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A bunch of lonesome and very quarrelsome heroes were smoking out along the open road; the night was very dark and thick between them, each man beneath his ordinary load. "I'd like to tell my story," said one of them so young and bold, "I'd like to tell my story, before I turn into gold."
Han Lei was one of the first creative types I met in China. I went to his Alienation opening in Ritan Park, Beijing back in 1994. Alienation was a series of black and white, 35mm photographs taken in small cities throughout China but mostly Zhengzhou and Kaifang where Han Lei originally comes from. It was a badly hung, badly lit exhibition held one rainy fall evening in Ritan's classicly dilapidated pavilion. Despite the lack of exhibition craftsmanship the work was undeniably strong, tight, focused and intensly moody. Hong Lei was at the opening, Wu Xiaojun too, Wang Jin maybe... but I don't remember much and only now, much later, does anyone stretch their memories back and land on that gloomy night as our first meeting.
At the time I was mesmerized by the scene and its impenetrable characters, mulling about like stealth warriors in a post apocalyptic void. I was tagging along with Cao Weijun, a new friend in a land shaking off the ideological constraints of Socialism's stark legacies. I didn't speak enough to Chinese to follow what was happening and Cao Weijun would intermittently drop me a clue in his broken, baritone English. Afterwards we strolled for what seemed like miles to a hole in the wall restaurant (that's all there seemed to be at the time - one hole in the wall restaurant after another- with plastic stools , florescent lighting and a roll of pink toilet paper on the table that doubled as napkins- ahhh the good ole days)
'Put out your cigarette, my love, you've been alone too long; and some of us are very hungry now to hear what it is you've done that was so wrong"
The bunch of hunched over, long haired cigarette smoking heroes cracked jokes between art talk, puffs on their cigarettes and the occasional mouthful of home style cooking. It was a distant memory but alas the birth of a friendship with Han Lei, who slightly older and mature seemed to me a philosopher cum photographer hero scraping out the existential fodder of China's hinterlands.
He's kind of the same now with a different set of accessories- as are the rest of that bunch to more or lesser degrees of financial success. But Han Lei still lives on the border, in the distance, in somewhereelse-ville, still tortured by the primal questions of the human condition.
Anyway I never made it to the Three Shadows opening in Beijing, and I'm not sure Han Lei did either. I was bogged down with the echoes of my bad visa judgment, Han Lei was probably deterred by the rain.
The Three Shadows opening exhibition revisits "NEW PHOTO" a short lived, hand xeroxed magazine produced by Rong Rong and Liu Zheng from 1996-1998. It profiled the two artist works as well as that of their friends. During those years photography in China emerged with unprecedented force knocking the doors down on painting's hitherto domination of the scene. There was a huge outpouring of performative photography and other conceptual modes that became source material for a zillion exhibition proposals to NY institutions that I made during that time with no success. It 's all about timing Yes heard that one before.
Photography still remains in China, as it does elsewhere in the world, one of the dominant forms of art making.
SO once again I am curating my own photography exhibition that will go back to the US with me when I finally do. Han Lei will be in it as will a lot of the usual suspects.
FIGURE/LANDSCAPE/FIGURE
Artists:
Zhang Dali, Han Lei, Rong Rong and Inri, Bai Yiluo, Sheng Qi, Wang Lang/Liu Xinhua, Li Wei, Sun Hongbin
Curated by Mathieu Borysevicz
Rapid social transformations coupled with changes in the cultural, economic and physical environment of today’s China have provided artists with a plethora of surrealist and dramatic inspiration to draw upon. Navigating the intersections of landscape and figurative photography, these artists represent the vanguard of China’s rising art scene. The works in this show range from documentations of dying, traditional folklore to urban interventions to political statements, digital montages and beyond. In each instance, new formulas for the age-old photographic traditions of figure and landscape are uncovered.
