Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta, Indonesia – BizArt, Shanghai Cina
I joined this residency program in China altogether with our touring exhibition titled “The Past the Forgotten Time”, organized by Cemeti Art House, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. I went to China with my fellow-artist, Yuli Prayitno, whose works also exhibited in Bizart for the event. It was November 2007.
It was my first time to visit China. Before I got there, I heard so much about the rapid growth of economic development in the country, especially, related to my interest, the phenomenal development of the arts. In Indonesia contemporary art scene, the discourse of Chinese contemporary art has been very popular during last five years amongst the artists, critics, curators and collector. Many galleries showed contemporary Chinese art works and the exposure of mass media on China art trends has been very intensive. Even, there is a new tendency amongst the young artists in Indonesia to duplicate the style of Chinese contemporary artists.
During my 25 days staying, I’ve spent my time mostly to explore the city of Shanghai. Living in the studio of Bizart, which is located at the Moganshan Lu 50, a complex of art galleries and studios, I have much time to see art scene of Shanghai, which appeared to be very commercial. I also had the opportunity to visit Beijing, which enabled me to compare the art scenes of the two cities.
Some exhibitions I’ve seen were quite interesting and gave me a feeling of chinese contemporary art today. Particularly in Beijing, I saw that the international exposure contributed much to the development of the art scene there. Not only from the art side, but also the international intellectual movement, global culture, has give great advantage to enrich the reference and conceptual ideas of young Chinese artists. Some of those exhibitions such as Bienalle Animamix (Shanghai Contemporary Art Museum), Fabrica (Shanghai Art Museum), Ha Jiemin (ShangArt), 85 New Wave (UCCA, Beijing), Anish Kapoor (Galerie Continua, Beijing), Retrospective of Long March Project (Long March Foundation, Beijing), has shown me the strong conceptual background of Chinese contemporary arts.
What is lack is about meeting artists, curators, and critics. Dadou and his staff helped me out to meet some artists and critics in Shanghai. It was a pity that most of the artists could not speak English (to be honest, the problem of language is one of the biggest matter during my residency). If it was possible, I would really like to talk to some artists to have more comprehensive idea about their creative process or their worldview. I met Lothar Sphere and Zao Chan. Our short conversation has been so worth to me. Davide Quadrio has discussed with us and guided us about how to explore the city and arts life in Shanghai.
My stay in China was one of the most interesting experiences in my life. I felt like I did meeting the ‘other’: to see a very different culture, learning about different language, observing different way of live. As a curator, those kinds of things would be very important for my ability of seeing difference as a basic idea of art projects. I learned so much about how’s the capability to put the historical background in a right context would lead us to a bright future as social human being.
