Skype Portraits, An old feeling in a New Year

So the baby's been sick, I've been spending lots of money and not making any, the landlord is trying to kick us out because he needs to sell the place so that he doesn't go bankrupt, it's been raining for 40 day and 40 nights, and most of the phone calls I've gotten lately are advertisements, BUT, all things considered, life is beautiful in this stinky year of the OX

Above are some selections from a series I've been working on - SKYPE Portraits

These are some of the the people that have kept me psychologically, creatively and emotionally in tact for the last 9 years of my life

They all live in NYC and SKYPE is the only way to see and talk to them these days... 13 hours apart, usually late at night or early in the morning, in the intimacy of their own homes, pajamas,hangovers, hangups, etc... mediated by a pulsing cross continental spaghetti wire mess that turns us both into pixelated pumpkin pies

Jean Christian Bourcart is a photographer/filmmaker/artist whose work has been shown virtually everywhere on the planet to much critical acclaim, including an upcoming show in Shanghai which I have to get busy arranging

Marcus Burnett is one kickass cinematographer who, despite his serene calm persona has shot some mean television docu+drama, commercials, features and, once in a while, under the influence of his goodforniothing artist friends, some super experimental shorts.
Clients include:Ralph Lauren, National Geographic, and God herself

When Shanghai is still pulling itself out of one sopping post new Year melancholy - I go Skype... to NY where the weather and mood is just as sweet

as always... click to enlarge 

The Exquisite Corpse, China Surreal

I'm trying to wrap up all those leftover 2008 project entries before we get too far into 2009. "The Exquisite Corspe, China Surreal" is a show I recently curated along with m97 Gallery in Shanghai. It is an exhibition of photographs from Chinese artists and photographers that describe the surreality of this here country. It started out as an attempt to recycle an older exhibition but just expanded and expanded... some 40 artists later... The critics loved it. The Chinese version of Art Forum, listed it as a Critic Pick... totally unbeknownst to me, I swear That's Shanghai said "Every now and then an exhibition pops up to remind us that there is more to curating than simply hanging pictures on walls. Such is the case with Exquisite Corpse... Outstanding!" Furthermore 艺术当代 Art Contemporary magazine asked me to further float my boat by writing a curator's statement for their magazine. Here it is below.




"poetry must be made by all and not by one." - Comte de Lautréamont

According to legend, and the reasonable trickling down of historical record, the Exquisite Corpse was born around a table of poets and artists in France, 1925. Amongst this flamboyant group was the painter Yves Tanguy, the poets Andre Breton and Jacques Prevert. The game was a variation of an old parlor pastime and began as a way to fill the blanks of what was usually a lively discussion. Among the topics often discussed by these young intellectuals, who were already disillusioned by the so-called progress of a relatively young modern era, were the writings of Freud. Freud’s practice of psychoanalysis, dream interpretation and other explorations of the human subconscious helped these characters to foster the Surrealist movement. Surrealism was thought of as “a means toward the total liberation of the mind and of everything that resembles it…" , It was the mind that ruled reality, they suspected, and yet the mind itself was a deep mystery. While each of the original Exquisite Corpse players were involved in their own independent explorations of the mind at the time, the game relied on the group to collectively disrupt any sense of rationality in the world.

The game was played in an improvisational, lighthearted way and the rules were simple. A phrase was written on a piece of paper; folded to conceal most of its content and then passed onto the next player. Using the exposed word as a departure point the next player would continue to write. That player would then conceal most of his text and pass the paper along until everyone had completed his or her turn. In the end the unfolded paper would divulge the abstract sum of the players’ contributions. As the story goes one of the first rounds of the game produced the results, “The exquisite/corpse/will drink/the young/wine” and hence the name of the game. The sentence’s strange evocation was a utility of its contradictoriness. It was a complete, random chance that brought these words together. "Corpse" implied death; "young wine," fresh life. The beginning and end were united, and the polarized associations of each word came together like unlikely lovers. The strange, often nonsensical results that the game yielded delighted the participants who thought them to reveal the "unconscious reality in the personality of the group" or the group’s collective subconscious. Max Ernst identified these subconscious outcomes as the result of the process called "mental contagion." Not only did this activity help to reap strange collaborative possibilities but it also proved to be one of art history’s first flirtations with undermining the traditional concept of the independent author and thus helped to usher in the era of post modernity.

