The Big Trash Debate

“Garbage is not what we cast out, but the prime locus of meaning in our lives: we arrange our existences so as to make room for garbage.”
–Don Delillo, Underworld

So I finally got a comment on this blog by a Mr. A. Gerelle (thank you very much - and my email is mabz@bestweb.net if you wanna talk directly) who alerted me to the debate on China's trash trade that Liu Jianhua's installation at Shanghai Gallery of Art in September incited. Lisa Movius wrote about it in the Wall Street Journal and Shanghai SCRAP scrapped the shit out of it in an overly informed -in the stats dept., under informed- in the art dept. and belligerent in an all around, way. Both of these writings were considered for the piece below which will be published in both Chinese- ARTCO and English -YISHU Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. It is an interesting debate that, either way you look at it, points to a growing global dilemma where we will eventually be enveloped in the trash of our own making.

It's a very long piece, sorry.

Export—Cargo Transit
Mathieu Borysevicz


According to the U.S.-based Clean Air Council, only two manmade structures on earth are large enough to be seen from outer space: the Great Wall of China and the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island, New York. These two structures, merely little grey impressions from a zillion miles away, are perhaps the oddball duo that has come to define an important aspect of our current global condition.

It’s actually surprising that at the current worldwide rate of garbage production, the Fresh Kills Landfill is the only depository visible from the cosmos. In the U.S., the average person creates 4.39 pounds of trash per day and up to fifty-six tons of trash per year. China's city waste production is also increasing dramatically. According to statistics, current annual waste production in China is at 150 million tons and increasing eight to ten percent each year. This cumulative waste storage would cover an area of over 300,000 acres, and, certainly, like Fresh Kills, be big enough to see from the heavens.

The Fresh Kills Landfill closed in late 2001 after specialists looking for signs of human remains used it as a laboratory to sift through the charred ruins of the twin towers. The dump is now the resting place of all that was destroyed during the 9/11 World Trade Center disaster. Fresh Kills has been closed for several years now, but the citizens of the U.S. continue to fill enough garbage trucks to form a line that would stretch from the earth halfway to the moon. It’s an image that recalls lower Manhattan in the months after 9/11, when monstrous trucks laden with torqued steel became the ultimate caravan, testimony to an insecure world that lay ahead and, behind, modernity, rotting.

It is here, in modernity’s final crescendo, that a new epic has begun, what president Bush calls the New World Order. It is a world that is reconfigured in terms of terrorism, the global market, and the emergence of new economic powers. Yet what we have seen in the wake after 9/11 seems like an endless cycle of diatribe, extremism, consumption, pollution, apathy, spectacle, etc. A world whose ideologies, once containing assorted pretenses to idealism, are now transparently mired in profit margins. China, quickly becoming the world’s largest economy, is at the epicentre of this debacle. A nation that has hastily left its agricultural roots in the dust to join hyper-modernity and its discontents, China is the world’s last hope and biggest threat. It has triumphantly lifted millions out of poverty, entered the World Trade Organization, and will host the upcoming Olympics, all in a remarkably short period of time. Yet many ruptures have been left in the course of China’s rise to stardom. Severe environmental pollution, precarious economics, and an increasingly tenuous class structure have come to plague China and influence its international relations. In the conundrum of globalism, where boundaries between nations are evaporating on the one hand and nationalism is building on the other, China will have to quickly define its aspirations in order to continue its rise. It is here, in China’s ill defined but rapidly changing set of global ambitions, that the artist Liu Jianhua makes his move. In his last two installation projects, Liu Jianhua has confronted China’s role in the global market head on.

