Yishu Awards for Critical Writing and Curating on Contemporary Chinese Art

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 V OLUME 15, NUMBER 6

INSI DE

Yishu Awards for Writing and Curating on Contemporary Chinese Art Interview: David Chau, Cc Foundation No References: A Revisit of Hong Kong Video and Media Art from 1985 Public and Independent Spaces in Shanghai Three Approaches to Socially Engaged Art in Taiwan

US$12.00 NT$350.00 P R INTED IN TAIWAN 11

VOLUME 15, NUMBER 6, NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016

CONTENTS 17 2 Editor’s Note

4 Contributors

6 Yishu Awards for Critical Writing and Curating on Contemporary Chinese Art

10 Alternative Spaces Are Still the Best Alternative Chen Tong 27 15 Made in China-Globalization: Art, Production, and Social Change Lu Mingjun

25 Exhibition as Exhibition Carol Yinghua Lu

36 Capturing the Traces of Everyday Life Echo He

40 Rethinking Practices within the Art System: The Self-Organization of Contemporary Art in 40 China, 2001–2012 Bao Dong

54 David Chau: In Deﬁance of Conventions Julie Chun

61 Notes from a Slaughterhouse: On Abjection, Movement, and Hong Kong Identity Michele Chan

67 Alternative to Museums: Public and Independent Art Spaces in Shanghai 61 Julie Chun

91 Three Approaches to Socially Engaged Art in Taiwan Lu Pei-Yi

102 Chinese Name Index

Cover: Xu Zhen, Eternity—Northern Qi Golden and Painted Buddha, Tang Dynasty Torso of Standing Buddha from Quyang City, Northern Qi Painted Bodhisattva, Tang Dynasty Seated Buddha from Tianlongshan, Northern Qi Painted Buddha, Tang Dynasty Torso of Seated Buddha from Tianlongshan Grotto No. 4, Parthenon East Pediment, 2013–2014, glass ﬁber-reinforced 91 concrete, marble grains, sandstone grains, limestone grains, chalk, steel, mineral pigments, 1522.5 x 93 x 460 cm, exhibition view, Unlimted, Art Basel, 2014. Photo: Dawn Blackman. Courtesy of MadeIn Company, Shanghai.

We thank Yukon Art Space Co. Ltd. and Freddy Yang, JNBY and Lin Li, Cc Foundation and David Chau, Chen Ping, Kevin Daniels, Qiqi Hong, Sabrina Xu, David Yue, Andy Sylvester, Farid Rohani, Ernest Lang, D3E Art Limited, Stephanie Holmquist and Mark Allison for their generous contribution to the publication and distribution of Yishu. 1 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art PRESIDENT Katy Hsiu-chih Chien LEGAL COUNSEL Infoshare Tech Law Office, Mann C. C. Liu Yishu 77 has two distinct highlights. One is the FOUNDING EDITOR Ken Lum announcement of and publishing of texts by EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Keith Wallace MANAGING EDITOR Zheng Shengtian recipients of the Yishu Awards for Critical Writing EDITORS Julie Grundvig and Curating on Contemporary Chinese Art. With Kate Steinmann Chunyee Li the generous financial support of Cc Foundation, EDITORS (CHINESE VERSION) Yu Hsiao Hwei Chen Ping Shanghai, and JNBY, China, we have expanded Guo Yanlong the awards to recognize five individuals (an CIRCULATION MANAGER Larisa Broyde WEB SITE EDITOR Chunyee Li increase from the initial two of past years) who are ADVERTISING Sen Wong making important contributions to the evolution of Michelle Hsieh contemporary Chinese art. The recipients for 2016 ADVISORY BOARD Judy Andrews, Ohio State University are Chen Tong as a senior critic or curator, Carol Melissa Chiu, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden John Clark, University of Sydney Yinghua Lu and Lu Mingjun for critical writing, and Lynne Cooke, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Bao Dong and Echo He for curating. Okwui Enwezor, Critic and Curator Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar and Curator Fan Di’an, Central Academy of Fine Arts The other highlight in this issue is the emphasis on Fei Dawei, Independent Critic and Curator Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh alternative or independent artistic and curatorial Hou Hanru, MAXXI, Rome practices and exhibition spaces. This is not the Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop Katie Hill, University of Westminster first time we have explored these aspects of the Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic and Historian Chinese art world, and Yishu is one of the few Sebastian Lopez, Critic and Curator publications that is advancing this discourse Lu Jie, Long March Space Charles Merewether, Critic and Curator within what increasingly is becoming a massive art Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand industry. Philip Tinari, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic and Curator Wu Hung, University of Chicago In addition to the recipients of the Yishu Pauline J. Yao, M+, West Kowloon Cultural District

Awards there are three texts that also explore ART & COLLECTION GROUP LTD. 6F. No. 85, Section 1, Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 alternative practices and spaces. They include Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 Michele Chan’s review of Videotage and its 30th Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 E-mail: [email protected] anniversary exhibition, Julie Chun’s in-depth VICE GENERAL MANAGER Jenny Liu examination of four alternative spaces currently MARKETING MANAGER Joyce Lin active in Shanghai, and Lu Pei-Yi’s discussion CIRCULATION EXECUTIVE Perry Hsu of three artists in Taiwan who are engaging in a Yishu is produced bi-monthly in Vancouver, Canada, and published in Taipei, Taiwan. The publishing dates are January, March, May, social exploration that consciously includes those July, September, and November. All subscription, advertising, and outside of the art world. submission inquiries may be sent to: YISHU INITIATIVE OF CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART SOCIETY 200–1311 Howe Street Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 Together, the texts in Yishu 77 explore the dynamic Phone: 1.604.649.8187 E-mail: ofﬁ[email protected] world of non-proﬁt or artist-run spaces, various DIRECTOR Zheng Shengtian innovative studio and curatorial practices, SECRETARY GENERAL Yin Qing alternative sites for exhibitions, and the often- RETAIL RATES USD $12 / EUR 9 / TWD 350 misunderstood relationship between art and its (per copy) publics. It is frequently assumed that there is an SUBSCRIPTION RATES impasse between artistic independence and the 1 Year Print Copy (6 issues including air mail postage): Asia $94 USD/Outside Asia $104 USD art market, but the authors here propose there are 2 Years Print Copy (12 issues including air mail postage): added complexities within the cultural ecology. Asia $180 USD/Outside Asia $198 USD 1 Year PDF Download (6 issues): $49.95 USD Yishu thanks Cc Foundation, Shanghai, and JNBY, 1 Year Print Copy and PDF (6 issues including air mail postage): China for their support. We are pleased to include Asia $134 USD/Outside Asia $144 USD an interview with David Chau, President of Cc DESIGN AND PRODUCTION Leap Creative Group CREATIVE DIRECTOR Raymond Mah Foundation, who discusses the formation of his ART DIRECTOR Gavin Chow DESIGNER Philip Wong commitment to contemporary art. PRINTING Chi Wei Colour Printing Ltd. WEB SITE http://yishu-online.com WEB DESIGN Design Format Keith Wallace ISSN 1683 - 3082

No part of this journal may be reprinted without the written Erratum: In Yishu 76 (September/October 2016), permission from the publisher. The views expressed in Yishu are Jacob Augustus Dreyer’s name was spelled not necessarily those of the editors or publisher. incorrectly. We apologize. Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 典藏國際版(Yishu)創刊於 2002年5月1日典藏國際版‧第15卷第6期‧2016年11–12月社長：簡秀枝法律顧問：思科技法律事務所劉承慶創刊編輯：林蔭庭（Ken Lum）

編者手記總策劃：鄭勝天 2 主編：華睿思 (Keith Wallace) 編輯：顧珠妮 (Julie Grundvig) 4 作者小傳史楷迪 (Kate Steinmann) 黎俊儀

網站編輯：黎俊儀 6 2016年Yishu中國當代藝術批評和策展獎中文編輯：余小蕙陳萍郭彥龍

10 替代的和不可替代的行政：藍立杉 (Larisa Broyde) 廣告：謝盈盈陳侗黃晨

顧問：王嘉驥田霏宇 (Philip Tinari) 15 「Made in China-Globalization」: 安雅蘭 (Judy Andrews) 藝術、生產與社會變革巫鴻魯明軍林似竹 (Britta Erickson) 范迪安招穎思 (Melissa Chiu) 洛柿田 (Sebastian Lopez) 25 展覽作為展覽胡昉侯瀚如盧迎華（Carol Yinghua Lu）徐文玠 (Claire Hsu) 姜苦樂 (John Clark) 姚嘉善 (Pauline J. Yao) 高名潞 36 捕捉日常生活的痕迹費大爲何雨（Echo He）楊天娜 (Martina Köppel-Yang) 盧杰 Lynne Cooke Okwui Enwezor 40 當代藝術自我組織在中國： Katie Hill 制度反思與製度實踐, 2001–2012 Charles Merewether Apinan Poshyananda 鮑棟出版：典藏藝術家庭股份有限公司副總經理：劉靜宜行銷總監：林素珍 54 周大為訪談：挑戰常規發行專員：許銘文田珠莉 (Julie Chun) 社址：台灣台北市中山北路一段85號6樓電話: (886) 2.2560.2220 傳真：(886) 2.2542.0631 電子信箱：[email protected] 61 屠宰場筆記: 談抑斥、動於靜、及香港身份編輯製作：加中當代藝術創進協會 (Yishu Initiative of Contemporary 陳敏熹（Michele Chan） Chinese Art Society) 會長：鄭勝天秘書長：陰晴會址： 200-1311 Howe Street, 67 美術館之外：上海的公共與獨立空間 Vancouver, BC, V6Z 2P3, Canada 田珠莉 (Julie Chun) 電話: (1) 604.649.8187 電子信箱: ofﬁ[email protected]

訂閱、投稿及廣告均請與Yishu Initiative聯系。 91 台灣社會參與式藝術的三個路徑呂佩怡（Lu Pei-Yi）設計製作： Leap Creative Group, Vancouver 創意總監：馬偉培藝術總監：周繼宏設計師：黃健斌 102 中英人名對照印刷：台北崎威彩藝有限公司本刊在溫哥華編輯設計，台北印刷出版發行。一年6期。逢1、3、5、7、9、11月出版。

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感謝力邦文化與楊豐收、JNBY與李琳、一年網上下載： 49.95美元 Cc基金會與周大為、Kevin Daniels、洪琪琪、一年6期加網上下載：徐依夢、余啟賢、Andy Sylvester、Farid Rohani、亞洲134美元 / 亞洲以外地區144美元 Ernest Lang、陳萍、賀芳霓（Stephanie Holmquist）和Mark Allison、D3E Art Limited對本刊出版與發行版權所有，本刊內容非經本社同意不得翻譯和轉載。的慷慨支持本刊登載內容並不代表編輯部與出版社立場。 Contributors

Bao Dong is an art critic and independent about giving a voice to contemporary art from curator based in Beijing. He graduated from Hong Kong and hopes to expose Hong Kong art the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2006 with an to a wider audience. She contributes regularly M.A. in Art History. Since 2003, he has curated to Art Asia Paciﬁc, Art Radar, and the Sotheby›s exhibitions in many art organizations as well as blog. She holds a B.B.A. in Law from the contributed essays on contemporary Chinese University of Hong Kong (2006–09) and an M.A. art to many academic forums and research in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, programs. He has been invited to give lectures University of London (2013–15). at many art institutions and joined the work team of the A4 Contemporary Arts Center in an Chen Tong is an artist, curator, writer, editor, advisory capacity in 2013. He is a contributing and the founder of Libreria Borges Bookshop editor to the bilingual magazine LEAP and a and Libreria Borges Institute for Contemporary writer for cn.NYTtimes.com. His articles have Art in Guangzhou. From 1979 to 1983, he been published in journals such as Dushu, Yishu: studied in the Chinese Painting Department Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Art World, of Guangzhou Fine Arts Academy, where he Art China, Art Today, Arts Criticism, Fine Arts has continued to teach since 1986. In 1992, Literature, Rong Bao Zhai, and Jiangsu Pictorial. he launched the Encyclopedia of Experimental Recently he curated Conception as Enzyme (A4 Art (EALS), a series of publications about Contemporary Arts Center, Chengdu, 2010), contemporary art, ﬁlm, photography, and theory. Wordscape/Horizon: The Inaugural Exhibition In 1994, he established Libreria Borges, where he of Contemporary Art and Poetry (The OCT organized events relating to contemporary art Art & Design Gallery, Shenzhen, 2011), Fresh and culture. In 1998, he co-established (with Lu Eyes 2011: Framework Growing Inside Out (He Yi) a publishing studio, Collection Minuit, where Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen, 2011), and he introduced works from a French publishing Wang Peng: One Man As Group (Today Art house, Les Éditions de Minuit (Midnight Press), Museum, Beijing, 2013). Other exhibitions he especially works of the nouveau roman, and co-curated include Is This World Real? (Lianzhou introduces and translates them into Chinese. Foto, Lianzhou, 2010), Jiang Zhi: If This Is a Man In 2009, he received Chevalier des Arts et (Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou, 2012), Lettres from the French Ministère de la Culture. and ON | OFF: China’s Young Artists in Concept His work has been presented in exhibitions such and Practice (Ullens Center for Contemporary as the 2nd and 3rd Guangzhou Triennial (2006, Art, Beijing, 2013). 2008), the 50th Venice Biennale (2003) and the 4th Gwangju Biennale (2002). Michele Chan was an investment banker before establishing her career in the arts, which Julie Chun is an independent art historian and appeals to her aesthetic senses. She is currently lecturer who has been based in Shanghai since a researcher/writer in the Contemporary Asian 2011. She serves as the Art Convener of the Art Department at Sotheby’s Hong Kong while Royal Asiatic Society China in Shanghai, where continuing to pursue independent research on she delivers monthly lectures at museums and the intersections among language, temporality, galleries to widen the public’s understanding of and visual culture. She is particularly passionate artistic objects, past and present. She lectures

4 frequently on art for the various foreign Tate Research Centre in 2013. In collaboration Consulate General offices in Shanghai and with artist Liu Ding, Lu has been working on organizes art lectures at the Shanghai American research re-examining the lasting legacy of Center. She holds an M.A. in Art History from socialist realism in the contemporary art and San Jose State University and B.A. in Economics intellectual practice and discourse in China. from University of California at Irvine. She also completed graduate studies in East Asian Lu Mingjun has a Ph.D. in History from Sichuan Modern History at Yonsei Graduate School of University (2011). He is currently Associate International Studies, Seoul, and conducted Professor of Art History at Art College, Sichuan research in Modern Art at University of University. Lu’s research interests include the California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is a regular history of modern and contemporary Chinese contributor to Yishu Journal of Contemporary art and art historiography in Europe and Chinese Art, and her art reviews have been America since the 1960s. His recent publications published in Randian and LEAP online. include Writing and Narrating of Vision: The Vision of History and Theory (Guangxi Normal Echo He is the founder and curator of Fou University Press, 2013), Visual Cognition and Gallery, an apartment gallery and creative lab Art History: Michel Foucault, Hubery Damisch, in New York dedicated to promoting the young Jonathan Crary (Guangxi Normal University generation of Chinese contemporary artists. Press, 2014), and On Meta-Painting: An Art She also works at Pace Gallery as a research and Institution and Cognition of Universality archive associate. She received B.A. and an M.A. (Henan University Press, 2015). In 2015, he was degrees in Business Administration from Peking the recipient of the Robert H. N. Ho Family University (2004–10) and an M.A. in Visual Foundation Greater China Research Grant. Arts Administration from New York University (2011–13). She has curated many exhibitions Lu Pei-Yi is a Taipei-based curator, researcher, in China and in the United States, and regularly and art critic. She received her Ph.D. in contributes to a variety of publications, Humanities and Cultural Studies from the London including The Art Newspaper (China), Art 289, Consortium, Birkbeck College, University of and Art China, among others. London. Her research interests are off-site art, museum studies, and curating in theory and Carol Yinghua Lu is a Ph.D. student in art practice. Recently, a research-based book edited history at the University of Melbourne. She is a by her, Contemporary Art Curating in Taiwan contributing editor of Frieze Exhibitionist and (1992–2012) was nominated for the 10th Award is on the advisory board of The Exhibitionist. of Art China. She was an associate curator of the Lu was on the jury for the Golden Lion Award 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale (2014); a curator at the 2011 Venice Biennale. She also served as of Micro Micro Revolution (2015) for Centre for the co-artistic director of the 2012 Gwangju Chinese Contemporary Art (CFCCA); and a Biennale and co-curator of the 7th Shenzhen co-curator of Negative Horizon: The 5th Taiwan Sculpture Biennale in 2012. From 2012 to 2015, International Video Art Exhibition (2016). She is she was the artistic director and chief curator of currently an assistant professor of the Department OCAT Shenzhen. Lu was the first visiting fellow of Cultural Creative Industry at the National in the Asia-Pacific Fellowship program at the Taipei University of Education.

5 Yishu Awards for Critical Writing and Curating on Contemporary Chinese Art

INTRODUCTION

Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art is pleased to announce the recipients of the Yishu Awards for Critical Writing and Curating on Contemporary Chinese Art. The two awards for writing are now in their sixth year, while three new awards, two for curators and one for a senior writer or curator, are debuting in 2016, bringing the total number of annual awards to ﬁve. For 2016, we are delighted to present the Award for Senior Critic/Curator to Chen Tong, the Award for Critical Writing on Contemporary Chinese Art to Carol Yinghua Lu and Lu Mingjun, and the Award for Curating Contemporary Chinese Art to Echo He and Bao Dong.

The awards were established to encourage and recognize writers and curators who are making an outstanding contribution to understanding the history and current issues that surround the vast realm of contemporary Chinese art. There is no submission process, and recipients are given no prior notice that they are being considered. Recipients may live anywhere in the world. We select two highly respected individuals in the ﬁeld of contemporary Chinese art to each recommend one recipient for emerging or mid-career critical writing and one for curatorial work. And we select one emerging or mid-career writer or curator to recommend one senior critic or curator who has had an important impact upon his or her work and contemporary Chinese art as a whole.

The recommenders for 2016 are Amy Cheng, a curator and writer based in Taipei, who, with music critic Jeph Lo, co-founded TheCube Project Space, which serves as an independent art space devoted to the research, production, and presentation of contemporary art in Taipei. She has curated many exhibitions, including the Taiwan Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, as well as shows in Taipei Hong Kong, Manchester, Luxembourg, and Shanghai. Pi Li is a renowned art critic and curator of contemporary Chinese art, who has served since 2012 as the Sigg Senior Curator at the M+ Museum of Visual Culture, Hong Kong. He co-founded the Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing, in 2005, and has worked with major institutions in Europe such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and Tate Modern, London as well as written for various publications internationally. Eugene Y. Wang is the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art at Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D in 1997. His extensive publications range from early Chinese art and archeology to modern and contemporary art and cinema.

6 RECIPIENTS OF THE 2016 YISHU AWARDS

Chen Tong For the senior critic or curator award, Amy Cheng recommended Chen Tong, an artist, writer, curator, editor, and founder of Libreria Borges, Guangzhou (1994), which also housed Liberia Borges Institute for Contemporary Art (2007 and now called CANTONBON), and co-founder of Video Bureau, Guangzhou and Beijing (2012). Amy Cheng notes:

Chen Tong is an “inciter” of culture. He has vision and passion, allowing him to cross over different forms of cultural practices. Since the 1990s, Chen Tong has maintained a profound and consistent attitude while shuttling between different artistic realms and identities. His influences Chen Tong, Award for Senior exceed pure writing or exhibition Critic or Curator. Photo: Chen Zhiqiang. curating, and he initiated Liberia Borges Bookshop, the most significant independent art and culture bookshop in China. Its significance lies not only in the fact that it is a bookshop but also a base for multiple platforms of artistic activity.

Video Bureau, co-founded by Chen Tong, with Zhu Jia and Lu Fang, has focused on constructing an archive for contemporary Chinese video art. Walking through its doors, people will be able to understand the development of Chinese video art and contemporary art and access resources to nuture curatorial thinking about contemporary art. Chen Tong is a “curator living in the future” and an activist who unites social criticism and cultural thinking with action. For me, Chen Tong is undeniably a cultural crusader.

Bao Dong Pi Li recommended Bao Dong for his curatorial work and Lu Mingjun for writing on contemporary Chinese art. About the two, he states:

Bao Dong and Lu Mingjun have maintained the autonomy of their work as well as intensively continuing to develop their ideas with dedication. China’s Bao Dong, Award for Curating. complex environment has led the production, exhibition, and interpretation of art to evolve around the market and commercial galleries. On the other hand, the progression of globalization along with China’s political and cultural ecology has resulted in a commitment in engaging art and social realities using rational approaches. Even if artworks, exhibitions, and criticism are not directed towards commercial conventions, they still can be politicized as humanitarian and utilitarian

7 instrumentalist approaches. Bao Dong and Lu Mingjun’s work is invaluable in resisting these tendencies. As curators and critics, they have deliberately dissociated their academic endeavours from both the art market and commercial forces, a position that is difﬁcult to maintain in China.

In terms of exhibitions and research, Bao Dong refuses to use art as overstated news to declare simple or cheap political stances. Instead, he is committed to exploring the intricate relationships among art, artists, society, history, and individuals. He pays particular attention to how language is constructed around these relationships, and he examines alternative possibilities and transformations in the language of art that is inﬂuenced by museums, social media, art mediums, and their contexts.

Lu Mingjun Lu Mingjun’s criticism has kept a distance from the common sociological approach in Chinese art criticism. He aims to explore the relationship of humanist values to traditional art history methodologies and contemporary art practices as a means to expand Lu Mingjun, Award for Critical Writing. the parameters of our perception of contemporary Chinese art. His research on Chinese art adeptly integrates methodologies in historical research and social criticism, giving a clear and emphatic quality to his writing. It is worth mentioning that despite Lu Minjun’s extensive use of Western methodologies through a rational approach to China’s particular issues, he maintains the eloquence of the Chinese language in his profound and thought-provoking writing.

In their curatorial and theoretical practice, both Bao Dong and Lu Mingjun have sustained their independence from the at times shallow but exaggerated segregation between art and society, mainstream and alternative, left and liberal, China and the West, and positions their autonomy into alternative outcomes.

Carol Yinghua Lu Eugene Y. Wang recommended critic and curator Carol Yinghua Lu for critical writing on contemporary Chinese art. He says:

Carol Yinghua Lu has been active as an art critic and editor in China since 2004. What makes her art criticism distinct is a heightened sensitivity to the perceptual lens through which artworks are ﬁltered and discussed. She is quick to Carol Yinghua Lu, Award for Critical Writing. identify and capture the dynamics

8 of emerging artworks that self-consciously establish new conceptual contexts unencumbered by clichéd discursive armatures. In articulating such conceptual frameworks, she participates in creating new paradigms and deﬁning new critical-discursive contexts to frame art practices.

Her sensitivity to the discursive may stem from the art- historical self-awareness that informs her critical writing. For her, art criticism is not just rhetorical stances; often, it amounts to historicizing and “archaeological” projects of excavation and reenactment of past situations. Her art criticism also evinces an understanding of the big picture and puts forward a nuanced observation of changing states within individual artworks. She observes with her own eyes and puts on her own-devised thinking hat. That is a precious quality for a young critic.

Echo He For curating contemporary Chinese art, Eugene Y. Wang recommended Echo He. He applauds her young career:

Echo He is to be recognized for the distinct gallery she co-founded with Jiaxi Yang. Fou Gallery is a gallery like no other. It creates an alternative space to showcase artworks that resonate with Echo He, Award for Curating. Photo: Yiyao Li, “grassroots” art communities artwork ©2016 Zhai Liang. Courtesy Fou Gallery, and young art aﬁcionados and Brooklyn. collectors less entangled in commercial motivations and investment-mindedness. It also doubles as a creative lab where attendants participate in art-related activities and aspirational events. Located in an ordinary apartment building in Brooklyn, Fou Gallery differs from the traditional white cube gallery space by offering high-quality exhibitions in a home. After it opened, the gallery soon gathered strong momentum and attracted a loyal following. Its success stems in part from the curator’s sensitivity to young generational aspirations and concerns.

Echo He’s curatorial zeal is impressive. In the past two and a half years, she has curated eleven shows in New York and Beijing, and organized over thirty events including lectures, salon talks, performances, afternoon tea parties, and ﬁlm screenings. Fou Gallery has become a key platform for a new generation of Chinese artists. Echo He likely did not anticipate that Fou Gallery would become a notable and viable model for alternative exhibition spaces, a creative lab animated by communal enthusiasm and youthful ardor, and an ecology that thrives outside of mainstream gallery culture.

The 2016 Yishu Awards for Writing and Curating Contemporary Chinese Art are made possible by the generous support from Cc Foundation and JNBY, China.

9 Chen Tong Alternative Spaces Are Still the Best Alternative

ithin the last ten years, Facade of Libreria Borges, Guangzhou, 2016. Photo: Peng contemporary art Wenbiao. Wseems to have entered a stage of vigorous development in China. However, it must be said that contemporary art has not developed entirely on its own, as it increasingly has been influenced by the change in direction of capital flow. One part of this change—as small as it is—is focused on directing capital toward contemporary art, which has caught traditional art by surprise. Of course, we could argue that the leading characteristic of traditional art is that it has always maintained its own identity; it stands on its own, and any effort to try to make it cater to something other than art is bound to be futile. Contemporary art, on the other hand, has seemed from the very beginning to try to avoid establishing a fixed identity, thereby allowing the intervention of capital to easily create changes in the essence of its character. Ultimately, such an intervention can incite excitement in some people, or fear, and some may even try to evade it altogether. For those who feel invigorated by the entry of capital into the art system, it is because they do not have a historical awareness of what it can entail—as a Chinese proverb says, “those who know not, fear not”—and those who have such awareness may not be willing to face the reality because they are fearful, and, lastly, there are those who see such a phenomenon as a form of deprivation as well as an insult to their autonomy. Considering these three types of responses, one is really no better than the other.

