Monthly Archives: January 2011

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News Years in China

 In china now, and severly challenged as far as internet access is concerned. I’ll be sending art-info content upon return. In meantime, and just from the front pages of Zhejiang Province news (where I am currently), residents of  Taizhou have newly installed of all things…a wall!  This will keep out unwanteds, particularly theives, who come New Years are considered to be a major headache in all Chinese cities, this one no exception. Residents and legitimate visitors are issued cheerful yellow coins for entering the city.

  From my humble point of view, I’d say Chinese theives are still relatively few given the massive income disparity in this country and the close proximity of rich to poor in China’s cities major and minor.  Will be interesting to note whether such measures have much impact.  If Taizhou is a success we may well see not a great wall, just a myriad of gates.

 

 

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Ai Weiwei studio no longer

 

Source: New York Times

A short post to note the passing of Ai Weiwei’s Shanghai studio, a demolition that had been promised by Shanghai authorities but without clear specification of a demolition date. That demolition date, it would appear, has arrived.

As Edward Wong dutifully reports (NYT article here), Ai Weiwei, who lives primarily in Beijing, not Shanghai, was alerted to the arrival of the bulldozers by his Shanghai neighbors.  He made it just in time to see the final pieces of his one-million-dollar investment turn to rubble (and pick up at least one major piece for the photography above).

The rest of this business aside (probably well-enough addressed elsewhere in this blog, not to mention just about everywhere else, including CultureGrrl with this post), I am struck again by the notion, as repeated by Wong, that Ai’s ongoing struggle with Chinese authorities could be considered a form of “performance art.”  What, I wonder, is being performed? And who has the script?  Is there possibly the implication that one or more parties is actually playing a “role”, which begs the question of what “real” sympathies might underlie the act.  Not to say that I find this description inaccurate.  Indeed, given the kind of stage that global media sets for such artists as Ai, the notion of performance, replete with acts and climaxes, lulls, intervals and intermissions, is indeed apt.  At the end of the day, though, Ai has no studio to go home to in Shanghai.  At least the broken bricks are real.

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The Rising Tide (A film by Robert Adanto)

In keeping with the documentary theme,

I just came across Robert Andanto’s The Rising Tide: A Documentary on Contemporary Chinese Art (2008).  Don’t know quite how I missed this one. It is quite an excellent piece of work, or at least it seems that way from the 4 + minutes I’m able to view on Youtube.

Of particular note is the somewhat hysterical (in the best sense of the word) view of contemporary China.  This is, of course, rather ironic, given that the an apocalyptic view of Chinese state (with heady reference to Zhuangzi towards the end of the clip) is itself the source of vibrancy of the art that is on display. In other words, this may be dark days of Chinese society, but its clearly bright beginnings for artists who document the demise. Thus, the more dire and “braindead”, the more exuberant and, simply put, beautiful the response becomes.

Another observation would be that Andanto’s “work” is actually the work of Chinese artists, videographers, photographers and others.  They are of course not only duly credited, but actually the subject of the documentary.  We assume that the rest of the video includes more of Andanto than the artists and society he endeavors to document. Still, as far as the Youtube clip is concerned, we have largely a filmmaker’s sleight of hand, substituting rather than featuring the artistic work of others for his own.

These criticisms aside (again with the caveat that I’ve not actually seen the work), a fine sleight of hand it is!  The cumulative power of Cao Fei and other artists’ insight into contemporary Chinese experience, nicely set to original music by NALEPA and CELESTE LEAR, makes this piece well worth the price of admission, whatever that is. Stills below are photographs from the website

 

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Project 798: New Art in New China

August, 2010 brings the arrival of a new and quite excellent documentary video by Lucius C Kuert focusing on nearly 20 artists currently (or recently) working at 798.  The content, which apart from a few shots of 798 grounds, with outdoor installations, tourists milling about them, and a few workers delivering supplies to worksites, etc., is comprised entirely of individual artists talking about their work and about 798. The only exception is David Ben Kay, who rather delightfully introduces his gallery Yuanfen in a number of installments over the course of the piece. In April Project 798 was awarded a Golden Ace from the Las Vegas Film Festival 2010.  The project website here, with a finely produced trailer that gives a good sense of the entire hour-long piece.

Yet, it is clearly the cumulative effect of this video that makes it valuable.  The multiple voices, in three different languages (with Italian added to the English-Chinese mix) provides a form of automatic resistance to reductive readings of the meaning, importance, relevance of this place.  The variety of views and approaches combine to attest, if nothing else, to the richness of China’s contemporary art scene.

Two themes, politics and market, run through the work, in parallel but also intersecting, and often quite ironically (as in the notion that Chinese artists who display images of government oppression are well positioned to be rewarded financially by global art interests). No one bothers to point out the irony that a Chinese Communist Party is managing an artistic community, but I expect that what was left on the video-editing floor contained much commentary on this subject.  Even with what does make it into the video, though, we can see the twin (and largely negatively construed) forces of CCP, which, for instance, won’t allow taboo subjects of Tiananmen Square demonstrations, Tibet, Religion, … (and so on) and the market, which forces less marketable artists to relocate to cheaper environs.  Of the two, the ambivalence towards the market is more clear, with Chen Wenbo declaring that decorative art has no place in society, and others like Hong Hao, who has made a career out of commenting on the marketization of Chinese art, a bit more nuanced.

The video, in other words, really allows us to look at the forces inherent in Chinese society today, from the point of view of artists, who are highly sensitive both to the strangely parallel winds of shifting political policy and market conditions.

Though it is the variety of voices that I find most compelling, to the extent that artists speak of economic dimensions of their creative experience, the prevailing view of the recent financial crisis is that it is a highly good development for Chinese art.  (It might be worth noting that those for whom the financial crisis was more clearly bad are not the type who could afford the rents at 798 and therefore be interviewed for this project.)

Zhang Xiaogang

As to highpoints in these interviews, there are principally two for me, and both come at the end of the piece.  The first is to see Zhang Xiaogang, who has the distinction of being not only the most richly compensated Asian artist alive (with “Bloodline #3″ selling for over $6,000,000 in 2008), is also highly articulate and thoughtful, providing a candid and quite compelling description of those strange bars of light that creep across his campuses. The next is the artist who strikingly concludes the work, is He Yunchang, who flatly reports that he’s never been involved in an “important” exhibition. The Project 798 itself is an important exhibition of sorts, and He’s privileged position at the end of the video (the last word!) provides a kind of artistic grit to the overall polished (and by some accounts ‘sanitized’) view of 798.  He Yunchang is a performance artist known for encasing himself in concrete, or bleeding himself (literally) into major Chinese rivers and the like.  The moment when he claims to not like artistic theatricality 表演性 is both genuine and also knowingly ridiculous for a man whose performances have a decidedly Houdini-esque quality.  He Yunchang provides the edge that the video needs to retain its own expositionary value, and perhaps also the continued value of 798 itself.

 

He Yunchang

Project 798: New Art in New China
2010
Distributed by Microcinema International/Microcinema DVD, 1636 Bush St., Suite #2, SF, CA 94109; 415-447-9750
Produced by Lucius C Kuert
Directed by Lucius C Kuert
DVD, color, 62 min.