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This project focuses on the Democratic Republic of Congo (Kinshasa) and The People’s Republic of China (Beijing) – and the mobility between both. A group of Chinese artists, architects and writers is selected to collaborate with a group of Congolese counterparts (every group consists of 4-5 people) to track down
the presence of their expatriate compatriots in Congo and China respectively. They map the Chinese presence in Congo (Kinshasa) and the Congolese presence in China (Beijing or Yiwu2 ) in the form of (1) narratives (people), (2) objects and (3) buildings.

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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.

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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“We are not professionals” but this does not mean that we are incompetent, unskillful or clumsy. It does not mean that we are hobbyists or ‘Sunday painters’. We are not professionals, because we are not in the business of packaging, distributing, selling, and buying. If being a pro is about making money in exchange for a product or a service, being an amateur is about passion in pursuit of pleasure.

Many artists[1] have suggested that professionalized sex is comparable to professionalized art. The intersecting domains of a restricted economy [the economy of buying and selling] and a general economy [the economy of desire] outlines an unworkable unity as an impossible marriage[2]. It is an impossibility because, first, business wants to control and restrict any flows by subsuming it under market rules, while desire can only exist uninterrupted, freely flowing and undisciplined. Second, as opposed to a restricted economic order, in a general economy the more you spend the richer you get, the more you invest the less debt you own.

For example, a sex worker makes love in exchange for money but s/he does not love for money. A lover is, on the contrary, a total amateur; capital does not signify anything as being in love is about sexual attraction, sensuality, and the sensibility of the other. One has to simply love in order to have love and no other condition is necessary to fulfill its requirements as there is no accumulation of love, it happens when it is spent. In this regard, when a sex worker loves, s/he has to give up earning money through the act of sex and become an amateur by rejecting his/her professionalism for a time.

A lover can be silly, outraged, confused, paralyzed, and obsessed. Conversely, a professional, an ideal type[3], has to conduct their work by specific rules of conduct, which are established according to the notion of a restricted economy defined externally by institutionalized frameworks. Professionalization requires specific subjectivation processes to accomplish the job’s requirements beyond just learning the secrets of the trade. This specific disciplining of the body functions as a performative re-positioning according to institutional structures. Repetitive training aims to transform the whole body. Once the body learns how to function, everything is exercised automatically. Professionalization is a total pursuit including how the words are uttered, discourses are developed and behavioral patterns are shaped. In short, a profession is an institutionalized practice, which produces forms and structures, therefore value.

Here I need to make a clear distinction: we should not confuse performativity with theatrical performance. Theatricality implies that there is a stage, back stage, an audience, an outside, a real life beyond the visible. Stage analogy is based on the concept of a social sphere composed of visible/invisible and real/unreal. Contrary to these binary oppositions, professionalization aims for a complete overhauling of life, no hidden domain exists beyond the visible and the performative presence is reality. Becoming a pro is the process of constantly reformatting, reconditioning, and reshaping the body. A professional, such as a lawyer, doctor, firefighter or architect is defined according to its rules of conduct in addition to social cultural dispositions associated to the job. The exceptions to jobs overall requirements can only exist as variations tolerated by the practice itself[4].

My aim here is not to discredit professionalism; there is nothing wrong with selling services. In one way or another we all have to work and are subjected to external power dynamics exercised directly on our bodies. Our question needs to be specifically reformulated in regard to the constitutive potentials of the artistic field. The question is the most general one; is it still possible to seek a “line of escape”? From elementary school to university, from hospital to courthouse, from factory to prison, our bodies are disciplined by series of discursive configurations[5]. If the total subsumption of life under a capitalist order is indicative of recent restructuring of societies, how can an alternative model work without being destined to failure? One can only hope that art has the potential to cut through pre-defined class dispositions and to raise diverse questions.

However, let’s start once again, “we are not professionals”; this does not mean that we are naive. It is apparent that art plays a major role in the justification of the re-feudalization of society. Artists, curators and dealers position themselves so that they can engage with the wealthy and powerful few situated at the top of the food chain. Artists make appearances at art fairs and engage with their collectors. These events are staged by and for those who can collect, store, and benefit from this closed circuit. When collectors become part of the intellectual dialogue the nature of the production is subsumed under a capitalist re-valuation process. But our difficulty is not the artists who are selling out to this “system”. We have to understand that any attack on “selling artists” are made on relatively moral grounds, similar to society’s disapproval of sex workers. This kind of attack is week and dilutes the real structural inequalities in societies. Limiting our argument only to the supply-side, hides the real mechanisms of the whole construction of demand and supply as a system.