At the 2006 Shanghai Biennale, Liu lodged the back end of a big red shipping container into a wall of the gallery. At the other, open end, a landslide of whizzing plastic toys, tools, lights, and electronics pushed out onto the floor and washed up at the viewers’ feet. Yiwu Investigation, as the piece was titled, simply presented the fruits of Yiwu, China’s largest commodity producer and exporter, en masse to the viewer. Liu’s presentation, besides being dazzling—the kind of brilliance that makes the supermarket far more exciting than any art space—was also very pointed. The city of Yiwu is the primary mass-manufacturing base of cheap goods on the planet. Over one thousand containers full of this hodgepodge are exported from Yiwu’s shores daily. They fill up dollar stores, flea markets, and, sooner than later, garbage dumps worldwide. However, Liu Jianhua’s argument is not (yet) about growing landfills. It’s about the dynamic of the world market and, thus, Yiwu’s, as well as China’s, position in it.

The six thousand plus foreign businessmen who live in Yiwu testify to the root of this dynamic. Yiwu’s success is based on the outside world’s insatiable appetite for economical little plastic things. The market boats 320,000 varieties of goods from 1,502 categories. According to the Yiwu International Commodities Fair, there are only 500,000 varieties of goods in the world. So almost everything in the world is produced in Yiwu and then exported to almost all points in the world. Two hundred and twelve countries receive regular shipments of plastic photo frames, lighting ware, hosiery, slippers, handy tools, imitation jewelry, make up, artificial hair, and dry flowers. The U.S. is one of the main recipients of these goods. Chinese-made products have become so ubiquitous in the U.S. that it is not only rare to find items made anywhere else, but it may be next to impossible for Americans to do without them. In Sara Bongiorni’s book A Year Without “Made in China”,” the author’s experiment of trying to live an entire year without any Chinese- made goods ends in near bankruptcy. China’s exportation of cheap products basically allows the poor in developed countries to continue their materialistic pursuits. This is not only an empowering position for China to be in, but also one that puts the country in a constant state of compromise. Ever since China joined the World Trade OrganizationWTO in 2001 and began its spectacular transformation into a trade superpower, the chorus of complaints about its low-priced goods has swelled. China has been blamed for everything from the massive loss of manufacturing jobs in the U.S., to using unfair trade practices to capture an ever-increasing share of the world market, to high levels of toxicity in Chinese-made Barbie dolls, Polly Pockets, and other playthings that eventually prompted the suicide of a Chinese factory owner. Not only does the world demand cheap goods, but it demands safe and clean ones as well. This is China’s relationship to the rest of the world. It is a relationship mediated by the need for need: the need for economic growth and the need for cheap little plastic things that eventually fill up places like the Fresh Kills Landfill.

Liu’s gesture is one that swipes the manifold arrangements of an increasingly accelerated global market past our eyes. The avalanche of cheap, candy-coloured items that he puts before us comprises the kaleidoscope of consumption, trade imbalances, and late-capital activity that has defined the twenty-first century. It also poses questions of civilization in general; for example, how did we get to this point? How is it that global culture is caught up in a bunch of little, disposable, artificialities? In the Biennale’s exhibition catalogue, Liu’s endeavor as artist is equated to that of sociologist or anthropologist. He displays his fieldwork not as documentation but as artifact. The evidence of China’s increasingly powerful role in the global market bellows out as harvested treasures from a shipping container, anticipating their exported destiny. Liu does not make a complete argument with his work, but he poses an inquiry. What is China’s relationship with the rest of the world? How is this relationship defined?

One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure

In September, 2007 when the international art world was descending on Shanghai for the prestigious SHContemporary Art Fair, Liu Jianhua was busy answering the above-mentioned questions with more questions. Whereas Yiwu Investigation showed the front side of China’s exportation equation, Export—Cargo Transit, at the Shanghai Gallery of Art, shows the rear.