The game was soon adapted to the visual realm and included freeform drawing, collage as well as a version that left each player to imagine the human figure in its component parts of head, torso, waist, legs and feet. André Breton spoke of these games as "…the most fabulous source of unfindable images…" Some of the better-known players of this game were Jacques Hérold, Yves Tanguy and Victor Brauner whose renditions exposed, like psychotherapy itself, the participant’s subconscious sexual desires and perversions. Since its inception The Exquisite Corpse went on to take on many other forms including film, sculpture and theatre, each producing endless associations and collaborative possibilities. The influence of the Exquisite Corpse and other Surrealist modes of expression still persist in contemporary culture; China’s visual arts are no exception.

In 21st century China there is a surfeit of surrealistic inspiration that artists have and continue to draw upon. Rapid sociocultural transition in conjunction with extreme economic and psychical transformations has left a plethora of loopy phenomena and ideological fusions throughout the country. The undeniable psychological toll of nonstop “reform” mixed with an influx of outside influences and an increasingly conflicting economic and generational divide have made for some interesting conditions. Standing in the wake of these changes artists have attempted to deduce what little sense might be made from their metamorphosing environment. Photography, traditionally used as a tool to record social change, has been employed by many of these artists as a way to render the affects that these changes have had upon them. In the exhibition Exquisite Corpse, China Surreal an eclectic array of photographic work by artists of different generations and backgrounds expose the “mental contagion” in today’s China. It is a contagion whereby culture, tradition, the body and imagination have all been hijacked by rapid transformation.

Inevitably, artists working within the same environment have drawn similar conclusions. Many artists’ works unintentionally inform, influence and question one another’s. One need not look too hard to see shared influences and themes throughout China’s visual arts. However, the links between these autonomous works and the potential sum of their total equation is what interested us most as curators. In composing this exhibition the question of how to explore the imaginary possibilities of a collective subconscious in the context of today’s China became the key issue.

While the works in the exhibition weren’t the result of a group activity, like the original Exquisite Corpse had been, they were chosen for their inherently surrealistic content. As the entire exhibition formed a delicately composed sequence of non-sequiturs each of the works themselves presented an independent enigma to contemplated. Hong Lei’s “I Dreamt I was Hanging Upside Down While Listening to Emperor Song Huizong Play Guqin with Chairman Mao”, a digitally composited image that shows a man dangling upside down from a tree while an ensemble of historical figures play musical instruments, is a surreal composition in itself that evokes a compounded sense of history and the artist’s own dream life. But pair this image with Mao Yu’s “Tree of Man” which shows six figures wrapped in red blankets hanging like pods from a tree while below the artist himself lays face up, naked and the Exquisite Corpse begins. As a series of stand-alone subconscious expressions each work in this exhibition is linked to the next by visual or conceptual themes, sometimes subtle, sometimes explicit, to produce one communal Exquisite Corpse.

Some of the artists have constructed neurotic testimonies to the growing sense of historical amnesia and individual alienation in today’s society. Han Lei’s alarming portraits of rural folk actors being punished by severe blows to the head follows Chen Wei’s “Sand and Nobody, No.1” which shows a man surrounded by stacks of manuscripts with his head buried in a sink. Both of these compositions, that posit the human head at the center, come as the afterthought to Bai Yiluo’s “Destiny No. 1”, a montage of thousands of faces that create one larger than life size skeleton. Nearby Zhang Dali’s “Demolition 1999101A” shows a simple head carved out of the ruins of Beijing hutong while behind it looms a glossy new office building. Urban transformation also becomes the metaphorical crux in the action-flick inspired works of Li Wei that shows a woman floating high above a construction site anchored only by a team of workers. Architecture is presented as a fictional, dream space in the works of Meng Jin, Sun Ji and Lu Jun. Liu Ren’s image of an apartment complex being hit by a huge tidal wave is placed above an image from Yang Yi’s series, “Old Town of Kaixian”, which illustrates the submerging effects that the Three Gorges Dam has had on his hometown; while in Wang Ningde’s film-noirish “Someday No. 33” a 1960’s-era character is pictured from the rear rowing a boat with a collapsed woman in it. Placed nearby is “A Missing Person’s Back” by Dong Wensheng showing a bearded head upon an ancient boat that floats slowly through the water.