“We are not professionals” is a rejection of the models that are presented by the neo-liberal institutional system, in which education plays a big part in producing required mobile exploitable subjectivities. Many art programs produce artist/curator types who are mute, reserved and presentable radicals. Since these programs are considered and function more like launching pads for commercial enterprises, artists are becoming extremely cautious, politically correct and relatively well behaved.

In addition to the rejection of capitalist circulation and the re-evaluation process, we need to be aware of the fact that culture is increasingly dominated mostly by the Anglo-Saxon model of cultural institutions. In this regard, “An Artist Who Cannot Speak English Is No Artist”, a conceptual piece by Mladen Stilinović, highlights the art world’s inability to cope with a truly multi-cultural world. Stilinović asserts that in order to function in the contemporary art scene an artist must circulate within an international arena by utilizing commonly excepted norms and when s/he fails to do so they are ignored. Stilinović’s critique is particularly poignant, as it also highlights the art world’s inability to see beyond a discursive articulation of art. If an artist cannot speak English, they cannot apply to exhibitions, funding and correspond with curators and so on. Obviously artistic expression is not bound by the use of language but it is clear that the ability to function within institutional circles depends on this specific professional articulation. If an artist does not fit to “western standards”, s/he will not be recognized as an artist and this is why most non-western artists who work on an international level are actually educated within western educational systems.

Obviously there are many alternatives to conventional market-driven art fairs and establishments. Conferences, symposia and meetings are important parts of artistic intellectual exchange as they serve a vital role in establishing new connections, forming collaborations and developing new ideas. But when these meetings become another venue for self-promotion, the space for salient engagement is usually hijacked by descriptive Power Point presentations composed of endless installation shots. Alongside this, we usually listen to an artist speaking in English and justifying their work through various typical statements, mostly focusing on particularly personal experiences, etc. This attitude is the exact opposite of artistic practice because art requires giving up clichés, developing new approaches, and being experimental.

Generally speaking, art dwells on impossibilities and is an infinite oscillation between knowing, not knowing, understanding, not understanding, meaning and non-meaning. Its constitutive powers come from the playful and unpredictable character of this ambiguity. When Arthub Asia curators Defne Ayas and Davide Quadrio proposed a performative symposium, it was a call to rethink the possibility of creating a new form of engagement between different subjectivities situated all over the world. The outcome was for the most part refreshing and it was an active reevaluation of current conditions in the Asian continent. Giving up dominant models of presentations, and rethinking the performative aspects of artistic engagement was aligned with the experimental nature of our practice.

The “performative symposium” provided a unique opportunity to develop distinctive forms of engagement with each other’s work, something that we are missing in conventional cultural institutions, art fairs and so on. Rethinking the exhibition space as an elementary school classroom asserted that we better have a stimulating connection with the world as students. A classroom setting implies a direct power relationship between the school (institution) and the learning subjects and it has its problems as a model for alternative engagement. However, in order to develop a democratic encounter with one another it constituted an alternative public space, where the public could join an discuss the issues at hand.

The main issue addressed in the symposium was the possibility of“ the making of the new silk roads”. Curators put this forward as a territorial statement by posing a series of questions prior to the conference, which suggested that we imagine a terrain characterized by the condition for new possibilities. In fact, on the one hand the lack of commercial support provides an opportunity as our expression is not regulated by capitalist circulation and professionalized articulations, and as artists this forces us to operate solely as public intellectuals. On the other hand, we are all aware of the fact that Asia is full of semi-democratic or dictatorial governments defined by strict national borders, in direct opposition to the semi-fluidity of the original silk roads, and we are living in conditions where, for the most part, expression is mediated and extreme power is exercised on citizens of the continent. In that respect “we are not professionals” is a declaration that we will proceed with our amateur desires and pursue our alternative interests. Instead of crying for commercial infrastructure and support, we need to activate alternative networks by utilizing given conditions strategically and efficiently.

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The making of a road necessitates a journey. How that journey eventuates is both a question of mental and physical strategy. Re-tracing the knowledge of our inherited and lived memories is always a process of a kind of sentimental nostalgia, perhaps somewhat more traumatic for some. Performing these memories, articulating them to a disparate audience, where language and lifestyle is so markedly at odds with each other, is a challenge. How do you share the emotion of a memory and its tale? Under what kind of cultural or political context do you sort these memories into a kind of narrative? This is the struggle of writing a history, of attempting to re-draw the lines of why, what and for whom and I felt this struggle during these 3 days in Bangkok. I sought an insight into these questions in this gathering for, ‘The Making of the New Silk Roads’, particularly in reference to my own work as a curator and writer. In my practice I have consistently looked to the voice of culture as a means of engaging a physical and psychological space of an artistic community, believing that through ‘talking, walking and making’ we can catalyze remembrances of the past in a new fashion, helping motivate or rekindle an awareness of the significant role each individual possesses towards an evolving society.

