Some people call it Chinglish, I call it Poetry. Language and its Discontents. Something to keep you amused while you wait

I was going to wait until I accumulated a few more of these... certainly they are everywhere and certainly I wouldn't be an expat if I didn't bring it up at least once in this here blog.

What they mean, if one could speculate, isn't important. What's important is the downright surreality of their appearance... they are signs that don't signify ... or do they?

An article in The Week (my favorite news source - a weekly mag that compiles the world news of the week via a myriad of, sometimes contradictory, sources: everyone from Al Jeezera, Nigerian Times to WSJ, El Monde, etc. have their say on the event of the week... it's the old blind man and the elephant trick... I recommend it to everyone who's been blinded by staring down the same old funnel of mainstream media) lamented about the incoherency, spite and outright offensiveness of China's use of English.
But I say
1. We're all bastardizing the damn lingo either way you look at it in this digital gizmo age of anything/instantly goes...
2. The Chinese are a lot better at our English then we are at they're Chinese
3. The results are often uncanny, beautiful, albeit naive creative expressions a la the Exquisite Corpse... which we'll get to more of next time, or the time after.

UNTITLED (SHANGHAI, PUDONG) 无题（上海浦东） the real story

I forgot to mention that there are two pieces to this installation. One is erected on a fence that runs around one corner of the site. It is 2.1m x 41.1m ... pretty darned long. The other is wrapped around a sign structure that stands 3.5m off the ground. It is 3m high x 40.1m long. There is subway construction happening in front of this sign so all the traffic on Fang Dian Lu sees the hi-hise sign which sits above the construction but is dwarfed by the slowly rising Himalaya Center- a mega project designed by Japanese architect, Arata Isozaki that includes a museum, shopping center, hotels, restaurants, bath houses, concert halls, etc, etc.
Another city within a city, within Shanghai.
Below is a statement on the project.
It is meant to honor the workers that are responsible for erecting China's glossy mega-metropolis' but some irreverent ahole was pissing on the sign when I went to photograph it last Sunday.
Whaatdaya gonna do?

Another thing that I might add is that this construction wrap, whereby the workers become the content of this image that occupies a typically commodified space, was a dream I had since 2003. If it wasn't for SARS I'd have this mutta up a long time ago... but all good things are worth the wait and years ago Learning from Hangzhou took this billboard's place... which is coming to a book store near you very merry soon.

Please click on the images to enlarge*



Pudong, Shanghai is an urban wonder: In the course of only a decade what was farmland has been cultivated into an entirely modern city which now hosts some of the tallest buildings in the world. Behind this miraculous transformation are hundreds of thousands of construction workers. These migrant laborers sleep, eat and work on the construction site itself.

They move from construction site to site but seldom enter the social structure of the city itself. Large-scale blinds are often erected around the edges of the sites that these workers call home and are wrapped in vinyl advertising billboards. This form of signage is particularly illustrative of China’s rapid pace of urbanization and its burgeoning consumer society. The construction blind is not only a precursor to the building under construction (and its future role in the market) but also denotative of the social politics of an increasingly classed society. The construction blind helps to erase the presence of the construction laborer and his peripheral, second-class status.

Untitled (Pudong, Shanghai) is one in a series of site specific billboards that responds to the proliferation of large scale advertising images upon the urban environment by indexing the social/political relevance of the billboard site itself. Here, images of workers within the barricade replace the commercial billboard. It is at once a testimony to the workers and their role in shaping China’s hyper modern environment as well as an attempt to neutralize the continual commodification of urban space.

This project is part of Zendai Museum of Modern Art’s INTRUDE: ART and LIFE series

The project was also made possible by the help of: DDM Warehouse Special Thanks: Zhu Tao, Daniel Traub, Sofia Wang and All the Workers of the Himalaya Center’s Construction Site!

For more info on the billboard series please visit http://www.mabz.net/BB/MABZ_BB.html




上海浦东是一个城市奇观 ：仅仅十年间一片农场已被灌溉成完全的现代化都市，这里矗立着世界上最高的摩天大楼。而这场魔术般的变迁背后是成千上万的建筑工人。这些外地民工吃、睡、工作在建筑工地。他们从一个工地搬到另一个工地，却很少进入城市的社会结构。

树 立在工地四周的巨大遮幅里是民工们称为家的地方，也常常被人造革的广告牌覆盖着。 这种招牌的形式确是中国城市化的高速进程及其增长迅速的消费群体的生动明证。建筑工地的遮幅不仅 是建筑在施工（市场中的失败角色）的一种预告，而且是不断阶层化社会的社会政治指标。工地遮幅抹去了建筑工人的存在 ，也掩盖了他们下等边缘阶层的地位。

《无 题（上海浦东）》是“特定场地”广告稗系列之一，通过编索广告牌本身的社会政治关联，反映城市环境中的巨型广告形象的剧增现象。 在这，围栏背后的民工形象代替了商业广告。是一次对民工及其在塑造中国亢奋的现代化环境中角色的证明，同时也试图中和城市环境的持续商业化。


这个项目是证大现代艺术馆的《介入：艺术生活366天》系列的部分
感谢东大名创库的诚挚帮助与支持，才使本项目得以实现
特别鸣谢：朱涛，叶文杰，王雪，及西马来亚中心工地的所有工人！


