Asia Art Archive (AAA) and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) celebrate the completion of two documentary projects that are essential to a deeper understanding of the history of Contemporary Chinese Art. AAA’s Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980-1990 and MoMA’s publication of Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents. The two organizations will co-launch both projects in major cities in China and in New York in the fall of 2010 with a series of public programs. These milestone projects focus on the dramatic development and growth of Chinese contemporary art over the last three decades by documenting, collecting and translating critical discussions, primary materials and key texts.

Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980-1990

The 1980s was a seminal period in China’s recent art history. During this time, many of China’s most celebrated artists attended art academies, held their first exhibitions, and developed the intellectual foundation for the art practices that have contributed to their present success. In order to foster research into this transformative moment in Chinese history, AAA has undertaken a four year focused archiving project; collecting, indexing and preserving rare documentary and primary source materials. As a result, AAA has collected hundreds of texts published during the 1980s, completed 75 video-taped interviews, produced a documentary film, and digitized the personal archives of renowned artists and curators, including Fei Dawei, Zhang Xiaogang, Zheng Shengtian, Lu Peng, Mao Xuhui and Wu Shanzhuan, to name a few. With a total of over 70,000 digital documents, AAA now maintains the world’s largest and most systematically organized archive of documentary material on the period. This scholarly resource will be freely accessible and open to the public from AAA’s physical premises as well as through a dedicated web portal www.china1980s.org, starting September 2010.

Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents

Despite the liveliness and creativity of avant-garde Chinese art in the post-Mao era and its prominence in the world of international contemporary art, a systematic introduction to this important work in any Western language is still lacking. Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents remedies this situation by bringing together carefully selected primary texts in English translation. The documents included range from the manifestos of avant-garde groups, prefaces to important exhibitions, writings by representative artists, important critical and analytical essays, and even some official documents. Arranged in chronological order, the texts guide readers through the development of avant-garde Chinese art from 1976 until 2006. Edited by Wu Hung, Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia and Consulting Curator at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, with the assistance of Peggy Wang, Assistant Professor at Denison University, Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents is published by The Museum of Modern Art and will be available at MoMA Stores and online at www.MoMAStore.org in September 2010. It is distributed to the trade by Duke University Press, www.dukeupress.edu.

Schedule of Public Program

The co-launch will be accompanied by a series of discussion forums with artists, curators and scholars:

Hong Kong, 7th September, 6.30pm, Hong Kong Arts Centre
Speakers include: Chen Tong (Artist), Doryun Chong (Associate Curator of Painting & Sculpture at MoMA), Jane DeBevoise (Chair of Board of Directors of AAA), Wang Aihe (Associate Professor, School of Chinese, The University of Hong Kong); Wu Hung (Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia, and Consulting Curator at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago) and Xu Tan (Artist)

Beijing, 9th September, 6.30pm, The Central Academy of Fine Arts

Speakers include: Doryun Chong, Jane DeBevoise, Song Dong (Artist), Huang Rui (Artist), Wu Hung and Xu Bing (Artist)

Shanghai, 11th September, 4 pm, Minsheng Bank Museum

Speakers include: Doryun Chong, Jane DeBevoise, Wu Shanzhuan (Artist), Shi Yong (Artist), Wu Hung and Yu Youhan (Artist)

Organizers of co-launch: Arthub Asia (Shanghai), Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong), The Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing), and The Museum of Modern Art (New York)

New York, 15th October, 6:30pm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Bartos Theatre

This program presents Jane DeBevoise, Sarah Suzuki (Assistant Curator of Prints & Illustrated Books at MoMA) and Wu Hung in conversation with leading artists and critics. The event will be followed by a reception, where the book will be available for purchase.

Materials of the Future: Documenting Contemporary Chinese Art from 1980-1990 is made possible by the generous support of The Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation, The W.L.S. Spencer Foundation, Ilyas and Mara Khan, and Foundation for Arts Initiatives

Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents is made possible by lead sponsor The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation. Generous support is provided by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art. Additional funding is provided by Budi Tek, Byron A. Meyer, E. Rhodes & Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley, Blakemore Foundation, Guy and Myriam Ullens, LLWW Foundation, OCT Contemporary Art Terminal of He Xiangning Art Museum (OCAT), Anne H. Bass, Jo Carole Lauder, Larry Warsh and AW Asia, Robert Rosenkranz Foundation, Vicki and Roger Sant, Agnes Gund, Robert E. Meyerhoff, The Fran and

Ray Stark Foundation, H.R.H. Duke Franz of Bavaria, Jack Shear, Thierry Barbier-Mueller, Mr. Marc Besen AO and Mrs. Eva Besen AO, Lyn and Jerry Grinstein in honor of Jay Levenson, Sophia Sheng, Eleanor Ford Sullivan, Migs Wright, Constance Caplan, Uli Sigg, and Lenore and Bernard Greenberg.
The co-launch events are made possible with the generous support of The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation, Minsheng Art Museum, Hong Kong Arts Centre and JIA Boutique Hotels

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亞洲藝術文獻庫  www.aaa.org.hk

現代藝術博物館  www.moma.org

亞洲藝術文獻庫  (「文獻庫」) 與現代藝術博物館 (MoMA) 剛完成兩個紀實項目，兩者對於更深入
地了解當代中國藝術皆大有裨益，我們深以為慶。它們分別是亞洲藝術文獻庫的「未來的材料：記
錄 1980-1990 當代中國藝術」計劃，以及 MoMA 出版的《中國當代藝術：原始文獻》。2010 年
秋，文獻庫將與 MoMA 在中國各大城市和紐約聯袂推出項目成果發佈會。這兩個項目意義重大，
它們通過記錄、收集和翻譯重要的論述、原始素材和文本，以集中探討當代中國藝術三十年來的迅
速增長和發展。

「未來的材料：記錄 1980-1990 當代中國藝術 」

在中國近代藝術史上，1980 年代的影響極為深遠。在此期間，許多當前知名的藝術家正在藝術院
校學習，首次展出其作品，並為其藝術實踐和今日的成就奠定了理論基礎。為了深入研究這個中國
歷史上的重要轉折期，文獻庫展開了一個專題文獻項目，花了四年時間，收集、整理和保存這些彌
足珍貴的紀實和原始素材。結果，文獻庫匯集了數百本八十年代的出版物，完成了 75 次錄像採訪
及一齣紀錄片的製作，並將一批著名藝術家和策展人 (如費大為、張曉剛、鄭勝天、呂澎、毛旭
輝、吳山專等) 的個人珍藏進行數位掃描。文獻庫共擁有七萬多個數位檔，堪稱為當今世上最具規
模和最有系統的八十年代紀實文獻庫。這批資料將於 2010 年 9 月免費對外開放，公眾人士可親臨
文獻庫辦事處查詢，或瀏覽文獻庫為此而設的專屬中英雙語網站：www.china1980s.org。
《中國當代藝術：原始文獻》

儘管後毛澤東時代的中國前衛藝術生機盎然、創意洋溢，且在當代國際藝壇上備受重視，但任何一
種西方語言中尚不存在對這個重要藝術現象的系統介紹。為了解決這個問題，《中國當代藝術：原
始文獻》精心甄選了一批原始文本譯成英文。這些文檔涵蓋前衛藝術團體的宣言、重要展覽的前
言、代表性的藝術家之著作、重要的評析論文等。書內收錄的文本按時間排列，循序漸進地引領讀
者追溯中國前衛藝術由 1976 年至 2006 年的演變發展。美國芝加哥大學講座教授、東亞藝術中心
主任及該校斯馬特美術館顧問策展人巫鴻出任編輯一職，編務有王必慈從旁協助，出版和發行機構
分別為 MoMA 及杜克大學出版社。如欲購買此書，可親臨 MoMA 專賣店，或登入
www.momastore.org 或 www.dukeupress.edu，直接於線上購買。
 

公開活動日程

是次聯合發佈會將同時舉行一系列由應邀的藝術家、策展人及學者參與之座談會：

香港，九月七日，下午六時三十分至八時三十分，香港藝術中心
講者包括：陳侗 (藝術家)、Doryun Chong (現代藝術博物館繪畫及雕塑部副策展人)、 杜柏貞 (亞
洲藝術文獻庫董事會主席)、王愛和 (香港大學中文系副教授) 、巫鴻 (芝加哥大學讲座教授、東亞
藝術研究中心主任及該校斯馬特美術館顧問策展人) 及 徐坦(藝術家) 

北京，九月九日，下午六時三十分至八時三十分，中央美術學院
講者包括： Doryun Chong、 杜柏貞、宋冬(藝術家) 、黃銳(藝術家)、巫鴻及徐冰(藝術家)

上海，九月十一日，下午四時至六時，民生現代美術館
講者包括：  Doryun Chong、 杜柏貞、吳山專(藝術家)、施勇（藝術家）、巫鴻及余友涵(藝術家)

紐約，十月十五日，下午六時三十分，現代藝術博物館
講者包括： 杜柏貞、黃銳(藝術家)、林天苗(藝術家)、Sarah Suzuki (現代藝術博物館印刷及插圖
書部副策展人) 、巫鴻，活動完結後將設有售賣《中國當代藝術：原始文獻》的攤位。

聯合發佈會主辦機構： ArtHub Asia暨民生現代美術館(上海)、亞洲藝術文獻庫(香港)、中央美術學
院 (北京)、及現代藝術博物館 (紐約)

主辦機構

亞洲藝術文獻庫 (香港)

亞洲藝術文獻庫成立於2000年，是一個年青、有活力的機構，旨在收藏及保存當代亞洲藝術的資
訊，並致力將館藏開放，增加大眾認識，鼓勵對話及促進有關的研究及評論。亞洲藝術文獻庫是首
個同類型的藝術中心及圖書館，擁有全球最全面的當代亞洲藝術第一手及第二手資料，目前超過
26,000項之館藏，是為同類型最齊全的收藏之一，公眾可親臨圖書館瀏覽資料，或透過網上目錄搜
查藏品紀錄。

由創辦以來，亞洲藝術文獻庫已不只定位為一個有待發現的靜態資料藏庫。透過定期籌辦的教育及
公開活動，文獻庫致力引發討論與反思，並將豐富的館藏資源介紹給更廣闊的受眾群。
網址：www.aaa.org.hk
現代藝術博物館 (紐約)

現代藝術博物館〔MoMA〕於 1929 年成立，作為一所教育機構，MoMA 一直致力於成為世界上最
重要的現代美物館。MoMA 的中心使命為促進及加強海內外觀眾對現、當代藝術有更透徹的認識與
欣賞。1952 年，MoMA 設置的國際項目部，成為本館與世界各地現、當代藝術社群建立並保持聯
繫的橋樑。通過一系列的國際計劃和出版項目，促進了有關博物館學、策展和藝術實踐多個領域在
國際之間的認識，批判論述及交流。
網址：www.moma.org
 