Over the course of the brief three days that we all shared I was most allured by the use (or lack of) the human body in the delivery of this ‘performative symposium’. I came to appreciate the way the participants worked in mediums relevant to the contexts in which they work. Such as the way the voices amplified the bodies of Lina Saneh (Lebanon) and Samah Hijawi (Jordan) in the recounting of their tales revealing the power of the written word and its oration. The use of speech in this way lay in stark contrast to the performances by artists from South East Asia, where the power lay in the human gesture, in the use of color and duration of time (Le Huy Hoang, Vietnam; Jompet, Indonesia; Gary Pastrana, The Philippines).

Harnessing the power of word and image through the human body was no doubt perhaps one of the desired aims in requesting this conference be ‘performed’. While I am open to the model of dialogue (conference, symposia, lecture) being challenged, and while there were several ‘presentations’ that inspired my consideration of a new kind of ‘silk road’ (such as through the work of Kyong Park (Korea), Howard Chan (Hong Kong) and Stefan Rusu (Moldovia)), I found overall that the space in which we were sitting was not allowing an openness that could have assisted in breaking down the various differences we all felt towards one another. This led me to think that the kind of space in which a performed articulation of a cultural engagement occurs is crucial to gauging the success of transmission of information, the dynamism of that space deserving a theatric. When I speak of ‘space’, I refer to a shared zone of time that understands the visual world in front of them holds a series of aesthetic codes that operate with a kind of pre-determined meaning. Sitting as we were inside a white gallery space come classroom throws two hierarchical systems of learning into a single experience. While the idea of designing the interior of the gallery into a kind of educational zone is an interesting questioning of the role of the gallery system in the art of ‘learning’, I have to admit that after a full day of talk, the discussion felt not the centre of the ‘display’, but rather our own bodies were the objects on view (to this end in my mind what were the most impressive ‘presentations’ were those that left an image in your mind as opposed to the concept of a speech),

To this end I think the element of the theatric could have been better considered over the course of the three days. This drama could have been a melding of domestic or public space; presentations held in relation to a designated and highly coded structure (eg. a church, an opera theatre, a bar). While sitting in BUG, my bottom going numb from sitting on my hard wooden little chair at my little wooden desk, I found myself re-visiting the age-old debate of theory versus practice wondering what the role of dialogue can be in this kind of forum where practice has been urged into some kind of performative realm, despite the fact that those who are gatherers and recorders (curators, writers, arts workers) are perhaps not instinctively attuned to the sensitivities of their knowledge being ‘performed’. I guess what I found myself asking over the course of these three days was, ‘What is our intended goal in this rotary wheel of presentations’? What is the praxis of negotiation when new borders are desired and re-drawn amidst multiple zones of cultural difference, how is this articulation produced and why? It is this nature of production that intrigues me. Bhabha states ‘Terms of cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative, are produced performatively. The representation of difference must not be hastily read as the reflection of pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet of tradition. The social articulation of difference, from the minority perspective, is a complex, on-going negotiation that seeks to authorize cultural hybridities that emerge in moments of historical transformation.’1 What is this historical transformation we are seeking in the Making of a New Silk Road? What are the desired outcomes from such a re-drawing of cultural relationships? How can we tease out the idea of ‘performative’ so that the terms of our cultural engagement is given more space to breathe? It was unfortunate that such questions were not given air during the three-day meet. Yes the onus was placed on the participants to make what we will of the time and content, however a little prompting and provoking from the facilitators would have been useful in making the participants more constructive with their ignorance of each others’ work.

In thinking through the possibility of a ‘new silk road’, in thinking further on the stories and contexts that were shared between us, I can see how much potential there is for this ‘region’ to begin its own network of artistic support and exchange (as opposed to adopting a structure modeled on Western systems of art and economy). For me, it would be interesting and much more beneficial if this project was given broader preface by examining the historical occurrence of the Silk Road. My limited knowledge (which is now in strong desire of further study into issues of Asia Minor trade; the rise of cosmopolitanism; to examine the discussion between world leaders at the time of the collapse of the colonial empire, such as Jawaharlal Nehru) tells me that the naming of the ‘Silk Road’ came as a term in retrospect. It was a loose set of pathways that, growing over time with ever increasing cultural and economic networks, eventuating as a pipe-line of power and influence in the region, up until the expansion of the European Empire after which this never formalized group of trading alliances on this ‘Silk Road’ found themselves without the power to continue operations. The ingenuity of the initial Silk Road began as a result of the myriad of goods and services that were available at this geographical juncture. What kind of ‘goods and services’ are we holding in the making of a ‘New Silk Road’? Perhaps we should be wary of the tendency to formalize a relationship before we even know the configuration of the knowledge between us?

