Friday, May 18, 2007

Some things not worth mentioning worth mentioning: CIGE, Idolotry killed the cat, Cui Jian at SHGA







The full title of this post is "Some things not worth mentioning worth mentioning: CIGE art fair/more auctions and why you can't say contemporary art without saying market; Putuoshan- Buddhist Buds big time and/or Idolatry killed the cat; and Cui Jian plays The Shanghai Gallery of Art" The buggers just don't give me enough space for my meandering titles. Once again I'm trying to catch up on what seems like years of cluttered blog notes stuffed gently into the corners of my brain, harddrive, camera cards and realizing while you can't mention everything there is merit in things not worth mentioning.

Contemporary Art (Market)
Hong
Kong Christies- need I say more?

Ok
so I'll say a little more:
I went to Beijing again for CIGE (China International Gallery Exposition 2007 (4th Edition) and a host of other art chores. I admit that I would accomplish more if I could manage my time better. I spent three days chasing my tail between endless cab rides, meetings, rice wine and spicy meals. Oddly enough the first thing I did when I got off the plane was dine with a bunch of Shanghai art compatriots The two Liu's; Liu Jianhua, a conceptual ceramicist and beyond, with his 12 year old son, seeing the capital for the first time and Liu Yingmei, smooth operator of 140sqm Gallery, in town for the fair were stewing in alcohol and lamb's legs with my old buddy Zhuang Hui and his extended family of artists and friends from Lanzhou. CIGE was all the buzz for that brief weekend in Beijing. It is yet another art fair epitomized by the first booth that you encounter as you pass through the well secured entrance. Looking more like an Ikea display complete with beds, tables, and fancy scrims, this booth carried an array of famous Chinese artist home products. Wine bottles, carpets, clocks, plates and lampshades all emblazond with those funny pink faces of Fang Lijun or the mask men of Zheng Fangzhi or the cross eyed girls of Feng Zhengjie, or Yue Minjun's big teethed smiles or... well you get the picture. The truth is the rest of the fair was just the redundancy of these products, echoed in other forms across many other booths ... '13,000 square meters showing 120 outstanding galleries from all over the world' selling more or less the same dozen "famous" Chinese brands. It was re-sale central with everyone toting their auction house darlings. The same names were scattered throughout the house. All the galleries seemed to be playing the same hand of cards, each betting on the same win. In between there was some other stuff... but the over cramped conditions just made it look like Stuff. Contemporary Art stuff. The truth is with fairs- the artistic experience is annihilated by the super market. On the upper echelons of this super-art-market there were some famous brand curators who did "projects" with international name brand artists that were not-worth-mentioning. Li Zhenhua, an ambitious youngish curator, put together an extensive, international new-media forum whose strong academic bend got lost between the Ikea art aisles and the VIP coffee lounge which made it not worth mentioning.

-brief break to Phil Tanari and Lulu Huang's new office, paid in part by Art Forum, in part by blood sweat and tears.



Back in Shanghai, East Link Gallery, once host of the famous "FUCK OFF" exhibition curated by Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi as a way offset the pretentious Shanghai Biennial of 2000,now has decided to get its auction license and hold an "affordable" auction. The first painting that you see when you step off the elevator, with a base price of 10G USD (not exactly affordable for us starving blogger types) is basically the greatest hits of Chinese contemporary painting rolled onto one canvas: There's Zhang Xiaogang's Bloodlines, Liu Wei's drunken Generals, Fang Lijun's floating heads, Guo Wei's pen stripped blue bodies, Yue Minjun's smile of course (don't you just want to punch one of those guys teeth out?) and other greats all coll aged together in cheery oils. This (not so famous) painter takes all these famous painters' licks and presents it to the ill informed consumer. Why have just one of these silly Chinese contemporary souvenirs when you get all these guys (and they are all guys) paintings on one canvas.. and for the bargain basement price of 10G.. I mean do you know what just one of these paintings go for? My God . It's sort of the leatherman or hotpot of Chinese contemporary. It is something that, ironically enough, confounds the auction house with it's logic of negating name brand worship by wearing them all at once. Not one of these signature styles emerges from the mass. It would also be worth mentioning here that all around China's large cities one can find renditions of Zhang Xiaogang, Zhen Fangzhi, Wang Guangyi, etc. in little road side stalls, second hand markets, shopping malls, etc. These guys are already a pastiche of themselves - by default of being in an environment where copyright infringement runs wild.

