Just another found Performance art documentation project, Shanghai 2008 1st Installment

It was around Lunar New Year in Xujiahui, Shanghai's hyper modern mall district. On the busy sidewalk outside a photo printing store, might've even been a Kodak, a woman was burning ID photos in a dust pan. Of course I rushed to document this odd occurrence only to be barred by the woman. She kept pushing me away and told me I shouldn't be taking pictures She balked "How weird that you want to photograph this!" I replied " How weired that you are doing this!"
Anyway - the whole affair had the looks of some ancient ancestor worship ritual ... but in a very PM way. In effect- this whole 'found performance' solved one of the dilemmas of the contemporary arts in China in general- how to make traditional practices modern. Gu Wenda, Xu Bing, Zhang Huan, Huang Yongping, Qiu Zhijie at times, and a host of others including this photo store employee are all engaged in this arduous task.

Just another found Installation photo project, Shanghai 2008 2nd Installment

This one is called "Sunflowers and Garbage Can", various views, set of three, edition of 12, signed on the back

Post Partum and Proud

As I sit here listening to the blood curt ling cries of a 13day old being tortured with the ancient Chinese - getting the diaper changed - method I realize that everything anyone ever said about having a child is true... The good, the bad, the in between- all true. Now I can finally say that the twelve zillion times I've heard my mother say - "You'll know when you have children" and I smart aleking rebutted "I'm never having children", has all been with merit I guess I know ... or am just starting to know Either way it's one helluva lesson in humility
Here's the Birth story below ...

After an amazing show of triumph on the part of Yan our son was born yesterday March 18, 2008. He was 8 lbs. 8 is a lucky number in China and we feel SOOOO very LUCKY!. While it was super dramatic and emotional - It took less than two hours from water breaking to the birth - no meds, no C's. Yan and the baby are recovering just fine. While he still doesn't look like either one of us, he's healthy - eating, farting, sleeping, snoring and crying only once in a while. In the tradition of long, arty, un-pronounceable, multi-culti names that run in the family his is:
RUI VINCIEN YANG BORYSEVICZ but you can call him Ray :)
RUI (sounds like Ray - means morning dew and is Yan's grandfather's name- Yang Rui- his Chinese name is also a Tang Dynasty military hero)
VINCIEN (is a derivative of Vincent, the name of my grandfather that both my father and I never knew - He was killed while my dad was still an infant and has always remained a mystery and legend. Rui Vincien will be the first to carry on the Borysevicz name of his generation)
YANG (is Yan's sir name)
BORYSEVICZ (is mine)
Yes a little long and heavy. We don't expect him to live up to it. We just want him to happily keep farting and remain healthy! And we still can get out of it - we have yet to sign the birth certificate.

Thanks for all your love and support along the way!!! Mathieu and Yan

Just another found Installation photo project, Shanghai 2008 1st Installment

Having lately seen the crossover of art and life reak beautiful havoc both in Zendai's Art and Intrude 366 days of public art interventions for which I have created a proposal and began a project for and which has already been published in its virtual photoshop proposal form in both the impossible-to-navigate website and the Shanghai Daily English version (Thank you Defne Ayas for alarming me to the matter and saving the day old paper- I hope that the southern seas have gotten you over your cold) As well as in Duolun Museum's Archive project of a local park which I profiled in the all new, though slightly lagging, ARTFORUM China website- I have decided to record the many instances of where art and life unknowingly overlap. That is- due in part to the increasingly pluralistic nature of the contemporary arts on one side and the increasingly surreal nature of reality (I blame it all on 911) on the other - art and life are increasingly miostaken or taken for one another. Through mere indexing I claim this art or its record as my own. Mine Mine mine
right
Here's some photos that Ive taken recently in Shanghai of impromptu and most likely unknowing (or I am just a culturally insensitive tool?) public installations projects. Many of them use meat as raw material referring to the unbridled consumptive tendencies during this time of year and the absence of animal rights in this overly peopled place. Other works show other food stuff- like the all over orange composition that momentarily occupied the corner by my house until, with the good participation of hungry and not too fussy passer bys, it gradually dissappeared. There's also a lot of laundry like installations which signify man's eternal post-paradise shame as well as the artists' attempt to harness the wind spirits... I think. Anyway there are a great many ways to read these great works. Please contribute your readings to mabzchina@gmail.com - It's not my usual address but I figured it was cool to have gmail

