An Artist Takes Role of China’s Conscience

The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who disappeared into police custody in Beijing after he was detained on Sunday while trying to board a flight for Hong Kong, is a fully 21st-century figure, global-minded, media-savvy, widely networked. He is also the embodiment of a cultural type, largely unfamiliar to the West, that dates far back into China’s ancient past.

ArtTactic’s New Chinese Contemporary Art Survey: China World’s “Most Confident” Art Market

ArtTactic is most bullish about artists like Yang Fudong, Ai Weiwei, and Zeng Fanzhi (Graph: ArtTactic)

Short- and Long-Term Longevity Indicators put artists like Yang Fudong and Ai Weiwei in the top (Graph: ArtTactic)

In terms of artist confidence, ArtTactic observes a number of recent changes to the long-term confidence ranking. Cai Guo-qiang, Ai Weiwei, Zhang Huan and Yang Fudong still make up the Top 4, with photographer Wang Qingsong entering the Top 10 for the first time at #5, followed by Liu Xiaodong in 6th place. In terms of long-term sentiment, 75 percent of the artists (39 out of 52) have seen a positive increase in long term confidence in their markets. Artists who have seen a positive increase in their long-term outlook since September 2010 include Wang Qingsong, Cao Fei and Lin Tianmiao. ArtTactic goes on to point out that Yin Xiuzhen, Liu Ye, Gu Wenda and Liu Wei make up the top of the short-term confidence indicator, but uncertainty lingers around their long-term longevity.

Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads

 

Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads

Designed in the 18th century by two European Jesuits serving in the court of the Qing dynasty Emperor Qianlong, the twelve zodiac animal heads originally functioned as a water clock-fountain, which was sited in the magnificent European-style gardens of the Yuanming Yuan. In 1860, the Yuanming Yuan was ransacked by French and British troops, and the heads were pillaged. 

In re-interpreting these objects on an oversized scale, Ai Weiwei focuses attention on questions of looting and repatriation, while extending his ongoing exploration of the “fake” and the copy in relation to the original.

grass-mud horse and river crabs

Origins of the Grass-Mud Horse

In early 2009, a creature named the “Grass-Mud Horse” appeared in an online video which became an immediate viral hit. The term grass-mud horse, which sounds nearly the same in Chinese as “f*** your mother” (cáo nǐ mā), was originally created as a way to get around, and also poke fun at, government censorship of vulgar content. After netizens created an online video depicting the grass-mud horse at war with and eventually defeating the river crab, a homonym for “harmony,” a propaganda catchword, the idea caught fire instantly and the symbolic meaning of this term has been completely transformed. Within weeks, the “grass-mud horse” became the de facto mascot of netizens in China fighting for free expression, inspiring poetry, photos and videos, artwork, lines of clothing, and more. As one Chinese blogger explained, “The grass-mud horse (草泥马) represents information and opinions that cannot be accepted by the mainstream discourse, and “ the Song of the Grass-Mud Horse” has become a metaphor of the power struggle over Internet expression”

    Link to interview with Ai Weiwei

No return: artshow in 1989

On jeanne Boden's Blog

http://jeanneboden.typepad.com/jeanneboden/art/

xu bing Tobacco Project (book)

BizArt Shanghai / arthubAsia

BizArt is a contemporary art center devoted to support Shanghai young artists and designers, and offer opportunities to cultural exchange projects. This first contemporary Art Centre in China investigates and promotes new artistic aspects from China and abroad.

The word "BizArt" implies both business and art, which are integrated yet independent. It tries to reach two goals: bringing business closer to art and being able to sustain the art activities without compromise.

Artistic and social discipline
Music : concerts (small forms)
Contemporary dance : Diffusion / Spaces rental / Debates / Lecture / Conferences / residencies
Visual art : production / Diffusion / Workshop / Spaces rental / Debates / Lecture / Conferences / residencies
Cinema-Audiovisual : Diffusion / Spaces rental / Debates / Lecture / Conferences
BizArt creates and organises :
 Its own arts events to bring chinese and western contemporary art together and to present these cultural events to a wider audience within and outside Asia.
 Workshops
BizArt will offered workshops to the general public, ranging from dance to music, ceramics to children.
 Artists in residence
BizArts offers to international and local artists the opportunity to reside in the BizArt space for a maximum period of 2 months to work on their artwork. By the end of the stay, the artist will set up an exhibition to present his work.In this sense, a real interaction can exist between local society and the art community.