Not only does product go out of China, but once used, it often returns. In order to feed its forceful manufacturing sector, China’s recycling industries are some of the most competitive in the world, importing some forty million metric tons of scrap materials annually. It is part of a sixty-five billion dollar industry that employs 50,000 people. To add another twist to international trade imbalances, the U.S.’s biggest export to China is scrap paper, which, reciprocally, often goes back in the form of shoe boxes and other product packaging. It is not unreasonable to assume that many of the products in Yiwu are made with recyclable materials imported from abroad. While there are many benefits to a vibrant recycling industry, with a developing market and vigorous competition come dangerous loopholes that often produce harmful results. In the waste trade lies another complicated global dynamic that echoes colonial exploits of yesteryear. It is here, with site-specific poignancy, that Liu aims to catch our attention.

In an elegant, post-Renaissance building along the historic Bund sits the Shanghai Gallery of Art. Erected in 1916, during the heyday of capitalist expansionism into the far East, the building originally housed international banks. Today, the building embodies Shanghai’s new-found extravagance, a situation often considered a sequel to that turn-of-the-century jazz age. Recently renovated by Michael Graves, Bund No. 3 hosts such luxury stores as Armani and Hugo Boss, as well as Jean Georges Restaurant. On its third floor, in the exalted halls of Three on the Bund’s gallery, Liu Jianhua has installed over ten tons of recyclable foreign waste. Bound in stacks, scattered along the floors, piled under the windows, and pushed tightly into Plexiglas cases that line the atrium, this imported garbage is literally everywhere. Field recordings of shipyards and processing plants play from overhead speakers. A dysfunctional compactor rises from the mess. Plastic medicine bottles, shiny foils, fibres, abstract packaging material, shredded resins, and adhesive backings all congeal to produce one extraordinary allover composition. As in Yiwu Investigation’s wholesale market aesthetic, Liu once again, through the captivating qualities of industrial debris, achieves the dazzle that the fictional domain of the art space usually doesn’t allow for.
In news quotes printed on the walls, another type of garbage is addressed:
“Most of the world's electronic trash, especially old computers, is dumped in China, causing severe environmental problems and illnesses among residents...”
“Britain is shipping a record 1.9 million tons of rubbish eight thousand miles across the world to be dumped in China. . . . Campaigners fear vast amounts of the waste, including potentially lethal chemicals, are ending up in illegal landfill sites instead of being recycled.”
The quotes go on to paint a sinister picture of the electronic trash trade wherein developed countries dump lethal goods on developing countries, wreaking environmental havoc and irreversible health problems:

“Because processing this e-waste tends to employ very basic technology, large amounts of dangerous materials end up getting released into the environment. Environmental inspections have shown that the town of Guiyu has no potable water. More than eighty percent of the town's children are suffering from lead poisoning. . . . .”
The quotes are nauseating. Not only is this waste coming from so-called developed nations, but these are nations that have all signed the Basel Convention—a pact of wealthier nations that agrees to stop exporting garbage to poorer nations. The convention is proving difficult to enforce. “The waste is illegal, but somehow,” the artist fumes, “it evades customs agents on both sides.”
In his introductory essay, curator Cao Weijun equates the situation with a form of neo-colonialization. “Liu’s use of foreign rubbish has everything to do with the literal translation of ‘foreign,’ which [in Chinese] suggests colonialization and Chinese history.” This aspect is surely heightened by the site of the gallery itself, a structure that once banked the profits of Western businesses in Asia and that today represents the pinnacle of luxury à la Western name brands. The fact that southern Guangdong, where much of the trash trade occurs (and where the installation materials originate), is the same territory that once hosted the Opium Wars also helps to embellish the colonial picture. But to portray this situation entirely as a return of past exploits is denying China’s own tenuous struggle with economic development. Cao goes on to expound the dilemma as a cause for self-reflection. “While investigating the colonizer’s crime, to what extent is it necessary to review ourselves? From being colonized to self-colonization, from feeling the pain of the lack of our own spirit and cultural identity to deriving pleasure by consuming the colonizer’s food and money, this has been the spiritual journey for the individuals and also the whole nation” According to government statistics, China itself disposes of at least five million television sets, five million computers, and tens of millions of cell phones every year. Many of these, like foreign rubbish, once stripped of valuable materials, are discarded along riverbanks, polluting the earth and groundwater. While the global market for foreign scrap is dominated by China, it is in China that businesses looking to increase earnings violate safety regulations at the expense of their own country’s environment and health. But no one escapes this dilemma free of blame. Complicity stretches to both sides of the global divide. While Liu’s gesture is an open platform for co-existing debates, it once again raises the same fundamental questions. How did we get here, besieged by all this garbage?
Liu’s action is based in a world of art. But does such a discourse, in an arena of luxury and fiction, have any real capacity to affect change, and to what extent? Garbage, as political provocateur, has often found its way into the art world. As early as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, it has served as an avant-garde destabilizer of the fine arts, bridging low culture with high culture and constituting one of the fundamental tenets of postmodernity. Marcel Duchamp was of course the main instigator, presenting trash with negligible transformation to a bewildered public. Robert Rauschenberg exploited its beauty as a means of formal expression. Arman sliced it, diced it, and sometimes bronzed it as a way to demonstrate against the useless waste of "unfashionable" items in the consumption-driven society of the 1960s and 70s. Allan Kaprow had his used tire installations, and David Hammons had his bottle caps, which copied folk artists from all over the world whose only materials were recycled ones. Certainly throughout Export—Cargo Transit, one cannot help but be reminded of Barry Le Va’s early scatter pieces. But perhaps more aligned with where this article is going is “The Social Mirror,” a twelve-ton, twenty-eight-foot long New York City Department of Sanitation collection truck reconfigured with mirrored panels. This piece, by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, was a highlight of the inaugural New York City Art Parade in 1983, and is a permanent, mobile public art work that continues to mirror our garbage-spewing society.
But for Liu Jianhua’s garbage, the most interesting thing that ties itself back to the art world is its newly contextualized status as a consumable luxury item. In containers marked Art Export, the stuffed trash prepares itself for repatriation back to its Western origins. This is part of Liu’s program, to see this foreign refuse re-enter the global market as a Chinese high-art commodity. Like much of China’s trade balance with the rest of the world, the country’s contemporary art market has been, almost exclusively, an export business. Since the early 1980’s, the primary patronage for Chinese avant-garde art has been from collectors and venues outside of China. This has of course affected its the development of Chinese contemporary art in many ways. Countless accusations have been made that wWestern patronage and palates helped to produce work that catered to Western tastes. Today, record Chinese art market performances have bewildered even the most seasoned of speculators. Some attribute this market phenomenon to a growing Chinese collectorship. Here, in this erratic market transformation, Liu also takes a stab. He aims to tie the market of “foreign trash” to the market for valuable, Chinese high-art collectables, therefore adding one more loop to the cycles of global commerce. His exhibition couldn’t have come at a better time. SHContemporary Art fFair brought collectors and gallerists from across the globe to Shanghai, willing to consume, some times, it seems, blindly, the next mainland craze; —in this instance, piles of trash.

King of the mountain- will the real M50 please stand up?

I haven't had time to fart much less work on the project that I (use as an excuse to) relocated back to China for in the first place. So in effort to find some space to concentrate I move up to the mountains- a little writer's residency of sorts, a little fresh air, food and clear thoughts. Right.
If I knew what was good for me I'd cut the Internet cords and bury the cellphone. But I do not. I'm in Moganshan - a stupendous mountain range about four hours from Shanghai on the local-relentless hornhonking-bumpydumpy-peasant bus. It's about 2.5 hours by car. I don't have a car nor do I intend to add to China's already dire state of the environment by buying one. Plus I can't afford one. Anyway Moganshan became a hot spot for foreigners and rich Chinese capitalists during the 20's and 30's looking for the same solitude and cool, crisp air. They built all these mighty, stone houses that look out onto the world below- or the bamboo. Some, like the one I'm in resembles a castle, others cottages, all from the same turn of the century, country home, architectural data bank. Either way the architecture helps to create the illusion that you're in Europe far from the honking, bustling, pollution laden air of Zhejiang, China. It is actually an indeterminate space and time in Moganshan- not Europe of 80 years ago and not China today but a dreamy in between. It is funny that while I'm up here in the green hills that I'm asked to write a piece about Shanghai's art scene. Moganshan, ironically, is also the road that Shanghai's premiere gallery district is located on. Most people refer to the district plainly as Moganshan. Truthfully I'd rather think about the birds and the breeze than the sceney, sophisticated hubbub of Shanghai's art scene. and so I procrastinate and the deadline approaches....