Many non-profit organizations (or CANTONBON's Mid-Month Book Reading No. 14: Czeslaw so-called “alternative spaces”) are Milosz, April 15, 2014. powerless in resisting the influx of capital flow into contemporary art, and they often voluntarily close down after a short existence. In comparison to art museums— whether they are government run, privately run, or privately owned—many non-profits are not equipped to face the power of capital. While many of these alternative spaces thrive on the emotional dedication of their art practitioners, many other aspects

10 Facade of Video Bureau, pertaining to the operation of these Beijing, 2016. Photo: Li Jiancong. spaces have been overwhelmed by the intervention of capital. Even the act of retreating is done in an extremely low-key manner, as every single element within the operations of a non-profit runs in the opposite direction of that conducted by for-profit enterprises: Rented spaces, a “loose-reins” approach to management, unstable sources of funding, and a continuously declining ability to rally supporters. Although art museums may also be subject to running into financial difficulties, the demise of non-profits lies within a problem that is not unlike agricultural societies or small-scale peasant economies. In the past, agricultural societies and traditional art were well aligned. Unfortunately, non-profits have shown a lack of interest in supporting traditional art from the very beginning. One might assume that without the intervention of capital, alternative spaces would become the sole venue for showcasing and developing contemporary Chinese art; however, if this really is the case, can we still regard such practice as contemporary art? At most, a non- profit space would only be regarded as a venue for producing art that rebels against mainstream institutions. We had this situation before the 1990s, when we only knew the term “avant-garde art.” At that time, this form of art possessed a fundamental characteristic that was described as “anti-system.” Ironically, the following phenomenon has appeared: One of the things that the system is most interested in reconstructing is, in fact, anti-system. And so, in the end, it is still capital that has the last word.

Interior of Video Bureau, Beijing, 2016. Photo: Xu Shuxian.

I do not know if Libreria Borges Contemporary Art Institute (we now prefer to call it CANTONBON) can be considered an alternative space, despite having taken part in the Gwangju Biennale and Venice Biennale in 2002 and 2003 under the label of an “alternative space.” In my opinion, one must actually observe, and understand, the everyday operations of an organization in order to make that decision. The moment I became aware of the fact that capital started ﬂowing into and subsequently inﬂuencing the direction of contemporary art in increasingly higher degrees, I decided to give up planning any further exhibition projects within my institute.

11 Thereby, I avoided setting up a Interior of Video Bureau, Beijing, 2012. Photo: Li Mei. non-proﬁt organization that would be left hanging in limbo between the museums and galleries. At the same time, it is precisely out of a kind of passion and hope based on the idea of a small-scale peasant economy that in 2012 I co-founded, together with Zhu Jia and Fang Lu, the Video Bureau, an archive, research, and viewing space with branches in Guangzhou and Beijing. From the very beginning, the formula for developing our program was a simple calculation, similar to how farmers count their crops: If we could include twelve artists per year, and that was to mean on average twenty artworks per person, it would add up to 240 pieces per year, amounting to 2,400 pieces in ten years, and so on. As of now, four years have passed, and everything has developed very closely to what we had predicted—as proof, the ﬁfty-four artists we have included in our programming thus far have amounted to one thousand video works.

In recent years, audiences have DVD archive, Video Bureau, Guangzhou, 2016. Photo: Xu paid much closer attention to the Shuxian. Video Bureau than they have to the CANTONBON. One of the reasons for this might be the efﬁciency of the small-scale peasant economy- style that we have employed, which ultimately has created greater visibility for the Video Bureau. In addition, the name Video Bureau implies that a drawing or painting bureau, an installation art bureau, conceptual art bureau, or even a photography bureau would not be imaginable, as the logistics of running these operations will not have the same advantage of being easily calculated.

Through the Video Bureau, we can basically see the present and future of a not-for-profit organization (or alternative space), and that is because this type of structure will never be able to be designed around, or contained by, capital. Instead, it may only be possible for the organization to manifest any kind of long-lasting endurance through slow progress and controlled consumption. Apart from this, Video Bureau needs to have the courage to face great uncertainty, as the creation of video art may not always develop in a linear fashion and may not always “improve” as demanded by the art market; it may not catch for long the eye of attention-deficit- afflicted critics; nor will it grab the attention of the public for long either, as interest may wane over time. If, one day, someone were to decide to fund the Video Bureau, then the sponsor would have to face the realities and conditions described above and be mindful that the slightest change to the organization’s inner structure could lead to its collapse.

Of course, within the category of “archive-building,” we are still leaving Video Bureau with extensive room for development; for instance, in regards to archive collecting, documentation, and research, we employ a system that goes beyond the traditional data format entry by a process of ﬁle collecting that is more thorough than the tabular form and systematic arrangements. If, one day, Video Bureau reaches this stage, it will become

12 Interior of Libreria Borges, more similar to CANTONBON’s Guangzhou, 2016. Photo: Xu Shuxian. organizational structure, which focuses on narration and dialogue in its programming. Or, one could also say that CANTONBON has, in fact, absorbed Video Bureau’s concise way of acquiring experience, Artist talk by Zhang Peili, July 26, 2013, Video Bureau, transforming its imprecise Beijing. mechanism back into a practice of limiting our options, such as exploring the preconditions of contemporary art institutions according to their respective regions. Our involvement in the Video Bureau and CANTONBON has inspired us to think that when we talk about the differences between art organizations, which may seem obvious, our narration has often remained on the tip of the iceberg, but there is still a great mass beneath the ocean that has not yet been revealed. If one proposes that the convergence between art museums (not to mention galleries) is not a bad thing, then non-proﬁts or alternative spaces are in even greater need of borrowing resources from one another and sharing experiences in order to ultimately eradicate any speculative aspects within the organization that have remained unclear. Having said this, I cannot help but raise the frequently used phrase “doing something for its own sake.” Provided that freedom remains the highest goal to achieve in art, going back to “doing something for its own sake" would perhaps make us realize that freedom is not too far away. It is very likely that a paradox would be created in this way, however, in which the closer you move toward freedom, the further you seem to ever be of truly reaching it. In this way, freedom is like a mirage; just when you think you are about to obtain it, you discover you have another mile to go, and you have to keep journeying through, deluded by mirage after mirage—and this seems to be the common fate of many art practitioners.

The phrase “doing something for its own sake” opposes the use of art as a tool, regardless of whether it is used as a tool for the government, a tool for virtue, or a tool for profit. So-called “pure art” cannot be considered pure because capitalism may appropriate it, and, ultimately, use it in the service of profit. What is more, if art were like the human body, it would, in the end, have to wear clothes, but would these clothes be an inherent part of a human’s self, or would they merely be an aspect of outward appearance? No one will be able to ever answer this question sufficiently, but we are capable of determining and establishing the foundation of something, namely its “appropriate” state of being.

I will give a few examples of how we work in our organizations, beginning with publishing at CANTONBON. What is a “book in itself”? Of course, it is its content. But what is content itself? Usually people will say that content is something a book is written about. We, on the other hand, do not see it that way, as the content of a book cannot simply emerge on its own. First of all, the content is propelled by the author’s concept; secondly, it is conditioned by the creative format he or she employs—in brief, a book is a form of creation. Therefore, when we publish a book, we must adequately respect the author’s point of view in order to fully understand the book as a whole, as opposed

13 to being merely concerned with the DVD archive, Video Bureau, Beijing, 2016. Photo: publication costs and proﬁts. If we Li Jiancong. anticipate a small readership, but we are fond of the book, then we will still proceed in publishing it with enthusiasm, while, at the same time, working to form a closely knit relationship between author, editor, and readership. In this way, the appearance of the book already becomes irrelevant—it can appear on paper, in digital form, online, or it can even be listened to through oral presentation.

Video Bureau’s approach is very different from the CANTONBON’s structure in working with publications. The huge difference that exists between these two is that with Video Bureau we cannot judge the artists by discussing whether we like their work or not. This makes us resemble librarians who are unable to read through every single book in the library’s collection. Similarly, I cannot watch every single video recording within Video Bureau in order to give it some kind of rating. Instead, I can only deal with the managerial and technological aspects of the organization. As we undertook this project as an active choice as opposed to being obliged to do so, I think there are no other goals that exist other than to offer our services for free. In fact, from our perspective, improving services may even lead to the positive inﬂuences our organization has on artists.

Of course, the essence and purpose Artist talk by Song Ta, September 30, 2016, Video of this type of organization is Bureau, Beijing. that it can be fostered over time without having to go through numerous trials and errors and, as before, it still will mainly involve solving issues surrounding funding and recruiting talent. To solve these problems once and for all, one must consider whether or not this organizational structure, or the standards that uphold an alternative space, can continue to be sustainable. If this type of structure were to persevere but reduce the quality of its service, then that could mean losing the organization’s dignity. In fact, if we were to continuously improve the standard of service in our organization, then our future would remain bright even in the face of financial difficulties. Ultimately, I do believe it is easier to persevere than to give up on something, so I always admire those who can decisively leave something be. If one admires a person for this ability, then I believe that is, in fact, an affirmation of the values of diversity. If a person chooses something that is to his or her own advantage, and others do the same, this will all be due to their passion. If there is no passion, then creativity will cease to be.

Translated by Cila Brosius.

14 Lu Mingjun Made in China-Globalization: Art, Production, and Social Change

Liu Wei, Antimatter, 2006, washing machine, tape, 80 x 100 x 80 cm. Courtesy of Liu Wei Studio, Beijing.

I Since joining the World Trade Organization at the beginning of the twenty- ﬁrst century, China has achieved incredible economic growth. In its efforts to bridge the growing economic disparities between urban and rural areas, the government accelerated its drive towards urbanization and by the eve of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, this tumultuous program had swept away many of the existing social structures. It was during this period that the centre of the contemporary art scene began its gradual out-of-town migration, pushed by the expanding metropolis, ﬁrst to the Yuanmingyuan Art Village in the 1990s, then the Songzhuang Art Village and 798 Art Zone, and, lastly, Caochangdi Art District and Heiqiao Art District.

The contemporary Chinese art scene has always ﬂourished in the fertile ground of the urban periphery, in suburbs and the margins of the countryside. This is familiar territory for Liu Wei, for example, whose deeper understanding of the process towards urbanization stems from experiencing it ﬁrst hand and incorporating it into his art. Living in Beijing’s

15 Third Ring while working in its Fifth Ring, Liu Wei’s daily commute goes from downtown to the suburbs. Everything he hears and sees in these two different areas then becomes the material for his art and drives his creativity: discarded furniture, electrical appliances, and recycled garbage have marked out his work from the outset. When we look beyond the artwork’s visual abstraction, whether in his physical installations or multimedia works, one can see a speciﬁc cityscape of image and concept.

It is hard at first to grasp the sense of Liu Wei’s statement, “I always stand Liu Wei, Merely a Mistake II, 2009–11, recycled door frames, by the people” until we understand that this does not mean he is simply out found wood beams, acrylic board, stainless steel. Courtesy 1 to please the public. Instead, this most contemporary artist offers up true of Liu Wei Studio, Beijing. visual perceptions of, and original reflections on, people’s everyday living experiences. How this is done can best be seen in his creative method. For Liu Wei, the cheap materials he finds represent the relationship between classes, bear traces of people’s memory, and reflect social change. Walking into his large workspace, a cross between a studio and a factory, we can see traditional handicrafts and modern, streamlined production methods working together under a rigorous regime based on the division of labour. Liu Wei has created a role for himself that is equal parts artist, general designer, general dispatcher, and manager, even enjoying the “title” of Administrative Director Artist. Of course, while this production method is commonplace in the Western world, we should note that his insistence on scale and speed are not driven simply by the rapid changes of the capitalist-led art system, but also stand as a clear representation of China’s urbanization and social transitioning within a globalized context. From production to formal implementation, this is the clearest proof that Liu Wei’s understanding and techniques bear witness to the seismic shifts within mainland China over the last decade.

Of course, studio output is only one link in the overall chain of production. Today, if a curator, critic, collector, or gallery manager starts to visit studios

16 Inside Liu Wei Studio. Courtesy of Liu Wei Studio, Beijing.

Inside Liu Wei Studio. Courtesy of Liu Wei Studio, Beijing.

or production facilities to learn more about the artists’ work, it is only to forge stronger links between the art and its audience. Nevertheless, the art system itself is rooted within China’s economic, social, and cultural structures, and subject to the same stress and strain brought on by globalization. It must follow then, that the scale and speed of output is a truer reﬂection of a globalized art world than a Chinese one. MadeIn Company, established by Xu Zhen, shows this with even greater clarity.

For Liu Wei, production itself carries certain ideas and meanings, even if he distances himself from other links in the art production system— distribution and consumption, for example. Although production is dependent on consumption to an extent, his lack of engagement with the consumer end of the process reveals a self-protective wariness. By way of contrast, these other elements that comprise the larger art system are included lock, stock, and barrel by Xu Zhen’s MadeIn Company. Xu Zhen does not regard studio and factory production simply as a single link in the production chain, but, rather, as a key element of its consumption.

As early as 2009, just after MadeIn Company was established, it was widely considered to be commercial in its approach and capitalist in its strategy, in spite of Xu Zhen’s tireless explanation of its artistic methodology.

17 Xu Zhen Showroom, Shanghai. Courtesy of MadeIn Company, Shanghai.

Until he launched “Xu Zhen” as a brand in 2013, he seemed to place more emphasis on artistic method or linguistic experiment. Yet the re-release of the label of “Xu Zhen” reiterated his idea that on entering the marketplace, artworks were essentially commodities. In this way, he insisted that MadeIn Company was a commercial art institution with properly formulated long- term development aims and objectives, and while some charged him with dressing up art as a commercial enterprise, for Xu Zhen, business and art are not, in the ﬁrst place, rivals. For him, nothing is more radical or more contemporary than acknowledging the legitimacy of business, especially when many so-called radical, anti-business practices become, in effect, the most marketable ones.

MadeIn Gallery, installation view of Information Sculpture Highway, September 8– October 23, 2016. Courtesy of MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai.

Business is not a factor independent of art; it is art, and that is exactly where the difference between MadeIn Company and ordinary commercial galleries lies. Thus his later ventures, such as MadeIn Gallery and the even more retail oriented PIMO Shop, are not just a means of expanding his business reach or public proﬁle, but represent the development of possible, practical ways of operating within what he considers an integrated system. Xu Zhen has said, “In today’s world, all objects on exhibition are commodities, and those on sale are art.”2 His is a capitalist mechanism— concerned not only with consumption but also with production—rooted in China but dependent on globalization. But we cannot overlook the sensory impact and cultural evocation his super-landscapes and aesthetics have on visitors. For years now, Xu Zhen has been challenging and defying knowledge and experiences we take for granted. Art is not a reﬂection of reality, it is a real social phenomenon and should create a sense of cultural

18 chaos. This suggests an alternative reading of “Made in China,” or, rather, “Made in China-Globalization.” Shifting from “Made in China” to a “World Factory,” his production system, including his works (or products), reﬂect and critique contemporary culture and politics, and hint at the mutually dependent but tense relationships between contemporary Chinese art and the world art system. This is where the fundamental difference between Western Pop Art and his work lies.

Xu Zhen, Eternity– Tianlongshan Grottoes Bodhisattva, Winged Victory of Samothrace, 2013, mineral- based composite, marble, steel, mineral pigments, 460 x 230 x 626 cm (pedestal not included). Courtesy of MadeIn Company.

Simple, full of quirky humour, and hollow: these are typical features of Xu Zhen’s works. His works also reflect the reality of Chinese culture and society, and are symptomatic of contemporary art. In his Eternity series, heads from iconic Chinese and Western sculptures are swapped and juxtaposed, exposing the reality of today’s globalized culture, in which such entirely disparate cultures collide under the cover of a super-landscape. Come what may, production or consumption create here another form of culture. In other words, as a culture, this “production-consumption” mechanism is not just for aesthetic observation; instead, it provides us with new perspectives on reality and redefines the identities of artists and their artworks. Even so, it still exists within the confines of an art world that mirrors not-for-profit organizations flying the anti-consumer banner, yet,

19 like them, it will nonetheless end up being absorbed and digested by the commercial system.

For now, at least, independent artists are not strong enough, culturally or socially, to influence the system. Pauline J. Yao was aware of this as early as 2008 when she wrote in her book In Production Mode: Contemporary Art in China that, “in situ art in China seems to take more account of its location or exhibition spaces than society or a public capable of thinking. It is targeted at initiates.”3 As Liu Wei’s practice and work suggests, the true cultural significance of contemporary art is neither urban (compared with other products, urban consumption of contemporary art is very limited) nor rural, but grows in the cracks between the city and the countryside. It is a space where artists can hardly expect to find people outside their universe.

II Critics have claimed that Liu Wei and Xu Zhen are both representatives Li Liao, Consumption, 2013, installation. Photo: of Chinese neoliberalism and historical nihilism, criticizing them for Dora Tang. Courtesy of the artist and Ullens Centre for 4 conspiring with capitalism, bourgeois values, and reality. However, Contemporary Art, Beijing. such views overlook one point: that the real landscape is not a massive installation. Size alone prevents its commercial viability, leaving it uncompromised by capitalist and neoliberal concerns. On the contrary, it reminds us of class and social differentiation brought about by global neoliberalism and state capitalism, the disparity between economic and cultural structures, as well as the mental strain of widespread alienation from the modern world. Thus Liu Wei and Xu Zhen can be seen, in fact, to be commenting on and resisting the crisis of reality in a realistic way, in opposition to neoliberalism and historical nihilism. Moreover, in the current world, a new landscape of networks, project work, non- materialization, and mobility has emerged. Claire Bishop pointed out that, “Even though participatory artists invariably stand against neoliberal

20 capitalism, the values they impute to their work are understood formally (in terms of opposing individualism and the commodity object), without recognizing that so many other aspects of this art practice dovetail even more perfectly with neoliberalism’s recent forms.”5

Li Liao’s Consumption (2013) exempliﬁes this apparent paradox. Li Liao was employed by Foxconn (Long Huayuan District in Shenzhen city), an assembler of electronics for global brands, as a production-line worker on October 9, 2012. He worked there for forty-ﬁve days then resigned after completing Consumption and making enough from his wages, once his daily living expenses had been paid, to buy one of the iPad minis produced by his own line. During this period, Li Liao immersed himself within the production chain in an attempt to draw back the veil on the prevailing unequal economic system and social structure. But grand concepts and gestures are not Li Liao’s aim. When a producer (the object) turns into a consumer (the subject), he is demonstrating the extreme disparity between the two roles and how they crudely invade our daily life rather than narrow the gap between subject and object, or between production and consumption. This in turn hints at a hegemony deeply embedded in our daily life, and demonstrates the means of resisting it.

As discussed above, the artwork Consumption will eventually be taken up by galleries, art museums, and fairs, becoming a part of the capital-driven, international art market that the artist opposes. Artists, in turn, will be signed up by galleries to provide “products” for them. But not all artists take the production system, art system, and the corresponding social mechanisms such as art media, seeing them rather as links in the chain of production or unrealized concepts, and detaching production from practice. Although artworks themselves have to rely on the art system, artists do not necessarily have to attend to the system and its social operation during the act of creation. One could even say that artists have intentionally bypassed this link from the very beginning. Moreover, there is no rule that insists on their taking social reality as the starting point of the creative process. Though they keep a watchful eye on society, this doesn’t need to have anything to do with art production, existing instead more as an experiment on artistic language and on the dissemination and communication of ideas.

Take Yang Fudong, who is more of a classical artist, as an example. He does not question the means of production, because it is a means of expression. Of course, he has requirements with regard to his studio and working conditions, but these are technical issues. In fact, the scant attention he gives the production process extends to the whole system. It makes no difference to him whether his works are widely disseminated; his sole concern is with new ways of narrating his own, self-generated, image-based languages. By ﬁltering the naked truth through his image language, Yang Fudong presents us with objects to watch and perceive. It is through the aesthetic experience of watching the brutality and detachment of Yang Fudong’s language that it is revealed to us. But even harsher than this is the way in which the senses themselves become subsumed and consumed by the global art market, another act of “Made in China-Globalization.”

21 From his curating the 1999 exhibition “Post-sense Sensibility” to his teaching of “Total Art” at the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, Qiu Zhijie has consistently resorted to the systematic construction of theories, and education, including some studies on the production system. For him, the studio is not the centre of production, nor is the gallery, the museum, the biennale, or the art fair. All that truly matters are the artist’s perceptions and thoughts; physical conditions or the environment should not restrict the creative process. Far from hiding his interest in money, the latter impinges on his thoughts. Arguably, his output is in the typical “Made in China-Globalization” tradition, even if he pays little heed to it. Faced with the primacy of globalization, Qiu Zhijie’s decomposition, reorganization, and construction, derived from his own knowledge and cognition, aim at a better understanding of China (especially Chinese artists and intellectuals) in a globalized world. Just as he chooses ink painting for his creation, his work also carries features of Western painting. Although he uses woven bamboo, a traditional folk craft, his model and structure are still based on the idea of installation. And while he deems calligraphy to be the true contemporary art form, in practice his calligraphy operates within different parameters, relationships, and recognition structures. Within the genealogy of his language, knowledge and ideas always navigate the space between the old and the new, the Chinese and the Western. What he calls “Total Art” is in fact a philosophical set within the vision of an ideal world—“the Great Unity”—as shown by his work where both liberalism and communism end up pointing in the same direction: utopia. Ever the optimistic anarchist, he is making plans for his art well into his 60s and 70s.

There remains the question long asked by Westerners: “Where is China in Chinese art?” Those whose curiosity in identity-politics is satisfied by an assortment of symbols, labels, and social practices certainly have the right to an opinion. On the other hand, they have surely fallen into the language trap set by this question. This has given rise to Hou Hanru’s “Un-Unofficial Art” and Gao Minglu’s “Yi Pai,” as well as the recent trend for a return to the traditional, or reconstruction of the traditional, as in the passion for ink painting, for example. Here the aim is to build a new subject matter untainted by Western thought—in opposition to it even. In fact, this is a critical reaction to “Made in China-Globalization.” Although artists are trying to work within the context of traditional media or tastes, their ways of thinking have already been Westernized and globalized, something that is especially obvious to young artists like Hao Liang. Although his ink paintings demonstrate his clear identification with tradition, his visual understanding (including his readings of traditional Chinese paintings) and framing are deeply marked by colonial presuppositions of the Sinologist, the China “expert.” This is so far removed from traditional Chinese aesthetics that it could be said to be opposed to it—more evidence of “Made in China-Globalization.”

III The Internet, the engine of hyper-globalization, is permeating artistic production and expression, and since the turn of the new century, artists

22 Lin Ke, Untitled, 2015, archival have been exploiting the Internet as inkjet print, 90 x 85 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Long a means of expression. Initially used March Space, Beijing. as an instrument, more recently the Internet has developed its own mode of thinking or cognition, embedding itself into the way artists work and into their language. This can be seen in the works of Guan Xiao, Yu Honglei, Miao Ying, Wang Xinyi, and Lin Ke. Some of these artists have studied abroad Miao Ying, Is it Me You’re Looking For?, 2014, HD single- or lived in foreign countries for channel video, 1 min., 14 secs. Courtesy of the artist. periods, and their familiarity with the Western art system and its operations have allowed them to enter the system without feeling they are compromising their identity. It is arguable, at least on the level of ideas, that they are free from the inﬂuence of the “Made in China- Globalization” concept, happy to take it or leave it. But far from preventing them from being active producers, they are in fact highly attentive to modes of production.

This “Art Post-Internet” trend reveals, according to Robin Peckham, how contemporary life is influenced by messages and vocabularies in a state of constant flux in a globalized world dominated by the Internet. In particular, artists are interested in how the traditional “career path” of studio/gallery/ wider world will change, and the impact this will have on their work.6 With the Internet disrupting old certainties, social reality seems less of a factor to be considered by the artists. Of course, their practices are not totally unrelated to social change. On the contrary, they are simply the product of social turmoil, for the Internet itself is a social reality. If we have to define their production mode, “Made in e-China” might be a more accurate term than “Made in China-Globalization.”

Another reason why we still use the word “make” is because since 2007 international festivals have overwhelmingly replaced the predominance of biennials and galleries. The combination of the Western ﬁnancial crisis of 2008 and the continuous growth of China’s economy generated massive growth in the Chinese art market and festival scene, and this in turn has inﬂuenced the way artists work. Moreover, the Internet and other media have transformed their working practices and rhythm, bringing new features to the artistic landscape for commercial players and consumers alike. Finally, as China has risen to become the second biggest economy in the world, it will no longer be a “world factory”—passively accepting globalization—but an active force, promoting global rebalancing through “The Belt and the Road” (the short name for “the Silk Road Economic Belt” and “the Maritime Silk Road”), and hinting at a new geopolitical, economic, and cultural world order. If “Made in China” or “Made in

23 China-Globalization” derived from China’s dependency on the globalized system under the post-Cold War pattern since 1990s, the Internet will bring changes to a current system dominated by the WTO. The concept of “Made in e-China” speaks of a rebalancing process, and new online forces such as Alibaba and Tencent are reversing the old disparities that dominated China’s relationships, while also reducing identification anxieties. In this sense, “Made in E-China” is a kind of comprehensive dis-localization (or de-bentuization—see the Bentu definitions of Pierre Haski and Philip Tinari) and dis-identification, which promise an unstressed, non-alienated relationship with globalization. Thus, the true substitute for “Made in China-Globalization” may not be “Made in e-China” but “Made in Globalization (-China)”: China restructured as a new protagonist.

During this process, the pressure exerted by the TPP (the US dominated Trans-Paciﬁc Partnership) cannot be ignored, nor the possible dilemmas for China posed by “the Belt and Road.” Boris Groys alerts us to another point: “Big communication and information technology corporations control the material basis of the Internet and the means of producing virtual reality: its hardware. In this way, the Internet provides us with an interesting combination of capitalist hardware and communist software. Hundreds of millions of so-called ‘content producers’ place their content on the Internet without receiving any compensation, with the content produced not so much by the intellectual work of generating ideas as by the manual labour of operating the keyboard. And the proﬁts are appropriated by the corporations controlling the material means of virtual production. As such, it is not ‘immaterial’, but thoroughly material.”7

This reminds us once again that we cannot neglect the operative mechanisms of the Internet, nor the logic and structure of capitalist societies. In this context, “capitalism” no longer refers to the old model, but to a trans-ideological matrix incorporating capitalism and China’s sociopolitical society. Unable to restrain the development of capitalism, and gaining new energy from the Internet’s vital force, it is lifting art production to a new “exciting point” even as it traps itself in a crisis: the so-called crisis of contemporary art?