Several other artists posit the figure at the intersections of nature, myth and imagination to produce results that are sometimes violent, disturbing and mesmerizing. In Yu Ji’s “Fang and Fang’s Doll” a naked pregnant woman stands in the middle of the road, while off to the side, an inflatable sex doll falls from a smoking car. Ma Liang’s quirky portrait of a bride and a man in a pig outfit seem to nod at Zeng Han and Yang Changhong’s medieval costumed players that stand defiant, yet incongruous against the industrial backdrop of Chongqing. Sheng Qi’s iconic “My Left Hand” shows the artist’s pinky-less hand holding an image of a skeleton. Here the artists’ wounded grip acts as a metaphor for personal and political anguish while at the same time linking us back to “Destiny No.1” Bai Yiluo’s imposing collection of identity portraits.

Through pictorial and thematic clues we can see the common traces of China’s collective subconscious emerge- where a schizophrenic sense of history puts the past in front of us, waiting to be contended with; in an environment where the cycle of demolition and construction seems to spin endlessly, rendering everything in its path continually obsolete; and where the human figure becomes a means to explore changing social behavior and the substratum of corporeal existence. It is a succession of oracular truths that only China’s present reality could have shaped and which, in the end, yields only more enigmas.

Mathieu Borysevicz 12.08

Twas the night before the night before Christmas... Commercial Video Killed The Air Space above Shanghai

It was the night before the night before Christmas
and all through the house
several creatures were stirring
including a flatulent mother in law
as I sat re-reading Joyce's 'Araby' in an old text book compilation of English literature that somehow stuck with Yan through all these years
Yan, sitting next to me, suddenly jumped up and exclaimed "我的天what the hell is that?"
As I peered out our fabulous 14th floor wrap around window that overlooks the exhaust choked city of Shanghai ...
I saw something that I had never seen before
Flying directly over Huashan Park was a dark mass that on one side emitted an array of flashing lights
Was it a Bird? A Plane? a UFO, yes finally they have come! but wait, no
Dasher, Dancer!, Prancer and Vixe, Not really
It's a
It's a goddamn flying television!
A floating Flatscreen, an electronic sign machine high in the sky, A video blimp
Yikes
Not only are commercial video screens installed in taxis, in front of and in elevators, on boats and buildings, bathrooms, behind counters, and everywhere else in between in this advertisement soaked city BUT
now they are, up high in the sky
Air rights for sale!
I suppose it was inevitable... but what next?
One day will we open a shower tap and bathe in a stream of video-ified water?
OK
The future is now and now again
and 'public space' in every direction is being filled in
meter by meter with advertisements
And as the video Blimp flashed 'a unidentifiable array of white smiley faces and products into the Shanghai night , I heard it exclaim
"Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!"

Happy (hopefully videoless skies) 2009!

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.

Christian and Lydia + Imagine, the world’s most famous unknown artist in Shanghai

The entry below was recently featured on Art Forum's, ever so gossipy and inevitably well read Scene & Herd column of the magazine's website - in a highly edited form. I am reprinting my original, perhaps slightly more crass, version for those that are interested in the real Yoko Ono Shanghai opening story.

I also wanted to give an extra shout out to the other artists who braved the long flights to come and share their wares in Shanghai, which is desperately poised to become another international center for contemporary culture. Ahem Yeeaaa

...especially my man Christian Marclay who is not only an old friend (through the music scene in NYC more than the art one, both which he navigates quite cleverly) as is his lovely lady and ex-Bronx Museum curator Lydia Yee who accompanied him here, BUT for his Hi/lo-tech virtuosity and its affects on the old ladies whose park was hijacked by the eArts festival that he was participating in that night. Above is a pretty bad remixed collage version of what the artist was up to: He created a single channel film from archival b/w footage, he then overlayed graphic clues- lines shapes circles and asked three groups of very different musical ensembles to interpret the "Visual composition". Twas very nice indeed

