A brief not exactly about about 'Surfacing' + 2008 Micro Macro Mine, In No Particular Order

Phil Tanari wrote me and said

"Do you have any interest in doing a year-end "top ten" for the .cn website? I am trying to organize a half-dozen or so of the usual suspects to write up their picks a la the mothership so that we have some nice nuggets to feed into Angle for the holiday season. This would be somewhere between 600-1000 words total, a list of your top picks for exhibitions/artists/incidents/etc in 2008, accompanied by some photos."

Yeahh
The cn website is artforum.com.cn which, as I found out this past weekend (at the opening of "Surfacing" - a group painting show at the Shanghai Gallery of Art - ) actually does get read, and not only does it get read but the forum section, where a zillion Chinese art world blogs are linked, gets this here rad-ass blog some eye-action as well! Chen Jie, a young super funk painter dude from Beijing (via Sichuan where he studied with Zhang Xiaogang-who gave him and his lovely, equally as funked out, wife Li Shurui - who's also in the "Surfacing" show- a Blood Line lithograph for their wedding.) actually saw and read this blog- in particular, the Chinglish entry which may have been interpreted as being semi-critical... which in fact it might have been given my part time status as "CRITIC"

Anyway, The SGA show is very clever and circuitous, in a David Chan kind of way, with painting looking as relevant as ever... or trying to look relevant, in that 'take me home and have your way with me', kind of way . Chen Jie makes one helluva departure from his earlier, more precious, Gerhard Ricteresque, KOK paintings. Here he's on a more rule-based, mathematical, formalism trip. One might even use the Zen word if they were that type of person. There's also some very enigmatic, very stuccoed, post impressist work by yet another painter's painter outa Shenyang - Wu GuangYu ... and they served hot-mulled wine at the opening, y'know for Christmas
Anyway
Here is MY 2008 list which I'm not sure ever made it to the cn website

2008 Micro Macro Mine, In No Particular Order
Mathieu Borysevicz

Trying to mine ten memorable “art experiences” out of 2008 is not only arduous but something that misses the expansive points that contemporary art has been trying to make for the last forty some odd years- that life is far more interesting. One of the grand curatorial conceits of this year’s Guangzhou Triennial, Farewell to Post Colonialism is the fact that art practices today are endangered by a reality that is increasingly fanciful, increasingly confounded by an ever-expansive mass media and proliferation of nonlinear technology, something that curator, Gao Shiming identifies as the virtual world colonizing the real world. In my very non-linear list below, some of the entries are events that belong to this greater communal reality. While they are not art events per se, they are some of the most spectacular, image driven, cultural experiences that I (and you and everybody else) have witnessed, and which undoubtedly will influence the pristine domain of the art world.
Another point I’d like to make in compiling this tableau of events is that art, no matter how you play it, is a subjective game that ultimately resists quantification or qualification. There were countless events in 2008 that were important and influential but did not make my list because either I didn’t see it, didn’t want to see it or saw it and didn’t like it. Any notion that I will reinforce your own convictions of taste will be disproved by this very biased list. My 2008 was indeed just that, mine, like it or not.

2008 in no particular order:

Baby Rats
2008 was the year that I, and many others in the Chinese art world became parents. While procreation encompasses a surfeit of physical, emotional and psychological experiences that contemporary art will never achieve, it will certainly inflect the practices of these new parents with a more life-affirming, humble, and purposeful approach to things. Stay tuned for enlightened changes from: artist, Yang Zhenzhong and writer, Lu Lei; artists, Xu Zhen and Feng Zhengjie; the Beijing based German photographer, Roland Fischer; Continua Gallery’s Qiu Keman, curator Tang Xin and artist/designer Xie Wenyue; critic, Carol Lu and artist, Liu Ding, and the countless others who became parents in 2008. Viva Procreation!
.... and WAIT this just in - Michael Lin and Heidi Voet just had twins!!!! Yahoo join the club

Earthquake
The Sichuan Earthquake was a humanitarian disaster that spectacularly mobilized millions, the art world included. Not only did several artists (including myself, Ai Weiwei, Zhao Bandi, Hu Xiangcheng and Luo Ping, etc.) personally visit the devastation but countless money was raised by impromptu art auctions and other art world contributions. From a formal point of view the media’s role in galvanizing the masses was epic. The grand, theatrical narrative of devastation, conspiracy and bereavement played out for months across a myriad of media in China and around the globe. On televisions, billboards, and the internet real life tragedy was transformed into fiction and vice versa. Premier Wen Jiabao cried, heroic soldiers rescued and countless victims were and are still mourned.