Notes

1. Discussion between Lu Mingjun and Liu Wei, Liu Wei’s studio, Beijing, January 20, 2016, unpublished. 2. Discussion between Lu Mingjun and Xu Zhen, Xu Zhen’s Studio, Shanghai, July 24, 2013, unpublished. 3. Pauline J. Yao, Production Mode: Contemporary Art in China (Beijing: Timezone 8, 2008), 138. 4. Su Wei, “Liu Wei and Xu Zhen’s Visual Maze: The Nihilism of History?,” TANC（艺术新闻·中文版), July 3, 2015. 5. Claire Bishop, Artiﬁcial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, trans. Lin Hongtao (Taibei: Diancang Press, 2012), 457. 6. Robin Peckham, “Post-Internet Art in Asia: A Global Internet of Art and Its Path?,” trans. Liu Xi and Dai Weiping, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art Studies (Beijing: China Youth Press, 2014), 163–64. 7. Boris Groys, Going Public, trans. Su Wei et al. (Beijing: Gold Wall Press, 2012), 163–64.

24 Carol Yinghua Lu Exhibition as Exhibition

he title of this essay “Exhibition as Exhibition” is derived from the late Greek-American filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos’ maxim, T “film as film.” Ever since Markopoulos coined this expression in one of his essays, “film as film” became the firm foundation that sustained his theoretical and creative output throughout his practice. For Markopoulos, the expression did not merely stand for his faith in and aspirations for the film medium; instead, it grew into a canon that governed all his actions and judgments. In a recently published collection of Markopoulos’ film essays, “film as film” appeared more than fifty times in total.1 “Film as film” is essentially a gesture of refusal: it rejects the various value standards and expectations tirelessly imposed on filmmaking by the whole system of evaluation and consumption of films. Moreover, “film as film” serves to represent a ceaseless quest for and belief in the potential of film as a creative medium; on this ground, the creator must avoid any kind of dependence on or fantasy for other people or systems aside from his own creation.

Here, I attempt to use the title “Exhibition as Exhibition” as the point of departure to open up a discussion about the curatorial practice that artist Liu Ding (who is my partner in marraige) and I have deployed in collaboration since 2007. To a great extent, our passion and faith in curatorial work echoes that of Markopoulos’ in ﬁlm, and we consider the practice of curation the same as that of an artist in that they are both creative labour: it does not carry more or less potential than artistic creation, nor does it cling to the artists’ works or exist merely in their service. We deeply believe in the unique qualities of curatorial practice, and the particular ideologies and methods necessary for its language to take formation.

Our curatorial practice has beneﬁted from Liu Ding’s creative experience as an artist as well as his particular understanding of creation from its very outset, and we have consistently strived to maintain this acuity, construct our own contextual awareness, and continuously mine the wonder of art historical narratives. Liu Ding continuously articulates his understanding of art and the art system, and this understanding enters his own art practice, itself adjusting and undergoing changes. He has an innate interest in the broader, perhaps overlooked, mechanisms within the art system, evident even when he visits something as mundane as an antique store; instead of looking only at the goods and focusing entirely on them, he would think about their context, which includes their physical surroundings and

25 their more implicit background and logic. The art system that Liu Ding revels in investigating goes far beyond the often-discussed issues of the art market, art institutions, and their rules. It includes questions that lie at a deeper level—the basis of artistic practice and the ideologies inherent to art historical narratives. These investigations and his reﬂections allow us to develop our curatorial work from a much wider latitude. Instead of abstractly coining terms, we openly bring into our exhibitions a wide range of materials that include practices beyond those of artists in the art system, work derived from other ﬁelds of activity and other eras, as well as various kinds of historical archives.

In reality, people often respond to works that possess intellectual and rational qualities by claiming they do not make sense. Meanwhile, they blindly worship works driven by intuition and instinct, and dichotomize intelligence and sensibility—even many artists themselves have unconsciously paralyzed and impoverished the levels of investigation and contemplation that could have evolved in their work. This hierarchical reading of art and culture and the view of “mass art” stemming from the Mao era, together with a consumerist psychology spawned by the gradual expansion of the art market since 2000, have posed severe challenges to thoughtful artistic practices that appeal to more than just intuition and technique. The system and ideologies of public opinion have relegated those practitioners who do not rely merely on instinct and physical labour to an unprecedented situation of being minoritarian and isolated. The self- conscious drive and exigency for “constructing your own context” that Liu Ding carries in his artistic creation and our shared curatorial practice also partially originate from this predicament.

Confronting the critique and context of de-intellectualization, many creative practices exist like orphans. For creation to be as creation, one must—to some extent—ﬁrst give up expectations for and dependence upon one’s surrounding context, which includes not only existing discursive foundations, criteria of recognition and judgment, and art historical experience, but also one’s own local cultural context and the alleged global context, even including the feedback or lack thereof from one’s so-called “fellow practitioners.” Furthermore, one must also distinguish and refrain from the conspiracies and attempts to promote the likes of creation as attitude, creation as a commodity, creation as spectacle, creation as event, creation as exhibition ﬁllers, and exhibition as entertainment.

Liu Ding’s Store is an art project launched by Liu Ding in 2008 which has since been stationed in various kinds of institutions including commercial galleries, museums, art fairs, and private and public collections. The project persistently presents the immutable relationship of consumption inherent to the art system through a uniform method (of exhibition and sales) in order to expose the fetishistic nature of consumerism and the underlying foundation of its values. Throughout his investigations, Liu Ding has— almost without exception—presented the project in what appears to be an “exhibition within an exhibition,” which not only produces meanings

26 Top: Liu Ding, Liu Ding’s Store, dependent on each exhibition and its respective institution’s context, but 2010, installation view, Urs Meile Gallery, Beijing. also allows his own appeals and ideology to surface through the design and content of his own presentation within a given exhibition. Liu Ding, Conversations, 2010, (left to right) Beatrice Leanza, Claudia Albertini, Liu Ding, Sun Ning, Chen Haitao, Carol In 2010, Liu Ding was invited to Yinghua Lu, Platform China Contemporary Art Institute, participate in Jungle: A Close-up Focus Beijing. on Chinese Contemporary Art Trends, held at Platform China Contemporary Art Institute, Beijing. Attempting a comprehensive presentation of ongoing art projects, a few dozen artists were invited to participate, which expressed the exhibition organizers’ desire to gain insight into the state of the art industry at the time. Liu Ding proposed to launch an ongoing project at the exhibition by having a private conversation with the initiator of the exhibition and several other exhibiting artists in order to share their ideas and thoughts on the condition of the art world. From such a simple and unpretentious starting point, this conﬁdential conversation allowed the exhibition curator and the exhibiting artist (Liu Ding himself) to freely reveal their thoughts, to go beyond any superﬁcial means of communication that can occur in everyday social interactions, and to speak honestly about the motives, encounters, confusions, and understandings that may exist within their own practices. After the discussion, Liu Ding had several other face-to-face discussions with colleagues—artists, curators, art critics, and institutional directors—that he had worked with for a relatively extensive period of time about their work and practice with other exhibitions and events that have taken place at different points in time. Albeit held in private, these discussions were positioned as part of the project, and therefore carried certain legitimacy; together, they gradually traced out an art map different from the outlook of the art world that people generally witness and talk about. On this map, an understanding of and appeal to creation constituted the guiding compass to which people jointly aspired.

27 Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu, Little Movements: Self- practice in Contemporary Art I, exhibition view, 2011, OCAT, Shenzhen.

Prompted by these discussions and insights, we then launched the research and exhibition project, Little Movements: Self-practice in Contemporary Art (in 2010 at OCAT Shenzhen and in 2013 at Museion, Bolzano), in hope of sharing our understanding of the art system and art practices that have been informed by our many interactions, observations, and reflections. At the time, a trend started to prevail within the art world—that practices in alternative spaces were considered the only hope for the art system to get out of its temporary gloom following the 2008 financial recession, but the significance of these spaces was over-exaggerated. Meanwhile, various strands of practices within the art system gradually evolved into a kind of showy performance and spectacle; public anticipation and pressure prompted the expansion of different kinds of artistic practices but left the art system’s inner kernel untouched. Under these circumstances, we believed it was necessary to reevaluate the actual conditions of art practices and the art system, and to thoroughly delineate its deep structure from the perspective of a practitioner—which includes artists, curators, art historians, and all the different contributors within the art system who see themselves engaging in a practice, which is different from fulfilling a job or a role—instead of that of a policy maker, a public relations official, a client, or the public.

In Little Movements, our subjects of investigation and representation were not limited only to works by artists but also included the practices of art historians, curators, and even those afﬁliated with institutions; those in the domains of art and literature, publications, art collectives, and art education were included as well. These practices spanned the 1980s, 1990s, and from 2000 onwards, and both local and international examples were included. Meanwhile, we made every effort to restrain ourselves and treat the topic from a clear state of mind, narrowing down the scope of discussion in order to avoid generalizations. On the art map we came to paint—which took the actual practices of those included as its descriptive content—all who were represented were mutually independent and equal regardless of the place and time of each of their occurrence. This understanding of the art system from the perspective of a practitioner should not be subject to a hierarchy of status and power, nor should their merits be weighed by inherent geographical, cultural, and time differences; in other words, “practice as practice.”

28 By launching this project, we began to convey our art historical perspectives in a more formal manner through exhibition creation. What lies at the heart of this art historical standpoint is a respect for creation and individual experience, as well as a narrative that takes creation and reasoning as points of connection. It is not a linear, evolutionist view of art history, nor is it one that inﬁnitely magniﬁes the discrepancies or similarities between local and global experiences; we do not consider art practices—including the overall operation of the art system—as a rule to follow, nor do we think that the existence of an order can be taken as the absolute guarantee and basis for the validity of its own existence.

When curating Little Movements, we proposed an ensemble of three interrelated compositions—research, exhibition, and publication—to mine each of their particular aesthetic and linguistic qualities through our own practice. We organized small-scale group discussions and explored the origins of various practices to have intimate dialogues with the practitioners. These “group discussions” saw the continuation of the method of “internal discussions” Liu Ding employed in his Conversations project during the exhibition Jungle, the only difference was that this time the dialogues were recorded on video. The conversations between the two parties—one represented by us the curatorial team and the other represented by the practitioners and their close collaborators or friends— did not resemble interviews, but mutual exchanges that expressed our understanding of and reﬂection on the practices under discussion. Through these exchanges, our opinions were thus shared without reserve.

In our exhibitions, we place great emphasis on the presence of a curatorial vision: it bears no relation to the curator’s power or authority but involves instead the rarely discussed problems of the curator’s creative motive, purpose, and language. The significance of an exhibition to a curator is like that of a work to an artist; what to express and the method of expression are two key factors that demand thorough consideration. In this respect, the curator must willingly confront these questions and elaborate one’s argument, and these should be—to some extent—regarded as part of one’s professional integrity. Unfortunately, there is a huge lacuna to fill in the discussion on this issue. The longstanding popular conception of an exhibition as a mere medium that provides display services for artworks and artists not only leaves aside adequate reflections—technically and conceptually speaking—on what an exhibition is and how to organize an exhibition, but also evades the question of a curator’s duty as a creator. In our curatorial practice, we often implement and develop these two lines of thought through our work on conceiving research methods, the selection and layout of exhibition content, exhibition design, the organization of ancillary talks and panels, and designing and editing exhibition publications.

Besides the two iterations of Little Movements, we revisited issues surrounding the methodologies of art historical research in two other exhibition projects, namely Accidental Message: Art is Not a System, Not a World (2012) and New Works 2: Xin Ke Du (New Measurement) Group and

29 Liu Ding, Carol Yinghua Lu, and Su Wei, The 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale: Accidental Message: Art is Not a System, Not a World, exhibition view, 2012, OCAT, Shenzhen.

Qian Weikang (2015), both held at OCAT Shenzhen. During our research, we engaged in face-to-face discussions with the involved or affiliated parties and revisited archives in approaching our subjects of research, acquiring first-hand accounts and experiences from as many sources as possible. Meanwhile, we distinguished the boundary of our subjective consciousness, and how this boundary molded our entry into the narrative of our research subjects and the acquirable content. This was a process that demanded constant self-reflection rather than emphasizing questions of so-called objectivity and historical fact.

In Accidental Message: Art is Not a System, Not a World, we excavated a number of conceptual works, artist publications, and archives from the 1990s, which to a certain extent generated an undercurrent that pushed forward the movement of art at the time. Although existing art historical writings have yet to take these practices that were of interest to us into account from the vantage points of their creative values and intellectual history and give them their due, they are without doubt integral to art history in China and are part of an art historical experience that cannot be neglected. Existing art historical narratives and value systems have long been restrained by an ideological structure that gradually took shape and became solidiﬁed in the 1950s. It forces us to mold and formulate art history and personal artistic careers within the framework of success and a linear, inevitable logic dictated by discourses surrounding magnum opus, masterpiece, great master, trend, and uniqueness. In Accidental Message, we proposed an anthropomorphic reading of artwork and art history, which incorporated a state of longing, hesitation, anxiety, uncertainty, accident, repetition, and distress in the creation of a work into the scope of our examination and discussion, thus acknowledging the relations between works resulting from these instances and our artistic experience of them. In the exhibition, we reproduced works by artists who were either at an early stage or a ﬂuctuating stage in their career, reenacted situations where a work was repeatedly adjusted, showcased letters of exchange between artists and their peers about their anxieties over what art is, overlapping self-published projects initiated by artists for the purpose of constructing their own contexts, and a documentary about an exhibition that was shut down before it opened, among others. Together, these choices constituted an account of our understanding of creation and art history.

30 Liu Ding, Carol Yinghua Lu, and Su Wei, The 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale: Accidental Message: Art is Not a World, Not a System, exhibition view, 2012, OCAT, Shenzhen.

As for the layout of the exhibition space, we juxtaposed works from the 1990s with those created after 2000 by both Chinese and international artists, completely disregarding differences in cultural identity, locale, age, medium, and historical period; at the same time, we did not assume or consciously set up any connection among them. We ensured that every exhibiting artist’s work had enough space for display while also employing architectural elements such as podiums and blue coloured wall surfaces, and we decentralized the exhibition design in order to make the exhibition narrative multidirectional and to hint at aspects hidden within the shadows of art historical experience and its less obvious connections.

Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu, New Measurement and Qian Weikang: Two Case Studies of Conceptual Art Practice in the Early 1990s, 2015, exhibition view, OCAT, Shenzhen, China.

Continuing the return to the 1990s set forth by Accidental Message: Art is Not a System, Not a World, with the exhibition New Measurement and Qian Weikang: Two Case Studies of Conceptual Art Practice in the Early 1990s we researched into and reproduced two examples of conceptual practices based in Shanghai and Beijing respectively, with both emerging in the early 90s and terminating in the mid to late 90s. Our ambition was to problematize existing art historical experience and values in order to expose the structures and ideologies people had long considered as only right and proper. While inclined to advocate for trendy creations and values, current narratives about the development of contemporary Chinese art do not lay enough emphasis on the task of differentiating truths. The result is that while many artistic practices did indeed occur, and left a signiﬁcant impression on the practitioners, they were gradually neglected and eventually relegated to the fringe of art history for not conforming or neatly ﬁtting into the dominant narrative. Due to the deliberate exit from the art world by the two parties involved in the case studies

31 Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu, New Measurement and Qian Weikang: Two Case Studies of Conceptual Art Practice in the Early 1990s, 2015, exhibition view, OCAT, Shenzhen.

of Qian Weikang and New Measurement Group, and their choice to burn many of their artworks and archival material, their work became “facts to be reconstructed” in our process of art historical research.

Besides engaging in extended Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu, New Measurement and Qian investigative fieldwork to build a Weikang: Two Case Studies of Conceptual Art Practice in the database as credible as we possibly Early 1990s, 2015, exhibition view, OCAT, Shenzhen. could, we introduced into the exhibition imagined episodes and duplicated works as well as the method of their recalculation in Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu, facing the challenges from artists New Measurement and Qian Weikang: Two Case Studies of who did not preserve any original Conceptual Art Practice in the Early 1990s, 2015, exhibition visual documentation and who have view, OCAT, Shenzhen. forgotten many of the details about what happened. We confronted these objective limitations through transforming them into creative components of the exhibition. Based on verbal accounts by Qian Weikang and one of the members of New Measurement Group, Gu Dexin, we respectively duplicated two works first produced at the beginning stages of each of their careers and that left a decisive impact on their later conceptual development. Meanwhile, without the involvement of Qian Weikang, we reproduced all the works in his artistic career based on the limited amount of information (single-perspective photos) we were able to find. During the research stage, we formed a “new” New Measurement group—imitating the original group’s rules and regulations—and recalculated the five works they produced during their collaboration. We were the first to prove the validity of one of their early proposals, namely that the rules they designed and repeatedly revised can actually be carried out by anyone and still lead to the same result. In recent years, our curatorial work has not only inspired and pushed forward our research, but has also become a significant medium and platform where discoveries and reflections can be translated and expressed.

In our overall exploration of the language of exhibitions, we have made various attempts in the selection, organization, and presentation of works

32 Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu, Little Movements: Self-practice in Contemporary Art II, 2013, exhibition view, Museion, Bolzano, Italy.

Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu, Little Movements: Self-practice in Contemporary Art II, 2013, exhibition view, Museion, Bolzano, Italy.

on display, treating the exhibition’s design and aesthetic as parts of its narrative and an expressive language, and we are constantly aiming to enrich this linguistic system. For the ﬁrst iteration of Little Movements, we made reference to the designs created by Austrian artist and architect Josef Dabernig for two exhibitions, Individual Systems and Once is Nothing, in our own exhibition layout, which allowed every work on view to occupy a relatively independent yet open area, stressing our principle of decentralization in the makeup of the exhibition and equality among all participants. In the second iteration of Little Movements, we built a wall inside the museum that slanted through the walls of the different exhibition halls, and installed the various practices included in the exhibition on both sides of the wall, a reference to Belgian architect Luc Deleu’s urban planning concept “VIP City” from the early 1990s. In Deleu’s urban planning model, a highway is suspended in the air, passing across the urban space and connecting the two ends of a city; urban spaces serving different functions are distributed on both sides of this highway where the hierarchical system is not formulated by the importance of their respective function. Our understanding of practice in general shares with this progressive urban planning design a spirit of equality, independence, autonomy, and a refusal to depend on any system or its power.

33 In New Works #1: From the Issue Top and left: Liu Ding and Carol Yinghua Lu, New of Art to the Issue of Position, held Works #1: From the Issue of Art to the Issue of Position, at OCAT Shenzhen in 2014, we 2014, installation view, OCAT Shenzhen. selected several examples from Chinese art history in order to discuss a despised and overlooked tradition that nonetheless has had lasting impact on our artistic creation and discourse: socialist realism. Reflecting on the visual logic of contemporary art from the past thirty years and more, we recounted how socialist realism and its underlying ideology and logic continue to reverberate in contemporary art practices. We selected for presentation several case studies and samples since the 1940s. Consisting of both old and new works, most of the documents and artworks in the exhibition are difficult to measure within the discursive framework of the spirit of resistance of contemporary art and the so-called ideological significance. Meanwhile, unlike works based on collectivist values, these works embodied a deeply introspective quality inherent to creation and were reflective of the artists’ thinking and individual worldview. In the exhibition, we drew lessons from an archeological methodology of demonstrating excavated discoveries and numbered every exhibiting artist or event, thereby allowing the works and archives to display an uncharted potential of carrying multiple meanings. Structurally speaking, the exhibition was presented as a kind of duet. The exhibition route is half open, with a short and dense narrative at the exhibition entrance that set the tone for the show. Linking the two exhibition halls together, a passageway was filled with covers of Meishu magazine from the 1950s and 60s and their abstracts; together they displayed the hesitation, skepticism, and revision one undergoes to form an abstract sense of values and represented the flow of this current. After

34 the passageway, one entered a semi-open space that once again presented a clash in the physical space between the deliberate individual paths that artists took and instinctive ﬂows. In this exhibition hall, we numbered each work on display with a virtual number, which were then pasted onto the research subjects by the groupings of even and odd numbers. The audience would have had a difﬁcult time if they attempted to follow the order of the numbers through the exhibition; in fact, they most likely could only have followed the designated path throughout the exhibition.

While we have delved into different directions in our exhibition making over the years, our curatorial practices, in fact, carry multilayered correlations: from their reliance on research to the issues addressed in these exhibitions their content of discussion and their exploration of exhibition languages and aesthetics, these exhibitions all share a degree of parallelism with each other and arrive at several points of intersection. We have always considered an exhibition’s motive, content, language, and form as one: these aspects organically and mutually contextualize each other, always inspiring each other. We repeatedly reiterate the importance of the idea of “practitioners” as subjects in contemporary research and practices, and we aim to continue to posit “practitioners” at the forefront of practice-based work through our exhibitions and textual discourse. By depicting the “practitioner” as the subject of our exhibitions, we encourage a resurgence of the richness inherent in research and history and have recounted ways of reading the organic quality of individual practices in historical and contemporary encounters. These qualities remind us of the need for self- motivated, frequent reﬂections on the serious relationship between history and the present, rather than treating that relationship as just a matter of ideology. To a certain extent, our exhibitions and publications prompt reﬂections on a kind of inevitability and caution against the coining of trendy slogans as well as a prevailing, essentialist conception of history.

Translated by Alvin Li. This text was ﬁrst published in Chinese in the Taiwanese publication ACT.

Notes

1. Gregory J. Markopoulos and P. Adams Sitney, Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos, ed. Mark Webber, 1st ed. (London: The Visible Press, 2014).

35 Echo He Capturing the Traces of Everyday Life

he Zhu and Zhangbolong Liu are two young artists who strive to present traces through their photographic works by exposing the Zsubtle web of tracks following life’s trail through time. Although these scenes are completely devoid of people, they are ﬁlled with a number of different marks and signs that point to certain occurrences. The artists’ photographs become empty stages, abandoned by its actors, yet the remaining set and stage props suggest intriguing narratives. Here, the story can only be unraveled through clues provided by the objects that have either remained or disappeared from view.

Zhe Zhu’s Vanitas series captures the remnants of everyday life. He meticulously gathers consumed objects, and references within his photography traditional arrangements found in vanitas still life paintings. Vanitas was a school of still life painting that flourished in the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Within these refined still life paintings, objects that symbolized life and joy, such as fruit and flowers, were placed together with objects that symbolized deterioration and death, such as bones, hourglasses, clocks, etc., to remind the viewer that happiness and sorrow are both equally ephemeral. Zhe Zhu adopts a cool-headed

approach to his work, creating his photographs with both great precision and a manner of experimentation. He chooses residual materials from everyday life and then arranges them according to the composition of classical seventeenth century vanitas paintings. He uses a large-format ﬁlm camera or a medium-format digital camera to record his images, which makes the photographs resemble oil paintings in their composition and quality of light.

Zhe Zhu, Fast Food, 2013, While working on this particular archival pigment print on paper, 61 x 76 cm. © 2016 Zhe series, Zhe Zhu’s grandfather Zhu. Courtesy of Fou Gallery, Brooklyn. passed away, causing the artist to contemplate the meaning of death, as well as develop a more personal understanding for the symbolism of vanitas. Zhe Zhu uses his own everyday objects to replace the elements within the traditional Zhe Zhu, Trick, 2013, archival pigment print of paper, 61 Dutch still lifes, including dried x 76 cm. © 2016 Zhe Zhou. Courtesy of Fou Gallery, flowers, household utensils, Brooklyn. dust, napkins, and bones. By capturing the process of decay and disappearance within these everyday objects, the artist lays bare his very own “trail of bread crumbs.” The final photographs become modest monuments for our current age of consumerism and material surplus in the attempt to grasp the fleeting moments created by fragmentary images of light and shadow, although this attempt seems almost futile.

Zhangbolong Liu’s Traces series, in contrast, attempts to record things that have already disappeared, or, to put it in the artist’s own words, to capture the “presence of absence.”1 In Library–2, New York, an illustration has been torn out of a Van Gogh picture album, leaving nothing behind but

37 Left: Zhangbolong Liu, Library—2, 2013, archival pigment print on paper, 27.9 x 35.6 cm. © 2016 Zhangbolong Liu. Courtesy of Fou Gallery, Brooklyn. Right: Zhangbolong Liu, Classroom–—3, New York, 2013, archival pigment print on paper, 27.9 x 35.6 cm. © 2016 Zhangbolong Liu. Courtesy of Fou Gallery, Brooklyn.

Left: Zhangbolong Liu, Bedroom—3, New York, 2013, archival pigment print on paper, 27.9 x 35.6 cm. © 2016 Zhangbolong Liu. Courtesy of Fou Gallery, Brooklyn. Zhangbolong Liu, Restroom—3, New York, 2013, archival pigment print on paper, 27.9 x 35.6 cm. © 2016 Zhangbolong Liu. Courtesy of Fou Gallery, Brooklyn.

the following written caption: “Plate Fifteen. Landscape with Olive Trees (October 1889 Saint-Rémy). Collection John Hay Whitney, New York. 28 1/2 x 35 1.2 inch.” Despite the Information Age that we live in, people are in need of only the bare minimum amount of data in order to fully trace back to the origins of this landscape painting. However, the disappeared landscape is much more thought provoking than the landscape itself. It raises a number of questions, such as, why did the illustration disappear? Did someone take it? Why was it removed? The soft traces of white that remain on these yellowed pages are similar to Hiroshi Shugimoto’s photographs of empty theatres, which were shot with exposure times that lasted the entire duration of a movie, leaving behind a screen of vast whiteness as a photographic record.

With images of a classroom blackboard wiped clean of its writings, a completely empty exhibition cabinet within the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the remaining white wall of a studio after a canvas had been removed from it, lingering pinholes on bathroom wallpaper, Zhangbolong Liu’s works create a kind of pending atmosphere, filled with foreboding and suspense. (image 9) The artist explains that he hopes to evoke people’s perception of time: “The traces of things are etched by time, with the flow of time. Finally, the original thing will thoroughly disappear; all we can find is the trace it left behind.”2 It goes without saying, however, that vanished objects cannot be recorded, and within this seemingly paradoxical context, the object that has been “grasped” by means of photography actually no longer exists. Change is the universe’s most constant state of being, and the objects we discuss only exist, in fact, within our own perceptions. With regards to this meaning, the state of disappearance that Zhangbolong Liu aims to document is more realistic than the disappeared objects themselves. The traces that he captures remind us that no matter how intense the emotion, how precious the materials, or how profound the story may be, all of this merely exists within the moment. This means that regardless of how much we may try to preserve these things they will inevitably fade away with the passing of time.