中央美術學院  (北京)
中央美術學院是教育部直屬的唯一一所高等美術學校，於 1950 年 4 月由國立北平藝術專科學校與
華北大學三部美術系合並成立。北平藝術專科學校的歷史可以上溯到 1918 年，由著名教育家蔡元
培先生積極倡導下成立的國立北京美術學校，這是中國歷史上第一所國立美術教育學府，也是中國
現代美術教育的開端。。現任黨委書記為楊力同志，現任院長為著名畫家、美術史論家潘公凱教
授，現任院學術委員會主任為著名油畫家靳尚誼教授。
網址：www.cafa.edu.cn 
ArtHub Asia 暨民生現代美術館 (上海)
成立於 2007 年的 ArtHub 亞洲是一個多領域藝術組織，致力於中國和亞洲其他地區的當代藝術創
作。它與很多博物館以及其他公立或私立的空間和機構都有合作關係，與視覺、行為藝術、新媒體
等領域的藝術家不斷進行對話。ArtHub 將致力於推動藝術實驗和知識生產，促進藝術家、藝術工
作者、學者以及藝術組織的多樣性發展。ArtHub 亞洲董事：Davide Quadrio、Defne Ayas、邱志
傑。ArtHub 亞洲是 2008-2010 年克勞斯親王基金會聯絡伙伴。

上海發佈會由 ArtHub 亞洲及民生現代美術館合力籌劃。民生現代美術館，成立於 2008 年，是中
國民生銀行基於承擔社會責任和文化理想而發起成立的公益性藝術機構。
網址：www.arthubasia.org
「未來的材料：記錄 1980-1990 當代中國藝術 」得到以下單位的慷慨支持：
何鴻毅家族基金、The W.L.S. Spencer Foundation、Ilyas and Mara Khan 及 Foundation for Arts
Initiatives。
《中國當代藝術：原始文獻》得到以下單位的慷慨支持：
何鴻毅家族基金、The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art, Budi Tek, Byron A.
Meyer, E. Rhodes & Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley,
Blakemore Foundation, 尤倫斯伉儷、LLWW Foundation、OCT 當代藝術中心、Anne H. Bass, Jo
Carole Lauder, Larry Warsh and AW Asia, Robert Rosenkranz Foundation, Vicki and Roger Sant,
Agnes Gund, Robert E. Meyerhoff, The Fran and Ray Stark Foundation, H.R.H. Duke Franz of
Bavaria, Jack Shear, Thierry Barbier-Mueller, Mr. Marc Besen AO and Mrs. Eva Besen AO, Lyn
and Jerry Grinstein in honor of Jay Levenson, Sophia Sheng, Eleanor Ford Sullivan, Migs Wright,
Constance Caplan, Uli Sigg, 以及 Lenore and Bernard Greenberg。

聯合發佈會得到以下單位的慷慨支持：
The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art、何鴻毅家族基金、香港藝術中心、以及
JIA Boutique Hotels。

如欲查詢「未來的材料：記錄1980-1990當代中國藝術」計劃，請發電郵致phoebe@aaa.org.hk

如欲查詢《中國當代藝術：原始文獻》的資訊，請發電郵致Hannah_Kim@moma.org

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Arthub Asia is a proud partner of this project. See more details below.

Edwin Zwakman

Rendering Real – New Work in China

Dutch conceptual artist and photographer Edwin Zwakman has made his fame with photographs of diligently constructed cardboard models that look vigorously real - fake, but accurate, as one of his most recent solo exhibitions suggests.

As constructed universes, Edwin Zwakman’s photographs share a quality that goes beyond the mere accuracy allowing for a lapse in perception to take place in the heads of its spectators. The stillness and awkwardness inside of the image transforms the portrayed landscape into a poetic standstill, a subtle reflection, giving way to the kind of alienation that one experiences when landscape steps out of the background and assumes an uncomfortable presence, or when a sudden awareness rises over those things surrounding us that we normally hardly notice. From this perspective, Zwakman’s photographs do not have the intention to trick us; rather, they show us how that what we consider to be real, plays tricks with us.

In his in-situ work, Zwakman explores similar mechanisms, and once again he makes use of symbolic and/or poetic imagery to instigate the confusion that characterizes his work. Whether subtle or not at all, Edwin Zwakman’s reconfigurations and interventions in public space again create a sense of alienation that makes for the audience to re-boot its view on the world - in the blink of an eye, momentarily, as a snapshot. Following this logic, Zwakman’s in-situ work can be read as a collection of temporary snapshots, only now he is not taking the picture, but the random passenger is.

In China’s urban metropolises, it seems as if reality needs to be rendered first before it can actually come into being. Massive billboards and advertisement campaigns announce the look of the new China in flashy renders and miniature models that once constructed and inhabited might turn out to look quite the opposite. The political power of the branded, rendered image, the poignant differences with the realization of it and the two parallel realities they eventually become, provides with a fascinating case to study in China when scouting the borderlines between fake real and real fake. It is one of the main research scopes of Edwin Zwakman’s residency in Beijing.

With the Treehugger project to be realized in the next months in Beijing, Zwakman applies another recurrent strategy in his work: to re-adjust the use of a symbol or an object and copy-paste it next to another, creating as a result a somewhat estranging encounter. The city’s numerous passenger bridges are taken out of context and simulated around a tree. But the Treehugger project also involves a reflection on the dichotomy between the above mentioned real and rendered real, and so he will alter an intervention in public space with reproductions or renders in a white cube setting. Or was it the other way round?

Els Silvrants, 16 April 2009

Edwin Zwakman will give a lecture presentation on his work in the Beijing University on May 8 at 7 PM and in the Central Academy of Fine Arts on May 15, also at 7 PM. For more information contact Liu Gang at liu@theatreinmotion.org.

With the Treehugger project to be realized during the Expo2010 in Shanghai, Arthub continues to host Edwin Zwakman at Arthub studios during his preparations. In his first trip, Edwin Zwakman resided in Beijing with Theatre in Motion.

His project is sponsored by OCT, FondsBKVB and DCC.

荷兰概念艺术家及摄影师，埃德温·斯瓦克曼因他显示着勤奋制造的纸板模型的照片而出名。这些照片看上去旺盛地逼真—— 如他最近一次个展的名称所标明一样—— 虚假但准确。

像被建造的宇宙，埃德文·斯瓦克曼的照片有一种不仅仅局限于因准确而能使观众产生错觉的本质。形象中的寂静和不安使照片上的景观陷入颇有诗意的停滞状态，微妙的反思，让位于一种像当景观走出其背景并采取让人不安的存在时那样的脱离感，或者一种像当我们突然发现平时不注意的东西的那样感觉一样。真么一看，斯瓦克曼的照片没有欺骗我们的企图；反而使我们发现平时认为真实的如何欺骗我们。

在他的现场作品中，斯瓦克曼探究类似的机制，也同样为了让观众迷惑而使用象征的和/或有诗意的意象。不管它们是否微妙，斯瓦克曼在公共场所进行的结构变形和干涉也都造成让观众换另一种眼光看世界的脱离感。即使是一眨眼的功夫、像快照一样即刻的。 按照此逻辑，斯瓦克曼的现场作品可被视为暂时快照的收集。不过，不是斯瓦克曼在拍照，而是偶然的过路人。

在中国的大城市，真实似乎首先是被营造的，然后才是形成的。巨大的广告牌以及广告战役通过鲜艳的绘图和缩小的模型宣布新中国的面貌。但此面貌被建造、并有人开始居住之后也许会完全不同。被营造的品牌形象的政治力量，形象与其实现结果的突出区别，以及形象与结果最后变成的平行现实，都使中国在寻找虚假真实及真实虚假之间的界限作为吸引人的研究事例。这也作为埃德文·斯瓦克曼在北京驻留的主要研究范围。

斯瓦克曼将会在北京的接下来两个月内完成他“抱树者”项目。斯瓦克曼还会采用在他作品中经常出现的策略：将一个形象或实物的用法重新调整并复制粘贴在另一个形象旁边，而以此造成一种疏离性的相遇。

然而，“抱树者” 项目也蕴含着对以上被提到的真实与被营造真实之间的关系的一个反思。因此，斯瓦克曼将会在一个属于公共场所的白色立方体里采用营造的东西来改动及干涉。

埃德文·斯瓦克曼将于5月8日在北京大学以及于5月15日在中央美术学院就他作品进行两次讲座。对讲座感兴趣的，请与刘刚联系：liu@theatreinmotion.org.

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Six of the participants are from India, Canada, France, Argentina, Australia and the Netherlands. They will be traveling to South Korea (Gwangju, Seoul and Busan), Taiwan (Taipei) as well as China (Shanghai and Beijing) for their research trip. For many of them, it’s the first time visiting any of these countries.

de Appel Curatorial Training Programme’ was initiated in 1994 by former director Saskia Bos, currently Dean of The School of Art at Cooper Union in New York. From the onset the course wished to bridge the gap between art historical education and ‘practice’ in the field of contemporary art by offering young curators a condensed package of experiences and skills which can be used as tools and instruments during the further development of their professional career.

Since 2006/2007 the curriculum of the programme, from then on entitled ‘de Appel Curatorial Programme’, has been reshaped under the guidance of director Ann Demeester and the new tutorial team. This e.g. implied a remarkable expansion of the tutorial team and an extension of the programme period to 8 months. Further changes included the introduction of a sequence of thematic workshops(ranging from ‘The History of Exhibitions’ to ‘Contemporary Project Management’) and the inclusion of a longer research trip to a destination outside Western Europe (in 2006/2007 a trip to New Dehli, Chandigargh, Calcutta, Bangalore and Mumbai under the guidance of artist Praneet Soi and advised by curator Grant Watson and Johan Pijnappel; in 2008/2009 a trip to Houston, New Orleans and Miami under the guidance of urban strategist Kai van Hasselt).

Related Projects

• Golden Ghost (Double happiness comes to the door) by Surasi Kusolwong- Shanghai (0)
• China on Display: Past and Present Practices of Selecting, Exhibiting and Viewing Chinese Visual and Material Culture (0)
• Arthub Commission: Ho Tzu Nyen’s new short film at Tate Modern, NSFS (0)

The China Academy of Art is the most influential academy of fine arts with the most complete range of degree offerings and programs of study in China. It houses a diverse pool of artistic talent, has a distinctive structure integrating theory and practice, focuses on human care and social needs, and combines modern technical and cultural disciplines with traditional artistic ones. The academy features the study of theories of fine arts, architecture, film and new media, which constitute the humanities and reflect the Chinese national spirit and creative theories of the era.