It strikes me as timely that the thought of considering a ‘New Silk Road’ should be occurring now in the wake of an international financial crisis that has illustrated the flaws within the capitalist system of financial gain as dictated by the West. This collapse of confidence in the structures of such an economy has revealed the strength of the Asian market, with an increasing amount of wealth seeking relocation in the Middle East. The movement of wealth and power has caused a movement in ideas, opening up the potential for new alliances and ways of making. What I would like to see with this project (in consideration of a continuing dialogue towards a possible second chapter) is to identify ways in which our respective enterprises and obsessions are useful, interested and similar. Perhaps we should focus on questioning ideas of trade in relation to the movement of information, perhaps considering a new kind of knowledge production and transference. This Bangkok gathering brought together not only artists as art makers, but also as pioneers of critical ‘space’ – this ‘space’ being at once physical and discursive. As someone who has been working, for the last 3 years, in an artistic environment with great potential (China and Vietnam), but little critical and comparative analysis, I would be very keen to see how we can share historical fact and interpretation of the shared and influential history between us so that our own borders of nationhood, state, spirituality and society (amongst others) is prompted towards a re-determination of what defines this new ‘Silk Road’.

Zoe Butt

Curator and Director (Programs and Development)

San Art, Ho Chi Minh City, VIetnam

December 2009

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Western/foreign/“outsider” scholars who approach the subject must contend with numerous language and cultural differences, and China’s culture of introversion that is often defensive when confronted with Western criticism, is almost always suspicious of Western interpretations, and definitely rejects negative attention. East-West negotiations (more specifically framed as China-West 中西 within China) are arguably the most important issue in Chinese art during the entire 20th century, and compose a comparative framework that unfortunately still pervades all discussions on art production, theory, criticism and art appreciation in China today.

In this regard, the study of Chinese art across cultures still lacks an accepted framework for discourse, and as the field expands, the already vast pool of variables will only increase: frames of reference, academic training and background, language skills, cultural fluency, one’s stake in their research and incorruptibility, level of participation and mother culture all contribute to our various competing and fluctuating perspectives. How to situate our research in authenticity? How to present art from China in a global context?

The conference “Negotiating Difference” attempted to address some of these questions last October at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt, looking at “Chinese” art in an international setting, and adapting English as the primary language at the conference, the main focus was on questions of methodology. Unique in the sense that it was directed at young scholars and graduate students, more than thirty people from diverse backgrounds convened in Berlin for the event. As the introduction reads: “Whether considered from a discursive, institutional or object-centered perspective, contemporary Chinese art always involves aspects of a globally informed locality and a locally affected globality,” [italics mine] organizers hoped to critically examine the predominant existing research frameworks that emphasize an essentialist “Chinese identity” or locate art from China within an entirely “Western” definition of art.

Hans Belting and Gao Minglu were scheduled to attend, but were in absentia, and thus the only “senior scholar” in attendance at the conference was Prof. John Clark from University of Sydney. In his keynote address, the art historian posited three questions that set the tone for the conference:  1) Are ‘Chinese-style’ and ‘Western-style’ twentieth century art practices and their interpretive structures autonomous? 2) If we avoid or defer the bifurcation ‘Chinese’ / ‘Western’, what kinds of historical time is implicit in the development of modern Chinese art? 3) How does Chinese modern and contemporary art look different if we use certain international comparisons from other Asian contexts?

Below, in an attempt to introduce to the conference as well as recent scholarship in the field, I’ve provided very short summaries (interpretations?) of each of the papers presented at the conference. Please accept apologies in advance for any cursory reviews, there was so much to discussion that a full summary of each one of them would be beyond the scope of my abilities. The summaries are divided into the eight panels that framed the discussion over the two-day conference, beginning below with “art the transnational and transcultural context.” Comments welcome.

I. Contemporary Chinese Art in the Transnational and Transcultural Context.

Dr. Juliane Noth, a professor at the Freie Universität Berlin and one of the organizers of the conference, presented on the No Name painters of the late 70s and early 80s, stressing their anti-academic, anti commercial position. Using a art historical approach she analyzed the group’s primary exhibitions in 1979 and 1981, individual art works, artists and the break-up of the group. One anecdote she highlighted was an interesting account of Rauschenberg, in Beijing for his 1985 exhibition, who went to a social gathering with the No Name painters. They were unhappy with Rauschenberg lack of respect for the Chinese avant-garde, he had instead expected to be met with the admiration and respect of pupils for their elder––the whole thing ended badly, and Dr. Noth uses the event to illustrate the problematic nature of globalized terms such as “avant-garde” and “contemporary” when applied to the complexity of Chinese artistic developments.