38 Right: Zhangbolong Liu, Met— This brings to mind a particular 3, New York, 2013, archival pigment print on paper, 27.9 x anecdote by Agnes Martin. When 35.6 cm. © 2016 Zhangbolong Liu. Courtesy of Fou Gallery, Martin’s dealer, Mark Glimcher, Brooklyn. brought his two daughters to visit Martin, the eighty-seven- year-old artist was still creating her highly minimalist paintings. Her canvases remained almost entirely blank with only the softest of pencil contours visible on the surface. When the girls asked her curiously what she was painting, Martin casually took out a few roses from a vase at her side, and asked “Are they beautiful?” The little girls nodded. Martin hid the ﬂowers behind her back and asked again: “Are they still beautiful?” The girls nodded once more. Martin smiled a faint smile, stretched out the other hand and slowly swished the air above the empty vase. “I’m painting this.”3

Zhe Zhu and Zhangbolong Liu’s duo exhibition Zhe Zhu and Zhangbolong Liu: Vanitas/Traces was held in New York from April 24 to June 28, 2015. Zhe Zhu’s Vanitas series focuses on different moods and trajectories concealed within the remnants of everyday life. Zhangbolong Liu’s Traces series follows the intricate network of clues captured within frozen stage scenes. The exhibition was organized in collaboration between Fou Gallery and the restaurant, CARMA Asian Tapas in Manhattan’s West Village.

Zhe Zhu and Zhangbolong This exhibition continues Liu, Vanitas/Traces, installation view, CARMA. Photo: Jiaxi my experiments to curate in Yang. © 2016 Zhe Zhu and Zhangbolong Liu. Courtesy alternative spaces. I founded Fou of Fou Gallery, Brooklyn and CARMA, New York. Gallery with the mission to offer a ﬂexible, small and dynamic alternative space. Located in an ordinary apartment building in Brooklyn, Fou Gallery differs from the traditional white cube gallery space by offering art exhibitions and events in a home- like environment. Here, people can appreciate art and exchange ideas with curiosity and happiness. I believe that art should be accessible and understandable by ordinary people instead of a certain group of cultural elites. Curating an exhibition in a restaurant allowed me to further explore the possibility to merge unique artistic experiences with everyday life.

Translated by Cila Brosius.

Notes

1. Zhangbolong Liu, “Traces,” Chinese Photography (April 2014), 54–57. 2. Ibid. 3. Kelly Crow, “Keeping Pace,” Wall Street Journal, August 25, 2011.

39 Bao Dong Rethinking Practices within the Art System: The Self-Organization of Contemporary Art in China, 2001–2012

The Origin of the Term “Self-Organization” in China The term “self-organization” was first used in the context of contemporary Chinese art in 2005 at the Second Guangzhou Triennial curated by Hou Hanru, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Guo Xiaoyan. Self-organization was one of the special projects of the triennial, and there were two panel discussions on the topic. The exhibition theme “Beyond” focused on the topic of alternative modernity in China and non-Western countries, and the term self-organization was defined by the following statements: “A number of independent art organizations, institutions, and communities have taken an active role in artistic creation and practice” and “their projects are often diverse, flexible” and “self-induced in nature.”1 Altogether, twenty-four self- organized groups2 were included in this project, and for the curators, the concept of “self-organization” was used to differentiate independent and autonomous organizations from those attached to government systems or political parties. This feature is also the fundamental difference between the various artist-run autonomous organizations and the organizations within the conventional art system as constituted by Chinese Artists Association, along with the various academies of painting, art institutes, museums, and so on. In other words, self-organization is considered a force operating outside of the conventional art system, just as the inception, growth, and flourishing of contemporary Chinese art is believed to have been achieved outside of official systems.

In terms of any independence from the conventional art system, self- organization is not a new phenomenon in the contemporary Chinese art scene. The various painting societies that developed after the Cultural Revolution, art collectives that formed around 1985, experimental art groups that were established at the beginning of the 1990s, artist-run spaces and autonomous exhibitions, and attempts to run non-proﬁt art spaces since 2000, all fall under the umbrella of this concept of self-organization. Even “artist villages” and “art districts” can be included, just as Gao Minglu considers such artist collectives alongside the collectives that existed around 1985.3

After the Second Guangzhou Triennial, the art scene witnessed an explosion in the art market, the sudden establishment of an institutionalized art system in 2006 and 2007, the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and then the unexpected ﬁnancial crisis that followed shortly after the Olympics. The concept of “self-organization” did not garner substantial attention in contemporary Chinese art circles until 2010, where it was mainly used by young art critics and the media to refer to collective practices, especially those of young artists, that had begun appearing countrywide in 2008.

40 Against the backdrop of a new system, the connotations of what “self- organization” meant fundamentally changed. Before analyzing this change and the causes of it, it is necessary to introduce the different forms of self- organization employed by young artists.

Categories of Self-organization Since 2008, a large number of young artists born after 1976, or the post- Cultural Revolution generation, have emerged on the contemporary art scene across the nation, and their self-organizational practices have received considerable attention. In only a few years, from 2007 to 2012, at least thirty-nine self-organized collectives were established in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, and other coastal cities, as well as in major inland cities such as Wuhan, Chongqing, and Chengdu.

The collective practices generally deﬁned as “self-organization” can be divided into four separate forms, or, one might say that they fall into four categories: art communities, art groups, independent projects, and autonomic institutions.

N12 No.1, 2003, installation view, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing.

Art communities such as LVXIAO (founded 2002), Beijing, N12 (founded 2003), Beijing, and North Village Independent Workshop (founded 2008), Chengdu are made up of artists with speciﬁc conceptual common ground, and they tend to communicate on a regular basis and organize group shows online or in an exhibition space according to naturally formed geographical and personal relationships. The members do not collaborate on artistic creations, but, rather, maintain their own individual practices.

Art groups go a step further in that their members do produce work collaboratively, and thus become a creative collective. However, the levels of collaboration within the different groups vary in that there is a range of relationships possible between the individual artist and the group. For example, while the members of Double Fly Art Center (founded 2008), Shanghai, and GUEST (founded 2011), Beijing produce work collaboratively, they also maintain their roles as individual artists. In contrast, the artists involved in TOF (founded 2011), Shanghai, Utopia Group (founded 2008), Beijing, and Cell Group (founded 2011), Chongqing participate in exhibitions identiﬁed only by the name of their group. In a more extreme case, the members of Hexie Baroque (founded 2011), Beijing intentionally stay anonymous, completely separating the individual artist from any nominal connections to the collective.

41 When the collective practice of GUEST, Guest, 2012, installation. Photo: Peter an art community involves some Le. Courtesy of the artists and Ullens Center for sort of common topic or shared Contemporary Art, Beijing. direction, and more participants are sought out to partake, self- organized independent projects can be the result. Independent projects stem from art communities, though tend to be more heavily focused on speciﬁc research on an issue, the establishment of new concepts, or the implementation of speciﬁc actions. For instance, the Museum of Unknown (founded 2007), Shanghai, and Future Festival (founded 2011), Shanghai among other groups, are interested in constructing new concepts and hence theoretical discussions are an important aspect of their projects. Art Praxis Space (founded 2009), Chengdu focuses more on social investigations and research. Provincial Youth (founded 2011), Chongqing, is also involved in constructing new concepts, but places more emphasis on social intervention, while ‘Everybody’s East Lake’ (founded 2010), Wuhan, is focused entirely on social intervention and actions.

In comparison, autonomous Museum of Unknown, Encounter, 2011, installation organizations such as Organhaus view in the exhibition A Museum That is Not. Courtesy Art Space (founded 2008), of the Guangdong Times Chongqing, Fei Contemporary Art Museum. Center (founded 2007), Shanghai, Observation Society (founded 2009), Guangzhou, Arrow Factory (founded 2008), Beijing, am art space (founded 2008), Shanghai, Sabaki Space (founded 2009), Guangzhou, Yangtze River Space (founded 2011), Wuhan, Video Bureau (founded 2012), Guangzhou/Beijing, Gland (founded 2011), Beijing, and Floor #2 Press (founded 2012), Beijing are relatively more institutionalized in terms of their self-organization—they have regular members, relatively stable venues, and long-term goals. They differ from the typical alternative spaces in that they provide a neutral space; that is, their aim is not to “replace” the gallery/museum, or to act as an “alternative” to the mainstream, but, rather, to accommodate autonomy of the space and promote its growth. Taiwanese artist Lian Decheng has emphasized this “non-conﬂict” and “neutrality” in his discussions of early alternative spaces that existed in Taiwan.4

It should be emphasized that there is a great range and ﬂuidity between the different types of self-organizations. Most self-organized communities exist in some sort of liminal state. Aside from the mutual generativeness of self-organizations such as those mentioned above, on a deeper level, one of the reasons for self-organized practice is a demand to break through certain predetermined conceptual and institutional conventions, and to realize a kind of power outside of the system that is heterogeneous and hybrid in nature, one always in ﬂux between formation and transition, and thus impossible to incorporate into existing systems. In short, the liminal is not just an aim of these self-organizations, it is also their inherent state of being. For example, the Double Fly Art Center, as implied by its name, resembles an art center. However it is an art group based within contemporary art

42 Art Praxis Space, Interactive Project, Black Land, 2011, video, 11 mins., 50 secs. Courtesy of Art Praxis Space, Chengdu.

Provincial Youth, Travel Plan, communities around China Academy 2012, social intervention. Courtesy of Provincial Youth, of Art (CAA), Hangzhou. Within the Chongqing. art communities of CAA, there are also self-organized projects such as Small Productions (founded 2008), which are closer to being independent. The participants in Small Productions also include those from other art communities of different regions in their projects. The Irrelative Group (founded 2011), which consists of alumni of CAA, was formed when its members were reunited

Provincial Youth, Travel Plan, in Beijing. In Chongqing, the Haus·M- 2012, social intervention. Courtesy of Provincial Youth, Commune (founded 2001), H2 Art Space Chongqing. (founded 2006), Organhaus Art Space, Provincial Youth, and 8mg (founded 2011) have also formed interdependent, mutually derivative and transformative relationships. There are similar examples Opening of exhibition Banana, 2013, Organhaus Art Space, in other cities as well. This liminality is Chongqing. also present in the participants involved with self-organizations. Many have moved between and experienced various self- organized groups. In fact, because of this cross-pollination, these self-organizations are highly ﬂuid, and can often unexpectedly take form and then gradually disappear, or change in form or approach.

Background and Strategies of Self-organization There are many reasons behind the popularization of self-organizations, especially those that started to appear after 2008. The most obvious cause was the economic crisis and the resulting standstill in the art market, which provided a rest period for an art world that had been hyped up for several years. People began to shift their focus onto other matters, including unmarketable artistic practices that had been developing for some time. It should be emphasized, however, that self-organization was not a reﬂexive

43 response to the financial crisis but rather something much more profound. Many self-organizing practices had started before 2008, and thanks to the financial crisis, ideas that had remained only at the level of discussion could finally be put into practice.

On a deeper level, this shift was also due to the emergence of a rethinking within the practice of contemporary Chinese art. While the art industry had grown rapidly, there was also a loss of interest in and an irritation at the increasing industrialization and spectacularization of the art system. Related critique and introspection existed long before the ﬁnancial crisis, especially among more established artists. As the founders of Arrow Factory recall:

Arrow Factory came into being during the frenzied lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It was a moment when China was utterly consumed by scale and spectacle, and soaked in the rhetoric of grandeur and success. The contemporary art world’s infatuation with overblown proportions, style conscious aesthetics, and commerce-friendly “creative industry” enclaves drove us to conjure up another scenario: the presentation of works by contemporary artists in an ultra- small space situated far away from the so-called art districts.5

Arrow Factory takes its name from its Floor #2 Press, The Painting of Xia Jianqiang, 2013, location, a typical Beijing hutong alley in publication. the city centre. The space was renovated from an existing storefront and is only ﬁfteen square meters total. The three founders, Pauline J. Yao, Wang Wei, and Rania Ho have kept the original shop- window design so that nearby residents and visitors can view through a glass door the exhibiting art project from the street day and night. By emphasizing the relationship with the local community, Discussion during the refusing commercialized operations, international workshop Red Line, 2014, Organhaus, never actively seeking media publicity, Chongqing. and keeping themselves removed from the spectacle of the art industry, Arrow Factory offers a conscious institutional critique. In contrast, Small Productions, founded in Hangzhou, is a collective based in young artist communities and also established in 2008, is a good example of autonomous organization. This practice does not emphasize, and even avoids, expressing any kind of standpoint or strategy. Despite the fact that the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou has served as the cradle for many of the most important artists since the 1980s, the art establishment there is still under development. For local young artists, there is a lack of support from the gallery/museum system. It was in this environment that Shao Yi and Zhang Liaoyuan decided to initiate self-organized exhibitions for young artists, which then became Small Productions. Although the simple goal of Small Productions was to stimulate the local art atmosphere, in reality, with a

44 “crazy” art market and stale, stereotyped gallery exhibitions, the project in fact developed an unconscious strategy: minimal costs, a relaxed attitude, frequent activity and the use of non-standard exhibition spaces. These came from “the limitations of resources that were available to maintain a creative state.”6 If we take Arrow Factory and Small Productions as examples of two typical states of consciousness and autonomy of self-organizations, then it is worthwhile to mention the similarities between them.

Zhao Liang, Middle Class Arrow Factory and Small Productions Angst, 2015, video installation. Courtesy of Arrow Factory, both present “smallness” and locality on Beijing. different levels. The former is a physically small space with a low budget that emphasizes its relationship with the local community; the latter produces “small” (casual, inexpensive, and quick) works and exhibitions while still maintaining Small Productions barbeque event, 2008. Courtesy of Small relevance to the local artist community Productions, Hangzhou. and ecosystem of art. This “smallness” and locality are formulated from a rethinking of institutionalization and a choice of strategy. Arrow Factory aims to counter “massive gallery spaces that have skewed artistic production towards quantity over quality” and “the ubiquitous presence of ‘white-box’ spaces which insist on prescribed encounters with contemporary art.” Their mission is “to present art in a context that reaches beyond the sanctified white-box setting of museums and galleries, seeking to bring artistic participation, exploration and experimentation up against the social and political realities of everyday life.”7 While their small space and low budget arise from limitations in resources, it does at the same time allow more flexibility in their operations. Small Productions, on the other hand, reflects the unhappiness and clarity with which young artists regard the gallery system, and especially their own reliance on relationships with traditional galleries. One of its founders, Zhang Liaoyuan, once asked, “If there weren’t any galleries in the world, would artists all have to stop working?”8 Small Productions is also very wary of institutionalization based on personal relationships. To avoid forming a small limited circle, their exhibition projects do not screen artists. Anyone interested can participate and any piece will be accepted, whether or not it constitutes a work of art or an exhibition. Anyone can borrow the concept of Small Productions, any artist can claim himself to be a member, and there is a conscious avoidance of making any conclusions or summations. This all enforces and protects the sense of pure autonomy, thereby distinguishing it from a rigid state of art production.9

Directed against the industrialization, monetization, and spectacularization of art, such self-organizations emphasize the sociality and localness of artistic practices (for example, Arrow Factory); directed against the gallery/ museum system, self-organizations emphasize the subjectivity and initiative of the artists (for example, Small Productions). Clearly, there is a rethinking of institutions and a critical consciousness behind these self-organized practices, which also constitute a strategic response. The aims of self- organizations thus vary with different contexts.

45 A Diaodui Collective, Arrow Factory Grotto, 2012, installation. Courtesy of Arrow Factory, Beijing.

Faced with the centralization of the Small Productions event, July 25, 2009. Courtesy of Small discursive power of art, an emphasis Productions, Hangzhou. on regional identity becomes the chief concern for many of these self-organizations. For example, Provincial Youth, Chongqing, borrows its name from the French cultural concept “la Province,” to put emphasis on the differences between the central and the local. Similarly, the name of the self-organization Yangtze River Space, Wuhan, also underlines its regional cultural context, as the name comes from a radical publication produced in Wuhan during the Cultural Revolution. The organizers of Yangtze River Space do not focus on political radicalness, but, rather, on a locality in terms of its cultural context.10 For these organizations, locality is not only embodied as regional identity, but also reflected in the way their art practices interact with society at large. For instance, projects by Art Praxis Space such as Kunshan—Under Construction and The Route to Mountain Liang constitute social research into the rural-urban areas around them; however, no ideological framework of urban/rural, modern/tradition, government/ people is established beforehand. These artists stress artistic intervention into specific social issues and the overall social fabric. This emphasis on locality is also apparent in interventions into specific social events, such as the Xia Jianqiang painting exhibition organized by Yangtze River Space.11 Although its involvement in social events was inevitable, the exhibition did not emphasize a specific political standpoint; instead, it resembled more a party thrown for friends and family.

In contrast, self-organizations based on social intervention often offer a response directed at social experience. The Cold Winter art project initiated by artists based in Beijing at the end of 2009 was a self-organized event countering a forced demolition of their studios the artists were facing. In 2010, the ‘Everybody’s East Lake’ project in Wuhan was directed against the violation of public environmental resources. This type of self-organization does not seek a kind of artistic subjectivity, but, rather, addresses public rights in the social realm. Art serves as a source of rhetorical power, and can effectively attract greater levels of social concern. A related issue is that as art becomes increasingly industrialized, art districts are slowly transforming from what was once simple artist communities to industrial developments

46 Left: He Chi, Next Door, 2016. Courtesy of Arrow Factory, Beijing. Right: Poster for Small Productions barbeque event, 2008. Courtesy of Small Productions, Hangzhou.

operated under government policy. Governmental power and real estate capital have predominance, and artists have gone from existing in a self- organized state to existing in a “being organized” state. This transformation is what underlies the formation of these artist-led self-organizations. On one side was pressure from within the art system, and on the other side was external social tension. Since 2008, the appearance of clear social conﬂict has demonstrated the desire for civil rights by society at large. As a part of the larger society, artists are also involved in these issues and events. They have no choice but to rethink the issue of “art’s intervention in society,” because on a certain level the social system has already intervened into art. Creating art is no longer the only method to practice art. Self-awareness and action towards the art system have become requirements of being contemporary. Within this context, the rethinking of institutions by these self-organized collectives has deeper connotations.

Provincial Youth, From Another impetus underlying "Self Identity" to " Cultural Sovereignty," public these self-organizations is often a performance, Chongqing, October 16, 2012. speciﬁc artistic medium or form. For example, LVXIAO focuses on cartoon art, and the Three Minutes Art Group (founded 2009) specializes in discussions and practices involving the moving image. Celebration is an experimental project focusing on performance art while the Nan Shan Painting Group (founded 2011) emphasizes issues related to painting. There are also many self- organizations with clear agendas related to the institutionalized art system. Video Bureau focuses on collecting and archiving video art ﬁles, and Floor #2 Press puts out contemporary art publications. The Youth Sale Store (founded 2009) offers an independently operated system for artists to sell their work. Golden Palm + Golden Razzies of the Year Award (founded 2009), organized by a group of young art critics, tackles the increasingly monopolized media discourse in the hopes of creating a more diverse space for public opinion.

The rethinking of the gallery/museum system is also embodied in the conscious decision to use outdoor and public spaces. Exhibitions such as Pride, Poetic Graces, and The End of the Earth organized by Xiong Huang

47 Group, Beijing (founded 2007), and Dragon Fountain Bathhouse curated by Forget Art—like Arrow Factory and Observation Society—were held in non-conventional spaces and represent the same desire to detach from industrialized art districts. There is also a conscious underlying institutional critique; in fact, Xiong Huang Group and Forget Art, Beijing (founded 2009) later organized separate events with this aim clearly in mind. For example, the exhibition Spring and Autumn inserted performances as an intervention into a gallery/museum exhibition, and Forget Art Fair was a parody of the standard art fair exhibition format.

While emphasizing the critical consciousness of these self-organizations, we must also not neglect the self-sufﬁciency that many of them embody. Even in the kind of self-sufﬁcient solitary play of the group A Diaodui (founded 2007), there is also an awareness of institutionalization and autonomy, and their practices can still be talked of in terms of this category of the rethinking of institutionalism. Liang Shuo, a member of A Diaodui has stated:

An artist must maintain a careful critical attitude towards the prevailing trends around him or her, rather than blindly following them. This attitude expresses a person’s free will and is appropriate, but when you insist on going against everyone else, it can fall into another kind of stereotype and that is not freedom. So I believe the core value of A Diaodui’s practice is “no obstacles in sight,” always adjusting and reacting to our surroundings. Nothing is worth adhering to.12

The key emphasis here is on independence, but this must be gained through continuous reﬂection. The anti-authoritarian attitude of many self- organizations is related to their awareness of the possibility of autonomy. For self-organizations, this conscious repudiation of institutions must confront the phenomenon of institutionalization itself, because it is precisely this institutionalization that centralizes discourse and power, and, as such, it has been the object of awareness and reﬂection in self-organized practices from the beginning.

Along the same lines, the self- Nan Shan Painting Group's In the Tree exhibition, 2011, organizations of recent years differ Chaoyang District, Beijing. from the art collectives that existed in mainland China around 1985. The collectives of the past demonstrated clear partisanship, with manifestoes and a “heroizing” of core members. They talked about a collective will, and, more importantly, the discourse revolved around the formation of a movement, popularizing a speciﬁc artistic idea and emphasizing its centrality. Gao Minglu’s summary speaks to this point: “The collectives of the ’85 movement were not merely a kind of organizational form, but also a spirit. They were like small-scale combat teams, each with

48 Video Bureau, Beijing, 2012. its own clear agenda and viewpoint.”13 There were a few leaders in different regions who essentially dominated each collective’s discourse, and they saw themselves as set apart from the general public. As Shu Qun put it, “We see ourselves as ‘supermen’ while calling the general public sheep.”14 A strong emphasis on centrality was also very common in these different collectives, especially in centralized exhibitions such as the Zhuhai Conference and the 1989 China/Avant-Garde exhibition. Huang Yongping once mocked the 1989 China/Avant-Garde exhibition by saying that a “swarm of art communities invaded Beijing, ﬁghting for fame.”15

Li Jinghu, Forest, 2012, In comparison to the 1980s, the self- installation view, Observation Society, Guangzhou. organizations that emerged after 2008 are much more relaxed. There is no emphasis on centralization, and even if someone serves as the founder or organizer, the importance of that role is not particularly emphasized. Institutionalized titles such as “curator” are avoided. These collectives also reject the idea of holistic artistic principals and resist establishing any. Their greatest difference from the collectives formed around 1985 is their anti-authoritarian nature and their lack of interest in precipitating a movement. Similarly, most of these groups do not base themselves on well-deﬁned art concepts, which is apparent in their often whimsical choice of names. For example, the name TOF is an abbreviation either for “Time of Flying” or for the group’s studio number 215 (Two One Five). The name 8mg comes from the tar content of a brand of cigarettes. The establishment of many of these groups was a response to the current exhibition system and its working methods, and embodied a strong sense of ﬂexibility. For example, the group GUEST spontaneously formed during a residency program presented by Organhaus Art Space; Cell Group was inspired by the organic organizational patterns of cell production; and the Big Project Group was established based on similar earlier collaborations. Their main thrust is the art projects themselves, with an emphasis on internal balance and collaboration rather than a prioritization of the individual. Furthermore, the members of Hexie Baroque purposefully keep themselves anonymous in an attempt to make such prioritization impossible and meaningless.

Although the self-organizations that formed after 2000 have mainly consisted of young artists with diverse focuses and targets, their organizational form is in general completely different from that of their immediate predecessors. The term “self-organization” in this new context implies two main points— namely, autonomy and collectivity—but the established systems and concepts that this autonomy faces are constantly in ﬂux, which is why the responses and aims, together with the nature and strategies of these groups, are always in a state of transformation. With this in mind, it is necessary to discuss further the connection between the transformation in the art historical background of this century and these self-organizational practices.

49 Left: Xiong Huang Group, poster for the project Pride, 2009. Courtesy of Xiong Huang Group, Beijing. Right: Xiong Huang Group, poster for the project Poetic Graces, 2009. Courtesy of Xiong Huang Group, Beijing.

A Rethinking of Institutions The contemporary art industry has been growing rapidly since the year 2000, coinciding with the younger generation of artists’ gradual transition from school to careers in the art world. Meanwhile, the Internet, which developed at the same time, has provided a powerful organizational platform and tool for communication. However, as was pointed out earlier, the phenomenon of self-organization does not apply only to young artists, nor is it new. Self-organization has been a common practice in contemporary Chinese art, and before the massive expansion of galleries and museums, almost all contemporary art exhibitions were realized through self-organized groups.

In fact, the art collectives that existed around 1985 were also formed by young artists.16 The ’85 New Wave Movement was referred to as the “Youth Art Movement,” and art collectives were called “youth art collectives.” The ofﬁcial name for what is now commonly called the Zhuhai Conference was The 1985 Young Artists’ Ideas Symposium and Slide Show. The age of the artists, however, was not the most important concern, nor was the proportion of young artists to older ones; instead, the key was the formation of a consciousness of autonomy. Young artists and critics at that time especially emphasized this kind of consciousness, even though this emphasis itself appeared as a kind of authoritarian demand. As Shu Qun states, recalling the process of organizing the Zhuhai Conference: “If we were to make the event happen, we had to place the authority in the hands of the young artists, otherwise it would have become a mess and wouldn’t have reﬂected the novel spirit of the ’85 Art Movement.”17 What artists of the 1985 era confronted was an establishment of an art system consisting of artist associations and art academies, as well as the similarly stale aesthetics and ideology underlying them. Since they only had a few art magazines of their own to rely on, their collective strategy naturally took the form of trying to initiate movements.

This collective strategy began to transform in the 1990s. The young artist Qiu Zhijie described the situation thus:

Art critics were very powerful in the Chinese art scene at the beginning of the 1990s. Artists sought the help of critics they trusted in times of difﬁculty, and the fame of a young artist also depended on the recognition of these critics. In 1992, art critics passed and published a convention establishing a fee-charging standard like that of a professional association. This document shows that it was widely believed that artistic creations had to be brought into the public discourse through critical reviews before being “introduced” into the art market.