更多有关广告牌系列的信息， 请登陆：http://www.mabz.net/BB/MABZ_BB.html

UNTITLED (SHANGHAI, PUDONG) 无题（上海浦东） the 7th (and maybe last) Site-Specific Photographic Installation AKA Billboard by me - now go and see it MF

I've been making these billboards for quite some time - This is number seven... each one is a pain in the butt logistally, financially, and in the end, no one seems to get it WAAHAahahhhahhh
OK some people get it.
Maybe it's not art in the fine sense for them snooty art crowds- more like public indexes of the social and political relevance of wherever they are placed.. that's the idea of course. They also are a critique of outdoor advertising and it's all pervasive assault on the urban environment. and and and

Here's a general Statement on the Series itself:

Using the same means and methods as the advertising industry, these works attempt to thwart the nature of this practice by neutralizing its message. That is, by using images that are a direct response to their own environment, and are neither iconographic nor commercial in their content, the work delineates and metaphorically collapses the space at hand. It is a visual gesture aimed at creating an added dimension in an otherwise cloistered urban sprawl. The work also acts as a portrait or document of the immediate environment, in effect indexing the oasis of the ordinary and its component social relevance.

This work is a response to the proliferation of large scale advertising images (in the form of billboards, construction wraps, wall banners, etc.) upon the urban environment. It is an inquiry into how these structures and images effect our personal space, visual perception, and cognition, as well as the architectural surroundings itself. It is also an attempt to expose the visual arts, or a cultural critique as it might be, to a larger, fresher audience and therefore to stimulate contemplation in a different context, or better yet, to inspire collective deja-vu.

Or something like that.


Here's some production and installation images around the 7th (and maybe last) Site-Specific Photographic Installation AKA Billboard by Me Borysevicz

Michael Who?, Heidi Voet and the global, deconstructive, pregnant painting project OR It's A Small World After All (unless you have to paint it)

First and foremost: GOD BLESS OBAMA and GOD BLESS AMERICA
God Who?
Not important- Important is that the right man was chosen. Something that the people of the US haven't been good at for a loong time now.
SO


Who is this Michael Lin anyway you may ask?

Michael is one mighty, globe trotting dude who made his fame appropriating granny’s rug sack material patterns, repackaging it as tasty architectural accents that rethink the tradition painting and feeding it to the cultural elite to ohhh&awww at… and sometimes actually use. Yes he makes useful art… But it’s more than that of course (sorry for the crass cynicism my friend- helps me get the juice flowing) Michael has helped to perpetuate the infinite, ever circuitous discourse of ‘painting’ by taking the stuff off the stretched canvas and applying it to walls, floors, ceilings, tennis courts, and whatever other architectural surfaces might pertain... including, at his last SGA appearance, a skate ramp. He built a modified half pipe right into the manicured atrium of the prestigious 3 on the Bund building for thrashers and pipe heads to feast their wheels on… It was a sunny, West Coast, conceptual addition to the often, stuffy, drab Bund-side digs of this gallery.

His projects also usually operate in an anthropological, cultural-specific way by using local iconocography or decorative motifs.These otherwise pop, kitsch, or traditional fabric patterns (now he’s getting into product packaging, etc.) become re-contextualized and re-scaled as breathy hi-art environments.

Michael’s from the West Coast- Cali and from Taiwan and from Paris < > Brussels and from Shanghai where he splits his schizophrenic, timezone confounded days with his beautiful, severely pregnant (with twins –one boy one girl... some guys have all the luck) and very talented artist girlfriend, Heidi Voet, who seems equally busy with international exhibition planning. (The last time I was there she had made a very funny assemblage that basically was a tropical plant wearing a Mickey Mouse/Campbell's tomato soup can T-shirt) The two split a studio downstairs from where Liu Jianhua’s studio used to be and where Xiang Liqing and Fei Pingguo (Alexandr Brandt) still are but never seem to be.

The first encounter I had with Michael’s work was in 2000 or 01, or something like that, at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Not only an exceptionally deconstructed art space in itself the Palais was hosting Michael’s floor painting/installation that also doubled as a lounge/rest area. Essentially a vast, purple sea that sat on the Palais’ bottom floor, this exceedingly decorative – almost Floridian rococo- piece just sucked you in like a cool pool on a hot day. Once submerged onto his floral patterned surface you were encouraged to sit down and relax on matching pillows scattered about on the ground… maybe it was a soft surface as well… I don’t remember t’was a long time ago.. but it stuck because I like that architectural interventionist shit, and I like painting too… But the stuff that just sits on the wall isn’t enough for these post-post-post-post Modern times. Michael seems acutely aware of this.

The next time I remember seeing his work was in an equally charged art space, LIC, NY’s PS1. This time he colored the seamless walls in PS1’s cafe with more fuchsia peony painting which enlivened an already lively place. PS1’s summer Saturday, ganja and sun soaked Warm Up parties only got higher with Michael’s paradisaical decoration/installation/painting. I never thought that I’d meet the man, much less work with him… but as it turns out it’s a small world after all.

Rania Ho introduced me to Pauline Yao who introduced me to Michael and Heidi at the It's Alright exhibition in Hangzhou. Michael also knows Patty Chang who also knows a lot more people that one day I may or may not meet.

Anyway- That’s Michael for you – in a nut(ty) shell. He’s in Taiwan now resting, waiting, and anticipating two bodacious additions to his already beautiful oeuvre.