Birgit Hopfener’s paper was titled “Destroy the Mirror of Representation: Negotiating Installation Art in the ‘Third Space,’” and employed a rigorous theoretical approach to challenge the institution of installation art as it is represented in the trans-cultural environment. Using poststructuralist and post-colonial theory, especially Homi Bhaba’s concepts of cultural hybridization, she distanced installation art from modernist and essentialist ideas of meaning in favor of performative models of meaning production. It was an ambitious approach, and a successful use of Chinese art forms that pose potential challenges to accepted notions of art.

Brianne Cohen, a student of Terry Smith at the University of Pittsburgh, examined Cai Guo-Qiang’s career from a paranational perspective, starting with the controversial “giant footprints” from the Beijing Olympic opening ceremony. She mapped a larger body of Cai’s work, perceiving his explosion works as a shift to the humanistic, also discussing his Everything is Museum series. These are small museums projects which challenge the apparent uniformity of the art world’s institutions (MoMA, MoCA, etc.) by presenting “museums” in highly localized contexts. Is there an imagined collectivity in his works that transcends national borders, or is he playing on spectacle? Her attempts to move the discussion on Cai beyond whether or not he is “playing the Chinese card” was much appreciated, even if he fuels cynicism in the more tempered observers of the Chinese contemporary art world

II. The Negotiation of Tradition
Dr. Silke von Berswordt discussed the “white landscapes” of Qiu Shihua (邱世华 b. 1940) bringing one of his optically challenging canvases directly to the scene of the conference. Qiu Shihua’s works are virtually impossible to reproduce in images, they are white on white landscapes that must be seen in person, thus making the very act of viewing a self-conscious act (think “Magic Eye” images from the mid-90s). Qiu challenges our perceptions on seeing, causing us to “analyze how, rather that what we are perceiving.”  Dr. von Berswordt made comparisons with the literati tradition and phenomenological approaches where “paintings do not merely offer a view of a well-defined landscape image, but rather they open up a relationship to the world itself.”

Wang Ching-ling, a distinguished PhD student at the Freie Universität Berlin is of Taiwanese background. His discussion of Taiwanese contemporary artists was a well-needed reminder of this marginalized group of artists within the Chinese diaspora, and his paper was a comparative study on how two different artists appropriate a classic landscape in the Chinese canon––Fan Kuan’s Travelers in Mountains and Streams 《谿山行旅圖》. The Taiwanese artist Mei Dean-E (梅丁衍 b. 1954), who works with themes of identity and often in “pop art” styles, integrated the work into a larger installation while Zhang Hongtu (張宏圖 b.1943), a Chinese artist based in New York who is especially well known for his recreations of landscapes “in the manner of” Western masters Cezanne, Van Gogh, etc. Wang leapt right over the debate on modernism and postmodernism in China to conclude both of these artists are working in a postmodern context, with Mei Dean-E using the work to explore his unique cultural identity through a highly politicized language that reflect the complexities of the artist himself and Zhang Hongtu employs it as a dialectical tool to explore concepts of East and West, the traditional and modern.

III. Concepts of Body and Gender in Chinese Contemporary Art

Wang Ruobing, from Singapore, is an artist and doctoral student at Oxford University, her paper was an analysis on the photographic work To Add one Meter to an Anonymous Mountain (1995) as an expression of Chinese intellectuals desire to return to ziran. Ziran can be loosely translated as “nature,” but should also be understood to encompass a deeper philosophical notion of “human nature” or the “natural order of the universe.” She reads their literal attempt to commune with and go back to nature as reflecting a larger artistic and societal movement.

Doris Ha-lin Sung, a Toronto-based visual artist and curator and PhD. candidate at York University, interprets the use of the body in the performances of Zhang Huan (张洹 b. 1965), Ma Liuming (马六明 b. 1969) and He Chengyao (何成瑶 b.1964) as demonstrative of a trend in performance art and “happenings” that illustrate a migration from the public sphere to the private, reflecting the political climate of the time and the artists’ desire to portray the “self.” She concluded that these artists use highly gendered versions of their most private resource, their bodies, to react to the suppression of their individualism, and, “In the process, they develop a unique language and strategy that underlines the influences of their predecessors in the search of the notion of ‘selfhood,’ through interrogating the present by the past.”