BizArt's New New Year's eve- Getting older and wiser with age

No matter what Bauldrillard had to say on the subject- representation will never catch up to that being represented. Now a full one month from when it occurred Biz Art’s New Year’s Eve Party finally makes the press. What is curious though is how the (this) event’s value, credibility and candor changes with age… almost like wine that gains character, a growing man that gains wisdom, and a story that gets elaborated with age.
Biz Art's event was what Kierkegaard called the “the brainstorm that anticipates the orgy”… well maybe not that extreme… but we did have one intoxicated tug-of-war with a lot of cold meat scattered on the floor plus a lot of manly buzzcut artist men doing the hootchy koo in plastic grass skirts… And OH yes if this was a gossip column, which it might as well be, we could say there was a certain celebrity ala Shanghai art world present: Arthur Solway- cousin of 26th street James Cohan Gallery, now officially in town to do big business, was here trying to reassure himself, via his conversational charm, that opening shop here was indeed the right decision and that SH, as superficial as it seems from the outside (and that I purported it to be in Dec.’s Art Forum- for which many folks including Arthur gave/still gives me flack for) has a big PHAT soul if you just look for it. Mian Mian, the writer was there. As was all the artists you could imagine including the legendary, albeit super humble, Lao Geng aka Geng Jianyi up from Hangzhou even though he has high blood pressure and a general disposition that one may characterize as existential angst mixed with pubescent zeal. It seems that everybody has high blood pressure these days- My theory is that all those cigarettes and MSG have finally come back to haunt this smoky crowd. Pauline Yao, down from Beijing via Hangzhou, where she’s writing a book about museums with and for the collector GuanYi who will build one soon- He’s using the switcherup- ‘gotta write the book before you build it’ method- blessed us with her presence. (Bea Leanza says that museums are all the rave now- everybody wants to re-examine, deconstruct, and basically f**k the museum- something that has been going on in various unsuccessful ways in the west – problem is the museum wins by default each time). She and Chen Shaoxiong were smoking in unison to the beat of some over-modulated KOK whilst in the background Fei Pingguo was playing limbo with the kids.
Anyway the legend continues- no one really has parties like this in China… only Biz Art, especially the tug of war part- which, with our hands still sore, got echoed back at us a few weeks later at the Lin Yilin opening- see below.

Lin Yilin, Glocal in Shanghai; and 3 on the Bund under new management

Lin Yilin is from the old skool of the Guangzhou Big Tail Elephant Group, a posse of progressives down south who found inspiration in urbanization and its accoutrements (building materials, migrant labor and lots of fast (sur)real estate ca$h) in the late 80’s early 90’s when the avante-garde was perhaps aptly titled. He was in Shanghai last week was it last week?- hard to keep up anymore, for a solo show at Shanghai Gallery of Art otherwise known as Husheng Hualang which is under new management after the high-princess of the Sichuan School, Weng Ling left for dryer maybe higher ground... we’re all waiting for her to pop up out of the ground somewhere soon but no one can yet say for certain where that may be… Meanwhile David Chan is the main, and slightly overtaxed, man. I met Lin Yilin for the first time through Cao Weijun (who also works at the gallery but in reduced capacity these days having had some body and soul issues) while we were all living our hiphop lives in NYC. Lin Yilin was fresh off the boat- so to speak- just getting acquainted with the Chinese art Diaspora in NYC and revving up for his new life in a new city… he came to an exhibition opening of mine and I still use a photo with Cao and Lin standing in front of my work to document it. The piece was a photo installation depicting a girls softball game that Roberta Smith in the NYTimes mistook for a cricket game –It was meant to metaphorically collapse the space of an otherwise claustrophobic courtyard with the added addition of window onto somewhere else… but that’s another story altogether. Lin Yilin still lives in NYC. Greenpoint, Brooklyn to be exact, in the old apartment of Qian Zhijian’s (critic, NYU Chinese art history doctorate, last seen teaching at Parsons) on India St. to be even more exact. It’s right near the studio that I gave up last month as the result of one mutha of a subletter nightmare. Before that Lin Yilin and I would once in a while have coffee, talk shop, while Greenpoint’s garbage processing plants glimmered in the distance. Soooo now a year or so later Lin Yilin is in Shanghai reminiscing not about Brooklyn but about the late 80s in Guangzhou -when a new influx of money caught everybody off guard and effected some funny incidences- He was talking with his head thrown back like he was back in the golden days of naivete all the while fiddling with his new iPhone at a restaurant with lousy service and even lousier Peking Opera performances. MianMian who, sitting next to him, after six years of not publishing a book, due to birthing a child, bouts with rehab and now a fundamentalist, diet coke downing Buddhist sits next to him talking in and out of English/Chinese about Chinese artists in the most enlightened way: “Chinese artists don’t need sex- because they’re always fucking each other” I think most people in the circle knows what she means. Lin Yilin’s show was very well installed – lots of big video projections inside partitions created especially for them and then one big fiberglass sculpture of “San Mao” sitting spotlight under the atrium. It reminded me vaguely of the Ghandi Statue on Union Square. Like Ghandi San Mao has his holy qualities, I love San Mao (a dirty little beggar kid with 3 hairs (san mao) who hangs with the bourgeoisie during Shanghai’s gilded age. He’s a comic strip character who has been manifested elsewhere in black and white films, etc. One may argue (LYL may himself be in this piece) that he’s an integral part of modern Shanghai-ese culture) But I’m not sure what he was doing in the show … The other videos were raw funny performative – there was a document of a tug of war orchestrated by Lin Yilin as part of Documenta in Kassel, Germany over the summer. One other especially poignant piece depicts a class of white European kids on a tour of China. Here LYL turns them into stand ins for Chinese people: The group sits in a Chinese class room, rides the bus, sings KOK (Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach) in effect the group embodies (due to their placement/context) the Chinese-ness that the (non-Chinese) audience seeks in Chinese things (esp. art). But they are white and western. They are our mirror. Yep. LYL NYC based, jetset, Chinese artist with his European kids in tow touring Shanghai. More on the subject
By the way that's LYL in the upper right next to Zhou Xiaohu who you've met earlier