In attendance: Gao Shiming, Defne Ayas, Xu Zhen, Wu Shanzhuan

Related Projects

• Q2008 by Feng Mengbo- video gaming performance first time in public (0)
• Points of Encounter- a Timeline to be Completed (0)
• Asia Art Award Forum, Seoul, Korea (0)

Related Projects

• ‘Double Infinity’, A collaborative encounter between Van Abbemuseum and Arthub Asia -Shanghai (0)
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Arthub Director Defne AYAS asks questions to Van Abbemuseum Director Charles ESCHE about working in China for the first time, after avoiding the China hype for years, for a momentary autopsy of Double Infinity.

The interview will be published in Yishu Journal, November issue.

Charles ESCHE (born 1962, England) is a curator and writer. Since 2004, he is Director of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands. He is co-founder and co-editor of Afterall Journal and Afterall Books with Mark Lewis. In 2009 and 2007 he was co-curator of the 2nd RIWAQ Biennial, Ramallah, Palestine. In 2005 he was co-curator of the 9th International Istanbul Biennial with Vasif Kortun and in 2002 the co-curator with Hou Hanru and Song Wan Kyung of the Gwangju Biennale, Republic of Korea. Between 2000 and 2004 he was the Director of Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmo, Sweden.
Based in Shanghai since 2006, Defne Ayas Ayas works as a director of programs to Arthub Asia, and as an art history instructor at New York University in Shanghai. Ayas is also curator of PERFORMA since 2004, the biennial of visual art performance with base in New York City, where she spends part of the year. Ayas serves as an academic advisor to the 8th Shanghai Biennale “Rehearsal” this year.

Defne Ayas (DA)

Charles Esche (CE)
DA: What has been your perception of China at large prior to your arrival? Maybe you can answer this question within the context of Former West project you are working on, a long-term international research project, which engages in rethinking the global histories of the last two decades in dialogue with post-communist and postcolonial thought?

CE: That is a big question. Clearly, the economic boom of the past 20 years has been down quite simply to the release of resources, energy and human creativity onto the capitalist market since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the consequences of 1989 in Tianamen Square. All this talk of technological transformation and paradigm change in capitalism is, to me, so much hyperbole. The fundamentals of natural and human capital remain the determining factor. As if it needed to be said again, the Chinese system proves that free men and women are not a product of free markets (as the US government defines it) though there are perhaps certain more complex relationships between the economy and liberty. For me, the most interesting question for the next decades, in China but also outside, is the extent to which we are prepared as a globe to question free market exchange systems if they don’t fit to other human desires? In that sense we have a lot in common across the world.

At the moment, and despite the financial crisis, the direction of travel away from complexity and towards the simplicity of “if it sells it is good” has been dramatic. Experimentation in forms of political and cultural representation in Europe has dried up. Democracy appears an endgame, as the neo-cons have it “the end of history”. Will this lethargy continue or will new floodgates open for new forms of being together? And will those potential new forms question the nation state as the basic building block of the current global consensus? That would be a challenge for China just as for everywhere else, as well as for our core identity as individuals and groups. But it is a challenge I feel we need to accept. These questions all belong within the research around Former West as a topic that deals with art and contemporary history. How artists answer them, and what possibilities they create for us to understand the world around us differently seem to me of crucial interest in trying to find out where we go next. China has a big role to play in this I believe, but it is not alone - which sometimes I sense is a bit of a surprise to the Chinese themselves!

DA: I could not agree more with the potential role of Chinese intellectuals and artists, but then I find this quite ironical, especially when we are in a constant position to articulate what Arthub does in China in terms of building up a network; what it is eager to do in regards to knowledge-production and dissemination in the face of a heat-seeking missile market economy. You’ve mentioned earlier that our collaboration has turned around your slightly cynical thinking on possibilities in China? Can you tell me more about this?
CE: Well, it is hard for me the make sweeping generalizations about a situation I know only partially, but I have to admit that I did use my initial prejudice against commercial art as a basis to decide to stay away from China during the days of hot sales to rich collectors. My early skepticism was based on perceiving art in China as largely being produced for a very select band of wealthy collectors and those collectors, especially the European ones, having specific financial entanglements with China for which collecting art was beneficial.

DA: This is quite the universal perception for Chinese contemporary art whose soft history mostly spins around Beijing but not near or in Shanghai. Such superficial view seems the Achilles’ heel of the art scene here.

CE: Such self-interest is part of the art system everywhere and I don’t want to oppose it as such. Rather I don’t want to waste my time on such situations that mostly affirm how good it is to be a master of the free market and instead search for something socially and politically more interesting or productive. Such a situation, with my limited access, seemed very hard to find in China. So I simply stood aside after coming here first in 2001 with Hou Hanru. I engaged instead with other geographies such as former socialist Europe and the Middle East where commerce was less dominant. Double Infinity brought me back to China and meeting you and Davide (Quadrio) here made me more curious.

My experience with Double Infinity and especially with meeting some of the artists and attending our two day seminar was that the financial crash seems to have increased the appetite for some kind of reflection of what art’s possibilities are and how we might use them (refer to the excerpts of the seminar transcript in this issue). It was also fascinating talking to students at the China Art Academy about feminism and realizing a similar confusion as in the West about politics. Feminism is perceived as a kind of optional choice for awkward girls rather than a simple and direct response to the denial of life chances. This denial is, it seems to me, where politics begins but we have rather forgotten that everywhere. To talk about it with Chinese students was very refreshing because I think they could also reflect differently on issues of ideology or politics while experiencing a similar vacuum or loss of political horizon as elsewhere in the world.
Also, I greatly enjoyed talking to Xu Zhen about his MadeIn project, which seems, as Gao Shiming said, a way to challenge authorship and market expectations in a smart manner. There was also a rather beautiful moment when I saw Yang ZhenZhong’s “I will Die’ video on a small screen in his studio. Immediately, the intimacy of the work came shining through, something which I had never perceived in the exhibited versions of large scale, multi screen installations. This work was now about the vulnerability of each individual and not about the sameness of our destiny. For me, it was an example of where modesty works, something that you don’t associate with recent Chinese art. There have also been a number of historical surveys of Chinese art recently in both Beijing and Shanghai that point to a more reflective engagement internally. And our own artists in Double Infinity reacted intelligently and irreverently to historical artworks in our collection. To me, this means that contemporary art is finding a more substantial historical ground on which it can build social commitment. If the works are then sold or commodified by rich collectors that is less of an issue than that they are rooted in a non-elitist reality and ask a more widely relevant series of questions. So yes, my interest in Chinese art is restored, or at least art from Shanghai and Hangzhou.
DA: The prospect of creating a critical momentum with you and your institution in Shanghai as well as a sustainable multiple-phased possibility for not only production but also conversation and internal healing was certainly appealing to Arthub. But what was it that really motivated you to accept working on this cross-cultural project, which was presented under the auspices of the Shanghai Expo?

CE: I think I have to explain a bit the background. If you remember, we came in late 2008 for the first time to Shanghai. The idea was to find out what might be possible and fit within our ways of working in the museum. One of our most enthusiastic advisors Paul Brouwer, who has since died, was a former Dutch ambassador and first suggested the idea to work in Shanghai during the Expo. He wanted us to be involved at Dutch national level to increase our profile with the Netherlands government and he saw the connection to John Körmeling as a good point of entry. Generally all ‘national’ projects are limited to institutions based in Amsterdam and Rotterdam and the Dutch cultural elite has difficulty recognising the achievements of the whole country. Given our own sense at the museum that we lacked a Dutch sensibility and firm connections to national politics, this seemed a good idea. We also wanted to support John who is a good friend of the museum and well represented in the collection. But it could only work if we also found a motivation beyond the tactical and local that chimed with our own way of working and thinking about art. Both Ulrike Erbslöh (Van Abbemuseum’s deputy director) and I wanted to come early to Shanghai to see if the combination of good tactics and good art might be possible.
We met a lot of museum directors, curators and educators from private and state institutions on our visit to Shanghai. To cut a long story short, it was relatively difficult to imagine working with any of them. Remember this was before the crisis and art market crash. Money spoke to the institutions above all, and everywhere we went there was the understandable reaction: “Why would we want to make a show with a Dutch museum when we want to showcase our own artists during the Expo?” We understood and respected this, but the fact was that what we were interested in - an exchange and process of learning from each other - didn’t seem interesting to our Chinese colleagues.

Then we met you in Shanghai and I asked you: can you tell me what is going on here? Can we meet some artists? That meeting, the dinner and the subsequent meeting at BizArt were the absolute highlights of the trip. For the first time, we could speak with people who understood us even if none of us had a clue how to make the ideas happen. Nevertheless, very quickly a plan emerged between us.

We were thinking from the beginning how to connect our concerns with Shanghai and it became obvious that we should ask 3-4 China based artists and curators on your advice to come to Eindhoven and work with the collection and institution to produce new work for a show in China based on Eindhoven, John Körmeling and the Netherlands in some ill-defined but potentially quite poetic way. It was simple, it could work and it would be a way of getting Chinese cultural players to react/accept/reject a European cultural heritage as well as entangle stories that are usually kept apart.
Anyway, we went back to NL and started working on raising money and planning the project. Yang Fudong and Jian Jun Zhang even came to the museum and things started to be sketched. We then heard about the China Arts Foundation and some still unclear plans to open a Dutch house outside the Expo site. This seemed like an opportunity. We had also come to the conclusion with your help that it would be as cheap to open our own temporary venue as hire galleries in one or other of the institutions - and give us more fun and more independence. So, we went to meet the directors of the China Arts Foundation to see what they thought and whether there was a possibility to work together.

DA: How was the initial idea - that China-based artists can come and visit your museum, select pieces from the museum collection for interpretation and exhibition - received? Can you share more how you envisioned the involvement of the Shanghainese artist into your collection re-reading?
CE: At that meeting with China Arts Foundation, our idea was ridiculed. Exchange such as this was not the issue and the important thing would be to make a John Körmeling presentation in the coming Dutch Cultural Centre. I have to say, I took this dismissal rather hard at the time and it continues to sour my feelings a bit, but soon afterwards it seems things changed because we were contacted and told that, while the original idea was not possible for them, they would be interested in something that had elements of exchange within a Körmeling based exhibition.
This triggered us again. Partly we saw the tactical opportunity but now there was a chance to work with you (while you had since become Arthub Asia and no longer BizArt) and to try and achieve at least some of our initial objectives with finance from the Dutch state. It was also clear that we would need to compromise and listen to the China Arts Foundation but I was especially excited by the opportunity to lay the groundwork for a longer-term connection that could prosper. This was and remains absolutely the core motivation to do the project, alongside the desire to recognise John as a significant international artist.