50 This belief was the reason for the numerous Art Critic Nomination Exhibitions in the mid-1990s.18

Forget Art Fair, 2011, The discursive dominance of nine-square-meter standard exhibition booth, Linda these critics gave rise to Post-sense Gallery, Beijing. Courtesy of Forget Art, Beijing. Sensibility exhibitions, which can be seen as a self-organizational practice of young artists directed against the power of these critics. The focus of their objections quickly shifted from the dominance of critics to the epistemologization of art. Qiu Zhijie believes that the discursive power of critics lies precisely in this kind of epistemology. In this light, even within Post-sense Sensibility exhibitions and similar art experiments, the shift of power in the art ﬁeld was very apparent. Perhaps, as Qiu Zhijie suggested, it was “essentially a power struggle between artists and critics.”19 Ironically, what critics saw was another turnover of dominance in the ﬁeld:

The Art Critic Nomination Exhibitions tried to inﬂuence the development of contemporary art through a continuous use of a purely academic “collective criticism,” which also represented a kind of cultural ideal. In reality, it was difﬁcult to achieve an academic purity, and it was even harder to “persevere” in this work because the critical power still eventually ended up in the hands of those with money.20

If we were to look at the Art Critic Nomination Exhibition in the early 1990s as a self-organized practice, their inquiry was to a large extent directed at the surfacing capitalist powers. Their emphasis was hence placed on cultural ideals and academic purity. For artists, however, the rise of the art market gave them a kind of autonomy that was equivalent to critics’ authority. Nevertheless, it was not sufficient to solely depend on the market, which could lead to the danger of being assimilated by capitalist power. Therefore, art experiments in the contemporary art field that were initiated and organized by artists such as Post-sense Sensibility would naturally appear. Of course, the relations within Chinese contemporary art fields in the 1990s were far more complicated, and the above examples have been offered to indicate the fact that the content of the autonomic inquiry differs when seen from different perspectives. For example, the Post-sense Sensibility exhibitions did not only target the epistemologization of creation and criticism in contemporary Chinese art, but also attempted, as Qiu Zhijie pointed out, to construct a “Chinese art wave deeply rooted in local resources, but also with a global ambition.”21 From a globalized perspective, the aims of the Post-sense Sensibility exhibitions were no longer the autonomy of the role of the artist, but the autonomy of the cultural role of contemporary Chinese art itself.

The Chinese contemporary art ﬁeld went through an overall transformation after 2000, as contemporary art itself surfaced from its “underground” status. There was the construction and ﬂourishing of a contemporary art market system, the initial formation of the gallery and museum system, an increasing openness toward contemporary art in academic circles,

51 and a gradual acceptance in the general public and media. There was also increased support for the art industry on the part of the government and a ﬁrmer censorial hand as contemporary Chinese art began to take a more prominent role in the international art world. This transformation was in fact an integrated spectacle formed by political power, money, the media, and discourse. Once an art system and its discourse becomes part of the spectacle, the autonomy of art is deeply threatened, and, at the same time, objective criticism no longer holds validity. Artistic practices have to be carried out within a conscious rethinking of this institutionalization. Practices that lack this conscious reconsideration, regardless of their intention or position, inevitably become part of the spectacle.

Given this new understanding of the situation of the Chinese art world around 2000, it becomes clear that the self-organizational practices that arose after galleries and art museums dominated the contemporary art system are different from those that came before. It is also clear that the current generation of young artists now exists in a new environment. The demand for autonomy has gradually shifted its focus away from a public authority or collective and individual authority, and toward an abstract, anonymous, and institutionalized authority; that is, the domination of the spectacle itself. The specific expression of this domination is not an external or disciplinary pressure, but, rather, an invisible pressure internalized in ideas and practices. These self-organizations’ rethinking of institutions is thus present more as a form of internal autonomy and reflexivity rather than as an external critique. Given that, self-organizations are no longer just a substitution for and supplement to the gallery/museum system, nor are they a kind of dependent practice, an addition to the art ecosystem, or a makeshift measure taken by the disadvantaged. In fact, these self- organizations in and of themselves represent a self-sufficient practice, constructing an independent ecosystem that must not be overlooked.

For the generation of young artists who graduated around 2000, the contemporary art system they are facing has been slowly taking shape, putting them under a kind of institutional pressure. These young artists have therefore widely participated in self-organizational practices in reaction to this pressure, leading even some artists who already have steady collaborative relationships with galleries to continue to join these organizations. As Qiu Anxiong, the organizer of Museum of Unknown, once said, “When you form a self-organization, you withdraw from the role. That is to say, you are constructing an internally-motivated way to create art outside of the system.”22 The work of these self-organizations does not reject the idea of a gallery/museum system, though in reality the initiative displayed by self-organized collectives clearly differs from the “being organized” state in the gallery/museum system.

The rethinking of the increasingly rigid and stereotyped contemporary art system, the reaction towards a solidifying power system in the art world, and the push of powers outside of the system, all imply the appearance of introspective practices within contemporary Chinese art. In this sense, self-organizations have constructed a kind of space for self-reﬂection within contemporary Chinese art. More importantly, self-organization touches upon a core issue, namely that a critical consciousness within an

52 art system has become a prerequisite for current art practices. A so-called “contemporaneity” is possible only through a self-conscious critique of the mechanisms of production, circulation, consumption, and acceptance of art. In this sense, self-organizations constitute a new foundational practice.

This text was ﬁrst published in Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 1 No. 1, (March 2014).

Notes

1. Hou Hanru (2005), “Beyond: An Extraordinary Space of Experimentation for Modernization,” in Yichun Yan, Yin Liu, and Guangdong Museum of Art, eds., Beyond: An Extraordinary Space of Experimentation for Modernization—The Second Guangzhou Triennial (Guangzhou: Lingnan Fine Arts Publishing House), 37. 2. The participants in this edition of the Guangzhou Triennial were Art Commune (Hong Kong), Art River Loft (Kunming), Bizart (Shanghai), Alternativearchive (Guangzhou), Blue House Art Space (Chengdou), Borges Libreria Art Space (Guangzhou), Freecinema (Shenyang/Guangzhou), L’image (Guangzhou/Beijing), Long March Foundation (Beijing), Old Ladies House (Macau), Para Site (Hong Kong), 1A Art Space (Hong Kong), Videotage(Hong Kong), Loft345 (Guangzhou), RCM Art Museum(Nanjing), Red Sky Art Space (Haikou), Happenning Group (Hong Kong), Tank Art Space (Chongqing), Third Line Art Group (Guangzhou), Vis-à-Vis Art Lab (Xiamen), Vitamin Creative Space (Guangzhou), Jia Shen Fang (Guangzhou), and 21st Floor (Guangzhou). Among these, RCM Art Museum is a for-proﬁt institution and Tank Art Space is an art district within an art academy. Guangdong Art Museum (2005), "The Second Guangzhou Triennial: Self Organization," press release, November 18, 2005, available at http://www.gdmoa.org/gztriennial/second/self-cn/self-cn.htm. 3. Gao Minglu, Bawu Meishu Yundong/The ’85 Art Movement, Volume 2 (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2008), 9. 4. Lian Decheng, “What Do Alternative Spaces Alternate?,” Yanhuang Yishu/Dragon: An Art Monthly 44 (1993), 38–41. 5. Rania Ho, Wang Wei, and Pauline J. Yao, 3 Years: Arrow Factory (Beijing: Arrow Factory, and Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011). 6. Zhang Liaoyuan, “Small Productions, Don’t Stop,” press release for The 5th Small Productions Event, December 29, 2008, available at http://www.douban.com/group/topic/5000989/. 7. Pauline J. Yao, “Small is the New Big: the Arrow Factory,” Contemporary Art & Investment magazine blog, April 14, 2009, available at http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5eb0bc130100cpsp.html/. 8. Zhang Liaoyuan, “Small Productions, Don’t Stop,” press release for The 5th Small Productions Event. 9. Shao Yi and Shi Qing, “Budget Flexibility of Self-organization: Shao Yi and the Small Productions— Shao Yi in conversation with Shi Qing,” in Ruijun Shen and Cong He, eds., Pulse Reaction (Guangzhou: Times Museum, 2012), 130–36. 10. Gong Jian, “Regarding the Intentions and Goals of Yangtze River Space,” in Dong Bao, Dongdong Sun, Paula Tsai, Juan Guo, and Philip Tinari, eds., ON|OFF: Collective Practice in China 2002–2012 (Beijing: World Book Publishing Company, 2013), 264–66. 11. Xia Jianqiang is an 11-year-old boy whose father, Xia Junfeng, is a street vendor who was involved in the killing of two chengguan ofﬁcers, a case that has received wide attention from the general public since 2011. The exhibition Xia Jianqiang’s Drawings opened at the Yangtze River Space on August 20, 2011 and lasted for three days.

12. Liang Shuo, “Regarding Chen Zhiyong’s three viewpoints,” A Diaodui’s blog, November 15, 2007, “http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4d821ae101000bjz.html/.

13. Gao Minglu, Bawu Meishu Yundong/The ’85 Art Movement, Volume 2, 9.

14. Shu Qun, “Nothern art collectives and the ’85 Art Movement,” Contemporary Art and Investment, 14 (2008), 48. 15. Huang Yongping, “Huang Yongping in conversation with Shi Jian,” in Dawei Fei, ed., The ’85 New Wave Archives II (Shanghai: Century Publishing Group, Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2007), 27. 16. Gao Minglu, “The New Wave Art Movement and New Cultural Values,” Wenyi Yan jiu/Literature and Art Studies 6 (1988), 127. 17. Shu Qun, “Nothern art collectives and the ’85 Art Movement,” 50. 18. Qiu Zhijie, (2004), “A Traveller’s Guide in Purgatory," in Huangsheng Wang, Haohua Zhu, and Yue Jiang, eds., Yearbook of Guangdong Museum of Art 2004 (Macau: Macau Publishing House, 2004), 156. 19. Qiu Zhijie, “The Origin and Mission of Post-sense Sensibility,” Meiyuan 5 (2001), 2–5. 20. Jia Fangzhou (2003), “Power of Criticism: Perspective of Criticism and Role of Critics in the Evolution of Fine Arts,” Wenyi Yan jiu/Literature and Art Studies 5 (2003), 113. 21. Qiu Zhijie, “The Origin and Mission of Post-sense Sensibility,” 2–5. 22. Qiu Anxiong, and Shi Qing, “Budget ﬂexibility of self-organization: Shao Yi and the Small Productions—Qiu Anxiong in conversation with Shi Qing,” in Ruijun Shen and Cong He, eds., Pulse Reaction (Guangzhou: Times Museum, 2012), 141.

53 Julie Chun David Chau: In Deﬁance of Conventions

n just the past year, a formerly David Chau, President of Cc Foundation, Shanghai. Photo: unnoticed group within China’s art Mobe Ban Whu. Icommunity has achieved meteoric attention and media coverage. They are not artists or curators or even high profile museum directors. They are the new faction of a young (thirty-five and under) and affluently divested “artrepreneur,” a term applied to differentiate them from the older generation of discreet art collectors and to highlight the effects of their dramatic buying power for purchasing art in bulk.1 It’s almost impossible for these handful numbers of men to escape anyone’s attention as fodders for online and WeChat attention. They include the founders Adrian Cheng of chi K11 art museums in Hong Kong and mainland China, Lu Xun of Sifeng Art Museum in Nanjing, Lin Han of M Woods Museum in Beijing, and Chong Zhou of the Shanghai restaurant Le Petit Cochon Vert. They have been educated abroad and command full confidence to grant interviews in Mandarin and perfect English. They also possess a no-nonsense ability to put down significant sums of money with relative ease where no older collectors had usually dared.

David Chau belongs to this category of China’s new artrepreneurs. Helming disparate businesses such as a ﬂeet company and modeling agency as well as diverse contemporary art projects, David Chau is widely known for his support of Shanghai’s galleries and launching the annual Art 021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair (begun 2013). His Cc Foundation is the sponsor of the 2016 Yishu Awards for writing and curating on contemporary Chinese art.

Julie Chun: I’ve read a few interviews and accounts about you that are available on the Internet and I found that it seems there is only one legitimate interview you had given, which itself was quite short. And all other articles were just citing or making references to that interview. So can you please tell me a little bit about yourself?

David Chau: Yes, there are several accounts about me online where the facts and numbers are completely wrong. To begin, I was born in Shanghai but my parents went to Hong Kong after I was born. Before I was ﬁve years old, my grandparents on my mother’s side raised me. Then I moved to Hong Kong for about a year and lived with my aunt because my parents had

54 moved back to Shanghai. In Hong Kong, I attended preschool and began grade 1, and then I came back to Shanghai and attended a local school to complete grades 1 and 2 and then transferred to an international school in grade 3 and 4. In 1995, our family moved to Vancouver, Canada.

Julie Chun: Why Canada?

David Chau: Canada was a popular destination for Hong Kong ID and passport holders. At about that time there was the looming issue of Hong Kong being transferred back to mainland China, slated for 1997. So prior to the hand-over, many Hong Kong, Taiwanese, and Cantonese people moved to Canada. My parents couldn’t manage to stay in Vancouver because to them it was too boring, so they came back to Asia after a couple of months with my younger brother and sister who at the time were signiﬁcantly younger than me. I lived with my aunt in Vancouver through grades 5 and 6, and when I was just beginning grade 7, my parents wanted me to move back to Hong Kong to be with them. So I went to Hong Kong for another two years before I found my way back to Canada to attend boarding school.

Julie Chun: So you missed Canada?

David Chau: Yes, when I was much younger. Mostly because I had good memories of living in Vancouver and perhaps I wanted to go back to Canada because I wasn’t used to living with my parents. For most of my early childhood, I never really lived with my parents for more than about two years at one time.

Julie Chun: As you are recounting your childhood to me, the one obvious factor that emerges is that you must have had to mature quite early being displaced from your parents.

David Chau: I did. I had to move schools almost every two years, and I was traveling alone on an airplane since six years old. I’m used to being by myself. Because I moved around so much, I didn’t have stable sets of friends. I was good at making friends, but never really good ones. I adjust very well to different environments and am usually the guy that everyone likes. But I’m never able to open up myself to anybody, because that’s just the way I grew up, I guess. Maybe I don’t want myself to get too attached to people. That was why I usually surrounded myself with stuff that I liked and I had to find a lot of stuff that interested me. I like to read. I love stories— histories and novels. When I was much younger, I also read a lot of action and mystery stories. I collected first edition books of mysteries, novels, science fiction, and even comic books. I’m an expert in superhero comics. The movies have made them big but I’m really the expert on all things superhero. I amassed quite a collection of comic books and sports cards as a kid. I was attached to things and that became my hobby—collecting the things that I loved. Then I realized that it was only a matter of time before these books accrued in value. Some first edition books went from about one hundred dollars to three thousand dollars in one year.

Julie Chun: Did your parents spoil you with material goods because you lived far away from them?

55 David Chau: No. My parents never spoilt me. I had to make my own money.

I received my first stamps from my grandparents when I was five or six. Back in the early 1990s, stamp trading was the first market that opened up in China and not the stock market. Even Liu Yiqian [founder of the Long Museum in Shanghai] started off making money with stamp trading. He was a taxi driver and then he was a stamp trader. I believe everything is connected once you get into something. Collecting is something that is not just innate. It’s a process of collecting one thing and then moving into something else. Which is why I don’t believe art collecting happens overnight. If you have never collected anything, you cannot start collecting art and be really successful at it.

Collecting and business became my two main interests in life from early on. I became interested in sports cards when I moved to Canada because basketball and hockey and the sports culture are a big part of life there. When I moved to Hong Kong to attend international school, I realized there were many kids who also collected sports cards. I sold sports cards to the local boys in Hong Kong who had way more money than the kids in Canada. I was able to do a brisk business with my classmates. I was even featured in the newspaper when I was twelve for sports card trading and making good money from it.

Julie Chun: So what did you do with the money you earned as a youth?

David Chau: I took the money and invested more. As I mentioned, I like to read. I read a lot of business books early on. I read Rich Dad Poor Dad [by Robert T. Kiyosaki], which was a fairly easy book for an eleven-year old kid to read. Despite what people say about the book, it’s a good primer for business and investment.

Write ups say I made my early wealth selling sports cards on eBay, but we didn’t have the Internet in the 1995–96. I made a lot of money trading sports cards before eBay by going to card trade shows. In fact, it wasn’t until 1997 that I was on eBay selling sports cards. I tell people I am not an Internet start up entrepreneur but I was the ﬁrst Internet entrepreneur. Even to this day, I still believe the Internet is part of the business but it’s all about what you do as a business in using the Internet as a tool for achieving those business goals.

Julie Chun: Even from a young age, the idea that one can liquidate an object into a ﬁnancial asset seemed to have excited you.

David Chau: Yes, that excites me a lot, tremendously. I’m a pragmatic person. I have to admit the money part of what I collect really excites me. I admit I’m not a successful dealer, which is why I’m not an art dealer nor am I a book dealer. Nor do I take my money out of collectibles because I’m a bad investor. I can never part with the stuff that I really like at the right moment.

Julie Chun: Do you play the stock market?

56 David Chau: Actually, I don’t. I’m not a trader. The proﬁt excites me but everything I learned about myself through all my early experiences, I realized I am not a totally speculative person. But, at the same time, I’m not the kind of person who wants to be a museum collector. I’m kind of in-between because I cannot part with the art that I love. And the art that I am not interested in, I’m not a good seller because I cannot lie about its value. If I want to sell a work of art that I have, I will sell it right away. Or I sell it through the auction or I let the market decide its value but that’s not how one normally does art. One holds onto it and sells it with the right people at the right moment. One does exhibitions and provides value to product. I can’t do that. I can’t sell art if I don’t think it’s good for my friends or clients.

Julie Chun: I’m going to pull you back a bit. Let’s go back to Canada. Let’s go back to your university years. What was your undergraduate major in college?

David Chau: At the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, I studied classical Chinese art history.

Julie Chun: That’s curious because despite everything that led you to that point, why art history?

David Chau: I decided on my major in my second year and selected what I was interested in. I minored in philosophy and International Relations. I wanted to explore different things and many courses were intertwined. I applied in the end to be an art history major because I believe that in order to understand the contemporary art of today, you have to understand art history—its past and its connections between the East and West, how the two sides came together, merged, and separated again.

Julie Chun: Did you spend a lot of time in museums?

David Chau: Not initially. But in my second year of university, my art history professor was Tsao Hsingyuan. On my own I was studying the art market. I was evaluating the trends of contemporary Chinese art and recognized that its value was going up. That was around 2002–03 when Yue Minjun and Zhang Xiaogang’s work was making its ascent. I mentioned to Tsao Hsingyuan that I really wanted to study the market side, not just the academic side, of contemporary Chinese art. She was also interested in this idea because she had personal connections with many of the artists since she had graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. She introduced me to Zheng Shengtian. At the time, Tsao Hsingyuan was married to James Cahill. It was incredible to have scholars like them as mentors. Some of the students, including me, were able to go to Cahill’s house on the weekends to study with him. We had quite a bit of hands-on study time with him even though we were not his students because he was retired.

At that time, there was Huang Yongping’s exhibition in Vancouver and then Xu Bing’s. That was when I ﬁnally stepped into a museum—the Vancouver Art Gallery. Since Tsao Hsingyuan was friends with Xu Bing, she had her students help out at his exhibition with tasks such as translations and other odds and ends. That led me in and out of the museum.

57 It was the summer after I completed my second year of university, when I was nineteen, that I came back to Shanghai and began working at Hwas Gallery, which at the time was located in the Hongqiao area. Back then, there weren’t many contemporary art galleries. Hua Yuzhou, the owner of Hwas Gallery, was one of the original gallerists in Shanghai. He is the first generation of gallerists, having begun as a manager of J Gallery, just outside of the Jinjiang Hotel. Then Hua Yuzhou opened his own gallery in 1994 and 1995. He represented artists like Chen Yifei, whom I have deep respect for because he is probably one of the most important people in contemporary art in terms of pushing the market. Everything that we are doing now in the art business, such as branding and crossing over to film and media, Chen Yifei is the first to have done this. He also brought in the major collectors, including fostering Liu Yiqian. Chen Yifei served as a bridge between the artists and the collectors and helped many artists to sell their work.

That was my entry into the art world. I went to the auction house in the summer of 2003. I bought a work on paper by Wu Dayu, which was affordable back then, a couple thousand Hong Kong dollars. I like and respect Wu Dayu a lot.

Julie Chun: According to the WideWalls article “7 Young Art Collectors From China: A New Generation Of The Huge Chinese Art Market,”2 you possess around 150 pieces by Wu Dayu. Is this correct?

David Chau: That’s incorrect. No one has 150 pieces. I have about twenty works on paper and a couple of oil paintings, and that’s it. And I’m already one of the biggest collectors of Wu Dayu’s work. He only has about 120 oil paintings available that are left and about a thousand works on paper.

Julie Chun: So what was your role at Hwas Gallery?

David Chau: I was the director of Hwas Gallery and spent much time in Asia doing business with the galleries and the auction houses. Hua Yuzhou liked me because I took care of many aspects of the business. Eventually we became partners of Hwas gallery for about two or three years. Then I left because at a certain point, the direction wasn’t going the way I thought it should be going. But I cannot stress enough that Hua Yuzhou is a good dealer. Even to this day, he is still a good dealer. When I left, I didn’t want to be involved with galleries any more because I realized the only reason Hua Yuzhou and I were able to work together was because he is a great salesman and I am good at picking the artists and taking care of the curation side. But if I were to move on my own without him, I felt I couldn’t do it. Also, I had a much bigger goal. I wanted to make more money and do greater things. If you look at the things I do now, I’m never the type that follows. In 2008, the stock market crashed. That was when I started Metropolis International Leasing Co., Ltd., one of China’s largest ﬂeet management companies.

Julie Chun: So do the proceeds from Metropolis Leasing fund your art related endeavours?

David Chau: No, they remain separate. Metropolis is a company with about two hundred plus employees all over China and I have partners in this

58 business. I don’t want to be like other Chinese owners who use company money to fund their foundation. Metropolis has been growing since 2009. We started with one car and now we are up to two thousand cars and trucks. It’s been a good company.

Julie Chun: You have collected art works by some of the early twentieth century modernist masters. What is your selection process?

David Chau: I look for works that are undervalued, but in China there is too much cheap art because there are far too many fakes. You have to know what you’re buying. Ink paintings by Guan Liang were really inexpensive at that time. My market radar was on the ﬁrst generation of Chinese artists who were contemporary with Picasso and Matisse.

Julie Chun: Can you tell me a little more about your Cc Foundation?

David Chau: Cc Foundation is a non-profit multi-faceted art foundation that I privately fund. We support young contemporary artists and assist those with good ideas. I felt that there was a way to improve the foundation system. The Cc foundation supports commissioned works and curatorial projects. Most recently I launched “Space I,” an exhibition site [with a floor area of over 2,000 square meters] in Songjiang Art Zone and “Space II” [with a floor area of over 200 square meters] that will open in November of this year at M50 Art District in Shanghai.

Julie Chun: What does Cc stand for?

David Chau: It has many meanings. First of all, it’s the last name of my parents. Both are Chau or Zhou in Chinese. It also stands for “culture and community” of the Internet age. I want to support the creative development of emerging artists and promote the art practices of various media as well as the general working environment for professionals to develop a platform for the Chinese contemporary art industry that will have a global impact. The space serves multiple functions; from exhibitions, education, public programs, production, meetings, media platform, collections, and even entertainment.

Julie Chun: This sounds vaguely like what Adrian Cheng established with his K11 Art Foundation.

David Chau: Well, it’s totally different because for Cc Foundation, it’s not just art. It’s going to involve music, movies, clothing, and much more. I had this idea to bridge art with everyday culture back in 2005. I always say I don’t do things that don’t need me. I like to think that I am helping out this whole ecosystem of the art world. I do what I believe I should do. When I see someone pursuing with a passion or dream in the utmost crazy way, it doesn’t matter to me whether they are doctors or scientists or even a gardener, they are artists to me even though they are not necessarily making art. So art does not have to be solely visual or conceptual. It’s about the pursuit in the most sincere and passionate way. I like to surround myself with people who share my values and who understand me. Which is why I get along so well with Xu Zhen.

Julie Chun: I’m so glad you brought him up. Your partnership has always been a conundrum for me.

59 David Chau: It’s because he and I share the same values. We have a lot in common. We don’t operate according to the standards of the conventional art system. We have our own system. The value that I share with Xu Zhen is that we want more people to get to know contemporary art. We don’t want the art world to be a small circle. We didn’t like each other initially, for almost ten years, because we both possess a strong personality. But since 2005, we’ve been good buddies.

Julie Chun: Do you have any business partnership with Xu Zhen?

David Chau: The only project we collaborated on together was PIMO, which in Chinese means rookie or superﬁcial knowledge. It also means fur, but really it doesn’t mean much except that it sounds great. It’s an art company that does many things, but mostly developing and providing large amounts of contemporary art products and services. It is our shared endeavour to present contemporary art that is not impossible to comprehend and a way to simplify things and connect people to contemporary art. With PIMO, we never plan in advance. We do a “festival” when we see that the time and the projects are appropriate, and it’s executed rather quickly. The ﬁrst and second PIMO events were carried out in less than a month.

Many people may not be aware, but before I launched Art021 in 2013, Shanghai’s art scene was hardly thriving. You have no idea how many [Chinese] collectors bought their ﬁrst piece of Western art at Art021. We put our attention towards fostering Chinese collectors. Wang Wei [from Long Museum] still asks my opinion about each piece of Western art she buys. We haven’t made any money with Art021 because all the money goes back into fostering the collectors or buying art from the galleries that didn’t sell. Many of these collectors who purchased from Art021 then went onto Hong Kong Art Basel. I’m proud of laying this foundation [for mainland Chinese collectors]. Even the name 021 in Art021 is derived from the area code of Shanghai. It is by building the knowledge of art in local collectors at home that they will branch outward to the international art scene. And I want to stress that Art021 is not Art Basel because most of our selection of galleries are still Asian-based galleries—Korean, Japanese, and Chinese. We totally believe in supporting the local and Asian art scene and Asian collectors.

Julie Chun: What’s your future direction?

David Chau: I want to explore the essence of art—by that I mean how can art become music again. In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, art mattered to people’s lives. People cried when they saw a painting. They lived with art. Yes, they didn’t have other distractions like the movies and the Internet, which we have today, but they had poetry and literature. I’m interested in art that has this kind of essence, in locating the genuine.

Notes

1. Wealth-X, “China’s Millenial ‘Artrepreneurs’ Think Outside Of The White Cube,” http://www.wealthx. com/articles/2015/chinas-art-collecting-millennials-think-outside-of-the-white-cube/. 2. Lorenzo Pereira, “ 7 Young Art Collectors From China: A New Generation Of The Huge Chinese Art Market,” WideWalls, not dated, http://www.widewalls.ch/young-art-collectors-china/.