Hipic.org
In this accelerated age of incessant media clamor and digital instantaneity the world, and hence our consciousness, overflows with photographic images. It would be impossible to estimate the amount of photographs that are produced everyday or even every second on this planet. Biz Art’s Hipic takes an imaginary stab at this enigma. Hipic is a computational machine that recycles digital images as a communal, time based, artwork, both online and in public, one minute at a time for the rest of time... or as long as participants contribute to the piece. At the time of writing this, Hipic was one year, three months, nine days, fifteen hours and seven minutes old- or close to 600,000 images long. Online or in public installations Hipic’s images progress in an illogical, though steady stream, one minute at a time, forming an ambience of constantly changing vistas.


2008 Olympics
Looking back it’s funny how much a thing of the past the Olympics are now. Was that August or 1999? Now matter how much we’d love to forget the Olympics, it has became an integral part of contemporary culture, not only in it’s employment of some of China’s most famous artists but in its omnipresent hold on our consciousness’. While the pre-Olympics Olympics formed an ideology based on magnitude, national pride and promise, the Olympics itself, from the architecture to the over anticipated, super elaborate, CG embellished opening performances to Liu Xiang’s tragic Achilles heel injury - which threw the entire nation into a psycho-analytical blame game, to the surreality of its closing ceremony- accented by Led Zeppelin’s aging guitarist, Jimmy Page playing “Whole Lotta Love” atop a transforming double-decker bus, the Olympics were truly a feast.


Comfortable Show, Shanghai
The critic Gao Minglu in his Inside/Out exhibition, identified a movement within early nineties Chinese art as “Apartment Art”. No matter how well this label fits the work of artists who basically had no other venues at the time, Shanghai was host to its own version of apartment art this Autumn. Amidst the hoopla of the Shanghai Biennial and the second incarnation of SH Contemporary, artist, Jin Shan and others organized a small but very refreshing exhibition inside an old lane house apartment in Shanghai’s French Concession. The exhibition seemed to begin well before reaching the venue itself, in the laundry-strewn alleyways and slightly dilapidated halls that doubled as communal kitchens. The event’s casual, DIY strategy was antithetical to the other art events in the city at the time. An installation of visitors’ shoes (Lu Yonglei) greeted newcomers to the exhibition while people dressed only in red imitation Calvin Klein undies and printed white t-shirts (Alexandre Ouairy) lounged about everywhere. An air conditioner unit installed inside out heated up the space and leaked water all over (Jin Shan), while in another room a floor of cushioned tiles (Tang Dixin) made walking impossible. The lived in, funhouse aspects of this exhibition gave the participant a feeling of being part of a teenage fantasy experiment rather than an exhibition.

Playing the Building, David Byrne’s Creative Time NY
David Byrne is one of those artists who traverse different mediums and forms with exquisite ease. With operas, films, music production, music curating, books, blogs, furniture, photography and The Talking Heads behind him what else can he possibly do? This summer as part of Creative Time’s ongoing series of public works, Byrne transformed lower Manhattan’s Battery Maritime Building into an interactive musical instrument. Opening at the same time as Olafur Eliasson’s much hyped, 15 million dollar waterfall installations, Byrne’s piece instead used low key, lo-fi technology to magically resuscitate a dilapidated building. The piece was composed of a reconfigured antique organ from which plastic tubes strung out in an elegant web and attached to various parts of the cavernous building. When the organ’s keys were pressed air pumped through the tubes eliciting various clanking or blowing noises from the building’s nineteenth century structure and delighting participants.


