Director: Menene Gras, Exhibition and Culture Director, Casa Asia, Barcelona/Madrid, SPAIN.

One cannot speak of Asian art in opposition to other nationalities in art, yet this discrimination, while

attempting to be positive, takes on greater import when it tries to establish the identity of a certain

visual production, given the corresponding information this wishes to add without necessarily affecting

its real or fictitious value. Following last year’s edition dedicated exclusively to India, the second Asian

country invited to ARCOmadrid following Australia, the theme of this sixth edition of “Asian Maps” is

sufficiently open in order to embrace some crucial aspects brought into crisis by artists, critics,

theorists and curators. Despite being frequently used in the vocabulary of anatomy to immediately

reference the human body and especially the joints of the extremities, the term dislocation is sufficiently ambiguous in the mesh of meanings to also integrate the possibility of an inflection into the

plane of the text: first of all, the term means a crystalline defect or an injury or fracture of the

articulations. Yet, the meaning we extract here is one of deviation and distortion coming from the

impact involved in an intervention aimed at putting to the test a materially formulated statement and

the meaning it proposes. By analogy, the word at once implies the action of deviation, distortion,

slippage or out-of-jointness besides spraining, twisting and injuring. In this case, it is understood as a

deployment associated with a form of action to strategically address the reading and interpretation of

texts that take on sensitive forms through the image. The ambiguity in the use of the term allows this

practice to be addressed from the different disciplines using the languages shared by visual

production in the broader field of art.

The participants in the seminar come from different disciplines, to

encourage the plurality of perspectives in accordance with the mission announced in the title of the

seminar. The exercise of dislocation and deviation or disjointing is necessary to provoke a fracture or

rupture that would favour or stimulate the change and new development of a certain language that is

organised in text and a weave of signs. Asian art cannot be addressed globally, but any localised

approximation must take into account the respective transitions of the local to the global, whatever the

chosen framework. The various regions of Asia are characterised by their diversity, without it being

possible to omit the local and regional identity in the global context of international art, whose

vulnerability ultimately reveals its dependence on the world economy and the market. The

interventions are grouped together in two panels to separate producers from theorists and differentiate

their positions vis-à-vis phenomena that accumulate uncertainty and posit unresolved questions, to the

extent that the production anticipates its rationalisation and as a consequence requires this exercise in

interpretation that must be proposed from dislocation, deviation and the fracture of the system or

systems of art today, as an essential strategy for knowledge.

• Lida Abdul, Artist, Sedona, USA.

Born in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1973, and resides there now. Abdul lived in Germany and India as a

refugee after she was forced to leave Afghanistan after the former-Soviet invasion. Her work fuses

the tropes of ‘Western” formalism with the numerous aesthetic traditions–Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu,

pagan and nomadic–that collectively influenced Afghan art and culture. She has produced work in

many media including video, film, photography, installation and live performance. Her most recent

work has been featured at the Venice Biennale 2005, Istanbul Modern, Kunsthalle Vienna,

Museum of Modern Art Arnhem, Netherlands and Miami Central, CAC Centre d’Art Contemporain

de Bretigny, and Frac Lorraine Metz, France. She has also exhibited in festivals in Mexico, Spain,

Germany, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan; She was also a featured artist at the Central

Asian Biennial 2004. For the past few years, Abdul has been working in different parts of

Afghanistan on projects exploring the relationship between architecture and identity.

• Lu Chuan, Cinema Director, Beijing, CHINA. Over the past ten years, 3 films and more than 40 international film awards all over the World, Lu

Chuan has written his own history as a young Chinese film director. In 1998, after receiving a

Master’s degree in Film Directing from Beijing Film Academy, Lu Chuan wrote and shot his

directional debut, Xun Qiang in 2001: In 2004, Lu Chuan’s second feature, Ke Ke Xi Li, aka,

Mountain Patrol, was praised by many critics and touched tens of thousands of audiences all over

the world. Ever since 2005, Lu Chuan shot his third film. This epic film, named City of Life and

Death, created quite a slir all over the world and won the top Golden Shell I and Best

Cinematography Award at the 57th San Sebastian International Film Festival and Achievement in

directing and Achievement in cinematography in the third annual Asia Pacific Screen Awards. In

2006, Lu Chuan was chosen “The Top 10 Directors to Watch”, Variety (USA). In 2009, he received

the award “China’s most powerful people 2009”, BusinessWeek (USA).