Eva Aggeklint of the University of Stockholm presented an introduction to her extensive research into the subtheme of marriage in conceptual Chinese photography, most specifically the portrayal of brides and grooms and the “masquerading” phenomenon that is often found in the genre. She highlights the flux nature of the bride (not the groom), who is most often represented as something other, or simply alluded to. She postulated what the humor, parody and satire in this bizarre sub-genre of photography could mean.

Dr. Adele Tan provided a feminist analysis an alternative reading of Xiao Lu’s (肖鲁 b.1962) performance in Dialogue, the fabled shot that foreshadowed the massacre in the Square in eighty-nine. Tan stated that her intention was “not to unequivocally take Xiao Lu’s side as true” but to explore alternative readings through feminist perspectives in a realm that she sees as closed to alternative explanations. Her analysis included a break down of the authorial controversy between the Xiao Lu and her then boyfriend Tang Song, a 2004 work in which she claimed authority on the work for herself, and Xiao Lu’s later works, including the controversial performance Sperm (2006), where she hoped to be impregnated through an unknown donor, and Wedlock (2009), a performance where she married herself. Xiao Lu is indeed a controversial character, and Tan painted her in the best possible light.

IV. Contemporary Chinese Art and Its Spaces of Production

Lee Ambrozy’s paper “The Third Studio––A History of Realism in Chinese Art Pedagogy” was a brief overview of Realism as the dominant pedagogy at the Centrl Academy of Fine Arts. By examining Zhan Jianjun (詹建俊 b. 1931), Liu Xiaodong (刘小东 b. 1963), Peng Yu (彭禹 b. 1974), and briefly Qiu Xiaofei (仇晓飞 b. 1978), all sharing the lineage of the Third Studio at CAFA, she attempted to show the dramatic changes in reception and employ of Realism over the century, and more importantly, to establish a definitive lineage connecting contemporary artists to art in “Red China,” indirectly challenging the notion that contemporary art in China was “born” in the late 1970s.

Wenny Teo presented a case study of failed negotiations and global market forces that came to play the fascinating case of Qiu Anxiong’s ‘We Are the World’, an exhibition held at the Contrasts Gallery in Shanghai December 2008. This work embodies the controversies and contradictions surrounding the “Made in China” label, both in theory and practice: a French artist was producing his works in China, but the deal went sour and the artist returned home empty handed, but leaving an abundance of unfinished objects which were utilized by Qiu Anxiong as an installation under his name. The European artist was outraged, Pearl Lam, the gallerist behind the work, stood firmly behind the project, publically defending the artist and his work, whereas Wenny Teo employed it here as an proxy in identifying a state of collective “schizophrenia” in consumer society, furthermore, proposing that it can be reclaimed as “productive.” Qiu’s statement frames the scene as “the front stage and back stage of the materialistic world” and Teo ends by invoking “Deleuze and Guattaris’ notion that the unconscious, or desire itself, is not a theatre, but a factory.”

V. Contemporary Chinese Art and Strategies of (Dis-)Engagement

Zheng Bo, an artist and PhD student at the University of Rochester presented on socially engaged art in China, examining projects by documentary filmmaker Wu Wenguang (吴文光 b. 1956),  Ou Ning’s (欧宁 b. 1969) multi-media research project on the Dashala’r 大栅栏 district of Beijing, and Zheng Bo’s own work, entitled Karibu Islands 贾里布群岛, which approached the debate on homosexuality from an alternative perspective, allowing queer and straight participants to project their ideals onto an imaginary island where time travels backwards. Zheng further outlined the importance of two interrelated and historically significant participatory movements, the Stars Movement and the Democracy Wall movement, envisioning the reemergence of socially engaged art in the mainland today as reflective of larger changes in China, and concluding that “The abstracted concept of ‘the people’ is replaced by specific publics: villagers, workers, gays and lesbians, urban residents facing collective relocation, etc.,” and a time where artists interact with participants in conversations, performances and art objects.

In “Non-Antagonistic Contradiction: Alternative Spatial Practices and Provisional Communities in Contemporary China,” independent curator Beatrice Leanza examined how the “Museum Age” (the decade since 2000) has affected spaces of art production on the Mainland and changed the critical discourse. In the second half of her presentation she gave an thorough introduction to the emerging scene of Chinese contemporary art today, citing alternative spaces, groups and collectives from various backgrounds who are at work in China today. Her curatorial background was extremely useful in her painting a dynamic portrait of artists working today on the mainland.

