BizArt's New New Year's eve- Getting older and wiser with age

No matter what Bauldrillard had to say on the subject- representation will never catch up to that being represented. Now a full one month from when it occurred Biz Art’s New Year’s Eve Party finally makes the press. What is curious though is how the (this) event’s value, credibility and candor changes with age… almost like wine that gains character, a growing man that gains wisdom, and a story that gets elaborated with age.
Biz Art's event was what Kierkegaard called the “the brainstorm that anticipates the orgy”… well maybe not that extreme… but we did have one intoxicated tug-of-war with a lot of cold meat scattered on the floor plus a lot of manly buzzcut artist men doing the hootchy koo in plastic grass skirts… And OH yes if this was a gossip column, which it might as well be, we could say there was a certain celebrity ala Shanghai art world present: Arthur Solway- cousin of 26th street James Cohan Gallery, now officially in town to do big business, was here trying to reassure himself, via his conversational charm, that opening shop here was indeed the right decision and that SH, as superficial as it seems from the outside (and that I purported it to be in Dec.’s Art Forum- for which many folks including Arthur gave/still gives me flack for) has a big PHAT soul if you just look for it. Mian Mian, the writer was there. As was all the artists you could imagine including the legendary, albeit super humble, Lao Geng aka Geng Jianyi up from Hangzhou even though he has high blood pressure and a general disposition that one may characterize as existential angst mixed with pubescent zeal. It seems that everybody has high blood pressure these days- My theory is that all those cigarettes and MSG have finally come back to haunt this smoky crowd. Pauline Yao, down from Beijing via Hangzhou, where she’s writing a book about museums with and for the collector GuanYi who will build one soon- He’s using the switcherup- ‘gotta write the book before you build it’ method- blessed us with her presence. (Bea Leanza says that museums are all the rave now- everybody wants to re-examine, deconstruct, and basically f**k the museum- something that has been going on in various unsuccessful ways in the west – problem is the museum wins by default each time). She and Chen Shaoxiong were smoking in unison to the beat of some over-modulated KOK whilst in the background Fei Pingguo was playing limbo with the kids.
Anyway the legend continues- no one really has parties like this in China… only Biz Art, especially the tug of war part- which, with our hands still sore, got echoed back at us a few weeks later at the Lin Yilin opening- see below.

Lin Yilin, Glocal in Shanghai; and 3 on the Bund under new management

Lin Yilin is from the old skool of the Guangzhou Big Tail Elephant Group, a posse of progressives down south who found inspiration in urbanization and its accoutrements (building materials, migrant labor and lots of fast (sur)real estate ca$h) in the late 80’s early 90’s when the avante-garde was perhaps aptly titled. He was in Shanghai last week was it last week?- hard to keep up anymore, for a solo show at Shanghai Gallery of Art otherwise known as Husheng Hualang which is under new management after the high-princess of the Sichuan School, Weng Ling left for dryer maybe higher ground... we’re all waiting for her to pop up out of the ground somewhere soon but no one can yet say for certain where that may be… Meanwhile David Chan is the main, and slightly overtaxed, man. I met Lin Yilin for the first time through Cao Weijun (who also works at the gallery but in reduced capacity these days having had some body and soul issues) while we were all living our hiphop lives in NYC. Lin Yilin was fresh off the boat- so to speak- just getting acquainted with the Chinese art Diaspora in NYC and revving up for his new life in a new city… he came to an exhibition opening of mine and I still use a photo with Cao and Lin standing in front of my work to document it. The piece was a photo installation depicting a girls softball game that Roberta Smith in the NYTimes mistook for a cricket game –It was meant to metaphorically collapse the space of an otherwise claustrophobic courtyard with the added addition of window onto somewhere else… but that’s another story altogether. Lin Yilin still lives in NYC. Greenpoint, Brooklyn to be exact, in the old apartment of Qian Zhijian’s (critic, NYU Chinese art history doctorate, last seen teaching at Parsons) on India St. to be even more exact. It’s right near the studio that I gave up last month as the result of one mutha of a subletter nightmare. Before that Lin Yilin and I would once in a while have coffee, talk shop, while Greenpoint’s garbage processing plants glimmered in the distance. Soooo now a year or so later Lin Yilin is in Shanghai reminiscing not about Brooklyn but about the late 80s in Guangzhou -when a new influx of money caught everybody off guard and effected some funny incidences- He was talking with his head thrown back like he was back in the golden days of naivete all the while fiddling with his new iPhone at a restaurant with lousy service and even lousier Peking Opera performances. MianMian who, sitting next to him, after six years of not publishing a book, due to birthing a child, bouts with rehab and now a fundamentalist, diet coke downing Buddhist sits next to him talking in and out of English/Chinese about Chinese artists in the most enlightened way: “Chinese artists don’t need sex- because they’re always fucking each other” I think most people in the circle knows what she means. Lin Yilin’s show was very well installed – lots of big video projections inside partitions created especially for them and then one big fiberglass sculpture of “San Mao” sitting spotlight under the atrium. It reminded me vaguely of the Ghandi Statue on Union Square. Like Ghandi San Mao has his holy qualities, I love San Mao (a dirty little beggar kid with 3 hairs (san mao) who hangs with the bourgeoisie during Shanghai’s gilded age. He’s a comic strip character who has been manifested elsewhere in black and white films, etc. One may argue (LYL may himself be in this piece) that he’s an integral part of modern Shanghai-ese culture) But I’m not sure what he was doing in the show … The other videos were raw funny performative – there was a document of a tug of war orchestrated by Lin Yilin as part of Documenta in Kassel, Germany over the summer. One other especially poignant piece depicts a class of white European kids on a tour of China. Here LYL turns them into stand ins for Chinese people: The group sits in a Chinese class room, rides the bus, sings KOK (Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach) in effect the group embodies (due to their placement/context) the Chinese-ness that the (non-Chinese) audience seeks in Chinese things (esp. art). But they are white and western. They are our mirror. Yep. LYL NYC based, jetset, Chinese artist with his European kids in tow touring Shanghai. More on the subject
By the way that's LYL in the upper right next to Zhou Xiaohu who you've met earlier