Refreshing and Waiting for Publication OR the continual emerging artist syndrome

So I've been out of touch
Not touching so much
because other, more serious, professional writing endeavors have kept me from letting loose here. BUT some of those potential publishers have dragged their heels and timeliness has got left in the dust. So below a short review of REFRESH, a group show of emerging (love the term- you can emerge till 35 years old and then you're a has been-emerging artist or a successful artist- or by that time the day job has taken over along with the mortgage and nursery school fees and art just seems like a silly waste of time. Me, I'm still clunking along, post-emerging at 36 with a group show here or there and wasting my time on this here blog.
Here's REFRESH slightly refreshed so it has some minor differences with the soon-to-be published version on artforum.com which isn't as interesting as bookforum.com but will bring you your daily dose of art chatter (which is what art is all about anyway -chatter). Below more chatter:


In the art world’s unrelenting pursuit of the continually new, REFRESH, a group exhibition at ZenDai MoMA, waves its youthful hand for attention. This show of thirty-five artists, most of who were born during the 1980’s, presents an eclectic range of mediums and mall-rat sensibilities in a museum, oddly enough, situated in a mall. These artists are of China’s first generation to experience an entirely Economic-Reform era life, complete with its material privileges and freedoms that previous generations could never have dreamed of. Subsequently much of the work embodies concerns less akin to their socio-politically infatuated predecessors and more attuned to a burgeoning global culture. Suitably, consumerism and its discontents greet the viewer in the lobby. A table case by Sha Weichen displays an array of home electronic equipment - cell phones, digital camcorders, laptops all meticulously constructed out of black tape. Light-boxes show a bright mountain of small toys, apparently self-portraits of the artist, Fan Mingzhu, buried underneath. A bay of blowing fans make a pun on the company's Great Wall name. from The show’s centerpiece, a humorous cross between sculpture and painting by Guo Hongwei, is a square of actual lawn littered with Coke cans, condom wrappers and banana peels which were made from multiple layers of acrylic paint. Many other examples of post painting dot the show. TV noise appears on a flat screen monitor next to a painting of the same subject. Along the expanse of another wall wasshisname (I'll check this later) painfully has rendered his signature marbleizing technique over which sits yet another flat screen monitor that shows the artist painting his colossal studio wall with the same little squiggly interlacing lines. It was a project that apparently took an entire month.

There are several photographers who show misguided youth in various stages of undress, intoxication and reflection ala Wolfgang Tillmans reminding us that this image obsessed generation is also one that is entirely sibling-less. However the results of China’s one-child family experiment are most successfully transmitted here via video. In a piece dedicated to her parents, Ma Qiusha recites the story of her life with a razor blade in her mouth. In Zu Weimin’s inscrutable video, execution style killings unfold in a gritty industrial wasteland to the reggae version of Bob Dylan’s “Blowing in the Wind”. Another video shows a rifle-scope focusing in on and falling pedestrian traffic, a nod to the pervasive influence of gaming on China’s youth. The curatorial aim of the show is to “refresh”, to make anew the hitherto categorically confined name game of historians. Despite much derivation and a desperate need for a final edit, the show presents young artists with a lot of promising territory to explore.

