M50 almost like an AK47 to the head

Phil Tanari and LuLu Huang, came to town today sporting their bohemian chic best and a grab bag of Art Forums. On a brief east coast tour, Phil over coffee, broods about art criticizing in an age of ballet shoe oblivion. (I don't mean the shoes that he was wearing though they were especially special - albeit a little wet from the rain- but the idea that we tip toe around on padded soles as to not disturb the flow.. maybe even at the expense of critical integrity? but then again who reads the stuff anyway) The review was of a politically corrected convulsion of a show with apparently no mojo or, in the end, politic at the Moscow Biennial. What's a writer/ reviewer to do? Especially without a wireless connection? Sell some ART Forum Ad space... which goes like steamed dumplings in Shanghai, and as I find out later that day, for at least a grand less than Art in America .
And the rain poured down as we stood in the palatial mess of ShangArt's warehouse space, FINALLY getting a face lift and plugging in them roof leaks.. never good for art preservation. Shanghart the biggest and best gallery in Shanghai has garnered solid relations with all the artists in the Yangtze River Delta in case you haven't heard- Next week Yang Fudong opens at their project space H -This week the remains of a Li Shan show - his very gay but somehow magical paintings and his photographic works that graph human testicals and insects together.
Wrapped in plastic, a 100,000 some odd dollar Zhou Tie hai tripdych beckons on the way out.
and then all of a sudden...
Hugo and Juan come tripping out of the Shangart construction on a mission to find a day light studio here in (raining till Sunday) Moganshan Artopolis
We go see to Wang Xingwei, in his recently renovated and paintingless studio. His Urs Meile show showed the world that there is still hope for (or at least someone who has an active imagination in his) painting
The studio won't work because the subject, aforementioned Li Shan, will be hanging with wings and there's no way to hang the man here...
Wang Xingwei will be being chased by a fighter plane as he runs across a ground that is a big potato (read Hugo from last week if you are lost)
anyway
China Art now took off the money wallpaper ... but they should've just left it on
Robert Bernell's Timezone Books, just opened in Shanghai, is sooo much slicker than his old digs in Beijing and they have both Art Forum and Art in America and Parkett where you can read about Yang Fudong
It's all related
I promise

Hugo Yang Fudong Lu Chunsheng

Hugo Tillman has been photographing "film stills of contemporary Chinese artist's subconscious'" The images are culled from brief interviews of the artists. I had the pleasure of translating for Yang Fudong, my Pig Year hero (who showed at MoMA, Marian Goodman and is often profiled in Art Forum etc. for his series of films that remake Chinese literature classics into updated, languid 35mm black and white films usually portraying a bunch of beautiful and desperate Chinese youth mulling around idlyllic landscapes in strange clothes); and Lu Chunsheng who follows in Yang's footsteps with a similar film series called "The History of Chemistry" which has little to do with either history or chemistry but according to him makes an inquiry into these belief systems.
Anyway
Both interviews were pleasurable for the fact that we talked very little about art, instead focusing on these artists childhoods. Yang Fudong whose very modest childhood (somehow giving birth to pretentious films) was defined by his father's military posting and later factory manager, whose mother was a cashier in a store, who had strange visions of horseback riders in the sky during the '76 earthquake in Beijing, and whose childhood toys were spent gun cartridges and bullets.
Lu Chunsheng also had some weaponry in his early years. Also a factory kid, though he's not certain what his father exactly did, traded two ping pong paddles for gun parts being assembled in the adjacent factory from a a bunch of other factory kids.