60 Michele Chan Notes from a Slaughterhouse: On Abjection, Movement, and Hong Kong Identity

Videotage, Cattle Depot Artist ostalgia is a curious sentiment to experience in a Village, Hong Kong. Courtesy of Videotage, Hong Kong. slaughterhouse—a site of designated carnage and cruelty Ncustomarily shunned by the public. In Hong Kong’s redeveloped Cattle Depot Artist Village, originally built in 1908 and functioning as a cattle quarantine and slaughter centre for nearly a century, the colonial red-bricked walls evoke an uncanny poetry of the derelict and the macabre. Housed within the Depot’s vine-covered tiles is thirty-year-old media art collective Videotage, one of the city’s ﬁrst and longest-running independent artist-run spaces, which recently hosted its 30th anniversary exhibition, No References: A Revisit of Hong Kong Video and Media Art from 1985, from May 19 to June 15, 2016.

As the city’s ﬁrst self-declared video and media art retrospective, No References posed a unique and challenging task given the increasingly

61 fraught political relations between Hong Kong and mainland China— not least, perhaps, for Beijing-based curator Su Wei. In a city known for its highly organized and publicized protest art,1 the exhibition exuded a refreshingly unassuming simplicity. Enclosed in humble and often personal micro-narratives, the works’ lack of any prescribed agenda opens up new possibilities of interpretation, remembering, and re-imagining. The result is a quiet, thoughtfully curated exhibition that invites, or indeed demands, an “inward” turn. Boldly eschewing the dazzling immersion and ultra- interactivity of fashionable new media and digital art shows today, No References gently yet insistently asked more of its audiences, imploring reﬂexivity and the awakening of deeper hungers, hopes, and fears.

Anchoring the show was a medley of works hailing from Videotage’s founding decade in the 1980s and 1990s. The single-channel Great Movement (1993–95/2016), a work by former Videotage director Ellen Pau, opened the exhibition with its simple wide sea panorama featuring a lone blinking lighthouse perched on the deserted precipice of Hong Kong’s southeastern peninsula. Created prior to the 1997 handover, and also using images appropriated from 1950s and 60s government news clips, Great Movement evokes multiple poignant narratives: nostalgia for the past; trepidation towards what is to come; and meditations on time, memory, and identity.

Ellen Pau, Great Movement, 1993–95/2016, video installation. Courtesy of the artist and Videotage, Hong Kong.

Ellen Pau’s artist statement alludes May Fung, A Letter to Mo, 1995, video, 25 mins. Courtesy offhandedly to 1997, observing that the of the artist and Videotage, Hong Kong. stalwart lighthouse “accompanied [Hong Kong] through the 1997 handover.”2 This is the closest No References comes to broaching the subject of Hong Kong’s complex relationship with its motherland, with Su Wei’s curatorial preferences favouring the personal over the political, and ambiguity over explicit rhetoric. Another early piece, May Fung’s A Letter to Mo (1995), or “A video letter to my friend about China,”3 as she writes in her artist statement, ventures bravely in the opposite direction by capturing candid documentary scenes of Yangtze River (Chang Jiang) boatmen heroically

62 battling mighty tides, and her work professes frank admiration and even affection for her neighbours to the north.

May Fung’s A Letter to Mo is juxtaposed with one of her more recent works. She Said Why Me (2016) is a hypnotic montage of a middle-aged woman (the artist herself) performing an eccentric pseudo-Tai Chi dance against various backdrops of contemporary Hong Kong. With unmoving feet rooted ﬁrmly to the ground, May Fung’s arm and upper body movements are stilted and laborious, her facial expressions focused and engrossed to a comical degree. As she loiters, stationary, front-and-centre, a shadow of her former self canters about in slow motion throughout an assortment of city tableaux: towering skyscrapers, parks, busy streets, and balding paddy ﬁelds. “She does not run amok in the city anymore,” she writes in her statement. “This was once her city, but now it is no longer hers. Did the city reject her, or did she reject it instead?”4

Left: May Fung, She Said Why Me, 2016, video, 10 mins., 46 secs. Courtesy of the artist and Videotage, Hong Kong. Right: Ip Yuk-yiu, Another Day of Depression in Kowloon, 2012, video, 15 mins., 50 secs. Courtesy of the artist and Videotage, Hong Kong.

May Fung’s question tugs at the heartstrings of a city long plagued by a crisis of identity and self-deﬁnition. She Said Why Me’s contrast of motionlessness versus movement, and, further, that of what appears to be fruitless movement within non-movement, teases out a chilling sensation of being hopelessly, irredeemably trapped. “She is not moving now, staying put,”5 May Fung declares in her statement—an observation that may well apply to Hong Kong’s entire troubled collective psyche. For all our demonstrations, high-proﬁle protests, and annual rallies and marches, are we actually moving forward or spinning in circles?

She Said Why Me evokes a hint of frustrated stagnation, especially when juxtaposed against the beguiling freedom and upwards-and-onwards movement expressed in May Fung’s earlier A Letter to Mo from two decades ago. This undercurrent of oppression and inertia builds as one progresses through the exhibition, where Jamsen Law’s Digesting Patience (2000) stars a couch potato methodically shoveling food into his mouth as he watches TV; Otto Li’s Soundtracking # John Cage 4’33” (2012) coagulates silence into an exquisite yet inanimate sculpture; and Ip Yuk-yiu’s Another Day of Depression in Kowloon (2012), a series of haunting digital portraits of Hong Kong refashioned from video game landscapes, features an abandoned city that appears lifeless and melancholic. A trace of wistful nostalgia prevails particularly in some of the more recent works, from Bryan Chung’s meditation on obsolete computer codes in 50. Shades of Grey (2015) to Solomon Yu’s reminiscing VHS tape archiving project Recording TV—A VHS Tape Collection Project (2015–present), heightening the sense of muted, contemplative stasis.

63 Otto Li, Soundtracking # John Cage 4'33," 2012, installation. Courtesy of the artist and Videotage, Hong Kong.

Left: Bryan Chung, 50. Shades of Grey, 2015, installation. Courtesy of the artist and Videotage, Hong Kong. Right: Solomon Yu, Recoding TV—A VHS Tape Collection Project, 2015–ongoing, installation. Courtesy of the artist and Videotage, Hong Kong.

What gradually emerges is an elusive yet potent internal struggle. The underlying sense of inertia in Su Wei’s selection of works by Hong Kong artists belies an invisible process of identity formation—one in which subjectivity is painstakingly constructed, consciously or otherwise, via alternative assimilation and rejection of historical, sociopolitical, and geographical narratives. Deliberately eschewing the grand pre- and post- handover chronology that frames and dominates traditional accounts of Hong Kong contemporary history, Su Wei delves deeper into the micro problematics that interweave individual lives, collective hopes and fears, and local artistic production. What he ﬁnds is a laboured resistance “against both singularity and universality,” as Su Wei puts it in his curatorial essay, or a schizophrenic back-and-forth between the acceptance (or ingestion, as per Law’s Digesting Patience)6 and refusal (or rejection, per Fung’s She Said Why Me)7 of externally prescribed norms and propaganda. We simultaneously seek comprehension and belonging as well as rupture and rebellion, with the opposing push-and-pull ultimately resulting in an apparent deadlock. Echoing Fung’s question: Did the city reject us, or did we reject it instead?

Rejection is, in fact, a fundamental aspect in the construction of selfhood and identity. For Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva, subjectivity and individuation is preceded by a state of abjection in which we separate ourselves from our mother—a literal and symbolic “rejection” of the maternal. As Kristeva herself puts it in her seminal essay Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, the abject is the state of “archaism of pre-objectal relationship [characterized by] the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be,”8 Prior to a child’s birth, the mother is not yet “object” distinguished by the child but “abject”: a liminal space that is at once self and other. Even after the initial separation of birth, the abject continues to manifest throughout a subject’s development in whatever disturbs, infringes, or encroaches upon its borders, identity, and meaning,9 exempliﬁed in the instinctive physical revulsion and disgust we experience upon encountering “border-

64 threatening” substances such as bodily ﬂuids, excretions and other unspeakable horrors.

Both Su Wei and Ellen Pau quote Kristeva’s Essay on Abjection in the No References exhibition catalogue, likening Great Movement’s lighthouse to local artistic and creative consciousness doomed to be forever vigilant against ever-invading seas. One wonders, however, whether either are aware of just how apt and fitting the Kristevian abject is in the context of the exhibition—firstly in light of the slaughterhouse setting, a place where gruesome animal innards, fluids, and waste are routinely cast off; and secondly in light of postcolonial Hong Kong’s conflicted maternal relationship with mainland China. As one wanders gingerly through the Cattle Depot’s grimy halls, whose renovated walls and floors are still want of whitewashing and carpeting, one’s musings on Hong Kong identity becomes particularly visceral and exigent. Almost two decades after Hong Kong’s return to its “mother”-land, what can be said of her seemingly futile efforts of resistance and self-constitution?

At this point, prompted perhaps by the seaward-looking beams emanating from Ellen Pau’s lighthouse, the nautical notion of le point vélique, put forth by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, comes to mind. Le point vélique is the very speciﬁc convergence point between the rival energies of wind and wave that allows a sail to quiver upright, motionless yet brimming with potential energy. Albeit stationary and unmoving, the critical moment of stillness prior to actual movement constitutes “a singular equipoise of intensities, a fertile comingling of immobility and movement, a still point that generates dynamic propulsion.”10 Such a powerful image awards meaning and even militancy to the exhibition’s ostensible inertia: for all her seemingly lackluster, futile, or even crippled movements, perhaps Hong Kong is set to take ﬂight.

What le point vélique highlights is the formidable agency in internal subjective resistance. The apparent lack of actual displacement stands witness to a productive impasse whereby the desire for self-constitution and autonomy faces looming forces of invasion and encroachment; again, the abject. There can be no acceleration without friction; in the same way, identity can only be constituted and strengthened through resistance to trials and threats. While the abject ostensibly manifests itself as a threat to identity; that is, a potential breakdown in the distinction between self and other, it is also, simultaneously, a critical “reminder of life itself”:11 it being the “ambiguous threshold both essential to and threatening of the tenuous individuation of the subject (emphasis supplied).”12 In other words the abject, and our instinctual rejection of it, enlivens a subject and afﬁrms its existence: the menace of the seas constitutes the watchfulness of the threatened lands; without sea there would be no vigilant lighthouse.

It is therefore argued that No References forges an alternative politics of potent internal resistance. The exhibition’s stillness effects a transformative slowing of time that demands introspection via silence and self-examination via external stasis. Genuine resistance does not need to be loud and two

65 Samson Young, Muted Situations #1: Muted Classical Quartet, 2014, video, 17 mins., 10 secs., and #2 Muted Lion Dance, 2014, video, 7 mins., 21 secs. Courtesy of the artist and Videotage, Hong Kong.

works by Samson Young that powerfully conclude the show most aptly demonstrate such a view. Screened side-by-side, Muted Situations #1: Muted Classical Quartet (2014) and #2: Muted Lion Dance (2014) feature, respectively, a string quartet performance and traditional Chinese lion dance in which the “dominant sound-producing constituents [are] suppressed,”13 per Samson Young’s artist statement. With the performances continuing “without a diminution in the energy normally exerted,” according to Young’s instructions, the silence of the muted melody, as well as the absence of the lion dance’s customarily bombastic drumbeats, effects an uncanny intensiﬁcation of emotions and energies.

With both silence and stillness, therefore, No References makes itself heard, deep in the entrails of a reincarnated slaughterhouse in Hong Kong. Samson Young’s artist statement is worth quoting in full:

The muting of sound layers does not translate into silence; nor does it equate to emptiness. Rather, the act of muting is an intensely focused re-imagination and re-construction of the auditory experience. It involves the conscious suppression of dominant voices as a way to uncover the unheard and the marginalized, or to reveal hitherto unconscious assumptions about hearing and sounding.14

Notes

1. For example, the Umbrella Movement, the pro-democracy political movement that arose spontaneously during the Hong Kong protests in fall 2014. 2. Ellen Pau, artist statement for Great Movement (1993-1995/2016 remake), in No References: A Revisit of Hong Kong Video and Media Art from 1985 (Hong Kong: Videotage, 2016), 32. 3. May Fung, artist statement for A Letter to Mo (2016). Ibid., 20. 4. Ibid., 20. 5. Ibid., 20. 6. Law’s artist statement explains that the work “explore[s] the subtle inner changes of a character during the consumption of food and visual imagery. By immersing audiences within the character’s physical and emotional state, the piece creates a three-dimensional metaphor for consumption and desire.” No References, 25. 7. Fung’s artist statement describes her own movements as thus: “She is not moving now, staying put, using her hands and body to push herself away.” No References, p. 20. 8. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 10. 9. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4. 10. Richard Kearny, “Bachelard and the Epiphanic Instant,” Philosophy Today no. 52 (2008), 39. 11. Cecilia Sjöholm, Kristeva and the Political (Hove: Psychology Press, 2005), 81. 12. S. K. Keltner, Kristeva: Thresholds (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 45. 13. Samson Young, artist statement for Muted Situations #1: Muted Classical Quartet (2014) and #2: Muted Lion Dance (2014). No References, 34–35. 14. Ibid., 34–35.

66 Julie Chun Alternative to Museums: Public and Independent Art Spaces in Shanghai

n recent years, the desire on the part of curators and artists to situate art in public spaces, providing unrestricted access for audiences Iand devoid of entry fees, arose in response and as a critique to the eruption of private museums in Shanghai, some of which were fostering an exclusive cultural status through private VIP openings and costly entry tickets. Thus, in Shanghai, it is not difficult to locate the multiplicity of temporary and permanent art venues sited in personal apartments, private centres, shopping malls, cafes, local basements, public parks, and even neighbourhoods marked for demolition. Yet the discourse about public art for determining who, or which institution or entity, should decide on what kind of art that should be presented and for whom it should be presented continues to be a vexing issue and remains mired in power relations involving favourable guanxi (relationship of reciprocity) as well as financial leveraging.1 China’s government-sponsored public art programs are managed by provincial or city officials with very little, if any, input from the general public for whom the art is supposed to serve. Moreover, self- serving and corporate sponsored promotional displays disguised as public art rarely offer critical insight. It has been two years since the publication of “Being Out There: The Challenges and Possibilities of Public Art in Shanghai” (2014), which presented the initial considerations that arose from my research.2 The text presented here picks up where I left off to investigate the recently established (or re-established) autonomous and independent sites that are striving to expand the cultural literacy of the local community. These sites warrant examination for acknowledging the disparate identities of the viewing public and for creating a common ground in negotiating the needs of artists, curators, and the public in the contemporary environment of Shanghai’s fast-changing society.

A brief recap of the public projects from my 2014 article demonstrates that peripheral and non-mainstream art are not immune to shifts. They also evolve over time within the urban discourse of transformations and disruptions. Due to abated funding, the Zhujiajiao Contemporary Public Art Exhibition was suspended after two iterations. Yet the notion of situating public art in a traditional Chinese water town must have had its poetic appeal, for it was strikingly recaptured at Wuzhen in the exhibition Utopias-Heterotopias (March 27 to June 26, 2016) on a grand scale by one of China’s veteran curators, Feng Boyi, who commands international respect and reach.

67 Due to the ever-present escalation of rent in Shanghai, Basement 6 Collective has had to move out of its former subterranean complex on Huashan Road to another basement that is more affordable a few blocks away on Pingwu Road. The current space is smaller in size, but the fervor and independent spirit of its founders, Anneliese Charek and Katy Roseland, remains undiminished. As for art in malls, Adrian Cheng’s well-funded K11 Art Foundation has increased its prominence by rebranding its initial free-entry K11 basement art museum as the slick and polished “chi K11 art museum” (chi is taken from Cheng’s Chinese name Cheng Chi Kong), collaborating with international foundations to mount exhibitions by European masters such as Claude Monet and Salvador Dali for which a single entry ticket price might reach as high as 120 yuan (about $18.00 USD).

Fortunately, not all free and accessible sites for art have succumbed to nonexistent status. The Jing’an Sculpture Park has received a greater torrent of foot trafﬁc thanks to the opening on April 19, 2015, of the newly constructed Shanghai Natural History Museum on its premises. The Shanghai Sculpture Space at Red Town has recently undergone a much-needed cleaning and restoration. The grassy knolls have been mowed for families to picnic, and many of the deteriorating sculptures, with the exception of Dai Yun’s brick Saloon Car (2010), have been removed and replaced with large-scale works that are in better condition. Stall #26, in the self-contained local alley market on Anshun Road, persists in its public engagement as Bazaar Compatible Program and is embarking on its sixth year of operation.

In the great urbanscape of Shanghai, the demise of sites for public art is countered in a positive way by the surge of independent and alternate art spaces. Funded predominantly through private sponsorship, some of these spaces are making signiﬁcant contributions to the art scene and the local community, oftentimes rivaling or surpassing the spectrum of what the newer, bigger, and better-funded private museums may have to offer when it comes to content quality and public programming. What and where are these sites in Shanghai? Who are the forces behind these smaller-scale albeit critical spaces for presenting art to the public? How exactly do these independent sites differ from Shanghai’s museums proper? Most importantly, in what ways are these independent art spaces surpassing the boundaries of conventional museums to add value in beneﬁtting the local community?

To locate the answers to these pressing questions, I will examine four such sites: MoCA Pavilion, Ray Art Center, Chronus Art Center, and am Art Space. Each of these independent sites in Shanghai is contributing, with high levels of success, in re-thinking the paradigm of the exhibition by pioneering unique modes of presentation and fostering vital inquiry into the discourse of contemporary art within Shanghai’s cultural realm. Similar to the conditions established in my 2014 article, the deﬁnition of “public” in the context of art will be conﬁned here to the simple criterion of open and unencumbered access that is devoid of any entrance fees and thereby truly made available to anyone. The term does not necessarily equate “public” art with government sponsorship because when China’s one-party state dictates the terms for public art, the results are often displays of quintessential nationalistic monuments and strategic placements of contemporary sculpture that advocate the political persuasion for collective harmony.

68 In this study, I have discovered that private funding of public art spaces did not necessarily lead to restrictive controls. Rather, the ideals for achieving alternate exhibition potentialities embraced by the supporting patron(s) have often resulted in greater degrees of creative liberty for curators and artists than when funded by the local or municipal government or corporations who would insist on a stronger voice and presence throughout each step of the exhibition-making process. I have also found that autonomy (that is, decision-making in the selection of artists and artworks, as well as curatorial strategies and public programs) at all four of these independent art sites is possible precisely because they tend to be smaller operations without complicated organizational hierarchies for reporting and approval, leading to greater degrees of efﬁciency. In the case of independent art spaces in Shanghai, small can be translated as big, perhaps not in terms of scale or namesake, but in the ability to open up possibilities for how contemporary art can be accessed by and communicated to the general public.

MoCA Pavilion: Pushing the Glass Ceiling “When the building ﬁnally becomes a part of the city, how the art affects one’s life is no longer limited to the physical ‘exhibition’ space. Rather, it’s how the museum as an institution lays the ground for a new culture of the city.”3 –Atelier Liu Yuyang

The forty-square-meter, two-sided glass cube located on the congested West Nanjing Road was the former gift shop of MoCA Shanghai. This space for commerce could not have been better selected, for it straddles the heavily frequented Starbucks and the entrance to Shanghai’s most iconic, and thereby touristic, landmark—the park at People’s Square. The MoCA Shanghai museum itself lies a short, ﬁve-minute walk through the meandering footpath of the park under a lush canopy of trees, directly across from an expansive lotus lily pond, near where many elderly retired men and women gather to play cards, smoke, chat, and linger. The gift shop was conceived as a marketing platform for announcing with posters and exhibition catalogues the current exhibition held at the museum, while artistic key chains, mugs, and other odds and ends proliferated on its shelves. Needless to say, the museum shop did not fare well; the overpriced commodities were too similar to the knick-knacks sold at half the cost in the nearby underground arcades of the People’s Square subway station, and the exhibition catalogues were overpriced for the occasional student or the retired elderly person who might wander in.

The ﬂedgling museum shop reimagined as a white (or in this case, glass) cube for art was the brainchild of Wang Weiwei, who has been a curator at MoCA Shanghai since 2010. In addition to her curatorial duties at the main space of the museum, Wang Weiwei assumed the responsibility of overseeing the direction and operation of MoCA Pavilion with one other full-time staff member, Shirley Zhu. Wang Weiwei is well respected in the domestic and international art industry despite the scrutiny that is constantly upon her. She is one of the rare in-house curators in Shanghai, where such a crucial position remains mystifyingly non-existent in many museums. Another point that sets Wang Weiwei apart is that she

69 has remained in her position for over six years in a city where most art professionals switch titles and hop from one art institution to another in a matter of mere months. Wang Weiwei specialized in Buddhist art at Fudan University and went onto receive her master’s degree in Art History and Archeology from Korea’s top-ranked Seoul National University. She is presently the only Chinese curator in Shanghai who, in addition to being ﬂuent in Mandarin, speaks, reads, and writes English and Korean ﬂuently.

MoCA Pavilion is fully supported and funded by MoCA Shanghai’s patron and director Samuel Kung. While there is an admission fee for the main space of the museum, the Pavilion is free of charge and holds longer opening hours daily from 10:00 am to 9:00 pm (the main museum operates from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm). When asked whether the impetus for MoCA Pavilion was prompted by concerns for public art, Wang Weiwei breaks into a quiet smile and states:

After the emergence Exterior view of MoCA Pavillion. Courtesy of MoCA of new private Pavilion, Shanghai. museums in Shanghai, there was much media attention heeded to these newly inaugurated art institutions, whereas MoCA had been operating since 2005. We were already eight years into having established our museum practice. In 2012–2013, we were in a far different position than the other newer museums. At that moment, I thought of si liang bo qian jin. It’s a Chinese phrase, which means to use a very small weight to achieve signiﬁcant results. I felt we had to ﬁnd our own unique way to keep in close contact with the art society and also the general museum audience. That was the beginning for me from where I conceived the MoCA Pavilion space.”4

The name MoCA Pavilion, or ting tai, referring to a small and pleasing architectural structure that stands outside the main building, has a positive connotation for Kung; he states he would like the people “to perceive it as an open, public gathering place.”5 In the middle of the bustling city, within the concrete jungle of skyscrapers, the Pavilion seeks to provide “a special space for people to communicate and for creative people to gather from all ﬁelds of art for experiment and interaction.”6

True to these words, the inaugural opening on April 14, 2015 commenced with the experimental dance and theatre exhibition The Maids in Enclave, directed by the artist Huang Fangling of a.f.art theatre Fangling (or a.f.art theatre 芳翎). The artistic efforts of Fangling prove important because she is one of the leading Chinese experimental artists striving to integrate art and theatre. Her artistic practice is focused on highlighting the drama that is often missing or subdued in Chinese works of art. While the theatre with its opera, speciﬁcally Beijing opera, embraces heightened drama and

70 theatrically, overt expression and sentimentality in the visual arts has not often been condoned in the historical tradition of the cultured literati scholar artists. Following the Cultural Revolution, Chinese avant-garde artists attempted to break conventions with performative art. Yet, until recent years, the genres of theatre and visual art continued to operate in isolation from one other. Huang Fangling’s practice is a bold interjection of intense dramatic tension and provocation to her conceptual performance art. a.f.art theatre Fangling, Maids The turnout on the rather frigid in Enclave, performance, April 15, 2015. Courtesy of MoCA evening of the second night’s Pavilion, Shanghai. performance on April 15, 2015, at 7:30 pm was overwhelming due to the attention generated by the prior evening’s performance. The ethereal light emanating from the glass box entranced passersby, who stood shoulder to shoulder with those who had made the journey expressly to witness this performance. At the heart of the production was a deeper interest, which, according to Huang Fangling, is “breaking down original plot structure and extracting elements [as] exhibition. I used the Theater of the Absurd to convey my ideas, with less story-telling but with stronger symbolic awareness and greater visual space.”7 When the real performance was not being enacted, the space of the MoCA Pavilion continued to display the staging of what was called “Pretend Rehearsals” and “Rehearsals” throughout the nearly three-week duration of the exhibition. The “Pretend Rehearsal” was a time for actors to freely and independently improvise in front of a live audience, while the “Rehearsals” were true practice sessions in preparation for the various evening’s staged performances. By inserting the fragmented actions of the “pretending,” each day’s rehearsal would defy the systematic sameness by incorporating elements of surprise and inconsistency. For Fangling, the space of the MoCA Pavilion served as a site more intriguing than a traditional proscenium theatre that spatially divides the actors from the audience. The glass-encased space of MoCA Pavilion had the effect of drawing the spectators right up to the performers, with some even pressing their faces against the glass wall. It created an invisible barrier that elicited greater voyeuristic excitement and imagination by eliminating the physical parameters of who was being watched by whom.

Immensely introspective, Wang Weiwei is constantly in review-mode, even as events are unfolding before her. She is also meticulous about mentally collecting and evaluating comments about the Pavilion’s exhibitions from art industry insiders, her staff, and general audiences. She knows the exact minute details of the ﬁfteen exhibitions that transpired in the Pavilion because she is present for the launch of each event. She recalls that the exhibition that drew the largest crowd was Faith, Courage, Three Pounds of Flax, a series of live performances by artists Gao Mingyan and Wang Yiquan (July 1 to 19, 2015), and the exhibition that the general audiences liked the least was Love in the Park by Wu Jiayin, Xujie and Wei Bozhi (July 23 to August 9, 2015) that was presented in collaboration with the Ray Art Center. The reason for the general disdain from the public is likely due to the sharp

71 social commentary at the core of Love in the Park. Through the effective employment of humour, the exhibition critiques the tensions surrounding the outdated, yet still ensuing, custom of China’s older generation arranging marriages for the younger generation. The Pavilion was set up as a site of a pseudo wedding photo studio, complete with a rental wedding gown, and it mirrored, while parodying, the reality of the matchmaking antics that take place every weekend at People’s Park just around the corner from the Pavilion. The exhibition lays bare the bitter wounds of high divorce rates resulting from love-less marriages, as well as the demeaning status of Chinese single women as “leftover women” applied to those who make the decision to choose career over marriage. These are indeed socially and politically sensitive topics that would incur government censorship if presented within the larger public or private museums, but was made possible at the Pavilion due to the advantage of its short exhibition duration and clever employment of wit and parody.