VI. Curating Chinese Contemporary Art

Davide Quadrio, director of BizArt, Shanghai/Arthub Hong Kong has a problem. Actually, he seems to be demonstrating symptoms of a collective problem, and it reads like this:

“Here, you will get to know Chinese youth oil painters, and become our friends while enjoying our oil paintings full of eastern sentimental appeal, modern and classical realism oil paintings.
XXX Art Studio was a professional oil painting organization, which set up in 2001, It mainly sell Chinese youth oil painters original oil paintings to collectors, while receiving entrusted orders of oil painting portrait from different countries and areas all over the world. Foreign collectors, such as American, Japanese, Australian, Brazil and so on, have collected most of his original oil paintings.

We are sure that you will be satisfied with it because of its good quantities in both art standard and materials. If you enjoy a certain original oil painting artwork you can choice to purchase; If you are an art agency or oil painting wholesale dealer, send a e-mail to us, We can provide large numbers of any kind of the high quality oil paintings.”

––––From a promotional email of a Beijing based gallery received in October 2009

BizArt’s work has been called “marginal” in the overall scheme of Chinese contemporary art, but Quadrio argues, if the above “problem” represents the mainstream, then the margins are where most of the interesting things are transpiring. Over more than ten years of work in China, he sees the recent market recession as a potential time for a rebirth in the art world. He cites China’s current socio-political regime state, the use of her cultural “soft power” and the need to overcome reminiscent imperialistic attitudes, also commenting on the difference in how official and civil societies interpret cultural change, and the fact that in all nations the civil society tends to have a more progressive notion of what culture and cultural development are. He feels that the past twenty years in Chinese cultural development have been marked by the hyper-speed of growth but not supported by a mature cultural framework, resulting in a lot of “learning while on the job.”

Dr. Meiqin Wang, a professor at California State University Northridge offered a rather scathing criticism and grim view on curatorial practice in China in recent years, concluding that those independent curators who were once considered avant-garde, “bear no real substance” in the contemporary Chinese art world today. Progressing through the global avant-garde of the 1990s to the current local situation, an overwhelming where wealth empowers authority, she cites the prevailing commercialism as a goal in itself for so many art professionals, and the diminished significance of curators in the development of art. She charts government sponsored exhibitions and the transition that many names in curating, such as Hou Hanru, made from criticism to curating, and some of the reasons for the multiple roles that curators play (gallerist, writers, filmmakers, museum staff, etc.). When the market came to maturity, the role of curator was already diluted and shaded by an economic priority, she sites Pi Li as a once a promising young curator, now “ashamed” to be associated with the word. Wang’s thesis reflects larger social issues, as she states: “It is a sad but realistic turn as China has transformed into a society that empowers wealth.”

VII. Dis-Playing Contemporary Chinese Art

Dr. Thomas Berghuis, of the University of Sydney and author of the seminal book Performance Art in China, discussed “The Official Re-Positioning of Chinese Contemporary Art onto the Global Stage” through a discussion of the Beijing Biennale. He makes a case for the re-examination of terminology such as “new wave” xinchao, and “experimental art” shiyan yishubu, culturally complex terms which highlight the fissures between “official” conceptions of art and what it should be, and the art that was in practice at the time.  Recounting the intense debate over national aesthetics and how to position Chinese art in a global context that transpired in official art journals around 1999-2003, he revives a much needed discussion of art as viewed in official Chinese channels. He  identifies the Beijing Biennale in 2003 as a local portion of a series of official exhibitions that were happening across the world attempting to “correct” notions of art from China, including Alors, La Chine? (Paris), Living in Time (Berlin). Berghuis’s discussion of contemporaneity and modernity reflects some initial steps at identifying a 1980’s “modern” and a 1990’s “contemporary,” as well as some of the significant factors that contributed to a transition in this discourse.

Tackling Uli Sigg’s powerful collection of Chinese contemporary art,
 Franziska Koch discussed the politics and hidden messages in “Dis-Playing ‘Mahjong,’” Sigg’s now world famous collection as it was received around the world. Her research focuses on the Western reception of contemporary Chinese art as it has been exhibited in Europe since the early 1990s, and how this increase in visibility contributed to the creation of a category of  “Chinese contemporary art,” a term whose validity she disputes. Using the display of Uli Sigg’s collection as a primary example, including interesting analyses of the different curatorial approaches that frame the collection and how those become the primary vehicle through which overseas audiences understand art from China.

VIII. Contemporary Chinese Art: Market and Meaning

Joe Martin Hill of New York University worked at Sotheby’s for many years, and exercised his grasp on the market by examining and then disputing the supposed correlation between monetary value and artistic significance, especially in light of recent booms. He dissected auction figures very carefully, concluding that the phenomenal boom of Chinese artists that peaked in 2007 was an irregularity, one that does not reflect actual value. The facts seem to spell out that Chinese contemporary artists were perhaps the greatest beneficiaries of these broader trends in geographic diversification of the art market, but he wonders: “does it make sense that of all the artists in the world achieving more than a million dollars at auction, a quarter born after 1950 and almost half of those born after 1960 should be Chinese?”