---

Financial support 
Through design/graphics and services. Art side mainly on sponsorships. NO money from government of public istitutions

arthub

Spearheaded by a dynamic team of specialized curators and producers, ArtHub Asia is a cultural and artistic constellation of independent thinkers devoted to contemporary art creation in China and across Asia. In collaboration with museums and other public / private spaces and institutions, and in close dialogue with its advisory board, Arthub Asia initiates and delivers ambitious art projects through a sustained dialogue with visual, performance, and new media artists. Inspired by the collective intelligence generated across media, Arthub Asia serves as a collaborative production lab, a creative think tank as well as a curatorial research platform. Arthub Asia is committed to furthering experimentation, knowledge-production and diversity among dedicated artists, art professionals, scholars, and arts organizations in the region.
Arthub Asia’s mission is to:
// Identify, provide, and enable intellectual, strategic, logistical and financial means for ambitious new artistic projects and productions by Chinese and Asian contemporary artists.
// Actively facilitate an informal network of contemporary artists, art professionals and writers, both within the region and beyond- starting first with an Asia-wide exchange platform and community, where different ideas and individuals merge, interact and motivate each other.
// Act as a catalyzer of the same people who want to share and initiate ideas for projects including for knowledge production (publications, research projects, symposia) and diversity (capacity building, networking and regional mapping).
// To continue to develop new and informed audiences through educational initiatives.
// Serve as a Platform for international partners including artists, scholars, universities, not-profit initiatives and museums, and facilitate the production of exhibitions, performances, workshops, and specialized art tours.
Arthub is registered a non-for-profit organization in Hong Kong, with three directors based across Asia.
Having already facilitated more than 110 activities in China and the rest of Asia since its inception in 2007 , Arthub has already become the major provider of structural support not only for artists working in China and across Asia, but also for a global community of leading curators, art professionals and producers.
Arthub was initially conceived to support through structural funding the not-for-profit BizArt Art Centre, allowing it to continue promoting contemporary art in China and to reach out across Asia, especially the documentation and archiving of BizArt-related projects. For more information on Bizart-related activities, please check here.

trends in Chinese contemporary art: project based art

Events only disclose their nature as art when represented in the particularity of the physical environment of exhibition space. Projects and events are art integrated with life, which, community-engaged art in particular, is more ready to be perceived as mass cultural activities in China than serious art intervention...

Read also: Robin Peckham comment on Wang Chunchen

Review: Art Intervenes in Society

First published in Modern Art Asia.
Text by Robin Peckham.
Review: Art Intervenes in Society: A New Artistic Relationship
Wang Chunchen


case study:
Long March
(2003 - 2010)

YANG SHAOBIN

800 METERS UNDER

Sep 2, 2006--Oct 15, 2006
Long March Space

Hans Ulrich Obrist - Ai Weiwei // the question about the future of art

the bullshit schools such as the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing or China Academy of Art in Hangzhou will no longer be needed.

A Post-Olympic Beijing Mini-Marathon. New Years Eve 2008-2009

Inside Out: New Chinese Art // chinese avant garde (chronologie)

Inside Out: New Chinese Art is the first major exhibition to present the dynamic new art being produced by artists in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and by selected artists who emigrated to the West in the late 1980s. Including works dating from the mid-1980s to the present (some commissioned for this exhibition), Inside Out focuses on works of art that explore the complex relationship between culturally specific issues and larger developments of a modern/postmodern age. Within this context, artists are appropriating and transforming both conventional Chinese aesthetic idioms and contemporary Western vocabularies to negotiate the cultural differences between past and present, self and other.