DA: Körmeling’s playful ideas in relation to architecture and city were certainly welcome in a city where there is barely any urban activism, however a focus on his work only was a far cry from what we wanted to really achieve together. To go back to the dynamics of the collaboration, how has the process been so far in your opinion? Our decision to work with the Van Abbemuseum in the context of this exhibition proved to be rewarding, though we thought we made a strange pair: an established museum institution and a very simply structured, three-person operation (Davide Quadrio, Qiu Zhijie and myself). The two curatorial teams aimed to actualize a static “transportation” of cultural objects (from the Van Abbemuseum collection) into a dynamic process where the locality (artists and thinkers not only “ethnically” Chinese but working in Shanghai and China) will re-contextualize, interpret and critique the core idea of “exchange”, revealing how this very word is most often misused or the tool of an imperialist agenda. The process has been one of constant negotiation: Was it at all possible for both parties to be involved in a cross-cultural artistic and institutional production of substance, which goes beyond the simplicity of the occasion, the World Expo 2010?

CE: Inevitably, the full ambition of what we would like to do is going to take time and patience. What we should aim for is a kind of porous and multilayered collaboration over time. Where artists you work with feel the museum as a European base and a place to act when they want to reach out beyond China. At the same time, we can try to construct funding to send artists and artworks from the museum to Shanghai on an irregular basis. I am interested in seeing the Van Abbemuseum dispersed across more sites and situations. I want to shift the idea of the museum from an architecture (Louvre, Guggenheim, Tate Modern) to something more mobile and productive. This rhymes with the historic experience of Eindhoven which is only interesting because it produced products and knowledge that travelled the world. It would fit into this plan to see Shanghai as a point of presence for the museum and vice versa. In that way, the museum is transformed through its experiences with an outside. It goes back to an old wish of Allan Kaprow for the museum to be “a force of innovation lying outside of its physical limits”. He said that in 1967 but maybe now we are ready to realize it.
In view of this ambition, I was happiest when I saw that we could send many people from the museum, including the registrar, conservators, technicians and others to Shanghai. The collaboration can only work well if it is linked in a different levels and we have made a good start towards achieving this. For instance, I was very happy when a number of my colleagues said they would really like Li Mu from the ShuFu Collective to come back and visit Eindhoven. That warmed my heart because it meant we as a museum were thinking together about the future. I am now working on making it happen and Li Mu has already prepared an initial proposal.

I still love the original idea of having artists visiting the museum here and using that as the basis for a project. Not realising the challenge and complexity of that idea remains disappointing, but with Li Mu we can make a new start.

DA: What has the challenges been for you professionally within the context of this exhibition?
CE: The challenges were initially in meeting the expectations of the Dutch China Art Foundation for recognition, funding and promotion. Raising the necessary cash has taken longer and been much more fraught than we expected. On the one hand, the majority of the money has come from the Dutch state for a project outside the country, which is typically generous of the Dutch funding system. However, I have seen the hoops that Ulrike has had to jump through to get the various funding bodies not to cancel each other out or feel content with each other’s contributions. More recently the rather high degree of sensitivity of the Chinese authorities to some of the proposed works as been revealing. I think Ulrike would see the challenges also in trying to keep many competitive partners happy who all have certain expectations of the project that we cannot always satisfy. The patchwork of funding that we have brought together has been difficult to manage.
The financial masters of this project are much more diverse than usual - that stretches your negotiating skills or room for manoeuvre. Personally, I have been in despair at times with the elaborateness of the system and sometimes withdrew myself from the process, or tried to steer it through my staff. I regret this a bit but it was probably the only option to keep all on track.
I think positively it was the first external project that involved so many people in the museum. That is excellent for the future, immediately for when we head to Ramallah with one of the Picasso canvases.

I think Van Abbemuseum and Arthub Asia now have good basis on which to build further.

DA: Any surprises that has made you think differently about it now versus when you first started?

CE: I didn’t really expect the censorship problems. I suppose I imagined the stories of censorship were mostly a question of mistranslation and over-reaction by westerners. I think that is still partly true, but not only. It was sobering to hear Alexander Brandt talking about censorship in the 1990s as feeling like a failure for the artists who had not addressed the right authorities in the right ways. That was also a surprising reaction to me, but one with which I could really identify. How different is that to failing to get funding from the Dutch state authorities? In principle artists in western Europe are free, in reality the depend on state or private patronage almost entirely.

DA: Censorship was quite a negotiation process for the exhibition for sure. We ourselves were also surprised what happened in the process of the approval of certain works that were ok to show in Beijing and Guangzhou but not in Shanghai, as in the case of Xijing Men’s video or Cao Fei’s Making of RMB City.

How do you think Double Infinity’s curatorial premise promises to contribute to the field?
CE: I have been recently very struck by something that Sarat Maharaj said to me. He was speaking about Euro-centrism and how we have to avoid throwing out the baby of European political and artistic experimentation with the bathwater of racism and white superiority. He didn’t put it like that but he meant something like it, I think. For me, what he said has a lot to do with how we in Western Europe can perform a function as a region in a globalised context. It means not forgetting the emancipatory, radical, challenging elements of our past in an urge to apologise for our exploitation of the rest of the world. The fact that most if not all of Europe’s noble experiments have failed in one form of another does not mean that we cannot pass on knowledge and experience of them, nor that we should cease to try to develop them in our own way alongside other continents. It is also undeniable that Europe has touched every corner of this planet for better and worse and cannot simply fade into provincial obscurity without facing up to the responsibilities and potentialities this creates.

Now, I think the curatorial premise of Double Infinity by taking objects from one site as the starting point for new work in another has something of these aspects of revaluing European experimentation through the eyes of artists who have received them up to now as, in some ways, revealed truths. The attempt needs to be made, both in China and in Europe or elsewhere, to transform the common understanding of modernist European artistic heritage over the last 100 years. Whereas many museums present the “masterpieces” of modernism as completed, externally determined truths, it is possible to present them as much more propositional and responsive to their own time and place. This needs to be done because there is much of great value in these modernist artistic proposals if their potency can be released again today. As Sarat’s observation suggests, that also means that they are not condemned only to communicate fully with their own origin and generation. Instead they can reach out beyond that, not to a rigid form of universal human experience but through the awkward processes of time and space translation that force them (the artworks and positions of the artists themselves) to take different stances, reveal other nuances and possibilities while remaining fundamentally themselves. Observing these aspects of weak, or slight change as a result of objects and ideas crossing continents seems to me partly what we are doing in Double Infinity and I see that is a potentially significant contribution. What I hope for the future is that we can develop these thoughts together and move on to ideas of entanglement, and even abandonment, of the obsession with cultural origins in the production of new work and positions.
DA: Please tell me more about the ideas in terms of sameness rather than only in terms of the exceptionalism of China being of some interest. How can this tie more to the region and rest of the world?

Could we potentially connect Chinese and other non-western situations in cultural production and presentation for a new kind of non-aligned cultural movement? How would that work, if at all?

CE: It is nice that you use the term non-aligned here.
DA: Well, you are the one who reminded me, on our way to the academy in Hangzhou, of the significance of the Bandung conference for an alternative reading of the history of the Leftist movement…

CE: I think looking again at the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) of the 1950s-1980s would be quite smart both in terms of its geographic spread but also it terms of its current economic and political power. China was, of course, crucial to the NAM but it extended far further. This might be one route to escape the feeling that China always has to answer to or reject models that emerge in the core west of, above all, the USA. How might China start to see its relations to the rest of the world not in terms of old imperial exploitation (which is a danger) but it terms of exchange of common experiences and mutual trust? This might be much easier to do with Brazil or Indonesia than with USA or the Netherlands at a cultural level. The former doesn’t contain so much prejudgment, and that might help speak about sameness. It is also interesting as a Dutch resident to see in China how much the “West” is seen as the USA. I think this makes a project like Former West even more significant, as a way to think about how desirable such a condition might be for the current west and for the rest. If it is possible, we should bring Chinese artists and intellectuals into this project to help us.

I also like the idea that a non-aligned cultural movement would today be neither commercial nor state but somewhere else. Using this term as a kind of search engine to find like-minded people and communities might be very smart and produce surprising alliances that might replace the stagnation of the old Left. In all these ways, sameness can be the tool to unlock what we have in common rather than emphasize what is different between us.

DA: Only very recently, intellectuals, and scholars started dissecting Chineseness with a geographic approach (vs Japan, vs India, vs Vietnam, vs Central Asia, vs Indonesia, vs Russia etc) or with an intellectual stab as in the case of the most recent GZ Triennial. Otherwise, China is usually read within the context of its economic tails (“Tails of the Dragon”), its diasporic outreach.
But then an exhibition as a format to do this can be quite tricky, as it can be a relatively closed/insular system. Would it be nice to be able to change the format into a process in which the idea of culture, as something that exists in and through dialogue, could be fully actualized? Did we fail to do this with Double Infinity? Did we manage to get somewhere? Can we really represent a larger, more diverse vision of culture, asking “What it can be, where is it in China vis a vis the rest of the world, how is it being constituted?”

CE: I think this is the whole project of advanced art and culture at the moment. To understand that understanding itself is a process with infinite possibility for refinement and misunderstanding. Can we get to the point where a museum is neither treasure chest nor entertainment centre but a site where the imagination can be loaded up for use in the world outside? In this sense, the experience of art is an applied experience, something that can be taken and made use of later. Did Double Infinity help this process? Yes, in a small way I think it did. But it is the combination of a million small steps that take far longer than politicians or media are prepared to allow. Remember, it took 29 years for Picasso’s Demoiselles D’Avignon to be recognized fully as the start of modern painting. What happened in those 29 years? Was it seen as worthwhile to have painted it in that period? I think we know the answers to that question today but for contemporary art we are still waiting and working. Such timescales should find more friendly ground in China than in the West these days, so I think that’s another reason to keep working here.

DA: Could the whole process have been any different for all parties involved? (Artists from China especially, then VAM and

Arthub)

CE: We could have done it at another time without the Expo. Then funding would have been much harder for sure but the discussions between us would have been much more focused on the why? and what? questions rather than the who? and how?. Why does such a joint project make sense? What do we want to do for the artists and the scene here and there? For the Chinese artists I would have liked to have had them much more present in Eindhoven and in the museum. I think that would have produced unknown results and effects for both us and for them. But nevertheless I think we are about to achieve something important in showing that a kind of collective curating can take place across such a distance and that setting up channels of direct influence can be productive. Double Infinity is an important first step and marker for such kind of projects between us in the future, when we need to go further. If I may say, I hope that for Arthub itself, this model of institutional collaboration may offer a way of working in the future, hopefully with us but also with others. That non-aligned idea is special, we could start with that…

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5 Burmanese Artists + 5 Jogja Artists

“ +ROAD” (read: crossroad) is the title of a cross-cultural art project involving five young artists from Yogyakarta and five artists from Yangon. They were involved in an intensive program designed to present their own works in a context of their own cultural understanding, scrutinizing behind the political, economic and social backgrounds of their art.