Anyway... YOKO
Over the past two months Shanghai has experienced a flurry of international art visitors. It started when Christian Marclay and Eliot Sharp flaunted their NY downtown grandeur at the second incarnation of the city government run eArts Festival; then there was Shanghart’s “Involved” exhibition, in which Bern Kunshalle curator, Philippe Pirotte was accompanied by the likes of Luc Tuymans, Knut Åsdam and many others for the opening festivities; just last week James Cohan Gallery presented its third exhibition in Shanghai giving the space over to Folkert de Jong and his jolly, Styrofoam sculpted simians, who along with his entourage from the Office for Contemporary Art in Amsterdam, met everyone that was anyone in the local scene during their extended stay. But nobody was more anticipated than the crowned queen of conceptualism, Yoko Ono whose China debut took the form of FLY, a retrospective of her instructional works dating back to the early sixties at the, barely two year old, Ke Center for the Contemporary Arts.

“I feel like Marco Polo must’ve felt when he first came to China,” exclaimed Yoko Ono during an anecdote of her arrival at Shanghai’s hypermodern Pudong Airport last Thursday. Besides being Ono’s first exhibition in China it also Ono’s first time visiting mainland China. Ono who, like most Japanese, was raised on classic Chinese culture, admitted that she learned her strategies for life from Sun Tze’s Art of War at the lively press conference which ended with the artist painting her Chinese name, not on the paper prepared for it, but on the window curtain instead.

The next day’s opening was even more comic when a twenty person per viewing rule left hundreds stampeding the artists’ Ex It, 1997 wood casket pieces, which had been installed in front of the museum’s entrance, while overhead an Ono world peace promotional video blasted John Lennon’s Give Peace a Chance through a steadily building drizzle. In the rear of the crowd Shanghart gallery’s Lorenz Hebling and artist Zhou Tiehai shook their heads at the potentially hopeless, rain soaked wait and opted to head off early to the dinner instead. As the evening’s drizzle developed into a downpour the museum’s doors swung open and the wet masses funneled into an already overcrowded exhibition. “A typical Shanghai scene” joked one local standing above the crowds on a platform built into the gallery space.

While hundreds participated in Ono’s instructional pieces including the Blue Room Event, 1966 and Wish Tree, 1996, Ono herself was upstairs in the museum’s lounge area dancing “like a chicken on acid” as artist, Rutherford Chang observed. Her short-lived dance performance for the masses changed to a more serious tune at the exclusive dinner attended by a select few at the recently opened Kee Club. This Hong Kong nightlife classic had recently been transported to Shanghai’s Dunhill mansions complex, a spectacular courtyard in the center of the city, which besides being blessed by the presence of Jude Law just a few weeks earlier also sports a very handsome, very Zen, Shanghart Gallery outpost.

After dessert Ono descended to the post-dinner cocktail for one last photo op with the locals before heading back to her hotel to sleep off the jetlag, leaving the dwindling crowd to soak up her blessings of universal love—and also the pouring rain.

Some people call it Chinglish, I call it Poetry. Language and its Discontents. Something to keep you amused while you wait

I was going to wait until I accumulated a few more of these... certainly they are everywhere and certainly I wouldn't be an expat if I didn't bring it up at least once in this here blog.

What they mean, if one could speculate, isn't important. What's important is the downright surreality of their appearance... they are signs that don't signify ... or do they?

An article in The Week (my favorite news source - a weekly mag that compiles the world news of the week via a myriad of, sometimes contradictory, sources: everyone from Al Jeezera, Nigerian Times to WSJ, El Monde, etc. have their say on the event of the week... it's the old blind man and the elephant trick... I recommend it to everyone who's been blinded by staring down the same old funnel of mainstream media) lamented about the incoherency, spite and outright offensiveness of China's use of English.
But I say
1. We're all bastardizing the damn lingo either way you look at it in this digital gizmo age of anything/instantly goes...
2. The Chinese are a lot better at our English then we are at they're Chinese
3. The results are often uncanny, beautiful, albeit naive creative expressions a la the Exquisite Corpse... which we'll get to more of next time, or the time after.