chronologies
1977
The Cultural Revolution (CR) ends with Mao Zedong's death in October 1976. But the change in leadership does not immediately result in new cultural values. From 1977 to late 1978, artists continue to produce work in the CR style, substituting new leaders for the former cast of characters. However, a few small-scale group exhibitions organized by artists feature landscape and portrait painting, challenging conventions that demand overt political/ideological subject matter in art.
...
The Stars are principally self-taught artists (i.e., not trained in the Academy) and are the first influential avant-garde group, challenging both aesthetic convention and political authority. Their use of formerly banned western styles, from Postimpressionism to Abstract Expressionism, is an implicit criticism of the status quo. The group's first exhibition, in September 1979, is a provocative display of work hung without official permission on the fence outside the National Gallery, Beijing. After the exhibition is disrupted by the police, the artists post a notice on Democracy Wall and stage a protest march. The Stars' first formal exhibition (Xing xing huazhan), held in Beihai Park, Beijing, in November, includes 163 works by 23 nonprofessional artists. 
... 
 1990
As a result of the post-Tiananmen tightening down, as well as ongoing commercial pressures, idealist avant-garde activity in China declines drastically and never fully recovers. Art publications suffer as well. In January, Fine Arts in China, which played an important role in the avant-garde movement, is closed by authorities. In September, the most popular art journal, Art Monthly, which had devoted considerable attention to the '85 Movement, is restaffed with conservatives. One of its editors, Gao Minglu, is ordered to stop all editorial work and spend time at home studying Marxism.
...
1994
Lack of government support and declining public interest forces avant-garde artists to find alternative venues for exhibiting their work: books, magazines, private homes, less populated rural areas. For instance, artists Zeng Xiaojun, Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, and art critic Feng Boyi fund the publication of Black Book (Heipishu), a parody of Red Flag (Hongqi), the official organ of the CCP.
...

 

residency program AAA (Hong Kong)

Over the past seven years the AAA has built one of the world's most comprehensive collections of material for contemporary Asian art. We believe that the bringing together of this material offers exciting opportunities for new interpretations. For this reason, the AAA intends to establish an annual residency program in Hong Kong for artists, critics and curators working in the field. The goal of the residency is to encourage new readings of the physical material in the archive, to offer individuals the chance to work with material outside their usual comfort zones, and to support interesting ideas and projects around the idea of the ‘archive’. Individuals will be invited to Hong Kong to spend time conducting research at the AAA and work with the Research+ Department to come up with a new project idea. At the end of the residency the AAA will provide the support to present this project. In 2007, AAA held a pilot residency program for local art critic and curator Jaspar Lau Kin Wah. Entitled ‘HistoriCITY’, the program included a mini-exhibition at the archive, a series of reading groups, and a roundtable discussion on art historical writings in and on Hong Kong.

Problems of Translation

	select back to home Perspectives Call for Material Problems of Translation Performance Matters Interview with Alice Kok Donation of Material Photologue AAA Closed Screening Learning Lab
Problems of Translation
AAA presents a public discussion with Jan Gerber, Sebastian Lütgert (both 0x2620, Berlin) and Ashok Sukumaran (CAMP, Bombay), co-founders of the Pad.ma video archive. When: 11.30am-1.30pm, Thursday, 16 December 2010 Where: Asia Art Archive, 11/F, Hollywood Centre, 233 Hollywood Road, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong Registration: enoch@aaa.org.hk Language: English Problems of translation occur not only between written or spoken languages (such as Cantonese or English), but are a much more common phenomenon. Translation is a challenge for all ‘gaps between disciplines’ (such as between art and technology). A closer look at the practices of programmers and painters, for example, might reveal that the principles and techniques they apply in their respective fields, have much more in common than is usually assumed. Problems of translation may not lie where most expected. In the art archive, the verb "archiving" implies many kinds of translation, of the qualities and potentials of artworks and related materials. In digital art archives, such translation of qualities is present in many everyday acts of scanning, tagging, and uploading. The transformation of analog art works into digital items not only changes storage mediums and handling qualities, but also enters work into completely new relations, exchanges, and equations. Digital materials tend to multiply and to leak, to both create great wealth, and to provide great distraction. ‘Digital labour’ or changed work habits is another consequence of this, which in turn changes how we think about the production and growth of such archives. To realise the digital archive's full potential means to take the idea of translation quite seriously, as a basic unit for all kinds of distributive and transformative forces, indirect effects, and creative misunderstandings. About PAD.MA PAD.MA - short for Public Access Digital Media Archive - is an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not finished films. The entire collection is searchable and viewable online, and is free to download for non- commercial use. Its founders see PAD.MA as a way of opening up a set of images, intentions and effects present in video footage, resources that conventions of video- making, editing and spectatorship have tended to suppress, or leave behind. This expanded treatment then points to other, political potentials for such material, and leads viewers into lesser-known territory for video itself... beyond the finite documentary film or the online video clip. The PAD.MA project is initiated by a group consisting of oil21.org from Berlin, the Alternative Law Forum from Bangalore, and three organisations from Mumbai: Majlis, Point of View, and Chitrakarkhana/CAMP.