Cui
Jian

Which brings me to Cui Jian (proclaimed father of Chinese Rock n Roll), whom I met for the first time doing a news story for ZDF (German TV2) back in '95 or 6 on copy right infringement. Cui Jian who at the time was China's staple entertainer (banned of course from ever playing again in the motherland for his politically provocative lyrics and punk attitude) suffered considerably in the financial dept. because his records were continually pirated. While he celebrated the democratic aspect of pirating he still had to complain... a little Metallica syndrome. Anyway last night he performed "unplugged" (though I saw some plugs in those acoustic guitars and keyboards) at the Shanghai Gallery of Art. SGA located in the prestigious Three on the Bund building hosts a very fine view of Pudong, especially at night when you can have 40 story video screens and a host of other neon dance advertisements merrily merrily across your brain. The gallery, which has put on some very ambitious installation projects (most recently Gu Dexin's 2007.4.17 - where the artist altered the architecture of the space with literally tons of concrete slabs and manholes- see video) was turned into an installation again- this time a Rock Club complete with light show, video projections and a PHAT Cui Jian performance. I've heard CJ and band many many times in both NY and China but he has never sounded better. He's been compared to Bob Dylan for his lyrics and Bruce Springsteen for his soul but for his musical creativity he stands alone with his unique blend of traditional Chinese, free-jazz, rap-rock, ska, folk, and some other indescribable elements .


Consuming Buddhism
So after two very tiring exhibition openings within weeks of one another. (see next post- PastForward (excuse the shitty website) and Three Unities) we decided to go away from this sweaty, polluted, concrete jungle and get back to our Buddhist roots in Putuoshan. Putuoshan is a little island a few hours (though it took 17 because of fog) away from Shanghai that has been a destination for Buddhist pilgrims since before the Qing dynasty. It's a beautifully preserved slice of heaven (after the megalopolis of Shanghai) dotted with what seems like a zillion temples, some old some new, all beautifully maintained and complimented with beautifully manicured gardens. The architecture and images of these edifices are trippy. Marble slabs from which frog men on waves carrying spears and snakes emerge, hermaphrodites and devils abound under bell top rooves and bright red counter cleavered frames. There's a 100ft tall Guanyin (a female Buddhist saint of mercy) who looks out over the ocean from a small mountain perch with a smiling face made from a ton of 14K gold. There's cedar walkways that tie the island's temples together through lots of wild life, flowers, frogs, and a bunch of "farmer" restaurants that charge NYC prices. Every few feet there's another stall selling incense, Buddha paraphernalia and beads to rub away your sins. Once in a while someone slinks along the ground prostrating themselves on the way to another temple. There's a bunch yellow baseball capped, middle class Chinese kowtowing, throwing money and taking cell phone pictures. It's basically a tourist trap for the Buddha inclined. But somehow it remains untouched- I mean this is a country well known for religious intolerance and here off the coast of Shanghai - nothing but religion... and well endowed religion. Tons of RMB has gone into the preservation and maintenance of such an elaborate system of temples. It seems that now that China has $ - people need to feel good about themselves and so- give it to the temple. Here in Putuoshan one can receive a special ceremony intended to bring them good luck, longevity, and whatever floats your boat for a 1000RMB fee. Monks with MP3 players hanging from their necks compare cell phones while on breaks from tourist minding... Buddhism reemerges again ala Chinese contemporary style.

Old friends and Old Friends reunited in Shangai: Zhang Huan, the real Slim Shady, and a studio to end all studios - the film version


Friendship: a Short version. I met David Shadrack Smith in 1994 in Beijing. After a few circuitous passings we became good friends. Two New Yawkas in China whattayagonnado? Shortly afterwards we meet Zhang Huan, rough and tough performance artist. We all become close friends, navigating east and west, making art, chasing girls, BSing philosophy, consuming dumplings, and lots of alcohol. David is a television documentarian... I am/was too. We worked together occasionally. We made a film called "Instant Noodles" in which Zhang Huan and his, at the time girlfriend, now wife, Hu JunJun act as weary, post adolescent wanderers looking for true love or meaning or just a good meal... anyway Zhuang Hui, Cao WeiJun, GaoLing and a host of other art world characters also appear in the film. We had only had one professional actor but it still was a very sweet film, a cult classic if I may say so. In 1998 I move to NY then Zhang Huan and JunJun move to NY and then David... we stay for a long time in NY, nostalgic for the good ole days of Beijing's instant noodles but moving forward just the same. Now I am back, not in Beijing, but Shanghai as is Zhang Huan and JunJun. David comes and visits. Dan Wolfskehl has also just moved here. Dan is a friend from even further back. We went to SVA together. He was introduced to David and Zhang Huan when we just moved to NY in 98 or 99. Zhang Huan's second NY exhibition is a show that Dan and I curated called "canalogy". It doesn't appear it on his CV though. David and Dan bond like two good NYJews. Dan is an architect. He designs David's loft and after constant prodding from me, moves his young family to China, land of architectural salvation... or damnation depending on how you look at it. Dan may also work for Zhang Huan and JunJun who build schools for poor farm children- Gao An Foundation -as a matter of Buddhist altruism. David still likes Beijing better. Can't argue apples and oranges. David calls himself Shady and has a new production company that is doing a job for National Geographic TV. Zhang Huan has became an international art sensation. He has a tremendous studio on the outskirts of Shanghai. It employs over 80 people including his funny confidant, Fang Wei. We eat a proletariat lunch there. I have also worked for Nat Geo and I have also made films for Zhang Huan. This is a film I made about Zhang Huan's studio for Asia Society in January. It is a 10 minute excerpt of a 30 minute film. PLAY