UNTITLED (SHANGHAI, PUDONG) 无题（上海浦东） the real story

I forgot to mention that there are two pieces to this installation. One is erected on a fence that runs around one corner of the site. It is 2.1m x 41.1m ... pretty darned long. The other is wrapped around a sign structure that stands 3.5m off the ground. It is 3m high x 40.1m long. There is subway construction happening in front of this sign so all the traffic on Fang Dian Lu sees the hi-hise sign which sits above the construction but is dwarfed by the slowly rising Himalaya Center- a mega project designed by Japanese architect, Arata Isozaki that includes a museum, shopping center, hotels, restaurants, bath houses, concert halls, etc, etc.
Another city within a city, within Shanghai.
Below is a statement on the project.
It is meant to honor the workers that are responsible for erecting China's glossy mega-metropolis' but some irreverent ahole was pissing on the sign when I went to photograph it last Sunday.
Whaatdaya gonna do?

Another thing that I might add is that this construction wrap, whereby the workers become the content of this image that occupies a typically commodified space, was a dream I had since 2003. If it wasn't for SARS I'd have this mutta up a long time ago... but all good things are worth the wait and years ago Learning from Hangzhou took this billboard's place... which is coming to a book store near you very merry soon.

Please click on the images to enlarge*



Pudong, Shanghai is an urban wonder: In the course of only a decade what was farmland has been cultivated into an entirely modern city which now hosts some of the tallest buildings in the world. Behind this miraculous transformation are hundreds of thousands of construction workers. These migrant laborers sleep, eat and work on the construction site itself.

They move from construction site to site but seldom enter the social structure of the city itself. Large-scale blinds are often erected around the edges of the sites that these workers call home and are wrapped in vinyl advertising billboards. This form of signage is particularly illustrative of China’s rapid pace of urbanization and its burgeoning consumer society. The construction blind is not only a precursor to the building under construction (and its future role in the market) but also denotative of the social politics of an increasingly classed society. The construction blind helps to erase the presence of the construction laborer and his peripheral, second-class status.

Untitled (Pudong, Shanghai) is one in a series of site specific billboards that responds to the proliferation of large scale advertising images upon the urban environment by indexing the social/political relevance of the billboard site itself. Here, images of workers within the barricade replace the commercial billboard. It is at once a testimony to the workers and their role in shaping China’s hyper modern environment as well as an attempt to neutralize the continual commodification of urban space.

This project is part of Zendai Museum of Modern Art’s INTRUDE: ART and LIFE series

The project was also made possible by the help of: DDM Warehouse Special Thanks: Zhu Tao, Daniel Traub, Sofia Wang and All the Workers of the Himalaya Center’s Construction Site!

For more info on the billboard series please visit http://www.mabz.net/BB/MABZ_BB.html




上海浦东是一个城市奇观 ：仅仅十年间一片农场已被灌溉成完全的现代化都市，这里矗立着世界上最高的摩天大楼。而这场魔术般的变迁背后是成千上万的建筑工人。这些外地民工吃、睡、工作在建筑工地。他们从一个工地搬到另一个工地，却很少进入城市的社会结构。

树 立在工地四周的巨大遮幅里是民工们称为家的地方，也常常被人造革的广告牌覆盖着。 这种招牌的形式确是中国城市化的高速进程及其增长迅速的消费群体的生动明证。建筑工地的遮幅不仅 是建筑在施工（市场中的失败角色）的一种预告，而且是不断阶层化社会的社会政治指标。工地遮幅抹去了建筑工人的存在 ，也掩盖了他们下等边缘阶层的地位。

《无 题（上海浦东）》是“特定场地”广告稗系列之一，通过编索广告牌本身的社会政治关联，反映城市环境中的巨型广告形象的剧增现象。 在这，围栏背后的民工形象代替了商业广告。是一次对民工及其在塑造中国亢奋的现代化环境中角色的证明，同时也试图中和城市环境的持续商业化。


这个项目是证大现代艺术馆的《介入：艺术生活366天》系列的部分
感谢东大名创库的诚挚帮助与支持，才使本项目得以实现
特别鸣谢：朱涛，叶文杰，王雪，及西马来亚中心工地的所有工人！


更多有关广告牌系列的信息， 请登陆：http://www.mabz.net/BB/MABZ_BB.html