Intrude: Art & Life 366, Zendai MoMA
Zendai Museum’s Intrude: Art & Life 366 series was a little too ambitious to really succeed. The project’s goal was that for the 366 days of 2008 a different artwork would intervene in Shanghai’s public realm. It was an earnest attempt to cross breed reality with the esoteric realm of contemporary art, to infiltrate new territories and reach new audiences. Art & Life 366 was a good idea but very difficult to manage, promote, document or realize in general. Having said this, 366 saw a formidable slew of local and international artists working in areas that they have hitherto never been for audiences that never expected it. Some of Intrude’s highlights included Vibeke Jensen’s nighttime video projections on Shanghai’s cultural institutions, Bai Yiluo’s oversized human heart being driven around on the back of a tricycle cart, Yoko Ono’s Instructional pieces and Yang Yong’s photographs as subway posters, Utopian Group’s museums in private homes project, etc., etc.


The US Presidential Election and Obama Mania
Need I say more?

Learning from Hangzhou at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, NYC
I play many roles in the art world: critic, curator and artist. In the age of plurality multitasking is certainly allowed. I approach each role with equal vigor and try my best to avoid collisions. Oddly though, as a critic I am constantly asked which artists I like most. I have pondered this question many times but always draw the same conclusion… me. If I didn’t think this I would probably not make art anymore. I told you that I was biased, didn’t I? But in compiling this list as a critic I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t include the installation, Learning from Hangzhou at Storefront for Art and Architecture in NYC. Learning from Hangzhou is a case study of urban phenomena, especially as it concerns the relationships between construction, advertisements and architecture. It just so happened that Storefront was renovating its façade this summer and the piece, which consists of thousands of images and text, was mounted as a billboard on the 140foot long construction blind. The opening was held inside the blind and on the street, literally in the transitional zone of construction site and public space (exactly the crux of the project), which along with the proximity to New York’s Chinatown heightened the work’s sense of site-specificity.

East of Que Village, Yang Fudong at Shanghart
David Velasco in writing about the same exhibition for the same publication called East of Que Village “a ravishing study of antagonism on the fringes”. MoMA curator Barbara London confessed in conversation that she thought that the piece was the artist’s most political and personal to date. After seeing Yang Fudong’s East of Que Village I’m still not exactly sure what either of these comments mean, but somehow they both seem accurate. Wild dogs are the protagonists in this bleak, six screen, video installation. While a pack of dogs scrape the sustenance out of a dusty, barely populated northern town, an oddly hierarchical group dynamic emerges amongst them. Perhaps the dynamic is one that we project upon them, as survivalists ourselves.

Liu Xiang, Over Determined Herosim OR the over/underdog, Shanghai Guys, Sun Xun with Dr. Spock and Dick Nixon- The Unedited HAMMER (non) Catalog

Poor Liu Xiang, you can only feel bad for the guy. After years of being fluffed as China’s gold medal maniac he, ironically enough, pulled his Achilles Heel (held for so long by his metaphorical mother- China) just before the big relay race, throwing the entire nation into a state of psycho-analytical blame game. All over the media today critical and compassionate outpouring posed the questions: are we to blame?, is Liu Xiang a wimp?, should we feel sorry or angry or both? The point is there’s no way any individual can stand so much retarding pressure.

A whole year of over determination in the form $20million USD’s worth of endorsements, one documentary program on the guy after 10 news bleeps, after magazine cover, China’s grand embodiment of Olympic greatness, the man who gave even Yao Ming a run for his money as the face of Chinese athletic aptitude, crumbled.

Cest la vie – For me the anti climax is even more profound – and in The Olympics there seems to be a lot of this – I just watched two gymnasts fall… even though you know these ‘losers’ are going back to a beating from their dad… like Liu Xiang is getting one from the whole populace, the guy who hit it spot on was boring in my mind. The over dog is more interesting when he's the underdog in my mind.