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• The Modern Art Museum, Art, Copying and Autonomy (0)
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For the complete program please click here.

The poster of the symposium can be downloaded from here.

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To celebrate Tate Modern’s 10th anniversary, the gallery will host No Soul For Sale – A Festival of Independents. For this free art festival, Tate Modern has invited Arthub Asia to be part of these celebration of creativity and independent contemporary art initiatives.

Crazy English is a performance by the Shanghai-based Chinese artist Zhou Xiaohu. The artist is concerned with Chinese social behaviors that mis-translate and misinterpret western marketing concepts and tools. In this performance, conceived especially for the Tate festival No Soul for Sale, Zhou Xiaohu has invited one of the teachers of Crazy English, a company specialized in teaching English language to large Chinese audiences, in football stadiums and other similar locations. Crazy English is a performance itself and a technique that makes standard American English an invented interpretation of English itself. Zhou’s aim, through the simple action of bringing Crazy English to London, is to show how something familiar, the English language, can instantly be transformed into something alien and forei gn (English for foreigners), thus raising questions of legitimacy and the distorted effects of cultural imperialism.
The performance will last for 30 min. and will take place in Arthub’s dedicated No-space, 16.00pm on 15th May 2010. The video recording of the video will be on display on 16th May 2010.
Zhou Xiaohu’s performance is made possible with the support of Far East Far West Ltd., Hong Kong.
__________________________________________________________________
Other interventions by Arthub Asia:
“Arthub Asia Keywords” talk by Dr. Francesca Tarocco, Head of Research and Special Projects at Arthub Asia and lecturer at the University of Manchester.
Time of presentation: 13.00 to 13.30 on 16th May 2010 at the Auditorium.
Information:
www.arthubasia.org
press@arthubasia.org

Notes to editors
The first edition of No Soul For Sale – A Festival of Independents was spearheaded by Cecilia Alemani, Maurizio Cattelan, and Massimiliano Gioni, and took place in June 2009 at X initiative in the former Dia Center for the Arts in New York. The idea for the festival was devised to celebrate and foster a spirit of independence and diversity in the art world.
As part of No Soul for Sale, Tate Modern is opening late on the 14 and 15 May 2010, tying-in with the nationwide project Museums at Night. Museums at Night is the annual after-hours celebration of UK culture, history and heritage that sees museums and galleries all over the UK staying open late and putting on special events to get people to do something different with their evening – and enjoy the history and heritage on their doorstep.
Arthub Asia is a multi-disciplinary organization devoted to contemporary art creation in China and rest of Asia, founded in 2007. In collaboration with museums and other public / private spaces and institutions, it initiates and delivers ambitious art projects through a sustained dialogue with visual, performance, and new media artists. Arthub Asia is committed to furthering experimentation, knowledge-production and diversity among dedicated artists, art professionals, scholars, and arts organizations in the region.

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还可参见艺术论坛精选：http://artforum.com/picks/section=world#picks24421

传承—深圳是位于中国西南部深圳市都市村庄白石洲中心地带的一处临时非营利性项目空间，占地120平方米，前身曾是一座茶馆。传承—深圳将于2009年12月至2010年4月期间举办一场集展览、表演、音乐和电影于一身的大型项目活动，推介新兴艺术作品，促进地区和国际艺术家之间的合作，并根据当地环境特点建立一座公共图书馆。展览《永远的移民》是深圳香港城市/建筑双城双年展的正式附属项目。项目空间和此次展览将于12月6日同时开幕。

介绍

作为一个临时、可移动的项目空间，传承—深圳旨在提出一个有关新兴移民城市艺术历史和视觉文化的迫切问题。本项目将通过艺术和策展实践探讨历史渊源、自愿式背井离乡、经济移民，身份以及性别政治等问题，希望和一座非永久性城市建立一种永久关系。

传承—深圳秉承对外开放的原则，低调地举办着各种公共活动，欢迎深圳居民在当地语境中欣赏由在深圳工作生活的艺术带来的各类艺术实践作品。传承—深圳还将与深圳多家院校合作举办工作坊，支持当地艺术家的研究和发展，并在附近居民和商户的参与下举办各种即兴艺术活动。传承—深圳的主旨是以平易近人的方式引导白石洲以及深圳居民体验和认识这座年轻城市的艺术文化资产。

传承—深圳项目空间受深圳/香港城市建筑双城双年展邀请，将于12月6日与其同时开幕，届时还将在项目空间中举行《永远的移民》艺术展。传承—深圳将至少开放至2010年4月，稍后还将举行2位中国艺术家以及1位访问艺术家作品展。

传承—深圳拥有一座日益壮大的中英双语档案馆，面向公众开放。图书馆是该项目的理论土壤，有着众多在深圳、珠江三角洲和其他艺术空间举行的展览以及城市化和当代中国艺术主题展览的资料和信息，供对此感兴趣的人士前来阅读。

地址：

广东深圳

南山区

华夏路

鹤塘小区10栋

104号

www.inheritanceprojects.org

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2009年7月16日（周四），下午3:30
上海当代艺术馆

与会者：

Jitish Kallat (视觉艺术家, 印度)
Alexander Keefe (策展人, 印度)
张颂仁 (策展人、画廊主, 香港)
Diana Freundl (《印度现在》策展人，上海)
Defne Ayas主持 (Arthub亚洲董事, 上海)

在过去的数年，中国和印度在艺术方面都有很蓬勃的发展。除了新崛起的艺术家，收藏家，崭新的画廊，博物馆更是不计其数。在这一次的学术讨论中，我们有幸邀请到杰出的学者就亚洲各国在多变的经济和政治氛围中的艺术，以及国与国之间的历史关系作出探讨和讨论。为了替在亚洲范围内不断扩大的讨论寻找新的词汇，这次学术讨论将集中探讨后传统在不同情况下的发展条件。这一次学术讨论是由上海当代艺术馆及非营利性的基金会Arthub共同举办

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每年有超过80部世界电影在电影节上展映，具体包括来自欧盟电影节、拉丁美洲、亚洲和东南亚的电影作品以及短片、实验电影、纪录片和动画片这些电影工业领域的新焦点。

除了电影放映，曼谷电影节还包括诸如Master Class Workshop（大师讲堂）等在内的电影主题讨论会以及其他特别活动。电影节还与法国南特三大洲电影节剧本工作坊合作创立了一个新的研讨班，指导电影制作人为新项目寻找投资。在研讨班结束的时候，东南亚最优秀的电影项目将会得到资助，该项目的制作人也将受邀参与法国的最终遴选。

曼谷世界电影节有着七年多的经验，目前已经成长为东南亚重要的电影节之一，在世界上吸引着越来越多电影产业、媒体以及电影导演和明星前来参与。

组织者将继续发扬曼谷电影节的精神和目标，那就是：让曼谷世界电影节在世界文化和娱乐之都——曼谷——成为国际电影中心。

《龙头：上海vs曼谷！》

第一部分

上海，等待天堂, 2007 , 92’

导演Sylvie Levey（法国）用五年时间记录了一户住在上海旧城区、三代同堂的王姓人家在遭遇突如其来的移民拆迁后的生活。电影《上海：等待天堂》（2007,26分钟）刻画了王姓人家对中国和世界的希望、挣扎和失望，也描述了突然闯入的全球化带给中国家庭的巨大压力。

第二部分

Olivo Barbieri，《沉默的故事》， 15″，2004

Olivo Barbieri（1954年出生于意大利）在1978年首次展示了自己的作品。从1989年起，他定期前往东方诸国——特别是中国——游历。在1993年、1995年和1997年间，他参与了包括威尼斯双年展在内的各类与当代视觉艺术有关的国际性活动。

1996年，他在埃森市举行了个人作品回顾展。2003年，Barbieri展开了一个涉及多个城市的特定场域项目（摄影和电影）：罗马、都灵、蒙特利尔、拉斯维加斯、洛杉矶、上海、阿曼、塞维利亚、纽约。在意大利和世界的多所博物馆、收藏馆和大学中都可以欣赏到Barbieri的影像作品。

张鼎，《伟大的时代》，2007，14″

张鼎电影新作《伟大的时代》（2007）以上海为背景展开了一段超现实主义的费里尼式旅程。在各个场景中，影片主角在舞台式的街市中骑着自行车（被装扮成马的样子），与电影配乐完美地融合在一起。

Mathieu Borysevicz，《泰安路》，2008，12”

Mathieu Borysevicz（1971年生于美国）的作品《泰安路》（2008年，12分钟）以抒情的镜头语言刻画了一个孕妇在上海的旅程。准爸爸（艺术家）在街头漫无目的地四处奔走，寻找自己失踪的怀孕妻子，营造了一幅与上海日常生活格格不入的超现实画像。

Speedism, 《IAHGNAHS ONHCET》 (>上海高科技舞曲), 5″,  2009

三维动画影片《IAHGNAHS ONHCET 》的片名其实就是“Techno Shanghai ”（上海高科技舞曲）的倒拼——或者我们应该说黑暗化，就像可能与它相似的《艺术摇滚》（Black Celebration）那样；它与“真实”的上海相反，是复制的复制的复制，是乱伦；它以一个城市主题公园的形式不断变异、腐烂，成为万城之城、万园之园。但是凭借这种（建筑）存在，它又一次开始呼吸……《IAHGNAHS ONHCET 》将是一个梦想成真的故事：我们的中国探险之旅将首次在Doomdough项目中展开……

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这一项目关注的是刚果民主共和国（金沙萨）和中华人民共和国（北京）——以及它们之间的变动。我们选择了一群中国的艺术家、建筑师和作家，让他们与一群刚果同行（每组由4到5人组成）合作，分别在刚果和中国寻找他们已经侨居国外的同胞。他们用以下三种形式查找在刚果（金沙萨）的中国人和在中国（北京或义乌）的刚果人：（1）叙述者，（2）实物，（3）建筑。

刚从刚果回来的中国组成员包括：Chen Shuyu、赵川、姜珺、白双全、Chi Peng。

第一场报告会将于2010年6月5日至11日在埃森市世界剧场内举行，Frie Leysen担任主持。

需要了解更多情况，请下载PDF文件，点击这里。

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以下是何子彦对自己此次经历的描述：

“乐大豆和Defne Ayas似乎将《新丝绸之路的制造》研讨会本身也看作了一件物品。我想，正因如此，他们才将研讨会设定在美术馆中举行。很显然，他们对研讨会的时空结构经过了深思熟虑，也对会议的发展流程进行了精心设计。这其中包含着剧本创作艺术，就我看来，他们希望借此进行一次实验，当然其中也蕴含着失败的风险。