For the succeeding year, with a wider selection of projects to consider (exhibitions are not by submission but by invitation from Wang Weiwei), Wang Weiwei made some modiﬁcations for future planning. She notes:

For the exhibitions in 2016, the direction of the MoCA Pavilion projects is planned to be more subtle. Since last year, I began thinking about the notion of “into the time frame” and selected artists whose artwork focused on projected images, whether it was drawings or layered images upon the large glass windows of the Pavilion. At the beginning of the ﬁrst year, my attention wasn’t so much concerned with the ideals of public art, but my views have shifted since working on the Pavilion. I began to develop a greater concern for involving the public directly so that the passersby will want to enter, rather than just gaze from the outside. Therefore, I selected the artists who could create a vision for the public with their projects. You can call it a public visual landscape for the audience. It’s about taking the passive experience and translating it as an active experience when someone actually walks into the space of the Pavilion. For example, engagement with works of art does not necessarily have to have an interactive component. If the concept and the space is well used, I believe the audiences can have an in-touch experience with the work of art, and maybe they will feel the connectivity because of that.

As in the year past, MoCA Pavilion will continue its collaboration with several entities. In 2015, it joined forces and even shared production costs with the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia in Shanghai, Tanzlabor 21 at Kunstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, Daegu Art Museum in South Korea, and numerous art and culture support agencies in Shanghai such as the Consulate General of France, the Korean Cultural Center, Art World journal, and the Art in the City art fair. The second year’s roster also includes projects and exhibitions with greater attention to academic rigour by inviting scholars such as Jing (Adel) Wang, Associate

72 Left: MoCA Pavilion exterior view of installation by Kang Heng. Photo: Yinlan Lu. Courtesy of the artist and Yinlan Lu Middle: Wu Jiayin, Xujie, and Wei Bozhi, Love in the Park, July 23–August 9, 2015. Collaboration between MoCA Pavilion and Ray Art Center. Courtesy of MoCA Pavilion, Shanghai. Right: Gao Mingyan and Wang Yiquan, Faith, Courage, Three Professor from the College of Media and International Culture at Zhejiang Pounds of Flax, performance, July 10, 2015. Courtesy of University, Hangzhou, to guest curate the opening and closing exhibitions MoCA Pavilion, Shanghai. for the 2016 MoCA Pavilion calendar year, which began in February 2016 and will last until March 2017. Thirteen exhibition projects are slated, and to encourage continuing international cooperation, the Pavilion will be collaborating with the Japan Foundation as well as continue its support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia artists in residence at Shanghai for them to hold solo exhibitions at the Pavilion.

Wang Weiwei also oversees the public education programs (planned in conjunction with the main museum’s public programs organized by Charlie Wang) so that the forums complement each exhibition with diverse offerings ranging from children’s workshops, bi-lingual art lectures in Mandarin and English (and even in other foreign languages such as Japanese and French), and ﬁlm screenings that are always open to all and free of charge (with the exception of workshop material fees) in order to promote inclusion of the general public. The response has been enthusiastic with attendance ranging at each program from about thirty to over one hundred attendees of all ages from various socioeconomic classes. With MoCA’s prime central location, the general public need not go out of one’s way and can conveniently stop by to experience the changing exhibitions during lunch or coffee breaks or on the way home to the subway station. Most exhibitions do not require prolonged periods of attention from the viewer but serve as a refreshing and much-needed cultural antidote, especially to those who may be uninterested or too busy to go out of their way to literally pay a visit to a conventional art museum.

MoCA Shanghai, the main museum, faces greater oversight for the approval and execution of exhibitions than the Pavilion in the decision-making process due to its bigger budgets and the higher risk to its reputation in the success or failure of an exhibition. While the Pavilion must also receive the stamp of approval from the Director Samuel Kung and Deputy Director Joe Zhou and official sanction from Shanghai’s government bureau, Wang Weiwei, having demonstrated keen insight and loyalty to the institution, is given far greater autonomy with MoCA Pavilion than most curators who work on public arts projects in North America or Europe. With projects and exhibitions that seek the inclusion, participation, and education of the public, MoCA Pavilion has managed to push the limits of the glass ceiling to redefine how a bit of creative experimentation can dismantle the stagnant framework of rigid and stratified institutional constraints to provide a welcoming site for art to Shanghai’s local community and to Chinese and international artists who may not be invited by larger private museums to exhibit their offerings.

73 am Art Space : “Room for Introspection” for Artists by Artists “Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know.”8 –Walter Benjamin

Despite the significant presence of am Art Space. Photo: Julie Chun. artists residing in Shanghai, there is a dearth of artist-run spaces. Yes, there is the busy Basement 6 Collective. The founders are, however, not local Chinese but Americans who arrived in Shanghai with a cultural awareness of the importance of artist collectives and communities. As Americans, they were exposed to the long history and legacy of empowering artists through solidarity that has its roots reaching back to the 1960s.9 To note, the current lack of local artist-run spaces is not to claim that China suffers from an absence of strong organizations composed of artists. The literati circles served as a constant source of inspiration, support, and even constructive critique among calligraphers and painters throughout China’s long history. Even now, the stronghold of the China Artists Association is, by far, the longest enduring, the most prestigious, and the largest government-supported artist collective in China. But such official organizations are managed by the Central Committee Publicity Department and fall under the auspices of the Communist Party of the Central Committee.10 The state bureaucrats would not likely condone flagrant expressions of artistic individualism or potentially contentious views that deviate from authorized standards and views. It was precisely because the artist collectives at the national and provincial levels were so tightly held in check that many of the artists from the ’85 New Wave Movement felt compelled to adopt their own stance with the informal formations of artists’ groups throughout China. According to art historian Gao Minglu, Chinese artists in the 1980s formed their own societies because it allowed them to pool finances to share the burden of exhibition costs, provide a unified support structure, and diffuse the blame that might otherwise be placed on a single artist when an exhibition was censored or condemned.11

Founded in 2008 by the Shanghai artist Yu Ji and her partner Lam Deng, am Art Space—the name is derived from a.m. or morning art space—exists as a true artists’ space for artists by artists. Originally on 6 Xiangshan Road, the space moved to its current site in 2011, an underground “white cube” located city-centre on 50B Fengxian Road near the hectic shopping district of West Nanjing Road. The clean, well-kept space has an illustrious history. The building was constructed between 1932 and 1935 and was called the Carter Apartments for being located on Carter Road, the name given to the street during the British Concession era.12 The apartment, which once housed the British senior ofﬁcials of the police department, was considered one of the ﬁrst modern complexes in Shanghai because it had a built-in

74 elevator.13 The ground floor serves as the working office for Lam Deng’s graphic design practice and doubles as an administrative office for am Art Space. A slender Art Deco metal handrail, reputed to be over ninety years old, guides the viewers down the flight of stairs to the main exhibition space, which is approximately one hundred square meters. The current space has been prodigiously utilized over the past five years, having been the site of thirty-seven exhibitions as of August 2016. With limited resources and with only one part-time staff member aside from the two founders, am Art Space has not only managed to support diverse artist-run exhibition projects but, since 2010, has surprisingly sustained an artist residency program for international applicants. Previous exhibitions have ranged from solo exhibitions by Dutch light artist Peter Vink, Swedish conceptual artist Anastasia Ax, British graphic artist Hugo Dalton, and French design and video artist Cyril Galmiche, to name but a few. These are not the names of high-profile, commercially renowned artists, but they do exemplify the great majority of artists today who are developing and expanding their individual practices, much like the local artists in China whom am Art Space also firmly supports. Another unique characteristic of am Art Space is that it is one of the exceptionally rare exhibition sites in Shanghai that encourages artist-curated shows. While slowly changing, the categorical distinction attributed to professions in China discourages artists from curating their own solo or group exhibitions. The guiding mission for such unconventional vision is clearly articulated in am Art Space’s statement, which emphasizes:

As a self-organized, independent organization, am Art Space exists outside of the traditional art system and commercial models, making it an autonomous, alternative form. In this increasingly regularized contemporary art system, we need the ability to examine and reﬂect on the current situation from other perspectives, and spaces for the body to engage in broader, freer creation and utilization. Our aim is to use the best of our limited abilities to support, promote and protect those experimental values and discussed values, and to effectively put them into action. We raise questions, not answers.14

Indeed, am Art Space has been an incubator for marginalized experimental art that seeks to disrupt and critique the existing art system, not only in Shanghai, but more broadly, in China. The compelling and notable endeavours by artists who have exhibited their projects at am Art Space owe their prompting and inspiration to artist Yu Ji, who maintains an arm’s-length distance from the spotlight. Born in Shanghai, Yu Ji graduated in 2011 from the Shanghai University Fine Arts College with a master’s degree in sculpture. Her artistic practice focuses on building a new vocabulary for contemporary sculpture, which occupies an unjustiﬁably under-appreciated position in Chinese art history. Working quietly and refusing to promote herself on the ever-popular social media platform of WeChat, Yu Ji is more interested in exploring the subjective nature of space and its relational dimensions and the ways an object can respond to its natural and artiﬁcial environment.

75 Her detached stance from the Yu Ji, Unmanageable— Towards the Opposite Stage, frenetic Shanghai art scene has 2016. Courtesy of am Art Space. caused important collectors and curators to take notice. To date, her sculptures are the only ones by a young (under thirty-five years old) female Chinese contemporary artist in the collection of the Yuz Foundation, which is known for its varied collection of wide-ranging pieces by predominantly male international and Chinese artists. She is also one of only five artists selected from mainland China by Maria Lind for the 2016 Gwangju Biennale in South Korea. Despite her objective gaze at the world, Yu Ji is well-regarded within the Shanghai art community by both young and old colleagues. Even though she was one of the founders of am Art Space, of those thirty-seven exhibitions held from 2011 to 2016, Yu Ji has participated in just four exhibitions, three which were with other artists. In fact, her solo exhibition Unmanageable—Towards the Opposite Stage (2016) was the only exhibition in am Art Space’s history that had no opening. The duration was also the shortest, lasting a mere fourteen days, when other exhibitions usually run their course from four to six weeks, at minimum, to two and half months at most. Her solo exhibition also conformed to the mission statement, for it was not about the final arrangement of objects on display but about the experimental process in which Yu Ji was still working through her current ideas. As such, the installation Towards the Opposite Stage (2016) that was on view resembled an expansive artist studio.

Yu Ji’s shift away from highlighting herself and her art runs counter to the current culture of narcissism prevalent in the contemporary art world. An academic study entitled “Narcissism and Art Market Performance” by Yi Zhou, a professor at Florida State University, afﬁrms that there is a direct correlation between the degree to which artists are ego-driven and the success of their work in the art market.15 Yet it is precisely her quiet and discreet resistance to conforming to mainstream mayhem and her desire to support projects by fellow artists who share her vision that has contributed to the sustaining success of am Art Space as a necessary and relevant site for art in Shanghai.

Consequently, am Art Space has Kai Tuchmann and Grass Stage, The Refuse, also been a meaningful crucible for performance, October 9 and 10, 2016. Courtesy of am Art showcasing experiential sound and Space. performance art. It hosted, from September 1 to November 1, 2015, Kai Tuchmann, a German theatre director from Berlin who in 2013 had taught at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing. Tuchmann’s 2015 artist residency culminated in The Refuse, a two-evening performance on October 9 and 10 at am Art Space in which Tuchmann collaborated with Grass Stage, an experimental Chinese “fringe theatre” formed in 2005 by Zhao Chuan. For Tuchmann, the theatre is not a site for mere ﬁctional drama, but, rather, what he calls a “documentary theatre” where alternative histories can be examined. As such, the script

76 was not written by one person but by the various actors involved who collaborated with the director in an effort to offer a pluralistic and alternative narrative to familiar historical accounts.

Sheng Jie and A Ming, Shanghai’s leading sound artists Yan Windowless Scenery, December 26, 2016. Courtesy Jun, Zhao Junyuan and Mai Mai have of am Art Space. also participated at am Art Space respectively to curate sound-based installations as the content of their exhibitions. Moreover, throughout 2015, am Art Space hosted a series called Windowless Scenery that promoted the role of noise and sound and music as key components of “inward” watching and listening in art.16 Working in close association with established and emerging artists, the experimental sessions have been drawing large scores of local and foreign audiences, indicating the growing awareness of and interest in sound art in China.

On April 9, 2016, I attended the sixth edition of the Windowless Scenery series, entitled The Prophet in Concrete: A Research of the Soundscape from the City in Pipelines, by the artist Xu Cheng. There were twenty-six people in attendance, including the artist. The doors were shut, and the audience sat on plastic folding chairs for an hour and half in absolute darkness during which time not one person left the premises. No visuals could be detected except the faint blue glimmer emanating from the electronic keyboard that was being manipulated by the artist. A compilation of sounds and noise in “10 Parts” ranged from children’s voices at a park to dogs barking. Certain sequences were infused with robotic sounds, and at one point, there was a distinct methodical tapping that resembled Morse Code. Screeches merged with the howling of the wind, which were interspersed with human voices bearing a distinctive Beijing accent that monotonously enunciated what seemed to be an audio tutorial for learning Mandarin. During the presentation of what I would deem “compositions in the dark,” there came the realization that many of the familiar sounds that we usually come in contact with on a daily basis are radically displaced in darkness. The fragments of a cackling broken record, the sonar call of whales, the clash of swords, and jingling bells were at times hypnotic, lulling me into an afternoon doze. Then came a loud reawakening of my senses as the entire loop was played backwards. These divergent and often contradictory sounds seemed to serve as a metaphor for the complex tensions faced by humans during times of conflict. For the final ending, the sounds of the signified and signifier seemed to be wandering in circular gestures, hinted at by the sound of a parent repeatedly calling out a child’s name while the child kept echoing his own name.

The recognition garnered by am Art Space as a site for non-mainstream art reached one of the foreign diplomatic ofﬁces in Shanghai. In 2014, the Department of Culture and Education of the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany decided to partner with am Art Space to initiate a cultural exchange of annual two-month art residencies for

77 German artists. Increases in funding and visibility through high-proﬁle sponsorship such as this will no doubt bring greater attention to am Art Space and, it might be hoped, inspire future artist-run project sites in Shanghai that will beneﬁt artists and the local community.

In the non-contingent territory of Seminar on how to apply for international artist residency am Art Space, most artworks are programs, April 26, 2016. Courtesy of am Art Space. subjected to a set of demands and desires that are not the same as those that might arise if they were presented in a commercial gallery or a large institutional museum. The cultural message that is being relayed here is noticeably different from the artistic displays that are fast becoming sights of spectacle, the new standard of norm in many exhibitions at Shanghai’s private museums. The collaborative studio Random International’s physically massive Rain Room, on a world tour that made its stop at the Yuz Museum in Shanghai (September 1, 2015 to January 3, 2016), would never “fit,” literally or figuratively, within the confines of am Art Space. This is true not only in respect to size, but the concept of what the Los Angeles Times has declared “brainless amusement” would fail to align with the core vision of am Art Space.17

With such bigger and shinier pretenses disguised as “art” and the powerful allure of the spectacle dominating museum exhibition halls, the art world that was speculated to be exclusive is now becoming conﬁrmed as so in China with privileged entry to openings and exclusive dinners becoming fodder for boasting one’s entitled status on WeChat. The desire for replicating the culture of the West in China has also resulted in a glut of some world-renowned artists monopolizing exhibitions in simultaneity. Olafur Eliasson was featured at the Utopias-Heterotopias exhibition in Wuzhen (March 27 to June 26, 2016) in parallel with his solo exhibition at the Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai (March 20 to June 26, 2016). The month of June 2016 was also an unprecedented Isaac Julien month, with three of his works installed at three major and separate Shanghai museums.18 Despite Jeff Koon’s ultra celebrity status, it is doubtful that even he has had such multiple canonizations in a major city, in China or elsewhere.Of course, the desire to exhibit the works by these global premier artists rests on the proven quality of their art, but are Shanghai museums so sorely lacking in curatorial and conceptual creativity that such high-proﬁle showcases must occur at a rate of feast or famine?

Operating on the smallest budget of the four independent art spaces presented in this article has not hindered am Art Spaces’s careful selection of experimental projects—especially those that strive for deeper exploration of art’s medium and in fulﬁlling the “Five Cs” of concept, construct, content, context, and criticality.19 Perhaps, in the near or distant future, am Art Space will evolve like Para Site, a stronghold artist-run space in Hong Kong founded in 1996, which has itself been reinterpreted over the decades as a prestigious and better-funded independent site “aimed at forging a critical understanding of local and international phenomenon in art and society.”20 In the meantime, Lam and Jam (Yu Ji’s nickname) aren’t planning

78 to go anywhere. Raising two stray cats in the ofﬁce, they currently have their hands full seeking out art that strives for modes of assessment rather than modes of display as they continue their efforts to support unique and non- mainstream projects proposed by their fellow artists.

Ray Art Center: Reconﬁgurations “We do not know, and may never know with certainty, the ultimate equation that will explain all electromagnetic and gravitational phenomena; but we do know that people act to achieve goals.”21 –Murray N. Rothbard

Ray Art Center (RAC) was founded in 2008 to meet a perceived need. Despite the culture of excess that was fast encroaching upon Shanghai, the city lacked a dedicated site that focused on the research and exhibition of photo-based art. The working relationship of the Ray Art Center founder Xiao Rui and the director Shi Hantao hinges on their passion for expanding the knowledge of contemporary photography in China. Having met in 2000, the two joined forces in 2002 to open Origin Gallery, the first to promote photography and video works in Shanghai.22 Six years later, in 2008, the gallery redirected its attention to promoting the research and critical inquiry of photographic art with the launch of the website Ray View and Point, which in 2013 was renamed Ray Sight—an online repository for information and knowledge sharing of influential writings pertaining to the historical and theoretical discourses on photography. In addition, Shi Hantao’s careful selections of Chinese essays, Western reviews and case studies of photography from Europe and North America were translated for the first time into Mandarin for the benefit of students and local readership. By the end of 2015, hundreds of articles and translations had been published on Ray Sight.

In 2014, Xiao Rui was able to secure a working space within the Sport Loft complex near the Hongkou Football Stadium in the northeast district of Shanghai, wherein RAC became fully instituted as a non-profit with a space to mount exhibitions. Xiao Rui provides the financial backing derived from his firm Shanghai Ray Investment Management Co. Ltd., while Shi Hantao oversees the curatorial duties and the management of RAC as the Executive Director, assisted by the Deputy Executive Director Gong Siyue. RAC is also supported in academic advising by Gu Zheng of Fudan University and Lin Lu of Shanghai Normal University. As stated on the RAC website, the three-fold mission of RAC is straightforward: “to support [the] research into the history and theories of photography in China, to sponsor practices of contemporary photography, and to increase public awareness of photography and contemporary visual culture.”23 Employing two full-time staff members in addition to Shi Hantao and Gong Siyue, RAC is further organized into the following undertakings to carry out its mission.

Ray Space is the thirty-square-meter “case study platform exhibiting the latest projects and alternative practices of photographers and artists.”24 It has an adjoining administrative ofﬁce and the Reading Corner, a small library that provides free access to the general public of the centre’s collection of photography catalogues, books, journals, and even handmade books by

79 artists. The inaugural event at Ray Exhibition opening of REAL-LY, Ray Art Center, May 25, 2014. Space was the group exhibition Courtesy of Ray Art Center, Shanghai. REAL-LY (May 25 to July 27, 2014), featuring works by a mix of thirty Chinese and international artists. Shi Hantao, who served as the exhibition’s curator, asked each of the participants to contribute an “atypical” photograph. Many who participated were specialists in the ﬁeld of documentary, news, or journalistic photography. The rest were from diverse professional backgrounds ranging from curators, news editors, advertising executives, critics, and academics. The eclectic compilation of photos sought to examine the notion of veracity and the distinction of truth attributed to photographs in China’s Internet age of Photoshop and CGI manipulations. The title REAL-LY represented the conjunction of two words (real and really) to rhetorically question the double meaning of reality, which in and of itself is a construction.

Since its 2014 opening, RAC has Patrick Wack, artist talk at Ray Pub, November 28, 2015. produced only five exhibitions and Courtesy of Ray Art Center, Shanghai. two off-site collaborative projects.25 This number pales in comparison to the output of exhibitions at MoCA Pavilion and am Art Space. Yet there are several reasons for this. All the exhibitions at RAC are longer in duration, lasting up to two to three months with significant gaps in between dedicated to extensive research, not only in planning and execution, but also for its supplemental programs that encompass public lectures, artist talks, workshops, and film screenings. The distinguishing feature of RAC is that its ancillary events are quite extensive and requires careful coordination. In the short span of one year in 2015, RAC hosted sixty-six exhibition-related public programs with a total attendance ranging about 3,000 people.26

Left and Right: Ray Chat on Campus, 2014. Courtesy of Ray Art Center, Shanghai.

The numbers of public programs and attendances are impressive, mostly because some of the larger private museums in Shanghai do not come close to RAC’s numbers. A majority of RAC’s public programs are held in the space of Ray Pub located two doors down from Ray Space. The site of the Ray Pub was acquired in early 2015, about a year after the opening of Ray Space. The vast multipurpose room has been the locality of both organized and spontaneous discussions on a host of topics under the series called Ray Chat vis-à-vis. In addition to Ray Chat vis-à-vis, another series, called Ray Chat on Campus Program consists of collaborations with academic institutions to offer seminars, panel discussions, and forums that take place

80 at Fudan University in Shanghai, Nanjing University, Xiamen University, Shenzhen University, Yunnan University, and many others. These campus lectures are speciﬁcally intended for students who do not necessarily possess prior knowledge of art and are also made free to anyone from the general public who wishes to attend.

Discussion following Border Every year the Ray Chat on Campus to Border film screening, May 9, 2016. Courtesy of Ray Art Program is held together by the Center, Shanghai. exhibitions’ themes, which are explored from an interdisciplinary perspective. Each forum offers a unique session for a new group of audiences to increase their perception and understanding of the state of contemporary photography and its future direction. Ray Chat on Campus kicked off in 2014 to examine the art historical traces of photography in China and consisted of 1) exploring the history of photography, 2) the process of image dissemination, and 3) examining the notion of “seeing and seen.” In 2015, “Gender—Body— Images” was the thematic focus, underscoring the gendered gaze and the visual potency of sexuality in the construction of meanings in Chinese society. This year, 2016, “Society Field Images” attempts to investigate the production of images beyond photography’s role as a recording format to an anthropological investigation for understanding the embedded meanings of spiritual spaces, colonial remains, and fragments of the contemporary. Included in the program was the film screening of Border to Border at Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, which documented the troubling divide between ethnic Chinese and the local Indians in Calcutta. The screening, which was followed by a talk with the film’s creator and director Chung She-Fong, highlighted how the images gathered in her fieldwork proved to be a powerful tool for analysing the present-day societal conditions of Chinese segregation and social exclusion that remains starkly real despite the historical consequences of the Chinese immigration to India reaching as far back as the 1800s.

Through Ray Publication, RAC also supports the paper-based publication of exhibition catalogues and brochures as well as collected writings and translations of important texts on contemporary photography. While established scholars are invited to publish their writings, RAC also supports and funds young scholars who are interested in conducting research on themes about photo-based art that have not been fully addressed. Another unique initiative offered by RAC is the four-month-long series of workshops initiated in 2015, which also takes place on university campuses. With each session lasting two to three hours, the four to six sequences of workshops are taught by some of China’s most eminent professors of photography and moving images. The courses are structured as high-level seminars with long lists of required readings, active discussions, and significant research that must culminate in a final paper. The workshops are open to ten to fifteen people, and applicants do not necessarily have to be college students.

81 The cost is nominal at 300 yuan (about $45.00 USD) for the entire four- month course. Yet two or three participants with a promising paper selected by the instructors, will receive up to 2,000 yuan (about $300.00 USD) in ﬁnancial aid for further research and a chance to publish on Ray Sight. Such undertakings by an artistic institution with the long-term vision for fostering future artists, researchers, and scholars of photography are almost nonexistent in most museums, private or public, in Shanghai. Even with many artist residencies in China, where room and studio space may be covered, high-level pedagogical support is virtually unheard of.

Another unique feature of RAC is Hsin-Mei Chuang and Matthias Messmer, exhibition poster of that the discourse of the exhibition As It Disappears: A Cultural Study of Rural China, October often conveys a subtle yet cogent 31, 2015 to January 31, 2016. Courtesy of Ray Art Center, voice of activism. Within the theme Shanghai. and presentation of photographs, there is a search for what the images can further signify. One such compelling exhibition was As It Ray Space, exhibition view of As It Disappears: A Cultural Disappears: A Cultural Study of Rural Study of Rural China, October 31, 2015 to January 31, 2016. China (October 31, 2015 to January Courtesy of Ray Art Center, 31, 2016). The exhibition takes its Shanghai. title from the eponymous book, which presents seven years of ﬁeld study conducted by the Taiwanese researcher Hsin-Mei Chuang and Swiss sociologist and photographer Matthias Messmer. Ray Space could not physically exhibit all the photographs culminating from the duo’s project, which took them through more than ﬁfty-one villages in twenty- one provinces and additional autonomous regions. Nor could it house the immense body of socio-anthropological evidence of their research, which included images and texts covering architecture, folk art, religion, education, environment, agriculture, and more. Following the lead of the book’s central premise, “China’s vanishing worlds,” the solution or resolution of the exhibition relied on the format of a pared-down and small-scale display of photo prints, texts, and posters, including physical objects that were divided into four sections corresponding to the four geographical regions of their research: Loess Plateau, Chongqing, Lingnan, and Yunnan.

The exhibition attempted to narrate the reality faced by villages in decline, a phenomenon that is fast-becoming the norm in rural China. This process of environmental degeneration affecting social conditions had been a topic of artistic, literary, and social discourse for over two decades since the government’s decision to implement rapid industrialization as part of its market reforms in the early 1990s.27 The exhibition As It Disappears distinguished itself by offering a deeper look at the cause, rather than the effect, which reached back to the roots of ofﬁcial policies that had set the wheels in motion.