More on Zhang Huan's studio:
Zhang Huan's notoriety stems from his early Beijing performance pieces in which the artist positioned his own body as a site of existential inquiry. After moving to NY in 1998, his performances in venues throughout the world were imbued with an eclectic mix of iconography and drama, functioning as a sort of surrealist cultural diplomacy. Two years ago the artist returned to China to live in Shanghai. His work has since taken a radical turn. For the past year and a half Zhang Huan has ceased doing performances and now is a full time studio artist. But his studio operation is far from traditional.

The outfit consists of two, 2500sqm, former clothing factories separated by a 5-minute drive through Shanghai’s rough, outer suburbs. The studio employs anywhere from 70-100 people at any given time. It houses the workers in dormitories and has a canteen that serves them 3 meals a day. There is a wood print studio that produces 14x20 ft unique prints, a wood carving studio where everything from reliefs and busts to free standing sculptures are the result of a collaboration between Zhang Huan and a crew of traditional Chinese woodcarvers from Dongyang, China; there are oil painting studios filled with recent art school graduates; a studio that hammers out enormous (up to two stories high, or 100m long) copper sculptures, and a division that is responsible for sifting, sorting and creating everything from paintings to tremendous head sculptures out of the artist’s favorite material, incense ash. The ash comes from several of Shanghai’s Buddhist temples, which the artist has contracted to supply him with the burnt offerings of their many devotees. After a recent visit to a Halal slaughter-house the studio is now working with China’s premiere taxidermist on a project that juxtaposes the artist’s own sculpted figure with the stuffed bodies of cows.

Besides running very much like a factory, with normal hours punched in by each employee, the studio has its own crating and shipping department, monthly birthday parties for the employees and department heads. The artists’ new materials - all recycled from antique markets, temples or demolished farmhouses in China’s hinterlands- speak to both the artist’s own childhood and to the sophistication of a learned, international art star. Broken Buddha statue relics, from China’s torturous Cultural Revolution, are now the inspiration for an artist whose entire career was founded on the most immediate, primal material, his own body. Buddhism, mysticism, tradition and the global market all collide in this artists’ diverse and tightly run factory. There is now talk that the artist and his directors will be joined by both a Yi-Jing master and traditional Chinese doctor to consult on the direction of the studio and its works.

Sunday, May 6, 2007

Yang Fudong, the garbage man. On set on the final Chapter of '7 Intellectuals'... they come back to the city and the city is gone NEW PART2 YFD


Yang Fudong, clad in a Black Sabbath T-shirt and red underwear that creeps out every time he bends over the jimmy rigged playback monitor on the set of the final installment of "Seven Intellectuals in the Bamboo Forest", yells out commands to the actors via his diligent AD's (assistant Director) mega phone. First Yang softly then the AD boisterously "Stand a little to the left- get a board under there!" Lulu, one of the actors in heels, skirt and rain coat keeps sinking in the sludge of this improvisational garbage dump along Shanghai's shanty-town outskirts. The red underwear is because it’s year of the pig and Yang’s a pig- those that are born in the year are susceptible to both good and bad luck… the red warns off the bad and welcomes the good. I’m a pig too and have an ample supply of red undies too. One needs a fair bit of luck to keep things in order along these freight train tracks that harbor a small resilient population of this mega-cities’ garbage collectors. Families from neighboring provinces live amongst heaps of garbage and eek out a living sorting the recyclables from the rest of the shit. A single water spout emerges from the rubble, women washing their clothes look up at the actors carefully circling two pool tables set between two diverging train tracks. The smell is unbearable. The crew, along with Yang himself converse in rugged Beijing accents, adding to the out of place-ness of this film set’s presence in this Southern apocalypse.
ohhh Im falling asleep More to come…