我认为，任何项目和实验都掺杂着个人维度。对我个人而言，此次活动举办之时恰逢我刚刚摆脱一项令人筋疲力尽的影片拍摄工作，马上参与到此次研讨会中或多或少令我感到有些不适。但是，《新丝绸之路的制造》看上去太有趣了，我实在无法抵御它的诱惑。因此，唯一的解决之道似乎是找到一个平衡点，让我既能参与到整个活动中，做出贡献，又不必以参与者的身份成为其中的一员。 我感兴趣的是活动的总体规划。对我来说，最好的办法似乎是加入乐大豆和Defne成立的“记录”团队，同时找个演员作为我的替身参与研讨会。

加入“记录”团队是一次极棒的经历，我可以同时游走于内外部之间。摆脱了参与活动的焦虑，我一头扎进了活动的‘表皮层’，跳出了‘文字水池’。通过摄像机镜头，我可以感受到每一次研讨活动无形却具体的方方面面——它的气氛、沉重和轻松的时刻。我把这段录像看作一种生理层面的研讨会文件材料。 它叙述了研讨会的面容、姿态和能量。或许我是在尝试创造一种集体肖像。

但是，我认为它也是一种梦想，或者可能是一篇爱情故事（最最通俗的那一种）——一个关于各种元素汇总聚集然后又四分五裂的故事。”

_______________

研讨会组织者：Arthub董事乐大豆、Defne Ayas以及Ark Fongsmut（曼谷大学美术馆）。Monvilai Rojanatanti提供协调支持。

组织团队：Ying Monvilai, Defne Ayas, Ark Fongsmut, 乐大豆, Bunyanut Suwannakul, Fat, P
平面设计： Bunyanut Suwannakul   空间设计：Supersudaca  技术支持：Supernormal
影片：
导演：何子彦，新加坡

创意：何子彦，乐大豆，Defne Ayas以及Seph Rodney

影片摄制组组织：Chacree Rujivipat

演员1：Karn Wanadornworawisan先生

演员2：Joe Chan

委托方：Arthub亚洲

与远东远西有限公司合作制作。

何子彦，电影导演，1976年出生于新加坡。参与电影节包括：（2009年）, 《此时》，第62届法国戛纳国际电影节第41届导演双周；Invisible Room (with The Observatory)（暂译：《看不见的房间（带天文台）》），新加坡艺术节，NEWTON；Some Rooms（暂译：《一些房间》），香港奥莎画廊；King Lear Project（暂译：《李尔王项目》），比利时布鲁塞尔Kunsten 戏剧节；Reflections (暂译：《回声》)，第54届德国奥博豪森国际短片节国际竞赛单元；《波西米亚狂想曲》项目，阿尔勒国际艺术节，2007-2008，法国巴黎蓬皮杜艺术中心；2007年——Thermocline of Art (暂译：《艺术变温层》)，德国卡尔斯鲁厄新媒体艺术中心；2006年——第一节新加坡双年展；2005年—— 《乌他马：离市里的千千万万个我》，第三届日本福冈亚洲艺术三年展；2004年—— Image Smugglers（暂译：《图像走私者》）, 第26届巴西圣保罗双年展。

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The publication, designed by Dutch designer, Joost Grootens, seeks to map a world of crossovers and collisions between art and urban design starting from both Eindhoven and Shanghai. Through photographic essays Jiang Jun and Ingmar Swalue conceptually and aesthetically locate these strange but close sites for our comparison. The book includes contributions by the artists and curators of Double Infinity and an interview with Pieter van Wesemael, an urban designer and Professor at the Technical University Eindhoven in Architectural Design and Urban Culture. “Today, tomorrow, but not too far” is a quote by Van Wesemael, which he considers a more pragmatic realism in the 21st century World Expo than the focus on history in the 19th and the focus on the future in the 20th century.

Presented as part of the exhibition Double Infinity.

Double Infinity is a collaborative encounter between the Van Abbemuseum and Arthub Asia, situated in and around the Dutch Culture Centre in Shanghai, parallel to the World Expo 2010. The Double Infinity project loops through and crosses over itself time and again. It is at one and the same moment an exhibition, a performance series, a lecture programme, a publication, a promotional tool, a celebration, a collaboration and a playful look at international relations. It marks the first time that a European museum opens itself and its collection to the responses of artists living and working in China – responses that form a host of enriching, humorous and critical insights.

Publication

Joost Grootens (design), Clare Butcher (editor), Ingmar Swalue (photography), Jiang Jun (text and photography), texts by the curators Charles Esche, Defne Ayas, Davide Quadrio and Remco de Blaaij.

Curators

Charles Esche, Defne Ayas, Davide Quadrio, Remco de Blaaij

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Professor Pieter van Wesemael is an urban designer and partner at Inbo Amsterdam, an architecture, consultancy and urbanism bureau. He is also Professor of Architectural Design and Urban Culture at the Technical University in Eindhoven. Van Wesemael’s research at the Faculty of Architecture at the Technical University of Delft presented the history of world exhibitions through a multiplicity of lenses. This interview is in response to Van Wesemael’s agile approach, from the social scientific and urban planning to the art historical and economic, to the complex didactics of world exhibitions.¹

The Aesthetic Debate and the Nation State in World Exhibitions

[World exhibitions] played a role as an intermediary between high and low culture, between upper, middle and lower class, and between trade, industry, technology, science, and art on the one hand, and the lay person’s more direct world of experience on the other. In the rapidly changing world – in material, economic, and socio-cultural aspects – they made a fundamental contribution to the creation of a new consciousness of class or group, each with its own self-image and culture, and nourished the evolution of modern, capitalistic, democratic society with its mass culture.²

Clare Butcher: Your research focuses on the implication of world exhibitions in the context of technological and economic development, as well as the idea of increasing mobility. Can you tell us more about how you see the relation between these factors and the artistic fields at play within this same history?

Pieter van Wesemael: As a start, world exhibitions are about the emancipation of the world of technology and industry. At first you see a very strong technological approach as well as a strong and immediate artistic inclination, because there is a clear response to this emancipation of industry in the crafts, where [industrialisation] is seen as ugly, low-value and mass-produced. So it immediately becomes an aesthetic debate. That is why I think that from the start, in 1851, they have not only been exhibitions, but also a competition. I call it a didactic phenomenon, and within these didactics, there were at least three main focal points:

- The application of technology to industrial production,

- The aesthetic quality of bringing crafts into the world of industrial production,

- The third was the importance of international collaboration. Between 1855 and 1975, there was in fact a pre-European Union in Europe, with Free Trade Zones between the major European economies. This is the core of the contemporary European Union: if you collaborate economically, this will lead to peace and mutual understanding, and all those other, more beautiful socio-cultural ideas.

Aesthetics and industrial production are the most important elements of the world exhibition and, despite some shifts, they never disappear. From 1855, the French, who had a long tradition of annual Art Moderne salons, incorporated high art into world exhibitions, and later, they stressed this as a means of getting a grip on national identity. Of course, the 19^th century was a time of nation-building, which is also a very contemporary subject. [Exhibition organisers] saw high art and crafts as a means of coming to terms with these aspects of national differences. This is understandable when you realise that until the end of the 19^th century, countries such as France, and even Germany, were not one state or one nation. The way societies functioned was local and regional, hardly national and certainly not worldwide. My article in the NEO catalogue³ is really focused on national and local history as a source for constructing national identity – not only aesthetically, as l’art pour l’art – but motivated by ideas about socio-cultural integration.

Remco de Blaaij: Your research begins at the end of the 18^th century, with the first industrial exhibitions. Do you think this was where the relationship between the worlds of art, architecture and industry begins? This was also the same time that museums, as we know them, really started to exist.

PvW: Yes, in a way there is a parallel. For example, after the French Revolution, the first museums in France were organised along with the first industrial exhibition in 1798. Part of the revolutionary programme was about reinventing a new society and state, a new French nation. Within that revolutionary programme, there was a shift away from the traditional arts and crafts to a more industrial economy, which was then of course very embryonic. If you look critically into what was exhibited as arts and crafts at these early exhibitions, they were not industrial at all! What they called manufacteur was not necessarily to do with mechanisation, but was more about the rationalisation of the production process. It was no longer production by single family studios, but a lot of people assembled together, each doing a part of the production. It was more about rationalisation than mechanisation.

World exhibition didactics

CB:  You use the phrase, “sugar-coated education” in your writing. Would you see that didacticism, or art, as being used to beautify the harshness of industrialisation? Or do you think art gained a status in its own right in the field of World Exhibitions?

PvW: The sugar coating has a lot more to do with the didactics themselves – demonstrations are much more fun than just mute objects! These didactics are heavily influenced by 19^th-century ideas of how you teach people something. So you show the real objects, not books and texts, but a visual education that is practical. These were not mute objects being presented: they were always within a context. You would see machinery parts in production, with people explaining what you were seeing or were supposed to see. The designers also made silly objects – a giant tower of sugar cubes, for example – in the contexts of these exhibitions. What I mean is that it is not functional, it is not rational unless you look at it from the perspective of what we would call marketing or advertising. Architects and artists were asked to design the exhibition itself, using their artistic gifts to design a marketing campaign. They would also make trophies – which would be a kind of collage of national symbols, but these symbols were just everyday objects. For instance, Canada had one with canoes, lumber and deerskin, which everyone associates with Canada. This was designed by Gottfried Semper, a German architect.⁴ He was also involved in designing chambers, a kind of habitat where you would place objects in context. For example, he designed one for China, which he probably knew very little about…

There is a connection between art and architecture and this sugar coating of the exhibition: exhibitions brought high art and the qualities of arts and crafts together with industrial production. Academics from the universities were also involved in giving lectures about this and were judges on the exhibition juries. So, as always, it is hybrid.

Modernity and progress: “imagineering” societies through world exhibitions⁵

The world exhibitions were also exhaustive and comprehensive encyclopaedic accounts of the world and times, furnished with explanations of the past and predictions of the future. In ideological terms, they invariably aimed at reconciliation or adaptation rather than radical alteration.⁶

PvW: Art and architecture are always playing a role in industrialisation, mechanisation and rationalisation, making everyday objects something special – these were monuments to human capacity to master nature and master history. From the start, monumental dimension was created out of a world that is actually very banal in its everyday form. The French exhibitions, despite changes in ideology with each regime, kept focusing on getting people used to modern times and the advantages they brought. In the 19^th century, that was very much about looking backwards – an historical perspective.

At the time, people could not imagine what would later happen in the 1920s and 1930s, when the world of science and planning enabled people to seriously plan 30 years in advance: through organisation and bringing various parties together. In the 19^th century, this was inconceivable. All you could strive for was to extract the best lessons from history to create a better tomorrow, which was in fact, a better today!

Today, as much as the 19^th century focused on history and the 20^th century on the future, we are now coming to a more pragmatic realism of “today, tomorrow, but not too far”.