Funny though that these two suspects, Liu and Yao, are from Shanghai- where I am writing this and where the men are known not for their athletic enormity, but instead for being sissies. Shanghai dudes are stereotyped as skinny, glass wearing pussies that carry their girlfriend’s bags, and are the ones in the family that cooks dinner, usually while wearing an apron, and then cleans up. The image of Yao wearing an apron or carrying his girl’s handbag is a curious one indeed. The point of all this is that China is still the undiscovered country, even by its own countrymen. The Olympics is allowing us to explore this terrain but even the Chinese themselves are pulling it out of their traditionally inflected, globalized, late capital arse it together as they go.

Just like me.

Below is the unedited version of an essay that I wrote allegedly for a catalog for a museum show. Museum show it was indeed – The Hammer in LA- but it wasn’t really a catalog. Turned out to be a brochure of sorts. Nice as it was I’d rather have one hard cover catalog than 30 of these flimsy brochures. I mean, whom do you give them to? Anyway since the essay, originally written for a particular audience, that is LAers, I decided to use some referents close to (their Hollywood) homes. I mean, in what other context could you bring Dr. Spock, Nixon and China contemporary art’s animator numero uno, Sun Xun together in one diatribe.

Either way the editors weren’t as seduced as I was by this dexterous display of pluralistic magnetism and cut out the Star Trek part.

pity Below as it appeared prior the slash and burn.

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NEW CHINA, The Undiscovered Country

'The world stripped of anticipation turns cold and grey'.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the sixth and last film based on the Star Trek science fiction television series presents the cast’s final mission together in what is a parable for the end of the Cold War circa 1990. Spock, when he confronts Kirk’s apprehension of dealing with the Klingons, makes an apt reference by quoting what he refers to as a “Vulcan Proverb”, “Only Nixon could go to China”. President Nixon’s 1972 visit to China was the first step in normalizing relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China. Just as the Federation visits the Klingons and awkwardly toast to their “Undiscovered Country” (a Shakespearian reference to death or an uncertain future) Nixon’s visit marked the first time a U.S. President had set foot in the P.R.C., a nation which considered the U.S. as one of its biggest enemies. This event, prefaced by decades of mutual demonization was an initial step in making these enemies face each other as human beings and helped to alter the anticipation of a world, hitherto mired in the Cold War’s inevitable endgame of nuclear fallout.

Nixon’s visit, albeit significant, left different legacies on either side of the ideological divide. For eight days and nights, American television audiences tuned in to a dazzling parade of images from this undiscovered country, the first that they had seen in over 20 years. Consequently, in the U.S., after decades of Cold War polemics permeated the core of postwar American culture, Nixon’s visit was triumphed as a diplomatic milestone - “The week that changed the world" he self-proclaimed, yet in China where the masses had little access to the pristine seduction of the televised image, Nixon’s visit was allotted a place in history as a brief distraction from domestic hardship and capitalist bashing. The president’s visit referenced by the Vulcans some several hundred, fictitious, light years later further demonstrates the skewed stratification of political memory. Different times, places, politics and perhaps, most importantly, media necessitate the production and consumption of a different history. It is in the contestation of political historicity that Sun Xun constructs his dystopic, multimedia world.

Historical Memory as a Theatre of Class Struggle

Eight years of Cultural Revolution after Nixon’s visit Sun Xun was born in Liaoning province along the north-east coast of China. While most of the country was, once again, in the throes of re-inventing itself - this time along the tenets of Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform and opening up policies, which declared “to get rich is glorious”, the new country that Sun grew up in was essentially the same old country. The effects of China’s momentous shift from socialism to capitalism were slow to change the proletariat mold of this peripheral mining county and so Sun was raised in the folds of a historical lapse. Propaganda still blasted from loudspeakers every morning bringing the factory complex where he grew up to attention just as it had done for the past few decades. Uniformed workers shuffling against chimneystacks and fluttering flags colored the environment of Sun’s childhood, as did reams of newspapers that disseminated the same good word of an altogether “New China” still in its infancy. As society was changing quickly the official mode for dealing with it was not. The same party voice propagated the same message but had little resonance in this new context. And so while the scattered visual remnants of totalitarianism planted the seeds for Sun’s work it was this environment of defective historicity that helped to form his work’s allegorical roots.