REFRESH: Emerging Chinese Artists
September 23 – November 08, 2007
Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art

And another thing about SH Contemporary before it completely fades into the abdominal mist

This is me and my atrocious Chinese (not to mention the wackjob hairdo) explaining Zhang Dali's new, very hard to sell, series of Bronzes, "Man and Beast" in ddmWarehouse's booth at the SH Contemporary Fair. The lengthier written English version which has little to do with the work and more to do with a convoluted notion of power ... without mentioning Foucault is below.

That's Yanyao in the photo- He's ddm's backbone who is somtimes distracted by his responsibities for a very cool place to view experimental video (not only) in China- artmofile.com He's also running the renegade Yunan Documentary Festival at Zendai Museum next week.


“Oppressive government is more cruel than a tiger”
- Confucius

From about 2000 to 1500 B.C., a people known as the Xia dominated the northern regions of China. The Xia worshiped the snake, a creature that appears in some of the oldest Chinese myths. Eventually, the snake changed into the dragon, which became one of the most enduring symbols of Chinese culture and mythology. It was said that Confucius himself was born under the guard of two dragons. Like the Chinese zodiac calendar, which measures time in a cycle marked by 12 distinct animals, the dragon is an amalgamation of many entities. This mythical beast dons the head of camel, the eyes of a demon, the ears of a cow, the horns of a stag, the neck of a snake, claws of an eagle and so on. While in Christian mythology the dragon was equated with Satan or war, in China the dragon was equated with generosity, good fortune and also the supreme divinity of the emperor. The connection between the dragon and the emperor was so great that some emperors claimed to have descended from dragons and were said to posses tails. Anyone other than the emperor who used the sign of the Imperial Dragon, with its signature five claws, was immediately put to death. This fantastical national symbol, on the one hand representing benevolence, on the other hand represents the deep-rooted social/political hierarchy of Chinese civilization.

While Confucius felt that tyranny is more ferocious than a tiger he was also under the belief that the legitimacy of a ruler comes from his birth. The Emperor is the ‘son of heaven’ no matter what happens. It is only when the Emperor starts to act unknowingly that a new ‘son of heaven’ will rise and take over. Commoners are not allowed to rebel because they possess no divinity and their actions would break the Confucian Order of Rites. This is antithetical to the West’s idea of a social contract, a theory formulated by Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes believed that the King and his subjects enter into a contract through which the people give the mandate of governance to the monarch. Once the King has breached the contract it is justifiable for the people to rebel. But for the common man, ignorant of alternative ideologies and subject to a strict system, the option for rebellion doesn’t exist. Confucian ethics, tradition, and history have molded man into a subject that is eternally obedient to the powers above him.

Power structures have changed over the years but the hierarchy remains. Where once the emperor ruled supreme, now other ideologies are in the mix. Money, government, religion, bureaucracy, corporations and markets have spawned irreversible structures that are far more powerful than individuals. Man has inevitably become the beast of burden to the systems he has created around himself.

Mathieu Borysevicz 8/07

SHContemporary (better late than never?): The art experience as flea market

The SHContemporary fair came and went like a wave of refreshing artness in this otherwise culturally deprived megalopolis. Apologies for not writing anything sooner but I figured the real media kept you abreast of all the hoopla and my cynical comments would just be an unwelcome diatribe next to the hard driving fluff that makes good reporting on art fairs. If you haven’t yet heard the fair news please check out Phil Tanari in artforum.com, and Karen Smith for Bloomberg (where she says the richest people in the world will get their only dose of art news), artnet, Art in America (courtesy of our lovely Lisa Movius) etc., also reported. All in all SHContemporary was a fine event: good parties, mix of people, art, weather, nicely dressed security guards, great pretenses to charitable giving, one or two actually interesting installations, BUT not so many sales (except James Cohan's whopping Nam June Paik and Bill Viola sale- we won’t mention any names but we will say it was an Asian collector which is a good indication that there is a market out here for Western contemporary (and hopefully reason for J.Cohan to stick around in Asia), and maybe that Damien Hirst purchase by the same restaurant mogul that captured the world’s attention with her 2.3 million $ purchase earlier this year for Liu Xiaodong’s very large and mediocre painting of a bunch of very poor migrant workers (ala Courbet), then there was Thomas Erben who sold 40% of his booth on opening night to a bunch of Floridians, even Erna Hecey Gallery sold some small Johan Grimonprez drawings to Huang Liaoyuan and Aura Gallery’s William Zhang both under the table to avoid the ridiculous 33% tax imposed on sales at the sale)