RdB: The title of the Shanghai World Expo is Better City, Better Lives. Do you think that this relates to the pragmatic turn? If we talk about “sustainability”, we should be thinking in terms of 40 or 50 years, not only today and tomorrow.

PvW: This is the first time that in the public conscience – worldwide – planet earth, our spaceship, is declining. You saw this notion forcefully injected into the world exhibition in Japan in 1970 and ever since then, this has been a recurring theme. Progress and Harmony (Osaka) was a theme, saying that we need to develop in accordance with what the planet can support.

I am not a social scientist, but as much as we believed in science and planning in the early 20^th century, you see this notion [of sustainability] recurring in the way some Dutch politicians are responding to recent climate reports. This goes back to the early 20^th century, when science represented ultimate truth and the idea that it is possible to translate scientific research and policy, one to one. This is the consciousness that has prevailed from the 1970s onwards, where in the world of policy and science, there is, as we Dutch would call it, de maakbare samenleving, the socially engineered or “makeable” society.

CB: You cite the 1970 Osaka fair as the moment when the exhibition shifts to the idea of “imagineering”. I am interested in how this comes back to the Netherlands and its concept of the makeable society, which seems to be quite unique to the Dutch context. In scanning over the project of the Philips pavilion in Brussels in 1958 and its relation to constructing a particular landscape of ideas, it is interesting how these examples relate to your statement that world exhibitions are always about societies in transition. The exhibitions reflect but also manoeuvre that change. I wonder, in your perspective as an urban planner, how these two ideas play off one another. You cite a number of examples where, in Paris, certain urban structures only exist as a result of the world exhibitions that took place there.

PvW: The fascinating thing about world exhibitions are their obvious ideological constraints. They are very much about a new elite, with a new world view and a new ideology aspiring to take power – not necessarily political power, but also in an economic sense. Here, ideology and practice, the ideas and the banality, are coming very close together, and that is why, in my research, I put a lot of energy and attention on the genesis of each exhibition, where you see how this strong ideology meets reality. This is not necessarily formulating a history of decline, but rather one of creativity and improvisation. There were new ideologies, which were not lesser, but they made it different.

Indeed, what interests me is that these world exhibitions are manifestos of the new elite. For instance, in New York in 1939, you see clearly that sociologists of a modern society and new players in the world of technology – industrial engineers for example – were putting their heads together, having to find out where society was going and what role this exhibition might play in bringing a new perspective to the public. In the end, the world exhibition has to be made not only by these new elite, but by the General Motors and Philips of this world, and this is a really interesting collision. I think this is both the exhibition’s weakness, because the manifesto gets corrupted, and its strength, because it is made so practical. In one way or another, almost every exhibition tries to give the impression of a world of tomorrow. This is not literary, like a Utopia, but very tactile. It is proven. It is a proven ideology because it is there. It is a city. It is functioning, it has cars, schools: it is all there.

CB: In 1939, there was the shift from Democracity, as one of the 1939 exhibitions was titled, to World War.

PvW: It was a tremendous deception. After World War II, there was a sense of avoiding imminent doom, scarcity of resources and the threat of the atomic bomb. Then, in 1970, in Osaka, there was this same approach again, where we can plan a better future.

Since then, I think it is safe to say that the didactic role of world exhibitions as a kind of instrument of the modernisation of society is becoming less important. This had a lot to do with the Cold War. There was a kind of stalemate between the First, Second and Third Worlds. In a sense, that stalemate is over, with the Second and Third Worlds becoming first and second. These are new dynamics.

Embeddedness: localisation of a global affair

PvW: This [shift in global dynamics] is the reason that since the turn of the new century, world exhibitions are again gaining popularity, for example in Asia, and I would not be surprised if Brazil plans to have one. The world exhibition is always primarily for the organising country itself, a motive for the local elite to get their population accustomed to another world view, which is not local, not traditional, but a lot more global, modern and open to international exchange and the meeting of art, science and industry. That is it. It has a lot to do with the land on which the exhibition is operating, of course, and various kinds of cultural constraints.

China is a totally different chapter when compared to the European, American or “Western” tradition, because it is an agrarian and industrial, service and knowledge economy all at the same time. I think that in that society, the elites have a completely different chemistry. I cannot imagine that any really Utopian idea, which has all but disappeared in Western exhibitions, would be present in a Chinese exhibition: what will be very strong in China is a practical fulfilment of “this” Utopia. For example, “We have a theme and this theme is so important because it is the message that we want to give our people.” It could then become a showcase of sustainable technology applied to urbanism, architecture, industrial design and mobility, as we have tried to do for decades. The last successful example of this was Osaka in 1970. In later exhibitions, there was just a lot of lip service. The world exhibition in Hanover in 2000 had exactly the same theme, but there was little sustainability displayed.

It has a lot to do with the eminent problem of world exhibitions, where there is no standing organisation. They do not have their own finances and are largely dependent on their exhibitors from industry to fill the exhibition. The thing is really to say, “We want a serious programme, not merely a touristic display, as most countries are doing.” Where that is the case, world exhibitions have no added value. How you embed it in local culture is extremely important.

RdB: Would you say that the importance of world exhibitions has shifted from a didactic to a more representative role?

PvW: I think what you see happening in the long term is that at the start, world exhibitions are about individual industrialists exhibiting with these countries to organise this representation. Over the years, this radically shifts to having countries representing themselves and using industrialists to do it. Unfortunately, this is true about most nations, in which after World War II, economic departments assumed the organisational role. They see the exhibition as a trade and tourism stimulus. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the format. Culturally, this is really a pity.

I think in a knowledge economy, creative economy and service economy, it is obvious that this notion of “economy” is much more than just about high-tech and tourism. It is crucial that this be presented properly. In Osaka, they paid a lot of attention to how their agenda could be shown, having the right people set that agenda and then fulfil it. You see practitioners, professors and artists collaborating. The Dutch display there in 1970 was made by young Dutch scientists, artists and architects, guided by older [practitioners].

John Körmeling is perfectly suited [to design the Dutch pavilion] for the Chinese context. He plays with cultural metaphors and icons, by estranging them. That is a very strong quality. It would be interesting if we were to succeed, through coming exhibitions, in reaching a better understanding of what this representation of Dutch culture means for China and a global economy. But you need to play these agendas out on a ministerial level. World exhibitions are in a way museums of society. How we make these living and dynamic representations will determine whether we can sustain their format and their function.

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JIANG Jun

Special zones might not be China’s invention, but it could be the society most in need of them. Chinese civilisation is well known for two unique features: a power that has occupied most of the territories in East Asia, where the span of both climate zones and elevation has given birth to the most diversified ecology on the planet, and a sustainable society that has been dominated for 2000 years by the Great Unity system, in which the vast territory of China is unified by a centralised authority. Consequently, as this eco-diversity resulted in a diversity of economies, there have been considerable difficulties in balancing the two paradoxical features. Pre-modern China used to solve the puzzle with a philosophy that “seeks common ground while preserving minor differences”. This meant that diversified economic models could be developed within a self-organised family structure, as part of the Great Unity system framework. Under Confucianism, an isomorphic model between family and state was established in order to minimise differences in political structure, while maximising the vitalities of local economies. If China’s eco-diversity has given birth to special zones, it is the flexibility and inclusiveness of the regime that has given them the space to exist. China needs special zones in order to stabilise itself within the tension created by Great Unity and eco-diversity.

In a densely populated society, the Great Unity system was able to make the most of economic benefits by means of integrating resources throughout its territory by way of national power. With the “socialist transformation”, however, it was the national power itself that increased in order to concentrate core resources on the industrialisation of China, rather than the country’s agricultural economy. Industrialisation was a revolution that drastically changed these valued ideas of “localness” and “specialness”. Urbanisation could be made generic when absorbed into an industrial chain of processes. When Communist China tried to construct an independent macro-industrial system in 1950s, the whole country was unified under a planned economy, in which national zones were given priority over special zones. When Deng inherited Mao’s upstream industry in the 1980s, however, he opened up spaces for downstream industry, thus reinstating the importance of special zones. Special Economic Zones, or SEZs, were established in South China as Petri dishes for China’s experiments in market economics. The military-guarded form of the SEZs was actually a spatial indication of how the market economy was planned. The 1980s experiment was not about market economics per se, but about a “planned market economy”: a fusion of an upstream planned economy and a downstream free-trade economy, which is special not only to China, but also in global economic structures.

China’s special zones of the 1980s echoed a number of other state projects from preceding decades. The Special Trade Zone in Guangzhou was established by the Ming and Qing Governments, where “official merchants” with government-issued trading licenses could cooperate with foreign merchants in a designated area. In the 1940s, Mao also set up Yan’an, the temporary “red” capital city of the Communist Party, as a Special Political Zone in wartime China. Even in the 1960s, when China was highly centralised, Panzhihua and Liupanshui, in the hinterland of Southwest China, were designated as Special Industrial Zones because of their iron and coal mines – so important in supporting China’s independent industrialisation during the Cold War. Hong Kong and Macau were also developed as Special Administrative Zones after their turnover to China as part of the “one country, two systems” policy… All these special zones are testaments to “what is special” at different historical moments in China.

In the experiments of the 1980s, SEZs were only successful in Shenzhen, because of its proximity to Hong Kong – with its Post-war geopolitical significance. Special economic achievement has here been determined by a special geopolitical situation, or a fusion of natural endowments, because of eco-diversity and socio-political configuration due to cultural diversity. Yan’an became a Special Political Zone because of its marginal position, away from both its enemies, the Kuomintang and the Japanese. Panzhihua and Liupanshui became Special Industrial Zones because of their natural resources. In a Great Unity system, a special zone could be easily set up by simply answering the question, “what’s special?” For a special zone to be successful, however, the question should be not what, but “how to be special?” This is why China’s largest economic zone, Hainan, which was established along with Shenzhen in the 1980s, with the ambition to “create another Hong Kong”, became a failed experiment in an economic bubble created by the real estate market in the early 1990s, leaving over 20 million square metres of construction abandoned. The “Hainan Lesson”, however, did not filter throughout the whole country, as the “Shenzhen Experience” did. When “development zones” – miniature special zones directly initiated by city governments – were flourishing throughout the country, some became “miniature Shenzhens”, while others became “miniature Hainans”, revealing the double-edged effects of special zones in the Great Unity system.