Sun Xun’s enterprise plies the uncontested surface of politicized truth with artistic means. By tying together the tenets of academic drawing with political cartoons and projecting them into the realms of installation and film, Sun’s multifaceted, imagistic world is manifest as improvisational theatre. His broken narratives, peopled with pedagogues as magicians and infectious insects that plague the world, work on the viewer’s emotional response to fear- fear of the unknown; of the undiscovered country that Shakespeare, Nixon, Spock and each of us cower to. But it is the ambiguous era in which he sets his stories that further mystifies the viewer. Sun’s world lies suspended in anonymous twentieth century eternality; a past riddled with legacies of modernity at its most extremes- a film noir testimony to absolutism. His flickering images crystallize into a gritty, dystopic urban overture to revolution; it is the Industrial Revolution as much as it is the Cultural Revolution. But Sun’s work, muddled in this overlapping and obsolete modernity, idles at the brink of revolution without spilling over. His aim is to scratch the surface of political history, a history continuously conflated into myth, in order to expose the past as being in a state of constantly becoming. His vision is the pregnant pause of mythology in the making.

In post modernism’s “crisis of historicity”, where recorded events are confounded by the pastiche of existing juxtapositions, the resulting collage is the allegorical enterprise of Sun Xun. Perhaps Sun’s suspicion of mediated truth comes with the territory. The China that Sun grew up in was in a constant state of re-invention and denial. Moving hastily from socialist bankruptcy towards economic salvation much of the population hasn’t had the opportunity to fully process the onslaught of novelty that they have, and continue to, experience. The physical, social, and cultural transformations of this New China have created a paradox where nostalgia for the way things were is continually negated by the continually new, and where the ideological imprint left by Mao has yet to be adequately filled. When Sun was still in grade school the “East is Red” changed its tune to “Balls under the Red Flag” as the end of the nineteen eighties saw the shock of yet another China. Taking the May 4th Movement’s (instigators of the twentieth century’s original “New China”) seventy year anniversary as their cue, students occupied Tiananmen Square in effort to reform what they saw as a government out of step with the current needs of society. The outcome of this standoff was yet another New China, which violently crushed individual liberties while simultaneously promoting individual wealth and unbridled consumerism. Today China is intoxicated with its newfound material salvation but has yet to comprehend its recent past, revise its politics or fulfill the spiritual needs of its people. It is in this erratic social transformation that a sense of collective historical amnesia has begun to set in. Sun’s work is an expression of this amnesia.

Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.

A history buff with a tendency to collect anything old in print, Sun Xun was given a bi-lingual, turn-of-the century publication, “The New China”. This book, ironically written by an American during his ten-year stay in the Republic of China , outlines a dogma of how a Chinese should behave in a world that was at the onset of globalization. Originally employed as a tool for cultivating a new sense of Nationalism, this doctrine is hauntingly similar to ones employed later by Mao at the outset of Communist Liberation or the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. It is also similar to ones being employed in the schools of today’s hypermodern China. While the reasons behind the dogma have changed the principals haven’t “Love and honor your country”. Fredric Jameson in writing about Utopia suggests that today's historical situation requires archaeologies of the future and not forecasts of the past. For China this is an apt prescription. Today, in the third major power shift in modern history, whereby America’s twentieth century domination has instigated an accelerating global economy and the rise of “the rest”, China sits at the helm. But the political signposts of today suggest a potentially different future, one in which China remains a country that is still undiscovered. China’s state of indeterminacy is expressed as a country that prepares for a science fiction future while forms of labor exploitation reminiscent of the industrial age still blight it; and with economic socialism left far in the dust, Marx’s, Das Kapital, becomes a bestseller in the nation’s capital . Sun Xun’s works are utterances of the historical schizophrenia that plagues China- a nation that is in a state of incessantly becoming new.