Galleria Continua Bejing

Galleria Continua - Ai WeiWei

Group exhibitions

REM(A)INDERS
AI WEIWEI, SUBODH GUPTA, LIU JIANHUA,
MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO, SUN YUAN & PENG YU, PASCALE MARTHINE TAYOU,
NARI WARD, ZHUANG HUI & DAN'ER

10/04/2010 - 29/08/2010

REM(A)INDERS - AI WEIWEI - “《》”
2008, variable dimensions bicycle pieces

Wang Du

Le travail de Wang Du est une critique évidente de l’hégémonie des mass medias, comme principale force à la fois de manipulation sociale et économique et de mobilisation politique. Ce qu’il y a là d’intéressant, c’est que Wang Du commence sa critique en indexant l’aspect le plus « terre-à-terre » du mécanisme des médias. Autour de 1994, au début de ce travail de sculpture, il a collecté, dans les journaux et les magazines, les images des événements et personnalités les plus triviaux pour en faire des statues plus ou moins sérieuses et parfois monumentales. Ce geste de retourner sens dessus dessous les valeurs sociales les plus communément acceptées, compromettant la stratégie manipulatrice des mass médias, provoque souvent une vague de rire dans le public. Pour autant, personne ne doute qu’il implique également, de manière plus significative, une mordante critique des médias et de leur toute puissance hégémonique dans la société contemporaine.

Par la suite, Wang Du s’est consacré aux événements les plus sensationnels relayés par les médias, principalement ceux relevant du star system de la culture populaire, mais aussi ceux appartenant aux conflits géopolitiques. Il poursuit sa collecte d’images provenant de supports médiatiques variés pour en faire de grands collages. Ces images assemblées, allant de la banale anecdote à l’événement politique capital, de l’histoire vraie à la fiction, deviennent à leur tour les scénarii, voire les encyclopédies, d’un monde « réinventé » par le biais des médias eux-mêmes. Le travail de Wang Du, s’il est ouvertement provocateur, n’est pas moins amusant et visuellement rafraîchissant, que ce soit en termes de contenu – les images qu’il choisit pour constituer ses collages du monde médiatique – ou en termes de formes – le vocabulaire sculptural, l’échelle et la disposition dans l’espace, etc. Dans cette tension entre provocation et divertissement, on peut sentir une claire méfiance envers les relations artificielles entre image et sens tel qu’elles sont propagées par les médias, afin d’exercer leur pouvoir hégémonique.

Cette méfiance révèle une position tout aussi ouvertement provocatrice et avant-gardiste qui ne risque certainement pas d’être accusée de « politiquement correct.


Texte de Hou Hanru tiré de Wang Du Magazine « Je veux être un média »

Ai Weiwei - Without fear or favour (2010)

Ai Weiwei - Without Fear or Favour (2010)

Chen Zhen

chttp://www.guimet.fr/CHEN-ZHEN,913

http://www.artspeakchina.org/mediawiki/index.php/Chen_Zhen_陈箴

Ai Weiwei in TATE

Is it OK to steal a Turbine Hall seed? / Sun Flower Seed Donation @ TATE MODERN

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/charlottehigginsblog/2010/oct/12/ai-weiwei-sunflower-seeds

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=146337922077397&ref=ts

Keep ratio scale...