The year Hainan’s laisser-faire approach broke the economic bubble was when Shanghai began its “more planned”, “5 Years, Big Change” (1993-1998) policy. It became evident that despite its ambition, Hainan is too close to Hong Kong to replace it. Hong Kong’s success was based on its position as the “gateway city” between a blockaded mainland and the international world in the 30 years after the Korean War, while Shanghai was the “gateway city” between an opened mainland and the international world in the wake of Deng’s policy of reform and opening. Hong Kong is at the mouth of the Pearl River, which connects only the Pearl River Delta, while Shanghai is at the mouth of the Yangtze River, which connects the whole of China along one of the world’s most important major arteries. As a special zone, Pudong was located almost at the centre of the old colonial city, on the other side of the Huangpu River, and easily turned itself into a new financial centre because of this geography. As a city, Shanghai was located almost at the centre of the mainland coastline, easily introducing the first-mover advantage of those special zones in South China to the north. Historically, in the 1930s, Shanghai was seen to be the biggest city in the Far East, after China’s experience of Guangzhou’s special zone and the Opium War. Now the city seems to be claiming its former glory by redeveloping its unique geographic significance.

The “superiority of socialism” was also restored to Shanghai when the central government opted to focus not only policy but also financial support on a new planned economy. While Shenzhen relied on foreign direct investment (FDI), mostly from Hong Kong, Shanghai’s success was based on hundreds of billions of investments from the central financial authorities. The experiences of the Shenzhen SEZ were implemented in Shanghai as a national strategy, making the city the “dragon’s head” of the Yangtze River Delta, or YRD, and the Yangtze River Valley [the body behind the dragon’s head]. Shanghai was also intended to become a metropolitan landmark for China, with identifiable skylines to showcase the accomplishment of China’s modernisation under the leadership of the Communist Party. Geographically, the YRD has more advantages than the Pearl River Delta, or PRD, as being the largest metropolitan area, absorbing a more rural population into the city because of its connection to the deep hinterland and water resources, which is not the case in the Bohai Sea Rim in North China. From this perspective, we can see how the World Expo 2010 could be another opportunity for Shanghai to earn greater support from central government by making itself the centre of the biggest metropolitan area in the drastic urbanisation of China as a whole.

Special zones might not be China’s invention, but they can possess distinctly Chinese characteristics. When the potential differences on both sides of the Shenzhen-Hong Kong border were incorporated into the Shenzhen SEZ, it not only inspired diversified urban spaces along the border, but also created a number of institutions and enterprises with inherent borderline characteristics. The resulting initiatives in government reform and the restructuring of state-owned enterprises provided valuable templates for the development of the hinterland. The modernisation of China is a process in which pre-modern institutions are supposed to be reformed by gradual progression. It is also a process parallel to the “special reform” of urbanisation, in which China will transform from agricultural China to urban China. Special zones provide both the impetus and space for an experiment in temporary institutions. The real ambition behind the SEZs is not a short-term economic leap forward, but a superstructure that is meant to underlie sustainable economic achievements. The focus of China’s special zones has shifted from economic to administrative and then political: the gradual evolution, rather than revolution, from a pre-modern regime.

In the last 30 years, we have witnessed a process of upgrading China’s special zones, from South China to North China; from the coastline to the hinterland; from the independent development of SEZs to national financial support in Shanghai and Tianjin; from the singular economic experiment to multi-directional exercises for strategic purposes – thereby transforming the government’s function in the Pudong New Area in Shanghai, balancing urban and rural development in Chengdu and Chongqing, implementing sustainable development in Wuhan and Changsha. With the increasingly diversified geo-political positioning of special zones, the visible hand of the national plan becomes proportionately powerful, while wearing the glove of a socialist market economy. The reforms in administrative and institutional areas, including land, finance and taxation systems, social security, urban and rural integration, environment and resource protection, together constitute China’s systematic transition from pre-modernisation to modernisation, while special zones revive the network of diversities on the map of a Great Unity civilisation.

Jiang Jun, designer, editor and critic, specialises in urban research and experimental studies, exploring the interrelationships between design phenomena and urban dynamics. He founded Underline Office in late 2003 and has been editor-in-chief of Urban China Magazine since late 2004, while also working on his book, Hi-China. His work has been presented at Get It Louder(2005/2007), the Guangdong Triennial (2005), the Shenzhen Biennial (2005/2007), China Contemporary in Rotterdam (2006) and Documenta (2007). He curated the international exhibition,Street Belongs to … All of Us! in China in 2008. He has been invited to lecture at domestic and international universities, including Sun Yat-Sen University, Beijing University, CUHK, Harvard University, UCL, Tokyo University, Seoul University, Princeton University, Columbia University, etc.. In 2009, his Urban China was exhibited at museums in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, the first Chinese magazine to be exhibited in solo overseas travelling exhibitions. Born in Hubei in 1974, he received his Bachelor’s degree from Tongji University in Shanghai and his Master’s from Tsinghua University in Beijing. He is currently an associate professor at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.

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• Open Academy in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia 2008-2009 (1)
• RMB City Opera by Cao Fei (Turin), Artissima 2009 (1)
• ‘Double Infinity’, A collaborative encounter between Van Abbemuseum and Arthub Asia -Shanghai (0)

“Awareness of the importance of working cross culturally has been on the rise and many art activities now privilege cross cultural exchanges, as we face new challenges in cultural diversity, fragmentations and conflicts, both within a common locality and inter-locality.

Yet what are the models of cultural productions that we are falling back on? We can agree on the importance of sharing, exchange and dialogue, as the gap in cultural understanding widens, even as distances between cultures and groups of people collapse in other ways. Yet have we taken time to evaluate how effective our current models of cultural productions are in extending cultural connectivity - in generating new ways of making and sustaining connections between peoples?”

Chu Chu Yuan, presentation text for the concept of Bureau for Cultural Interconnectivity, August 20062

What is so important about sustaining these connections that Chu Chu Yuan refers to? This, for us, is the key to understanding the Arthub Asia story.  We have been working in the cultural world for almost two decades now: from within civil societies, exploring connections between private and public structures, to re-thinking models of cross-cultural models – all with an almost unconscious desire to understand, analyse and interface with Asia. Our experience has meant a constant dialogue with cultural peers, artists and organisations both in Asia and the rest of the world; and we have come to the conclusion that it is difficult to change the mindsets of cross-cultural project facilitators and practitioners who keep re-validating seemingly fixed and unchangeable models.

Once again, in the words of Chu Chuyuan:

“We have inherited many of our current models of cultural knowledge and methodologies (of research, forms of presentation, productions) by inheritance from past histories and hierarchies (e.g. colonisation, foreign education, old institutions) and have not intensively worked on adapting and renewing these models for local conditions and changing times.”

This is utterly true in the Chinese and Asian context where contemporary artistic practices have a short history of structural development and face the problem of “translating” these “cultural knowledge and methodologies”. It is certainly possible to look at various cultural exchanges that took place historically, mostly in modern times if not under colonial shades, and learn from them. Yet the fact is that the various levels of economic and political “ruptures” over time (as in the case of China 1949-mid 1979) mean that in Shanghai, it’s only possible to talk about a contemporary art scene from the mid-90s onwards. For this reason, the decade of groundwork for BizArt (now called Biyi) needs to be better analysed and understood.

Arthub Asia was born (in 2007) out of a long, unique existence as BizArt (b. in 1998): the sole Shanghai-based non-profit art space that was, for many years, responsive only to a local need and demand, which to this day is very much still there. The principle of “groundedness” is BizArt’s strength but also became its Achilles’ Heel, stunting its growth, leaving it guarded and incestuous. Only much later did the process of building common ground between China and the rest of the world begin (such as the Korean residency that was established at Bizart in 2003, as well as a partnership with UK Artist Links later on),³ revealing the importance of Bizart-supported artists’ mobility across the globe and the issues of interculturalism and cultural imperialism. Once the organisation’s base was consolidated at a local level, it was time to move out of the box and explore interfaces with the rest of Asia and more broadly. It was only then that Arthub was conceived.

By positioning itself in this fragile yet important niche, Arthub has not only thrived, participating in global knowledge flows and connecting locality with the global picture; but it has also remained vital in facilitating that connection of locality within and to locality, from person to person, mind to mind. Arthub has become a proxy and an experiment, pooling some of Asia’s global authority and asking whether new synergies can be created when select local and global minds are able to freely connect through imagination and creative impulse. As Arthub Directors, we have been responsible for orchestrating this network, encouraging Arthub participants to collaborate with our partners in different capacities (through research, workshops, exhibitions, productions, publications), hoping these groups will gather among themselves in an ad hoc fashion to address both predictable and unexpected challenges, learn from each other and pull in non-visual, art-related fields as needed.

The core questions that Arthub faces are now:  How do we further the possibilities within our network and develop models that will carry cultural production into the next decades? What are the aspects that we want to carry forward and leave behind? If we acknowledge the shift from a world where the key advantage was in protecting knowledge within a given set of “knowledge stocks” into a world where participation in the flow of knowledge becomes more valuable, then how can we effectively link ourselves with more engaged and inspired partners we see as actively creating, producing, renewing or possessing new knowledge?

Our decision to work with the Van Abbemuseum in the context of this exhibition was part of the answer to these questions. The Van Abbemuseum proved to be a rewarding partner for Arthub, though we made a strange pair: an established museum institution and a very simply structured, three-person operation (Defne Ayas, Davide Quadrio and Qiu Zhijie). The two curatorial teams aimed to actualize a static “transportation” of cultural objects (from the Van Abbemuseum collection) into a dynamic process where the locality (artists and thinkers not only “ethnically” Chinese but working in Shanghai and China) will re-contextualize, interpret and critique the core idea of “exchange”, revealing how this very word is most often misused or the tool of an imperialist agenda. The process has been one of constant negotiation: is it possible for both parties to be involved in a cross-cultural artistic and institutional production of substance, which goes beyond the simplicity of the occasion, the World Expo 2010?

Double Infinity marks the first time that a museum opens itself and its permanent collection up to the dynamic responses and contributions of artists and artist collectives in China, where usually exhibitions and collections are “moved” in and out of the country without a deep connection to the needs of the local scene. We consider this to be quite a significant gesture and believe that our joint planning and discussion process over the last two years could provide a template for an innovative way to work in China. The issues surrounding cultural exchange in the 21^st century and contemporary flows of knowledge will indeed be the focus of a number of invited contributors from around Asia, who will participate in our month of programming around the exhibition itself. This, for us, is the key to our own production of knowledge and a means to short circuiting other prospective institutional models usually deemed appropriate for China when engaging with the “West”.

We know that to thrive as Arthub Asia in a new century we need to seek out further meaningful collaborations by enabling a greater number of the region’s independent thinkers to participate in global knowledge flows, beyond the boundaries of the established art world. The future belongs to those who promote richer and ever more diverse exchange in the truest sense and form the practices required to harness the outcomes. Since its inception, Arthub has been convinced that this is indeed possible and we hope this project, Double Infinity will push the boundaries between institutional approach and civil society, hands-on “groundedness”. This is what our work aims to achieve and the results are there for all to see.

Defne Ayas & Davide Quadrio

Shanghai & Bangkok, February 2010

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