Since the advent of photography, portraiture and figurative motifs dominated the practice. In this exhibition we not only see many artists extending this practice, but freely combining it with the equally prevalent tradition of landscape photography. In many instances the increasing urbanization of China has enveloped the landscape and subsequently become a stage for artists to act out their own renditions of the surrounding urban metamorphoses. Figurative photography, with the essence of the human form at its heart, has traditionally been at the service of the state in the People’s Republic. Consequently the legacy of propaganda and identity photography has become a subject in itself for many of these artists. Adversely, earlier folklore and superstition, on the verge of obsolescence, is also the site of investigation for artists.
above "A Bunch Of Lonesome Heroes" Leonard Cohen
Three Unities is a collection of 3 different solo shows in one space, the DDM Warehouse in Shanghai. Since there was nothing in common between the three artist's work I decided to overstep any curatorial acrobatics and make three separate solos- good for the artist, and for the curator. Zhang Dali shows his hot, brand new, never shown before series of bronze sculptures. "Man and Beast". The works will also be at the Shanghai Contemporary art fair in September for all those that will attend.
Zhang Dali “Man and Beast”
Confucius comes upon a crying woman and asks as to why she is crying. The woman responds that a tiger has eaten her son and husband. Confucius responds “why do you live in the wild, why don’t you go live in the city?” She balks at the idea “ The city, with all its political oppression is far more ferocious”
Confucius’ story “Tyranny is more ferocious than a beast” underlines Zhang Dali’s new series of bronze sculptures, “Man and Beast”. These new works show the artist departing from his signature, stark realist mode of working and moving towards the elusive realm of imagination, myth and fantasy. Juxtaposing life-size animals with human figures, these surrealist unions are rife with symbolic implications of a brutish violence that pervades our society and politics. In China animals traditionally symbolize power and ferocity. Some of Zhang’s animals are imaginary or altered in scale, some are poised to attack, while others are plainly seated upon the human figures. The compromising arrangements allude to the common man’s eternal struggle with power and the hostile structures he has wrapped himself in. Zhang Dali is the bad-boy artist whose ubiquitous and mysterious graffiti took Beijing by force in the mid-1990’s. He has since gone on to achieve international fame. Zhang Dali has recently been profiled in both ART Forum and Art in America for his participation in The Gwanju Biennial. His “Chinese Offspring” sculptures have also been recently acquired by famous British collector, Charles Saatchi
So all along I had it, not only in my head, but in the calender that my visa was going to expire on the 1st of July 2007, 90 days from my initial entry - I had it all planned out carefully - I have a multi entry visa, 90 days at a time -2x- I'd go back to NY in the interim and not have to deal with that godforsaken out post at the western shore of 42nd street again. Of course I paid a little more for this extra service. It was all going smoothly as I led out the last few month of my life BUT BUT BUT fulkingA I mis counted. damn by one whole month. maybe it was the M-month thing, y'know confusing May with March . Maybe I counted these 90 days way too early, before morning meditation, maybe it was too late at night after a few too many drinks, maybe Im just no good at math anymore- I blame it all on digital culture and algorithms that take care of these calculations these days.Either way -It was a whole day of run around to 4 different policing type station strategically located at opposite ends of town, a reams of forms/stamps/signatures/duplicates, a 5000RMB fine (not to mention the air ticket penalties -if they even let me switch the dates at all, a new visa fee, and all that damned taxi fare) and a headache that will still continue the next working day later. Im fucked the next two weeks of careful planning ruined. Not to mention I haven't have a real income for the past half year and this just about depletes my funds. Anyway no need to feel sorry for my sorry selfWe're having a fundraiser to celebrate stupid mistakes that cost a lot of money !and to cut my hair properly.Please send all checks and money orders to: Mathieu Borysevicz PO BOX 220022Brooklyn NY 11222Figured I'll be in the US when you all motivate on this
Zhou Xiao Hu, Famous for his funny claymation series based on current affairs, has a new solo show at Bizart that furthers his play upon the media spectacle. "Renown" is a life-size installation that takes the press out of the press conference and pokes a pointer at the posturing of artists as modern celebrity.
Upon entering you see the artist surrounded by a diligent press core. Clad in the full gear of Sony Betacams, baseball caps, backpacks, these microphone toting western journalists all stand captivated by Zhou xiaohu's delivery. But Zhou Xiaohu is a video projection (my photos do no justice to the installation - sorry ZXH) Each one of these cameraman and journalists are also surprisingly also fake. The detail of the figures, from their clothes to their eyebrows are amazing - beating the pants off of Duane Hanson and Madame Toussaud hands down (apparently fabricated in Xian by some museum prop specialists) The simulacrum reinforces the modern condition of mediated reality.
