Christian and Lydia + Imagine, the world’s most famous unknown artist in Shanghai

The entry below was recently featured on Art Forum's, ever so gossipy and inevitably well read Scene & Herd column of the magazine's website - in a highly edited form. I am reprinting my original, perhaps slightly more crass, version for those that are interested in the real Yoko Ono Shanghai opening story.

I also wanted to give an extra shout out to the other artists who braved the long flights to come and share their wares in Shanghai, which is desperately poised to become another international center for contemporary culture. Ahem Yeeaaa

...especially my man Christian Marclay who is not only an old friend (through the music scene in NYC more than the art one, both which he navigates quite cleverly) as is his lovely lady and ex-Bronx Museum curator Lydia Yee who accompanied him here, BUT for his Hi/lo-tech virtuosity and its affects on the old ladies whose park was hijacked by the eArts festival that he was participating in that night. Above is a pretty bad remixed collage version of what the artist was up to: He created a single channel film from archival b/w footage, he then overlayed graphic clues- lines shapes circles and asked three groups of very different musical ensembles to interpret the "Visual composition". Twas very nice indeed

Anyway... YOKO
Over the past two months Shanghai has experienced a flurry of international art visitors. It started when Christian Marclay and Eliot Sharp flaunted their NY downtown grandeur at the second incarnation of the city government run eArts Festival; then there was Shanghart’s “Involved” exhibition, in which Bern Kunshalle curator, Philippe Pirotte was accompanied by the likes of Luc Tuymans, Knut Åsdam and many others for the opening festivities; just last week James Cohan Gallery presented its third exhibition in Shanghai giving the space over to Folkert de Jong and his jolly, Styrofoam sculpted simians, who along with his entourage from the Office for Contemporary Art in Amsterdam, met everyone that was anyone in the local scene during their extended stay. But nobody was more anticipated than the crowned queen of conceptualism, Yoko Ono whose China debut took the form of FLY, a retrospective of her instructional works dating back to the early sixties at the, barely two year old, Ke Center for the Contemporary Arts.

“I feel like Marco Polo must’ve felt when he first came to China,” exclaimed Yoko Ono during an anecdote of her arrival at Shanghai’s hypermodern Pudong Airport last Thursday. Besides being Ono’s first exhibition in China it also Ono’s first time visiting mainland China. Ono who, like most Japanese, was raised on classic Chinese culture, admitted that she learned her strategies for life from Sun Tze’s Art of War at the lively press conference which ended with the artist painting her Chinese name, not on the paper prepared for it, but on the window curtain instead.

The next day’s opening was even more comic when a twenty person per viewing rule left hundreds stampeding the artists’ Ex It, 1997 wood casket pieces, which had been installed in front of the museum’s entrance, while overhead an Ono world peace promotional video blasted John Lennon’s Give Peace a Chance through a steadily building drizzle. In the rear of the crowd Shanghart gallery’s Lorenz Hebling and artist Zhou Tiehai shook their heads at the potentially hopeless, rain soaked wait and opted to head off early to the dinner instead. As the evening’s drizzle developed into a downpour the museum’s doors swung open and the wet masses funneled into an already overcrowded exhibition. “A typical Shanghai scene” joked one local standing above the crowds on a platform built into the gallery space.

While hundreds participated in Ono’s instructional pieces including the Blue Room Event, 1966 and Wish Tree, 1996, Ono herself was upstairs in the museum’s lounge area dancing “like a chicken on acid” as artist, Rutherford Chang observed. Her short-lived dance performance for the masses changed to a more serious tune at the exclusive dinner attended by a select few at the recently opened Kee Club. This Hong Kong nightlife classic had recently been transported to Shanghai’s Dunhill mansions complex, a spectacular courtyard in the center of the city, which besides being blessed by the presence of Jude Law just a few weeks earlier also sports a very handsome, very Zen, Shanghart Gallery outpost.

After dessert Ono descended to the post-dinner cocktail for one last photo op with the locals before heading back to her hotel to sleep off the jetlag, leaving the dwindling crowd to soak up her blessings of universal love—and also the pouring rain.

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.

Amongst a Tidal Wave of ArtEnnials... What a Difference a Made, OR how to turn a pisspot into art again, and again

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

A Random Update: The World Mountain Documentary Festival, a Film Festival without films+The promise of more to come

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