of madness inspired by the betrayal of both a nation state he was nurtured to love (Tiananmen incident) and also a personal love does these big sloppy expressive paintings commemorating June 4th.

Ren Hong- takes images of collective consciousness and filters them through kaleidoscopic patterns made up of various charged forms- butterflies, arrows, birds, urns, etc. These tediously made oil paintings are made to look like soft, effortless day dreams.

Zhang Nian and Liu Xinhua/ Wang Lang's work unfortunately were not able to be photographed because my borrowed and easily blurred camera ran out of batteries.

Thank you anyway very much Rania for the camera the stay and everything else

And after all this bombing the year of the pig is off in earnest