Then your cell phone rings (or is supposed to- technical difficulties abound on the cell phone dept.) The cell phone is Zhou Xiao Hu reciting the same meandering self promo rhetoric about the exhibition, where it aims to go, what it aims to do... basic politician claptrap. The biz-art presser reads: "The artwork, presented in the form of a social diffusion, will lie idle. The artist will attempt to measure the uncertain relationship between society's reactions and art, seeking for the possibilities residing in the crevice between social and artistic events." I'm not I entirely grasp all of that but neither do ever entirely grasp anything... especially deconstructivist toned art banter.
There was some pizza and Fanta in the back of the room but it didn't supplement the post opening meal where Zhou and his mostly Changzhou artbuddies rubbed elbows with the Shanghai usuals: the haoren Liu jianhua, Wang Xingwei, Zhang Ding, and Xu Zhen (Changzhou a city 1.5 hours away from Shanghai has quite the burgeoning art scene. According to the boys at the table there's nothing else to do there except make contemporary art- Hong Lei is one of the more famous artists that still resides in Changzhou)
anyway
It's all part of the spectacle
So I'm off again. Cut down from my own fruitless blog here in the hinterland. But now I see the pattern. I used the P word in my last entry and then woosh wiped clean off tthe main/motherland web. Them buggers took me off again. It's a language game as is life in general. Lot's of miscommunication and Sensorship.
Speaking of which-
I finally go to see my friend Zhang Ding at his faraway apartment somewhere near the airport (Q.why do all these artists live in faraway places by airports? A. because other artists do. It's a follow the leader thing here- apparently Xu Zhen and Yang Zhenzhong led the march to this middle of nowhere artist enclave, that might as well be somewhere in Ft Lauderdale- recently Megan Connolly inquired about the migratory patterns of these Chinese artists and should write a thesis about the whole thing soon) Zhnag Ding lives here with two sweet cats and his super sweet girlfriend Alexia Dehaene who works very hard at BizArt, one of China's only not for profit art spaces. Late last year Zhang Ding spent 15 days in jail (the webmongers will love this for sure) for showing his "My Photos" series in which he collected a zillion very charming, sometimes very strange home made porno photos from the web. The he then pretended that the photos were taken by one fictional Araki-like photographer and presented a transcript of the interview along with the photos. Either way the authorities didn't find it amusing or morally healthy and put poor Zhang Ding in jail for 15 days. Artist, He An spent 10 days there for a piece that was apparently an illustrated instruction on how to rape a woman (sounds like he deserved it).
Zhang Ding says he was treated very well while incarcerated.
Very well then now put my blog up mofo!
NONO at the Long March- A curatorless, themeless show, that while not pretending to be anything ends up being a pretentious survey of curious new work by China's latest greatest: Yang Zhenzhong (Venice darling-only one of two Chinese artists in the Biennial's selection exhibition curated by MoMA retiree, senior art dude, Robert Storr) had this very simple video where he filmed phallic edifices that dot the skyline of Shanghai on a see-sawing tripod so it looks like them architectural marvels are poking the abyss of the sky- in the background we hear orgasmic sex sounds-pounding, grunting, whining, very funny … almost titillating.Xu Zhen- Mr Art Forum, prized prankster of the Shanghai scene makes a very PHAT, expensive, large, tongue-in-cheek nod to the legacy of Damien Hirst with a dinosaur in a fancy formaldehyde filled fish tank. The muther must be 5 meters long, 3m high with a split in the middle so one can walk through the cross section of the dinosaur’s guts (convincingly made of insulation, plastic bags and a bunch of unidentifiable over the counter crap). In the end the piece is one big, expensive, wasteful one-liner, But that’s the intention anyway. Har har ho hum
Shi Qing made one of the more mature of pieces I’ve seen of him yet with a theatrical, red carpeted room containing a large video projection of a traffic cop on a stage waving a big red flag. Inside the room are articles of the production: traffic cones and the like. Somehow the whole piece is elegantly tied together and hard to leave. Shi Qing was always trying to say too much in his work – here less is definitely more. Wangwei makes a four room installation that resembles a zoo where large nocturnal reptiles from around the world appear to have escaped in this dark-room like labyrinth.