1 ‘The End Of Utopia: Politics And Culture In An Age Of Apathy’ Russell Jacoby quoting Betrold Brecht, Basic Books (May 2, 1999) ‘The Fight for History,
2 A Manifesto’ by Kate Sharpley, a First World War anarchist and anti-war activist which proclaims that the bourgeois institutions of the State's cultural apparatus will always attempt to control and exploit the historical record for their own benefit. 3 “The East is Red- Dongfang Hong”, a Cultural Revolution song that reveres Mao Tsedong by equating him with the sun. “Hongqi Xiade Dan” Cui Jian, “China’s father of Rock and Roll’s” ambiguous yet hugely popular song and album title that describes his generation as eggs (testicles under) laid by the Red Flag of the P.R.C. 4 Movement set off when students and intellectuals rioted in Tiananmen Square on May, 4th 1919 to protest China’s colonial occupiers and the constraints of Confucianism in effort to establish a distinctly, independent Chinese modernity. 5 Gertrude Stein, A Completed Portrait of Picasso (1924). First published in Vanity Fair. 6 The New China” written by H. B. Graybill Missionary and Educator in China 1914 7 Fareed Zakaria, Rise of the Rest, NEWSWEEK, May 12, 2008

The Inevitable Olympics as Cultural Mutiny, Dennis Oppenheim-No free rides to Beijing, and LEARNING at STOREFRONT, a site specific masterpiece

SO
I’m sure you were all watching as China after much anticipation, frustration and climate control blitzkrieg, skyrocketed into 21st history last night. Funny how much the ceremony, steeped in obsolete and irrelevant traditionalism, owed so much to contemporary art (Xu Bing and Gu Wenda in particular); Funny how “official” Chinese contemporary culture in general is inevitably mixed up with its antiheroes – Ai Weiwei as the reluctant king of the bird’s nest, Zhang Yimo as 6th generation cultural minister, Cai Guoqiang as national pyromaniac, etc.... Funny watching as the foreign press still diligently sniffs out anything that resembles infractions of human rights, often at the expense of mistaking Chinese incompetency for repression... Funny though, how competent China actually appears to be, shoving its 41Billion dollar Olympic face at the world while even Kobe Bryant is willing to cut Beijing a little slack for not scrubbing every atmospheric inch free of smog.

Funny how all of this comes on the heels of Kung Fu Panda’s box office domination and China intellectual flagellation “how could we let Hollywood feed us our own culture and how come it tastes and looks soo good?” Funny that pres Bush (would you get out of there already) talking religious freedom and Taiwan cloaked as “Chinese Taipei” is allowed into the spotlight if only for a moment.

Funny that we’re finally here, alive and well! after all those damned numbers clocked themselves into eternity on Tiananmen Square.

Enjoy the games! Dennis Oppenheim will.

He came to my opening at Storefront for Art and Architecture in NYC where, after weeks of postponement and Adobe Illustrator hell, I finally got the Hangzhou (see previous entries) piece up in one piece. Dennis, still shaggy haired and wearing a black t-shirt after all these years, will go to Beijing to see his 18ft high safety cone sculptures which are installed in the Olympic Village… he’s paying his own fare because no one invited him to see it- The powers that be obviously don’t know a VIP when they see one. He’ll probably watch Kung Fu Panda on the plane and eat fusion fare just like us after our splendid month in NYC where we were fed a daily dose of China bashing ala NYTimes and a lot of scary pollution statistics that made us think about changing our flight more than once.

Anyway please click here and then here for a look at LEARNING FROM HANGZHOU in an exceptional site-specific manifestation (Storefront is renovating its facade and the piece –which is all about the relationship between advertising and construction/architecture/urbanization is mounted as a billboard on the construction blind around Storefront. The opening was held inside the blind, literally in a construction site… very nice site specificity… not to mention another aspect mentioned by Peggy Roalf in DART “It's as if New York has been presented with a public reading wall, much like the public newspaper reading walls that can still found in China.”) Yep I’m still my favorite artist.

Now back to women’s weightlifting … and I thought women were smarter than that.