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

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.

---

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

LEARNING FROM HANGZHOU @ STOREFRONT FOR ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Plleeeaaaasseee just allow me 15 more masturbatory moments with this Learning project. Promoting our own product with your own blog, how can press get any better?
Hey you know what they say: ‘If you can’t be with the one you love … love the one you’re with’

I wanted to add that LEARNING FROM HANGZHOU at Storefront for Art and Architecture was made possible with the generous support of my dear friends and frequent patrons of Chinese contemporary art, Tim and Ellen Van Housen… as well as IBEX, a big, munificent and culturally attuned construction company.
THANK YOU

Above more installation and opening shots (I left right after the opening and didn't have time to document it)
Below the project intro:

LEARNING FROM HANGZHOU
the (de)constructed environment
a photographic analysis

a project by Mathieu Borysevicz

上有天堂 下有苏杭
“Above there is Heaven, Below there is Hangzhou”


HANGZHOU
The Yangtze River Delta corridor is one of the fastest developing regions in the world. Spanning from Shanghai to Ningbo and encompassing 16 cities with populations larger than 1 million people (including Shanghai, a city of 20 million at the center) the Yangtze River Delta now boasts a gross industrial output value equivalent to 21 percent of China’s total. It is a region in China that has the most investment, population, environmental pollution, and at 45% the corridor has one of the fastest urbanization rates in the world. The city of Hangzhou lies 180 kilometers southwest of Shanghai and is a major hub in the Yangtze River Delta’s geographic and economic configuration. Over the last ten years Hangzhou has tripled in size to cover 16,596 square kilometers and increased by one million for a total population of 6.29 million.

Hangzhou dates back some 4700 years and is considered one of the cradles of Chinese civilization. It is traditionally known for its beautiful women, rich cultural heritage and romantic legends. But while downtown Hangzhou is centered around the picturesque and idyllic West Lake, the backside of the city unravels in a spirit of anarchic ecstasy with no apparent adherence to architectural stylistic integrity or regulations regarding size, signage, or districting. This is indicative of many Chinese cities, where planners cannot keep pace with the accelerated evolution brought on by the country’s recent economic growth. China’s policies of economic reform have not only affected tremendous urban expansion (and even births of cities) concentrated into a short period of time, but also an unbridled culture of consumerism. Learning from Hangzhou is a case study of revolutionary transition as it occurs in one Chinese city. The aim of the project is to delineate some of the physical manifestations effected by economic expansion and examine where socio-cultural change and urban development overlap.



LEARNING FROM ADVERTISEMENTS
This project borrows its title and cue from Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown’s seminal work, Learning from Las Vegas. The authors, in pursuit of understanding the implications of popular culture upon architectural design, observe in a late nineteen sixties Las Vegas that the distinction between architecture and signage was becoming increasingly blurred. Signage they deemed was often more important and elaborate than the venues that they advertised and some buildings were signs in themselves. While Hangzhou is no match for the surrealism that Las Vegas offers, it possesses its own idiosyncratic interrelationships of architecture and signage that are confounded by the city’s rapid pace of development. Whereas in Las Vegas, signs become the buildings, in Hangzhou, the constructed environment becomes a stage for the discourse of economic expansion, often leaving architecture at the service of signage. The advertising and real estate industries, equally prosperous, have literally obliterated the respective roles of each other. Learning from Hangzhou offers a lesson for a globalizing world that is increasingly frivolous in its commoditization of public space.

Learning from Hangzhou furthers its inquiry beyond architecture and signage to the broader spectrum of urban iconography wherein demolition and construction, architectural eclecticism, accruements of habitation, graffiti advertising, inexpensive large-scale printing, climate control and cultural desire all collide in an orgy of semiotic permissiveness and point to a civilization in the awkward throes of transition.



INSTANCE ARCHIVE
From 2003-2007 thousands of digital photographs, based on patterns or visual re-occurrences throughout the city, were recorded and archived into categories of architectural, socio-economic and urban cultural phenomena. These photographs cover territory from outdoor advertising (in its many different and all enveloping configurations) to the constructed environment (the transitional zones of demolition/construction sites, architecture, and architectural apparatus’) to urban culture’s visual codes (street markings, ad imagery, internet bars, the wedding industry, etc.). The intention is that by isolating instances of repetition from the overall fabric of the city processes of urbanization and social/cultural change can be examined more carefully. Learning from Hangzhou is an attempt to present a developing city codified along the edges of its own physical utterances.

Like every city, Hangzhou is a dynamic organism whose very fabric is disappearing as quickly as it is woven. Learning from Hangzhou attempts to record phenomena that will otherwise vanish in China’s amnesiac race towards hypermodernity; and to ultimately describe a civilization and its attendant environment that is alive with frenetic change.

Presented here are excerpts from the project.

SPECIAL THANKS:
Storefront for Art and Architecture
Asian Cultural Council
China Academy of Fine Arts, New Media Department, Hangzhou
Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi
Tim and Ellen Van Housen
Shen Min
Pernilla Ohrstedt
Zhang Peili
Wang Xiaofeng
Liu Peng
Peng Yun

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.