Peggy Wang is a PhD student of Wu Hung at the University of Chicago, her paper demonstrated how art exhibitions and journals became the scenes of contested meaning and value in the early 1990s, in light of the immanent arrival of a global art market. Highlighting the debate between “academicism” and “commercialism,” she cited a series of academic exhibitions titled Art Research Documents organized by critic/curator Wang Lin, and the market oriented Guangzhou Biennale, organized by Lu Peng, which was an attempt to use a critic’s eye to assign value to art works through applications for the exhibition to juried prizes for the winners. She also discussed how the introduction of new mediums challenged definitions of significance, framing her discussion around a public debate carried out in journals. She illustrates the critical discourse on art in the early 1990s as a “cultural battleground” where contested meanings and values were debated on their most fundamental levels.

Courtesy of Sinopop

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It exists an education of the taste that have the gradual effect of masking, instilling arbitrary notions, the arbitraries of the notions instilled.

Pierre Bourdieu 

Civilization is just a chaotic jumble of rags and scraps.

Robert Lowie 

Collezione Mauro Corinaldi, Milano in accomodato all’Università Bocconi di Milano, Courtesy Galleria Umberto Di Marino, Napoli

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For additional pictures please check here

“As the torch-bearer of Contemporary Art in Bhutan, I am fully engaged in dedicating myself to the issue of Bhutanese contemporary art and helping the youth of Bhutan. With full support and dedication from my students and fellow artists we would like to take the Bhutanese art to new heights without compromising our age old traditional art.”

The studio is also connected to an art gallery where art b the artists at VAST is sold in order to subsidize the studio:

The on display at the studio is by the volunteer artists who work there and their students:

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For this new live work to be presented at the Astra Theatre in Turin, Cao Fei embarks on the challenge of not only creating new chapter of RMB City but also working with avatar-actors and various staging elements to create a new drama based on the “model dramas” (Yang Ban Xi) of Cultural Revolution period. Yang Ban Xi were the only politically-approved performance form at the time, as traditional opera was banned by Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing. They were series of propaganda productions (movie musicals, ballets, operas) that got later adapted to cinematic form, therefore getting more entrenched into the visual and symbolic imagination of a certain era of Chinese history. Their integration of elements of the then-banned Chinese traditional opera, ballet, propaganda songs, and popular music, featuring ballerinas pirouetting with rifles and male proletariat dancers executing landlords rendered in boldly-colored costumes against kitsch-inflected sets is what has continuously fascinated Cao Fei, who has  been exploring the potential of the operatic medium every since. (Please refer to her theatrical stage production “PRD Anti-Heroes (2005).

Cao Fei’s concept of performance in RMB City will make a clear reference to the aesthetics of the “Yang Ban Xi” but putting it into a contemporary perspective with iconic styles and movements that have now become “classic” and highly symbolic. Cao Fei will use the RMB City and its multi-venue nature for an experimental theatrical stage and instead of solely recreating the old performance techniques in the virtual space of RMB City, she will create a  new kind of  a “RMB Yang Ban Xi,” a non-linear, partially interactive drama that will contain some of the classic Yang Ban Xi characters and elements now complemented by our contemporary reality. Various characters will interact, through dialogue, song, and dance, creating spectacular tableaus in the different locations and will bring to life various plots (dances, movements, and symbols) that are taken from daily life. Considering the dynamic and interactive nature of Second Life, the audience will also be able to explore and experience the specially-created Yang Ban Xi environment in Second Life via personal computers, and/or via specialty computer-access terminals, and interact with performers through customized avatars, creating a large online performance space.

As both a real and virtual stage, the Teatro Regio and RMB City respectively, will provide a place for discussion about the past, the present, and the future, with a new formula that combines an extraordinary show with live interaction between the virtual world (the present), the “Yang Ban Xi” opera with its encoded language (the past, but still comprehensible to the generation of Chinese who grew up with this mythology) and a reinterpretation of this work in constant evolution (the future).

Please click here and here for the flyer about RMB City project.

Ms. China Tracy, Cao Fei’s avatar, will play the lead role in the performance, accompanied by other actor-avatars on the screen, and on stage, who will be wearing highly imaginative costumes designed by the artist for RMB City and specially made by the Teatro Regio costumiers for this unique presentation.

The perfect city with Chinese characteristics. Cao Fei’s RMBcity project for Artissima 2009, “Blinding the Ears”. An interview by Davide Quadrio, translated into English by Honora Shea, Fan Zhen and Coco Kwok.

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