Liu Wei muses heavily on those funny, very po-mo, exercise machines that give endless amusement and physical benefit to old folks in parks around China. I love these brightly colored machines. Here he cages them and spreads cookies and banana peels on the floor. Yet another prime example of reality being much more interesting than art. How does one –in an art context -mystify that which is already mystified in reality? He An displays a bunch of Internet picture stuff, apparently a search for a lover like thing– If I see another female infatuated Internet piece I’ll poop.
Kan Xuan (also appearing at The Venice Biennial - in Hou Hanru's China Pavilion) makes some new video work- one that sucks so bad I’m not going to mention it - The other, both stylistically and thematically completely different, takes up a 4m high back wall of the gallery and shows a famous brand hot sauce icon graphically intercut with African nature films and a very funny soundtrack. Very fun but that’s about it. NONO still on view while the rest of you art lovers migrate around Europe.
The rain stopped, the temperature dropped and then rose again. It's hot as hell now and I think I may be catching a cold but can't be for sure.Here are some images of the stores I describe in the post before last. Stores that carry direct renditions of Yue Minjun, Liu Ye, Zhang Xiaogang, Zheng Fengjie, etc. The Yue Minjun painting of that ubiquitous smiley face wearing a hat goes for 300RMB~39USD. The large one, being painted for a Taiwanese client, will go for 1800~ 210bucks. I must say the lad is doing a fine job. The painters are recent college graduates from no name art schools in faraway places, like Hunan, Xinjiang and the like. They paint what they like to- one is painting the work of Han Yajuan, a recent graduate of a very well named art school - The Central Academy in Beijing. She just had a solo show a few months ago... now they've got the catalog and are making copies.Pauline Yao recently curated a show about the culture of fakes at Universal Studios in Beijing. The best piece in the show was a work by an anonymous, presumably Western artist. It was a Karoke lounge where Matthew Barney videos were tailored as sing along Karaoke clips. I crooned to The Who's, "Teenage Wasteland" aka "Barbara O'Reilly" as Matthew Barney rode around on a horse in his avant garde undies beneath Roger Daltry's lyrics.Yes in this age of finite intellectual resources we must recycle... we cannot, however, pretend to fake each other out too long.Now it's raining again
I met Liu Jianhua about 3 years ago when I was visiting Beijing from NYC. Feng Boyi had just curated a mammoth show at the 798 space that will soon become Ullens foundation.
See below for the hitherto unpublished review I wrote on the exhibition. Zhuang Hui was in the show as was about 30 other Chinese and international artists including Liu Jianhua. At the opening night or maybe it was the day after, a bunch of us including Zhuang Hui, Shi Jinsong (both with their shirts off and rubbing their sweaty bellies- always appetizing) and Bai Yiluo (who with jinsong are now making an exhibition all about trees- very nice trees), plus Zhuang Hui's ever expanding posse of Lanzhou arrivals and some asshole / B-rate artist who got stupidly drunk and decided to take out his unearthed discontent on the guy sitting next to him, which happened to be me, got together for dinner. That night Liu Jianhua, through much kicking and screaming escorted the silly, sweaty fool away. I didn't instigate the affair but by being a laowai - foreigner I was an easy target and he needed a target. Anyway Liu Jianhua reared his cool, calm head on more than one of these types of occasions since I've known him and now that I'm living in his town he's becoming a close friend. He's one of the nicest guys you can meet (nice like he brings his wife and kid along to art events and dinners-which is quite unusual in this testosterone filled, individualistic art world) and he makes some interesting work as well. Liu Jianhua works primarily in ceramics. He's known for the qipao girls which are easy targets for flaming feminists but he doesn't mean it like that. LJH is much older than he looks and has seen a lot of state administered sexual repression throughout his growing up and these sexy things served up on platters are an expression of this. He's also making installation works - one of which was shown at the last Shanghai Biennial. The piece exhibited there was comprised of 10,000 USD worth of plastic little gadgets and toys from the manufacturing town of Yiwu that spilled out of a container truck- A testimony to both the monster production arms of the Chang Jiang River Delta and the world's insatiable appetite for disposable little plastic things.