Polit-Sheer-Form @ Bizart: Form=Content=Form; Is progress antithetical to the post modern condition and can you pass me a banana please?

Polit-Sheer-Form’s exhibition opening at BizArt took many viewers by surprise when upon arrival instead of finding your typical reception they found a meeting in progress. Around a large white table spotted by plates of bananas and clouded by cigarette smoke the artist collective Polit-Sheer-Form debated and discussed with local artists and audience members the merits of, well, what exactly was going on. New Poly-Form is a creative collective comprised of the critic-turned-gallerist Leng Lin and the artists: Liu Jianhua, Hong Hao, Xiao Yu, and Song Dong. Each of these characters, successful in their own practices, had decided to make their friendship and debates a pronounced art movement in 2005. According to the exhibition literature the group eats, plays, gets massages, travels, and discusses important topics together. Being together and the social processes that occur is the crux of their practice. It is a stance, they claim, that resists the growing culture of individualism in Chinese society and instead harks back to a time not so long ago when individuals relinquished their egos for the good of the collective. Earlier this year an exhibition at Leng Lin’s Beijing Commune presented images based upon the group’s outings painted in a uniformly deadpan manner and inflected with a labeling system reminiscent of propaganda pictorials from that bygone era. However the art that Polit-Sheer-Form usually produces is not object orientated but instead conceptual gestures aimed at completing a system of self-referentiality in effort to, as Leng Lin professes, advance the notion of art. For this noble reason the group decided to take their esoteric art practice on a road tour to Shanghai. In Biz Art’s bare walled corridor a large framed photograph (presumably a composite portrait of the group’s members) hung to the left of the table, on the other side banners installed vertically on poles unveiled the group’s manifesto. “Within the context of… private desires allowed for by the market economy, the individual, without the literal and metaphorical support of the collective, is isolated within the course of development” At the beginning of this collective affair a computer rattled off recordings of questions that were to be topics for discussion. But the discussion quickly deteriorated into an attack on the group itself and it’s convoluted intentions. Leng Lin did a lot of the defending to basically what was an inquiry into the inherent structure of the group and event at hand. Besides the form of the group what is the content? Surely everyone engages in cavorting with friends, is packaging this as art interesting? Is form alone, especially an already tried and true form (the artist collective), enough to advance art? Whether or not Polit-Sheer-Form’s rebuttal helped to quell these issues they had already succeeded in their mission. For an art world increasingly unable to engage in critical issues this meeting broke down the relationship of producer and consumer and exposed a goldmine of issues that affect the very sustenance of art.