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So I’ve taken a 3 + week hiatus to straighten things out on the other side of the globe. Nueva York beckoned and I heeded, and I must say “what a time it was” I Heart NY with all my heart especially when I’m just passing through. But in order to catch up as I am continually doing, continually past forwarding… I go back to about a month ago when Christopher Phillips and Victoria Lu look poised for an arm wrestling match… y’know I’m not sure where I’d place my bets if it came to an arm wrestling match between these two curatorial VIP’s but I’d say it’d be a good match. Christopher is currently co-curating, with his friend Sally Wu, an exhibition called “Shanghai Kaleidoscope” for the Royal Ontario Museum’s stunning new contemporary wing. The wing is a mind fuck for any installer or curator and comes to us via another one of Daniel Libeskind’s wet dreams. It is truly impossible to hang art or project art or find an electrical socket close enough to where you may want to place art, you get the picture - just a bunch of haphazardly cantilevered walls made of expensive imported German steels so that the building will always win in the ongoing arm wrestling match with the art it holds. Anyway Christopher is interviewing major players on Shanghai’s contemporary cultural scene for the exhibition. These interviews with architects, artists, designers, curators, etc. will be part of the show- most likely they’ll be presented on pedestals because the only 10ft sq upright wall may be taken by a painting at this point. Victoria Lu is the creative director at the Shanghai MoCA, a private museum tyrannically governed by Jade magnate, Samuel Kung. Victoria, still super-funky after all these years, lets the museum’s young curators run amok in effort to counter the evil leader’s fuzzy dictatorial agenda, sometimes even mounting a comprehensive show in their wake. Victoria is from Taiwan but her family originates from Shanghai- they left with the Kuomingdang when the PRC took over- a street is still named after her grandfather who must have been quite important– like she is today (no street names yet). She feels a particular affinity to Shanghai, speaks the local dialect and gets to go to all the fancy city goverment parties because she is like one of us. She is a proponent of something she calls Animatronix - a mix of the cartoon world and the new media world and she thinks it’s taking over as a major aesthetic shift much like hip-hop is/was or neo-retro is/was or the cool Wolfgang Tillman snapshot aesthetic so well employed by Marc Jacobs ads or was that a Nan Goldin aesthetic, anyway nothing’s taking over, maybe taken for a short ride but …. Victoria was recently interviewed by China Vogue where she disclosed all the juicy stuff about her last three husbands, a suicide attempt, and shopping secrets but not too much about the Animatronic thing. A far more interesting interview to say the least. Christopher shot away from a pre-composed scribbly list of questions and shook his head yes to everything she said. I’m sure a lot of people react that way to her. She is rumored to leave MoCA soon but not Shanghai. Stay tuned.
A bunch of lonesome and very quarrelsome heroes were smoking out along the open road; the night was very dark and thick between them, each man beneath his ordinary load. "I'd like to tell my story," said one of them so young and bold, "I'd like to tell my story, before I turn into gold."
Han Lei was one of the first creative types I met in China. I went to his Alienation opening in Ritan Park, Beijing back in 1994. Alienation was a series of black and white, 35mm photographs taken in small cities throughout China but mostly Zhengzhou and Kaifang where Han Lei originally comes from. It was a badly hung, badly lit exhibition held one rainy fall evening in Ritan's classicly dilapidated pavilion. Despite the lack of exhibition craftsmanship the work was undeniably strong, tight, focused and intensly moody. Hong Lei was at the opening, Wu Xiaojun too, Wang Jin maybe... but I don't remember much and only now, much later, does anyone stretch their memories back and land on that gloomy night as our first meeting.
At the time I was mesmerized by the scene and its impenetrable characters, mulling about like stealth warriors in a post apocalyptic void. I was tagging along with Cao Weijun, a new friend in a land shaking off the ideological constraints of Socialism's stark legacies. I didn't speak enough to Chinese to follow what was happening and Cao Weijun would intermittently drop me a clue in his broken, baritone English. Afterwards we strolled for what seemed like miles to a hole in the wall restaurant (that's all there seemed to be at the time - one hole in the wall restaurant after another- with plastic stools , florescent lighting and a roll of pink toilet paper on the table that doubled as napkins- ahhh the good ole days)
'Put out your cigarette, my love, you've been alone too long; and some of us are very hungry now to hear what it is you've done that was so wrong"
The bunch of hunched over, long haired cigarette smoking heroes cracked jokes between art talk, puffs on their cigarettes and the occasional mouthful of home style cooking. It was a distant memory but alas the birth of a friendship with Han Lei, who slightly older and mature seemed to me a philosopher cum photographer hero scraping out the existential fodder of China's hinterlands.
He's kind of the same now with a different set of accessories- as are the rest of that bunch to more or lesser degrees of financial success. But Han Lei still lives on the border, in the distance, in somewhereelse-ville, still tortured by the primal questions of the human condition.