He's also casting household appliances in white ceramic, altering their size and then installing them in different configurations. He recently came back from Arario Gallery in Seoul (a very powerful Korean gallery with 3 venues in Beijing's Jiu Chang) where he showed ceramic boxing gloves with the names of warring countries names engraved on it among other things.
We visited him at his studio recently and he gave us a signed little flower piece.
Thank you LJH
“Convergence” 798 Dayaolu Workshop/Platform/European Contemporary China
Beijing, China
More is more in China today. There’s more money, traffic, choices and more exhibitions with more artists. In the blitz of satellite shows shadowing the notoriously avoidable Beijing Biennial “Convergence” stands out as the most quantitatively ambitious. Feng Boyi, the chief of three curators that pulled together this international, forty-person show calls the current situation in China “a beautiful chaos”. “Convergence” in every shape and form addresses, as well as mimics, this chaos.
Spanning three sites on the eastern outskirts of Beijing this exhibition brings together artists from different countries, generations and practices to forge a wider sense of community through their shared concerns about modernization. At the same time, the curator speculates, this widened sense of community is inevitably affecting a narrower sense of cultural difference. In “Convergence” the idea is not so much a homogenization of cultures but a juncture between artists of different backgrounds, which in itself is noteworthy for China. Only a few years ago it was not only difficult for Chinese artists to exhibit in China but unheard of for foreign artists to work and show in China. Times have changed. Now Beijing plays host to artists from all over the world who seek excitement and cheap studio space. While “Convergence” provides a meeting ground for some of these artists, the scope of the exhibition is so large that curatorial coherency is lost to diversity. Wim Delvoye for instance, who is now farming pigs for his famous tattoo series on the outskirts of Beijing, shows some of his livestock next to Sze Tsung Leong’s epic images of construction sites, a pairing which reflects, albeit inadvertently, China’s beautiful chaos.
The show’s main exhibition space, 798 Dayaolu Workshop, in itself an astounding edifice, is a perfect vessel for this or any other chaos. Spanning an unimpeded 4700m2, the defunct factory space was incidentally the product of Sino/German/Russian cooperation during the height of Socialism. Responding to the specificity of this manufacturing site Heike Baranowsky’s two channel video piece “Death Breath/Tomb Womb/Evil Live” shows close up views of hands toiling endlessly with a mechanical device. Zhuang Hui’s “Cannulation Building” a reconstructed life-size model of his dormitory hallway where he spent years as a factory worker sentimentalizes a time less complicated. The passageway is dimly lit, and all the Spartan props are rendered in baked clay. It is a moment frozen in time. Outside a neon sign reads “Looking at all the cruel things of the past now seem so gentle.” Sitting opposite this structure is “Tunnel” a kinetic installation by Xu Zhongmin that demonstrates the mindless conformity and mechanized condition of modern man. Three diagonally intersecting metal tubes repeatedly convey lines of walking figures from nowhere to nowhere and back again, creating an entrancing web of no escape.
Disenchantment with modernization as it takes form in urban expansion is reiterated in several artists’ works. In Liu Jianhua’s photographs of Shanghai’s Pudong economic zone these one-liner works show the city’s glossy skyline, all built within the last 10 years, behind stacks of poker chips. “Netropolis, The Invisible City”, a video projection by German artist, Michael Najjar, more poetically conveys the process of urbanization by repeatedly dissolving wide views of different cityscapes onto one another without ever resolving to one single image, while Xing Danwen’s Urban Fiction Series animates the drama of social desire in China by situating the artist herself, playing various roles, in maquettes used for real estate promotion.
While different thematic threads intertwine in this vast exhibition the idea of international convergence is humorously deconstructed in Ai Weiwei’s “Change”. Here the artist renders the global market defunct by exchanging 100US dollars into foreign currencies and back again until there is nothing left to exchange. But it is the video “The Butterfly Effect” by Waseem Khan in which a sleeping figure is unaffected by a swarm of surrounding butterflies that brings us back to the illusory theory of a beautiful chaos that globalization has fostered in China and beyond.