More here!
So as this big busy city churns onwards my steps have fallen behind on catching up with Yang and his trusted crew until... the day before installing PastFoward (the show I've been working on forever which I will discuss some other time), walking back from a hot Hunanese lunch with the OV gallery bosses fresh in from HK, in heated discussion with Yan about how these sly Southern mofo's owe us big time for putting on such a mighty exhibition in their otherwise overly designed/under programmed gallery... We run into Yang Fudong sitting on some steps with a green bean popsicle stuck sideways in his mouth. This time a red t shirt. Wearily he gestures behind him towards a slightly weathered neo-Grecian edifice and explains "ice cream break" Yet another weary day on the set. The Cococabana, a club on Ruijin Lu modeled ever so slightly off the NY original is a high scale, lounge bar with glass beaded curtains seperating several burgundy red velvet sitting areas... lots of booze on all the tables... props I am told as they hand us green bean posicles. Everybody looks distracted and tired as they line up the next dolly shot across a few cubicles with the same cast that, knee deep in garbage last time, are here drinking and toasting as if celebrating the fresh change of set locations, albeit
half a little heartedly ... this time for picture framing.
Qiu Anxiong steps out of the dark and says 'hey'. Like Lu Chunsheng, Qiu is helping out with Yang's epic. Camaraderie amongst creative types always makes my heart flutter and it is ever so prevalent in China... where a circuitous system of bangmang -helping keeps the art worlds and relationships in general afloat.
Yang locked picture on the 15th after one month of continuous shooting. Hats off to a job well done! Now post production begins urgghh

Quick updates: Beijing to Beijing, all that happens isn’t blog worthy, Sheng Qi’s new car, and navigating avante garde bickering, Zhang Hui's grass




Quickly now, because the march of time is double paced and as spaces and places tie themselves in knots I have fallen way behind on my blogsphere responsibilities. I went back to Beijing from Shanghai but never caught up with the blognotes of the last trip so very quickly back to Beijing:

1. I stayed for 7 days and each day the meals I ate became increasingly spicy: Sichuan, Guizhou, Hunan, and a fusion Thai hot pot that literally lit my pants on fire. The question is why in Beijing? Why this dry, northern town known for its noodles and salty bean sauces? Why so much severely spicy food? Rumor has it that Beijingers have a fetish for strong sensations whether they be sewer smells, orgasms or spicy food - they have to continually assault their senses one way or another in order to remind themselves that they are still alive… otherwise the traffic will swallow them whole.

2. The above mentioned Thai hotpot with Zhang Dali, Sue Qiu, Zhang Nian and Sheng Qi, The meal is worth mentioning because of the high octane chili and the fact that Sheng Qi, who has made a mint selling photos of his pinky-less hand as a contested memorial of the (jeez afraid to say it just might get censored again) bad things that happened one day in June nineteeneighteenninetianannmensquare, just bought a new VW bug and was able park on the sidewalk and block the pedestrian traffic. Yeah so what- well the sidewalk in China isn’t off limits to road traffic and road traffic isn’t off limits to pedestrian traffic and this is one theory as to why there is such horrible traffic. In addition, people with new cars in China, especially fancy German imports, receive special VIP treatment and Sheng Qi, former dissdent artist type turned noveau riche, is a VIP> BACK TO THE FINGER. I say contested because according to Zhao Shaoruo (an artist jailed and subsequently exiled to Finland for many many years because he inserted his own image over that of Chairman Mao in his photographs works) Sheng Qi chopped off the finger because of a Van Gogh-esque love ordeal with an Italian lady…. truth of the matter is that both are true – the finger came off as a combination of betrayal by both state and by love… but Sheng Qi has bought the VW by slightly mis-representing the missing pinky and cashing in on Tiananmen - but some body had to do it... Sheng Qi was the man
The contestation by Zhao Shaoruo’s, which happened on the second trip to Beijing over lunch with Wang Qingsong and a bunch of artists with integrity, of course raises another issue that dominates the discourse of China’s contemporary arts- bad tact: infighting, dissing, back stabbing, playground bullying and name calling.

3. Zhang Hui is painting like mad in yet another artstudio ghetto located somewhere along the Airport service road. Nice imaginatory people-scapes based loosely on the surreality of social transition, Chinese contemporary art rumors, and his own blurry dreams… The paintings are painted then painted again and then again… blocking out old imagery and forging a flip flop spatial depth. He uses a lot of chalky, flat, dry colors, Paine’s grey, pinks, etc. He said that he’ll give me a painting if I get him a show in NYC. Any NYC gallerists out there that want to show this brewing painting force please stand up! Besides painting he’s growing grass in his patio, hoping it will fill up to the ceiling, but I think its just gonna flatten itself to death.