Anyway I never made it to the Three Shadows opening in Beijing, and I'm not sure Han Lei did either. I was bogged down with the echoes of my bad visa judgment, Han Lei was probably deterred by the rain.
The Three Shadows opening exhibition revisits "NEW PHOTO" a short lived, hand xeroxed magazine produced by Rong Rong and Liu Zheng from 1996-1998. It profiled the two artist works as well as that of their friends. During those years photography in China emerged with unprecedented force knocking the doors down on painting's hitherto domination of the scene. There was a huge outpouring of performative photography and other conceptual modes that became source material for a zillion exhibition proposals to NY institutions that I made during that time with no success. It 's all about timing Yes heard that one before.
Photography still remains in China, as it does elsewhere in the world, one of the dominant forms of art making.
SO once again I am curating my own photography exhibition that will go back to the US with me when I finally do. Han Lei will be in it as will a lot of the usual suspects.
FIGURE/LANDSCAPE/FIGURE
Artists:
Zhang Dali, Han Lei, Rong Rong and Inri, Bai Yiluo, Sheng Qi, Wang Lang/Liu Xinhua, Li Wei, Sun Hongbin
Curated by Mathieu Borysevicz
Rapid social transformations coupled with changes in the cultural, economic and physical environment of today’s China have provided artists with a plethora of surrealist and dramatic inspiration to draw upon. Navigating the intersections of landscape and figurative photography, these artists represent the vanguard of China’s rising art scene. The works in this show range from documentations of dying, traditional folklore to urban interventions to political statements, digital montages and beyond. In each instance, new formulas for the age-old photographic traditions of figure and landscape are uncovered.
Since the advent of photography, portraiture and figurative motifs dominated the practice. In this exhibition we not only see many artists extending this practice, but freely combining it with the equally prevalent tradition of landscape photography. In many instances the increasing urbanization of China has enveloped the landscape and subsequently become a stage for artists to act out their own renditions of the surrounding urban metamorphoses. Figurative photography, with the essence of the human form at its heart, has traditionally been at the service of the state in the People’s Republic. Consequently the legacy of propaganda and identity photography has become a subject in itself for many of these artists. Adversely, earlier folklore and superstition, on the verge of obsolescence, is also the site of investigation for artists.
above "A Bunch Of Lonesome Heroes" Leonard Cohen
IKEA in the rainy morning, looking for, among other things, a toilet seat that fits the toilet... seems impossible
IKEA -same shit, same building-different street name
Lunch with
James BrearleyB A U I N T E R N A T I O N A LBREARLEY ARCHITECTS + URBANISTSwww.bau.com.auat Whisk which sells itself as a chocolate bar but you can get a mighty tuna salad with that pink salad dressing striped over the top as well. The large "shot" of thick, but not Jacques Torres thick, hot chocolate, all for a mere ... James picked up the tab, wasn't so bad either
James is a displaced Australian Urbanist Architect who has been in Shanghai long enough to build a glass boxed cafe atop an already impressive square 4 story building in the middle of the French quarter. He, and his modest staff including his sweet wife/partner, designs cities and buildings and then the designs get thrown out or fudged by the corrupt contractors or egotistical greedy city officials but in the end some slight variant of the original plan gets built, no time for being precious here.I gave him the Learning from Hangzhou Powerpoint presentation (www.mabz.net has a small section under Imaging for those that read this stinking blog) and he scheduled me a lecture in his cafe sometime soon. It's nice to know some nice art.achiUrban minded people in Shanghai
Christopher Phillips, ICP curator, all the way from ice stormy New York or Newark, as planes for the middle kingdom sometimes depart from these days, was suffering the 13hr flight and time difference jet lag that had me down for weeks, but still made his way through a Tuesday full of museum openings in Pudong to dinner with me in Puxi at Lost Heaven, a heavenly under-lit Yunnanese restaurant. Yunnan is one of China's southwestern provinces bordering Laos, Burma and full of minority color. China has 56 ethnic minorities all with their own language, food, customs etc A good portion of these ethnicities are matriarchally structured
Christopher talked about the evolution of a museum culture in China and the currently backward, but quickly changing conditions; and the pet project cultural investments by the same, above mentioned, corrupt officials. We talked about art stars and the peripheral but very eclectic characters that dot the small but growing art world here, we talked about the market, the millions that the artists are sitting on, about Zhou Tiehai's new villa in some antiseptic corner of Pudong- a city that was a horizontal piece of farm land when I first visited in 1994 and then we talked about Daniel Libeskind's new museum wing in Toronto where Chritopher is curating an exhibition about Shanghai, and for which I will film some interviews... maybe.
It's all maybes here... until you build some museums, cities, etc.