Born in Taiwan and currently living in New York City, Lee Mingwei creates both participatory

installations, where strangers can explore issues of trust, intimacy, and self-awareness on their

own, and one-n-one events, where visitors explore these issues with the artist himself through

eating, walking and conversation. Lee’s projects are often open=ended scenarios for everyday

interaction, and take on different forms depending on the participants. Time is central to this

process, as Lee’s installations often change during the course of an exhibition.

Mariko Mori has been catapulted into artistic fame, collected by museums and art collectors the

world over. In the early nineties, Mori attracted attention with her creation of large scale

photographic works and epic video installations, projected in full Cinemascope. These fantasy

dreamscapes star the artist herself in improbable scenarios, featuring fashion imagery peppered by

her critique of mass popular culture. By 1999, Mariko Mori began eliminating her physical self in

her work, shifting to a profoundly spiritual perspective. Her constant quest for research has enabled

her to create abstract, large-scale, highly accomplished three-dimensional works which cross the

various disciplines, including science, architecture, cinema, and music. In particular, Mori gained

worldwide acclaim for her interactive installation, WAVE UFO, which was included in the 2005

Venice Biennale/ The WAVE UFO began its travels in Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria in 1993,

followed by the showcase exhibition at the IBM building with the Public Art Fund and thereafter at

the Palazzo Ducale, Genoa in 1994. The Wave UFO continued to travel as part of Oneness, a

large scale mid-career retrospective of Mariko Mori’s work, to Groningen Museum, Groningen April

2007, Aarhus Kunstmuseum, at the Aros Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark, October 2007, and

most recently to Pinchuk Art Centre Ukraine in 2008. Born in Tokyo, 1967, Mariko Mori studied

fashion design in Japan and worked as a fashion model in the late 1980s. She attended the

Chelsea College of Art, London (1989-92), and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent

Study Program (1993). Her monumental installations have been exhibited throughout the world,

including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Prada Foundation, Milan; The Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art,

Chicago, The Serpentine Gallery, London; the Dallas Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of

Art, and the Groningen Museum, Groningen.

• Davide Quadrio, Founder and Director, ARTHUB and Far East Far West Art Productions,

Davide after managing BizArt Art Centre in Shanghai the first not for profit independent creative lab in China for a decade, created in 2007 Arthub a platform to support artistic endeavors in Asia. Arthub is now one of the 12 worldwide network partners of Prince Claus Fund (the Netherlands) for South East Asia (2008-2010). With BizArt and its team and now with Arthub, he organized hundreds of exhibitions, educational activities and exchanges in China and abroad, developing relationships with local and foreign institutions worldwide. Quadrio has been consulting Bund18 Creative Space (2005-2008) curating shows such as Vivienne Westwood’s Exhibition together with V&A, the Droog Design exhibition tour China (Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing) and the solo exhibition by Olivo Barbieri, Site-specific during the 2006 Shanghai Biennale. In the international arena he curated shows worldwide and most recently Artissima Cinema in the Museum of Cinema, Turin (2007/2008) and in Florence at Palazzo Strozzi with the show China!China!China which will tour to Sainsbury Art Center (2009). Davide organized a 5 days public art event for the Eart festival, October 2008 in heart of Shanghai, Xujiahui district. On the cultural development side Davide has been working with ASEF and international governments consulting among others Pro Helvetia, the Foreign Ministry of the Netherlands, of Ireland and UK. Since 2009, he is a founder and director of Far East Far West Ltd, an art production company which supports new, challenging productions for artists or projects based in Asia. Davide has been often invited by Universities such as Leiden University (the Netherlands), La Sapienza (Italy) and East Anglia University (UK), Academy of Fine Arts of Seoul (Korea), just to mention few for lectures, workshops and presentation. Articles by Davide appeared in various magazines, newspapers and catalogues worldwide, such as Yishu Journal, Flash Art, Artforum etc. and several academic publication due in 2010.