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So much has happened since I last got around to updating (sorry for using the same excusatory tact each time we meet). Shanghai and Asia in general had an onslaught of artistic ennials (bi’s tri’s ) Fairs, counter fairs, etc. It’s way too much to remember or write down and way past the point to make any difference any way. During the beginning of this mayhem I was busying myself with the work of his majesty, Micheal Lin on his installation ‘What a Difference a Day Made’ at the Shanghai Gallery of Art.
Besides acquiring an entire zaohuodian (general store) for an undisclosed amount of moolah he reinstalled the contents of the store in the entrance of the very zaohuo unfriendly SHGA. He went on to hire acrobats to juggle the store's objects inside the gallery’s atrium space. This performance was pre-recorded from 5 different angles as well as performed live at the opening. The videos were then projected around the space on hanging scrims so that the image was visible form either side. At the opening the pre-recorded video was interchanged with projections of the live performance.
The five videos de-constructed the figure as it were, breaking it down proportionally (feet, head, torso-profile, above the head and finally- full figure) –as that figure toiled in dynamic, majestic contraposture with juggling toilet scrubbers, light bulbs or multi-colored plastic pails. Many came crashing down with thunderous sounds, many flipped effortlessly, cutting the air with melodic, Beckettian happiness. I should add that the mirror encased columns leftover from Gu Dexin’s last sort of, yawwwn, ho-hum exhibition made for some super crazy hall of mirror reflections for the video and objects.Amongst these videos (dispersed around the space at varying heights to mimic the camera’s POV were a bunch of plywood art crates decked out with red carpet lining and spotlight to display the contents of the store de-re-contextualized. A simple pisspot or scrub brush because museumified, fetishised, interesting as an object in itself. Often the arrangements were lyrical, queer, a ceramic ashtray next to a toilet pluncher.
The project formed organically. There was the initial mind fart *buy the store there and install it here!… and the rest just was a matter of making meaning from meaning without meaning to mean in a way that will mean nothing in the end. Jasper Johns once said something like - art is taking something and doing something to it, then doing something else to it.” He also said “Everyone is free to interpret the work in his own way. I think seeing a picture is one thing and interpreting it is another.”
Michael was taking some things and doing some other things to them. It wasn’t a very new idea (ahem what's that chess player guy's name Duchomp or DuChamp..?) or form(s) but it was an opportunity encased in the trappings of what the zaohuodian is as cultural artifact. Anyway the conceptualization process was a discursive one, the results of much elliptical conservation between Michael, David Chan, SHGA’s curator and myself. How to do without over doing? How to create an equation where many but not all of the answers would appear? How to make interesting, intriguing but not over determined layers with all this stuff and space and time…? Outside Russian tanks were destroying homes in Georgia, children were dying of melamine laced milk powder and the credit market was teetering over the deep dark ravine we now find ourselves in, while we sipped white whine and pondered how? If we added this ... how would it affect the temper of that? How did art become such a strategy of seductive, semiotic warfare? Anyway it turned out a very fine piece indeed… Even Christian Marclay liked it.
BIG VIDEO / PERFORMANCE Production credit to: YTVProductions and Mathieu Borysevicz
Ya, So it's been a super long time since I've made it back to the bloglines. A lot has happened, especially as it concerns the contemporary arts of China... and the world for that matter, now helplessly mired in an economic mud bath that is sure to eliminate art from most people's shopping lists and god willing send art's focus from the market back towards its own elusive core ...
Anyway. Before the shit hit the fan I went to Qinghai for a film festival or so it seemed...(*This is also posted on DART soon... like tomorrow)Qinghai is located between Gansu Province and the Tibetan Autonomous Zone in the mid-west of China. It is home to several minorities including, at over 20% of the population, Tibetans. It is an area that sits at an average elevation of 3000 meters above sea level. It is a place, one might argue, that is very close to heaven, a spiritual place indeed. So spiritual in fact that even the film festivals there don’t show films.
In late September myself, along with a group of 25 filmmakers and enthusiasts from Beijing were invited to Xining, Qinghai’s capital for the Sanjiangyuan International Photography Festival and the World Mountain Documentary Festival. It was a four day event chock full of sight seeing, feasting, singing, ceremonies… but oddly, no films. The Xining city government, who organized and sponsored the event, generously hosted a total of 1000 plus visitors from as far away as Brazil, Australia and the United States. Films or no films, we were treated to an entertaining time, yet throughout remained slightly perplexed by the context of it all. Pitching the affair as a film festival was not only a little misleading but slightly surreal.
On the first day while the rest of the bunch visited the famous Ta Er Temple, where a living Buddha blessed my six-month-old son, I stayed in with altitude sickness. That night we dined on local home cooking and had a singing contest at the Tu Minority Village. The next morning we visited the stupendous, crystal blue Qinghai Lake, China’s largest saltwater lake, at 3600meters above sea level. It is a truly amazing, even godly, sight that the photographers in the group feasted their lenses upon. We rushed back for the festival’s grand opening dinner ceremony that evening at which delegates from the local government and foreign VIPs commended each other’s efforts to produce such an interesting and ambitious festival. Karaoke followed dinner and lasted deep into the night.
The next day at the grand opening ceremony it seemed that we were actually going to begin the film part of the festival, but as one visitor noted while meandering around the colossal exhibition hall where we were brought “I feel like we’re all part of a large Ai Weiwei experiment”. This was the actual manifestation of the photography part of the festival. It was a venue that also hosted the glitter saturated opening ceremony (again full of simultaneously translated congratulatory speeches), the film market and oddly, a fashion show. In the exhibition hall rows and rows of mostly landscape photographs were being re-photographed by enthusiasts and what appeared to be soldiers. The market’s unmanned booths eventually led visitors towards the fashion show where models sauntered up and down the runway to the beat of some strange carnival techno tune wearing the same clothes for about twenty minutes and then disappeared. It was here that a local TV crew interviewed me about how I felt about the film festival. Needless to say, I was stumped. Later that same day there was some developments in the direction of a film festival. A forum was held where speaker’s topics included “Introduction to the Creation Status Quo of Chinese Western Mountain Documentary” and “What do viewers expect of a documentary on mountains and climbers?” In the given context these questions took on existential dimensions.
The festival had printed several catalogs for the event that, along with fruit baskets were left in the hotel rooms each day. Some of these publications discussed the history of jade while others listed the films in the festival. There seemed to be interesting films indeed: a film about polyandry in a minority tribe in China, a Dutch film made in North Korea, and a work by Rick Widmer, a filmmaker now living in Beijing, whose film about a Massachusetts’s county fair ended up winning the Jade Kunlun Prize - the Special Jury Prize for Best Social Documentary. There were works from a slew of local stations in China who produced other “mountain” films, basically films about non-Han Chinese minorities and/or actual mountains. There were films from Russia, India, and Germany on topics like goats, agriculture, the environment, man against nature, love, death, and mountains of course. But where were these films? Even Rick didn’t have a copy of his own film for us to watch at the hotel. It wasn’t until the live television awards ceremony that evening (mind you this is the same day that the festival official opened - no need to waste any time) that some films actually made it to the viewers. Before every awards presentation the first 30 seconds to minute of the corresponding film was shown. It wasn’t really enough time to get past the opening credits, or get a gist of the film, but it was a refreshing dose of film, indeed. As we said our sad goodbyes at the airport the next morning we reminded each other of the Buddhist maxim about abandoning expectations. Who said there needed to films at a film festival anyway? We all had a fine time either way. I’ll definitely return next year.
Very little information about the Qinghai 2008世界山地纪录片节 film festival is on line here