But everything has to do with sales. Does it or does it? Can an art fair be like a game of chess where all the moves override the result? Probably not. Art is a business and this is a sales convention. Our foreign guests- galleries from Europe, India, America, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, etc. seemed to have a splendid time and (besides talk of dire sales) they will come back if they know what’s good for them because you need to invest as a business.

Overall what we learned from the fair is that today we look at art in fairs and auctions (if not mammoth Biennales which are like fairs in museums) – the experience of art going has been reduced to a the flea market effect- a labyrinth of stalls toting art goods to be consumed in the 30sec-2min time it will take to browse each of the 130 booths (somehow K.Smith listed it as 100 – it was originally to be 100 (100 of the best and brightest galleries) but somewhere along the way Pierre Huber (who made speeches at every occasion and at every occasion lost the battle with his English – think an intoxicated Kermit the Frog with a thick Swiss accent) and Zhou Tiehai (artist businessman turned artfair businessman) gave in to the huge demand and opened up the upstairs level of the building).

A note on art and architecture: The sophisticated mood and look of the fair had everything to do with the grand architecture of the Shanghai exhibition Center – apparently a gift of Stalin back in the heyday of cross Siberian pinko love ins. It was originally known as the Hall of Sino-Soviet Friendship and was built with Soviet help in the late 1950s to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Chinese communist victory in 1949. At night, the spire is often lit up with garish pink and lime green lights. A nice departure from the cubbied, wholesale halls of the usual art fairs, and here a nice example of art and architecture being happily married.

Further note: Liu Jianhua’s mammoth exhibition of 10 tons of illegally imported foreign electronic garbage at 3 on the Bund, which opened during the fair, is a mutherload of post-colonial, late-capital, global-market, environmentally abusive shit and will be the subject of my first review for Art Forum (which was banned from the fair because an Ai Weiwei photo offended the authorities- see artforum.com) … but you have to wait till November. Just like this report - tardy to the max.

Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair Part 1- The boring press conference poem, “Art Fair = Utopia“

The Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair has already taken Shanghai (and the anxious rest of the world) by storm and it hasn’t even yet begun, but the press conference (held at the Italian consulate) was soo boring that I started taking notes, kind of, then Lisa Movius (freelance darling of the Shanghai Cultural Scene) starting texting me.
Below is compilation of the texts and notes etc.

Something about simultaneous translation
Sleeping in the back
Everybody plugging away on their Blackberries
The trajectory of contemporary art in China and all the people who helped along the way
minus everyone who actually helped, ruminates behind the Blackberry punches
Pierre Huber responsible for bringing Asian Art to the world's attention
Which world was that again?
Where is that International Art world anyway?
“I am dying of boredom, you?”
Overlapping
Translators and Speakers interrupting one another
Starts and Stops
Simultaneous stutter like a cd skipping
“Seems escapism. The government asshole should be fun”
Sides of faces and backs of heads, the usual Shanghai art suspects:
Victoria Lu, Laura Zhou from Shangart, Lisa Movious, Davide from BizArt, James Cohan guy AKA Arthur Solway, local press busier than bees
Enter Chinese Speaker:
Booms. Change of tone
Self Flattery, Mobility, Enthusiasm, Morale
You'd never see this in the days of Hans Van Dyck
Was this an Art Fair or Utopia?
Voice projects outwards and upwards hitting highs that puff out the back wall of glass overlooking 19 floors of Shanghai
More on China’s miraculous economic reform
“Glorious History”
Did he say that or is it the translator stuttering again?
“At least his bull is funny”
Enter: Lorenzo Rudolf
The Art world was once an easy place to navigate
(was it a place once?)
You had the west and then the rest of the world
Where is the international Art world located?
You had the west and then the west of the world
Local, Global, Asian, Contemporary, Community
careful buzzing sounds
“This will last for days. Go back to sleep”
Artists, Collectors, Professionals, Galleries, Artworks, Asian public
130 Galleries
Even Latin America
“He’s quoting his fucking press release”
And all of Asia is growing
“Ohhh he discovered Asia!”
Art Fairs are popping up like mushrooms after a September rain (He actually said that)
All of what happens in Asia and the world
“It takes a 老外 (laowai- old foreigner)”
Art Fair=Utopia
“Think they’ll feed us?”
Enter Pierre Huber
Is that English he's speaking
Simultaneous translator collision
Another historical retrospect
Once upon a time there was only Hans Van Dyck- This is true
And now all these.... what did he say?
Critical Discourse
Art Fair = Utopia
Thank You for Coming
谢谢光临

The Producer(s)- Making Patty Chang's dream come true while Gorged on incompetency and indecisivness at the 3 Gorges

In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse
-TS Eliot

One of my multiple hats is that of an artist but I must say:
Working for artists is like a bullet in the head
I would feel bad for gallerists if most of them weren't such slimebullies themselves ... Or maybe it's working for artists that makes them that way in the first place... Or maybe vice versa, who knows
Either way wishy washiness reached tremendous heights during the last 3 weeks and my producing skills gained new momentum- somebody mentioned changing course and becoming a diplomat...
having said that artists and gallerists are alright
Intuition itself is to blame!

I just spent the last 3 weeks in YiChang, Hubei along the Yangtze river, known here as ChangJiang, producing a film for the American artist duo of Patty Chang and David Kelley. The film was a fantastical, very broken narrative about man and his futile attempts to control nature... I think. Fused into this general theme was the story of a submarine that crashed into a mountain and the Three Gorges Dam project which is one mutherload of engineering that is an attempt by man to control nature. And then there were scenes loosely based on the pyscho-drama technique of acting out one another's dreams as a a form of healing. These employed a bunch of out of work Beijing Opera actors and their hitherto untapped dreams.
When you're in the position of producer all the theoretical narrative twists and overriding concepts are pushed aside and you're left concentrating on nuts and bolts. So I'm not sure what the film is really about. Truthfully I don't think the authors do either. That's the majic of art.
"We need a submarine for the next scene" you don't ask why? you think how to get a sub in this pinko little town? what color do you want the sub? You ask questions that will eliminate future misunderstandings and OT
Let's just say that artist's, by nature of relying on intuition rather than careful planning, tend to make things a lot more complicated and time consuming than most other professionals. For instance we were to be shooting in an altogether city just 2 weeks before production which needless to say, made things very frantic. A lot of reliance was put in the direction of a bunch of unsuspecting drivers, baritones, laid off state workers and museum tour guides all of which performed exceptionally well in their new found roles as casting agents, line producers and prop stylists.
In the end Patty and David were delivered what they wanted and everybody was happy. In between - a lot of chaos and sleepless nights.
The truth is there couldn't have been any other way to make the piece. Sometimes you just have to toss all the ideas and practice into the breeze and chase it around till you have the piece you want.
The work was commissioned for an Italian art space in Turin. It will be a hit for sure. Stay tuned.
PS. a very special thanks to Liu Peng- my right hand man- met while on set with (and recommended by) Yang Fudong- Liu Peng and his friends have a little art production brigade and criss/cross between working on films, TV and sappy esoteric artshit