The endeavour to offer more than wall spaces ﬁlled with aesthetically appealing images is the clear intent of RAC, as ﬁrmly stated in their Annual Report:

82 We believe that in-depth probing of a series of specific topics from multiple angles and then inviting scholars, experts, and artists within related fields to participate would mutually advance our work in all dimensions, and would ultimately facilitate each project into a systematic entity. Hence, art projects can also become public activities beneficial to the society, which promote the interaction of multiple disciplines, the [construction] of pragmatic knowledge, and the dissemination of ideas.28

Lin Ye, Shi-sha-shin, 2016. These are not empty words. For Courtesy of Ray Art Center, Shanghai. a recent project in March 2016, RAC supported curator Lin Ye’s comparative Japan-China research project entitled “The Dimensions of Privacy,” which explores the cross- cultural practice of shi sha shin (meaning “intimate” photography in Japanese). Tensions ensuing from contentious memories of Japanese atrocities in Chinese history have engendered bitter and intense nationalistic fervor against the Japanese that remains very present.29 With very few exceptions, the art world has not been open to exhibiting Japanese artists in mainland China. Through a system of compare-and-contrast images, Lin Ye’s project triggers an expanded discussion of relevant cultural issues about the people and their viewpoints from both sides of the national divide. It is this position of fostering awareness and negotiating prejudices for a better understanding of human conditions that conﬁrms the unique status of Ray Art Center.

Chronus Art Center—Rendering the Future Present “If technology, like language, is a form of life, we cannot afford neutrality about its constitution and sustenance. The point is not just to read the webs of knowledge production; the point is to reconﬁgure what counts as knowledge in the interests of reconstituting the generative forces of embodiment.”30 –Donna J. Haraway

Chronus Art Center (CAC) is another public site in Shanghai dedicated to a specific genre of art that is not frequently addressed and explored in China. CAC is claimed as “China’s first nonprofit art organization dedicated to the presentation, research/creation, and scholarship of media art.”31 The word “chronus” is the Latinization of the Greek word for “time,” and according to Bruce Bo Ding, Public Program Convener of CAC, the name is apt for defining time-based art because “in new media, time is an important element. New media art may seem like a very small community but in terms of content, it offers an extremely rich source that is connected to many fields of inquiry especially when aligned with technology.”32 Founded in 2013 by the entrepreneur Dillion Zhang, the independent curator Li Zhenhua and the digital media artist Hu Jieming, CAC was restructured in scope and direction in 2015 under the guidance of Zhang Ga, who is CAC’s current Artistic Director while holding his post as the Distinguished

83 Professor at the School Exterior view of Chronus Art Center. Courtesy of Chronus of Experimental Art Center. Art, China Central Academy of Fine Arts, as well as a Senior Fellow Media of Arts and Technology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. With Li Zhenhua and Hu Jieming curtailing their involvement, Zhang Ga assembled an international steering committee composed of prominent scholars, artists, and museum professionals, including Ute Meta-Bauer, Chris Chafe, Casey Reas, Rudolf Frieling, Ken Goldberg, Amy Heibel, Horst Horner, Sabine Himmelsbach, Chrissie Iles, David Joselit, Marina McDougall, George Legrady, and Christopher Salter.33 Many of the steering committee members have participated by delivering lectures or holding exhibitions at CAC. Dillion Zhang remains as the committed ﬁnancial sponsor with the proceeds from his ﬁrms CP Company (exhibition production team), WTi (home theater systems), and numerous side businesses, yet he has deferred much of the artistic leadership to Zhang Ga.

The newly renovated, spacious, eight-hundred-square-meter complex of CAC is located within the well-traversed M50 Art District on Moganshan Lu that houses a cluster of art galleries and a few remaining artists studios near Suzhou Creek in the Putuo district of Shanghai. CAC is the only gallery within the commercial premises that does not deal in art but offers challenging ways to investigate how digital media and technology intersects in a contemporary society driven by the accelerated processes of image production and dissemination of ideas. With Zhang Ga currently residing in New York, the responsibility of ensuring the high quality of CAC’s programs, research, and daily operations is delegated to the professional team of nine full-time staff members.

Guo Cheng, CAC’s Executive Director, is responsible for overseeing that all exhibitions are carefully organized, seamlessly structured, and technically well executed according to the high international standards set by Zhang Ga. Guo Cheng comments, “Quality exhibitions are our main consideration. Nothing is done randomly at CAC.”34 Since the inaugural exhibition Extra Time (August 23 to November 17, 2013), with the prominent Indian artist collective Raqs Media Collective, CAC’s exhibitions have steadfastly grown in scale and scope, as exempliﬁed by Pandemonium: Media Art from Shanghai, which occurred from March to June 2014 as a visual dialogue between CAC and Kuntsquartier Bethanien, Mariannenlatz, Berlin. In 2015, a series of screen-based exhibitions were presented as one-month long interdisciplinary projects by seven respective international artists.35 For 2016, the focus is on presenting art as it relates to science and technology, a ﬁeld that has received little attention in China.

In addition, a fellow is invited for a residency at CAC as a recipient of the Research and Creation Fellowship. Launched in 2015, the three-month fellowship is an open call for Chinese and international artists who can

84 CAC_LAB. Courtesy of Chronus supply a strong project proposal for Art Center. exploring the artistic possibilities of emerging technologies. With support by CAC staff members, the fellow has full access to CAC_LAB, a high- tech operative studio dedicated to the research of art, design, science, and technology. As a former fellow now employed at CAC as the Head of Research and Creation, Fito Segrera oversees the operation and research emanating from CAC_LAB. Segrera explains, “When I ﬁrst arrived Shanghai in June 2015, part of my duties was to create a space for research. One of the functions of the lab is to provide support for the exhibitions and to be a core site for the development of technologies that can enhance or even become works of art. . . . Oftentimes, the lab ends up producing the technologies that are needed because it does not yet exist. So at the lab we support and work through the process of research methodologies, similar to what scientists and engineers use. It’s a hybrid practice that leads to future developments.”36

The mission of the research/creation lab, as articulated on the CAC website, is to “institute five research/creation foci, including 1) Emotive Networks & Haptic Gaming, 2) Generative Art and Big Data, 3) Intelligent Audio-visual Systems, 4) Existential Technologies and 5) It from bit.”37 Similar to the Ray Art Center, there is a heavy emphasis on public programs consisting of artist talks, panel discussions, screenings, and workshops. Segrera also directs the workshops, which fall under CAC’s diverse public programs organized by Bruce Ding Bo. Always open and free to the general public, the workshops offer a practical, hands-on approach for “understanding what the work of art is about in terms of algorithm and software,” states Segrera. For example, the workshop Accumulated Memory Landscape, led by Segrera, took as its inspiration Jim Campbell’s exhibition Accumulated Psycho (October 12 to November 11, 2015.) The conceptual underpinning of Campbell’s work was the reconstitution of Alfred Hitchcock’s one-hour-and-fifty-minute film Psycho into a single image of precise data condensed as computational memory. In turn, the workshop, thereby expanded upon the exhibition’s notion to re-examine the three main paths of human memory to locate the parallels between the biological and the technical process of capturing, storing, and recalling data. A custom-built, wearable electroencephalogram (a device that measures the electrical activities of the brain) had to be constructed to test the memory hypothesis. The result was a symbiosis that took Segrera, the artist, and the public, who provided the data, to a new level of dialectical exchange. The final production was the creation of a digital space that could be visualized as an immersive 3D landscape of collected memories.

These public programs are essential to CAC because of the rigorous research-based context of the exhibitions and the speciﬁcity of the accompanying formal language, which are not always readily accessible despite the high potency of the screen image’s visual draw. This is perhaps the foremost reason why the exhibitions at CAC cannot be rightly deemed

85 an entertaining diversion. For starters, each exhibition relies on an active rather than passive interchange from its viewers for a better comprehension of the modalities of the concept the artist is striving to convey.

A case in point is Haptic Field Chris Salter, Haptic Field, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and (July 9 to September 4, 2016), Chronus Art Center. an exhibition by the American artist Chris Salter, who worked in collaboration with the Italian sound artist TeZ Maurizio Martinucci on

this project. The act of strapping on Chris Salter, Haptic Field, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and wireless pulsation devices on arms Chronus Art Center. and legs as well as donning opaque lab goggles to enter the expansive void of the exhibition space gave visitors a sense of unsettling anxiety in facing the unknown. In certain ways, Haptic Field took the dialogue of humanity’s relationship with and within nature as conceived by James Turrell to a different dimension by immersing viewers in a constructed, unnatural environment that also reiﬁed and problematized one’s relationship to ambient surroundings that are both familiar (visitors having encountered such moments via screens) and unfamiliar (their having an experiential embodied experience).

Recognizing the importance of interdisciplinary interchange has been key to CAC’s exhibition planning and public programming. The strength of the lectures, roundtable forums, and artist talks rests on not only describing the inspiration and the impetus of the work, but, more tellingly, on enlarging the scope of awareness and knowledge of future possibilities that can exist beyond the exhibition’s conceptual framework. Topics and themes, questions and answers—which form a dialogue of contestation and inquiry—move back and forth beyond the construct of “show and tell,” thus leading to a wider level of connectivity in the formation of theoretical underpinnings and intellectual scholarship.

Bruce Bo Ding is responsible for Roundtable discussion with the Screens Collective. Photo: curating the 2016 public program Julie Chun. series entitled Mediated Body and Embodied Technologies (M.B.E.T.), which functions as a research process addressing the various mechanisms and possibilities of a human future that is potentiated by technologies. According to Bruce Bo Ding, the series was launched by “reﬂecting and speculating on the relation between the enacted and the represented as well as the virtual and the real (a contingent production rather than a natural inevitability), M.B.E.T. brings back embodiment into the picture to investigate if/how the forms/media of embodiment are relevant in the production of identity and subjectivity as well as the circulation and communication of information. In the spirit of open source, it tries to create a ﬂuid and evolving space in which practitioners and

86 researchers from different areas can come together and contribute in this creative exploration.”38

One such CAC panel discussion I attended on June 11, 2016 was entitled Issue #1: Roundtable | Screen/Body/Attention: Interruptions for Urban Screens. The forum was moderated by Bruce Bo Ding and chaired by Stephanie DeBoer, Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University Bloomington and Fall 2015 scholar-in-residence at CAC. DeBoer is one of the members of the Screens Collective with Wu Jie, Associate Professor at the Department for Design and Innovation at Tongji University, and artists Petra Johnson, Taqi Shaheen, and Xu Zhifeng. The Screens Collective positions itself as “an interdisciplinary and multinational arts collective dedicated to developing the full range of languages and linkages that are potentiated in urban screens. . . . [for] devis[ing] frameworks, structures, and languages for urban screens with and through which ﬁelds of shared attention can be seeded.”39 They posit that the ﬂat monitors they have been examining throughout Shanghai “are part of urban force relations that modulate our bodies, movements, and sensations. Yet there are also moments of other bodily responses and interactions/non- interactions with urban screens.”40 The issues and polemics raised at this gathering had the effect of heightening the ways in which critical thinking can be applied beyond the current exhibition’s framework to instigate further critique of the process of biology, technology, and its constantly evolving relationship to society.

Due to Zhang Ga’s international inﬂuence and Dillion Zhang’s patronage, CAC is able to join forces with globally renowned institutions for expanding the scope of technology-based exhibitions in Shanghai. Guo Cheng notes:

We have several programs including collaborations with ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie or Center for Art and Media) and Nam-June Paik Art Center as well as Summer Session collaborations with V2 (Institute for the Unstable Media). All of these programs aim to support Chinese and international media artists with exhibitions, residencies, and other relevant incubating programs and events to develop their global network. It makes CAC not only a space that introduces mature/ established artists and great artworks to Shanghai and China, but also provides a platform and test-bed for enriching the dynamics of the local community.

Through such international cooperations, CAC is positioned to stretch the limits of creative imagination for evolving technologies that can propel the complex and sophisticated possibilities of today’s art into the near future. The exhibition Datumsoria (September 18 to December 30, 2016) exempliﬁes this urgency by unifying the mighty yet disparate practices of Liu Xiaodong, Nam-June Paik, and Carsten Nicolai. According to the press release, the Datumsoria is deﬁned as “a new perceptual space immanent to the information age.” The undertaking hints at the notion that even the

87 esteemed heritage of oil painting on canvas cannot remain static in an ever- shifting world and that art’s innovation has veered securely upon the path of the “electronic super highway,” a term first coined by Nam-June Paik in the 1970s.41 The exhibition seems to be striving for a new world, as it also engages with technical modes of data collection to examine how art can be created (or generated) in the present digital age of 3D printers and artificial intelligence. It remains to be explored how the monumental works by Nam-June Paik’s piled-up television sets upon Genghis Khan’s bicycle, Liu Xiaodong’s robotically engineered painted canvases, and Carsten Nicolai’s images and sounds predicated upon the historical circumstance and locale of Chemnitz, Germany will correspond and work in relation to each other, yet the exhibition concept serves as an augury of the unstoppable forces of mechanization that is continuing to affect and effect the contemporary art world. Datumsoria is slated as the first of a series under “Art and Technology @ project,” conceived and curated by Zhang Ga. With firm command of institutional purpose, intent, and direction, driven by intellectual rigour, Chronus Art Center is indeed sustaining technical autopoiesis while initiating new protocols to counter the social phenomenon of general passivity that is ironically brought about by our contemporary technical culture.

Alternate Visions Some of the autonomous and independent art spaces in Shanghai examined in this study can rightly be categorized under “self-organizations,” a term that gained currency from a special project presented at the 2nd Guangzhou Triennial in 2005. According to critic and curator Bao Dong, “self- organizations” are independent and autonomous artistic sites, organizations, and collectives in China that differ in intent from the conventional art systems sponsored by the government.42 Like the various examples he cites, the four independent spaces in Shanghai highlighted in this essay are likewise self- sufﬁcient and they each have differing motives, agendas, and strategies for autonomy. Yet, unlike the liminal position that have situated the past and present self-organizations, MoCA Pavilion, Ray Art Center, am Art Space, and, especially, Chronus Art Center are resolutely established and command a notable position within Shanghai’s art circle. They also have an explicit aim and mission, which are quoted above, and each has successfully worked toward the expressed purpose of ﬁlling an artistic niche that was previously lacking.

The endeavours of the public and independent sites in this article exemplify the recent phenomenon of “the curatorial.” Jean-Paul Martinon of Goldsmiths College, University of London, deﬁne curating as an “institutional practice,” while the curatorial “disrupts knowledge in order to invent knowledge.”43 All four spaces examined here pay close attention to not only the content and the knowledge generated through the exhibitions, but, more importantly, to activating the possibilities for future discourse and establishing new points of departure. These sites do not aim to replicate the series of large pre-constituted forms of homogenous sights of spectacle that make their rounds across the globe. Rather, these sites for public art in Shanghai strive to identify themselves with, and as supporters of, hetereogenous thinkers, critics, artists, curators, creators, and doers who embody the spirit of independence even within the conﬁnes of the pre-set

88 Datumsoria, 2016. Upper left: Liu Xiaodong. Upper right: Nam-June Paik. Bottom: Carsten Nicolai. Courtesy of the artists and Chronus Art Center.

limitations that are real and present in China. The spirit of independence they embrace is not necessarily about fomenting a sense of individualistic insistence or even a rejection of institutional practices but in recognizing the shifting identities and needs of the producers (artists) and the receivers (the viewing public) for the establishment and sustenance of democratic and pluralist spaces where the culture of contemporary art can have beneﬁcial implications for society.

Notes

1. The deep-seated custom of guanxi (relationship of reciprocity) governs as the unspoken but highly influential foundation for business and personal transactions in Chinese society. Yet no serious study as how it relates or affects the art industry has been undertaken to date. For a brief observation of noticeable guanxi dealings in Shanghai, see Richard Vine, “Breaking Out in Shanghai,” Art in America, April 1, 2013, http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/news/breaking-out- in-shanghai/. 2. Julie Chun, ““Being Out There: The Challenges and Possibilities of Public Art in Shanghai,” Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 13 (November/December 2014), 6–27. 3. Quotation from Atelier Liu Yang, http://www.architecturelist.com/2011/03/16/shanghai-museum-of- contemporary-art-by-atelier-liu-yuyang-architects/. 4. All quotations by Wang Weiwei are from an interview with the author on June 21, 2016, in Shanghai. 5. Samuel Kung, “MoCA Pavilion: Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, Art Project Space,” in MoCA Pavilion (Shanghai: Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, 2016), 8–9. 6. Ibid. 7. E-mail interview with Huang Fangling and the author on August 12, 2016. 8. Peter Osborne, ed., Walter Benjamin: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, Volume 2, Modernity (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 4. 9. The United States, especially New York during the 1960s, offered numerous alternative art spaces, including artist-run centres. Alternative histories: New York Art Spaces, 1960–2010, edited by Lauren Rosati, Mary Anne Staniszewski, and Exit Art (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012), chronicles more than 140 alternative spaces, groups, and projects that took place outside the traditional confines of commercial galleries and museum circuit, thus enabling many young artists who have now achieved critical fame (such as Gordon Matta-Clark, Adrian Piper, Martin Wong, Jimmie Durham, and many more) to innovate, perform, and exhibit. 10. The China Artists Association (中国美术家协会) was originally established in 1949 as the China National Art Workers’ Association (中华全国美术工作者协会), with Xu Beihong (徐悲鴻) as its first chairman. The name change took place in 1953. The CAA operates under the Secretariat of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and is managed by the Central Committee Publicity Department. The association’s reach extends to painting, sculptor, architecture, ceramics, print, fresco, animation, ethnic art, and children’s art, http://www.caanet.org.cn/AboutCAA/jianjie.aspx/. 11. Gao Minglu, Total Modernity and the Avant-Garde in Twentieth-Century Chinese Art (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2011), 135–36.

89 12. Information about the Carter Apartments was provided by Patrick Cranely, the founder of Historic Shanghai, in an e-mail exchange with the author on August 11, 2016. 13. From “about” am Art Space, http://www.amspacesh.com/about/about.html/. 14. am Art Space mission statement, http://www.amspacesh.com/eng/Content.asp?cid=1#/. 15. Yi Zhou, “Narcissism and the art market performance,” in European Journal of Finance, March 15, 2016, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1351847X.2016.1151804/. 16. “About: ‘Windowless Scenery’,” events, am Art Space website, http://www.amspacesh.com/eng/ newsdetail.asp?newsid=60#/. 17. Christopher Knight, “’Rain Room,’ technology’s hot-ticket riff on Mother Nature, November 2, 2015, Los Angeles Times, online edition, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-knight-rain- room-review-20151102-column.html/. 18. Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves (2010) was on view at chi K11 art museum Shanghai from May 21 to June 30, 2016, while his Playtime (2013) was on show at Shanghai 21st Century Minsheng Art Museum from April 30 to July 31, 2016, and his Stone Against Diamonds (Ice Cave) (2015) ran at OCAT Shanghai from June 5 to August 28, 2016. 19. I have developed the requirements of the “Five Cs” as a basis for evaluating exhibitions. This criterion comes from the ideals of “concept, context, content” formulated by the architect Bernard Tschumi. See Bernard Tschumi, Event-Cities 3: Concept vs Context vs Content (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). 20. Para Site, “About,” http://www.para-site.org.hk/en/about/. 21. Murray N. Rothbard, “Praxeology as the Method of the Social Sciences,” in Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, ed. Maurice Natanson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 31. 22. OFOTO Gallery, located inside M50 Art District (2nd floor of Building 13), and M97 Gallery, located a few paces from the M50 Art District, are two separately owned galleries dedicated to contemporary photography that were each opened in 2006, while Beaugeste Gallery opened in 2007 at Tianzifang in Shanghai. On April 2016, M97 moved to its present location on Changping Road. In May 2015, Shanghai Center of Photography opened as another non-profit institution dedicated to the research and exhibition of contemporary photography. Initially free for the first few months of opening, the single entry ticket has steadily risen upwards to about 40 yuan (about $6.00 USD). 23. Ray Art Center, “About Us,” http://www.rayartcenter.org/English/Aboutus.aspx/. 24. Ibid. 25. Aside from several off-site project public lecture programs, the two collaborative exhibitions consisted of Love in the Park (July 23–August 9, 2015), by the artists Wu Jiayin, Xujie, and Wei Bozhi, at MoCA Pavilion, and Metaphorical River (June 26 to August 26, 2016), by Zhang Kechun, at 10 Corso Como Shanghai. 26. The figures are tabulated from Ray Art Center Annual Report 2014–2015, http://www.rayartcenter. org/English/Content_view.aspx?id=8397&types=10/. 27. Works of art, including performances, that center on the effects of accelerated urbanization can be traced back to Huang Yan’s ten-year, labor-intensive project Demolished Buildings, begun May 25, 1993, as well as Zhang Dali’s highly visible Demolition series, begun in Beijing in 1995. 28. Ray Art Center, Annual Report 2014–2015, http://www.rayartcenter.org/English/Content_view. aspx?id=8397&types=10/. 29. The most recent anti-Japanese uprisings by the Chinese occurred in 2005 and 2012. The catalyst for violent reaction in 2005 was a Japanese textbook narrative and in 2012 it was the ongoing dispute over small islands in the South China Sea. Both incidents had the effect of being magnifying Chinese nationalism and anti-Japanese sentiments. See “Anti-Japan protests across China over islands dispute,” BBC online, August 19, 2012, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-19312226/. 30. Donna J. Haraway, “A Game of Cat’s Cradle: Science Studies, Feminist Theory, Cultural Studies,” in Configurations 2, no. 1 (1994), 62. 31. Chronus Art Center, “About Us,” http://www.chronusartcenter.org/en/about_cac/about_us/. 32. All quotes by Bruce Bo Ding are from an interview with the author on July 21, 2016, in Shanghai. 33. For a brief biorgraphy of each member, see Chronus Art Center, “About CAC: International Steering Committee,” http://www.chronusartcenter.org/en/about_cac/the-international-steering-committe/. 34. All quotations by Guo Cheng are from an interview with the author on August 23, 2016, in Shanghai. 35. The seven international artists included Michael Joaquin Grey, Wolfgang Staehle, George Legrady, Marina Zurkow, Casey Reas, Jim Campbell, and AL and AL. 36. All quotations by Fito Segrera are from an interview with the author on August 20, 2016, in Shanghai. 37. Chronus Art Center, “About Us,” http://www.chronusartcenter.org/en/about_cac/about_us/. 38. Chronus Art Center website, “Mediated Body and Embodied Technology,” http://www. chronusartcenter.org/en/sacred-listening-in-a-folding-space/. 39. The Screens Collective Public Rehearsal #1 (June 11, 2016), synopsis of the roundtable discussion, unpublished three-page internal Word document, provided by Petra Johnson to the author on August 15, 2016. 40. Ibid. 41. Nam-June Paik, Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii (1995), artwork description, Smithsonian American Art Museum Renwick Gallery, http://americanart.si.edu/ collections/search/artwork/?id=71478/. 42. See Bao Dong, “Rethinking and Practices Within the Art System: The Self-organization of Contemporary Art in China, 2001–2012,” in Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 1, no. 1 (2014), 83–95. 43. Jean Paul Martinon, “Theses in the Philosophy of Curating,” in The Curatorial: A Philosophy of Curating (London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 25–33.

90 Lu Pei-Yi Three Approaches to Socially Engaged Art in Taiwan1

n Taiwan, the trend of socially engaged art can be traced back to the 1980s, but it has become increasingly evident since the 2000s, especially Iover the past ﬁve years, sparking widespread discussion. This essay, through the examples of Chen Chieh-jen, Wu Ma-li, and Huang Po-Chih, explores the question of how art can respond to the sociopolitical climate of democratization, post-industrialization, and changing China-Taiwan relations.

The Changing Sociopolitical Climate The lifting of martial law in 1987 was a crucial moment for Taiwanese society, politics, and culture. Several key features of socially engaged art, such as its participatory, public, community, and civic aspects, are all related to the values of a democratic society. The discussion of social issues, criticism, and intervention also needs to take place in an environment that tolerates pluralistic and oppositional voices. Since the 1990s, Taiwan has seen a series of democratic reforms. The holding of the first direct presidential election was in 1996 and Lee Teng-hui became the first democratically elected president. The first change of government took place in 2000, when the presidential candidate of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chen Shui-bian was elected. The DPP was in power for eight years, but the last years were marred by the President’s corruption scandals. In 2008, when Ma Ying-jeou became president, the Kuomintang (KMT) returned to power. Its pro-China stance has sparked controversy, culminating in the Sunflower student movement in the spring of 2014. This movement protested the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement and signalled the independent attitudes of the younger generation. As a result, Taiwan- China relations entered into a new phase.

Within the context of these sociopolitical shifts, socially engaged art projects reﬂect and respond to the prevailing mood, as well as changes in society, and Chen Chieh-jen, Wu Ma-li and Huang Po-Chih offer three different approaches.

Art as a Means to Manifest Reality: Chen Chieh-jen’s Practices Chen Chieh-jen’s work has been concerned with sociopolitical issues since the 1980s. Dealing with his own life experiences, he follows the widely-used phrase,“the personal is the political.” 1 Chen Chieh-jen sees social conditions as the consequence of historical, political, and economic structures. Exploring, evoking, and contemplating the history and reality of marginal places in society, he uses ﬁction and the imagination to recreate them in order to come up with a poetic critique, making visible unseen realities that exist in contemporary society.

91 In the early 80s, during the martial Chen Chieh-jen, Malfunction No. 3, 1983, street action, law period, Chen Chieh-jen and his Taipei. Courtesy of the artist. friends carried out the performances Malfunction No. 3 (1983) in the streets of Ximending, and Bombing the Womb– After the Creation of the World (1986), in Taipei’s East District. At a time when public space was strictly controlled and monitored, they used their bodies in street performances, an act that challenged the establishment and provoked the conservative and closed society at that time. Before and after the lifting of martial law, democratic movements outside the KMT and a variety of other social movements deeply impacted society and loosened its rigid politics. Modest theatre productions, street performances, body art, and visual art installations inﬂuenced one another to become a catalyst for social movements.

After the lifting of martial law, Chen Chen Chieh-jen, Revolt in the Soul and Body, 1990–1999: Chieh-jen became confused about Genealogy of the Self, 1996, Hahnemühle Photo Rag (R) the role between art and society, Baryta, 208 x 260 cm. Courtesy and he temporarily abandoned his of the artist. artistic career for eight years before returning to making art in 1996. His photo-based work Revolt in the Soul and Body was ﬁrst presented at the 1998 Taipei Biennial. It was in 2002 that he turned from photography to moving images, creating the landmark work Lingchi—Echoes of a Historical Photograph. Factory, in 2003, became the model for his subsequent ﬁlm works, which he made to “write down people’s memories,” “open up to the other,” and to “bring about internal and external decolonization.”2 His other works include Bade Area (2005), The Route (2006), Military Court and Prison (2007–08), Empire’s Borders I (2008–09), Empire’s Borders II— Western Enterprises, Inc. (2010), Happiness Building I (2012), Friend Watan (2013), and the recent project Realm of Reverberation (2014), all of which surround his core concern and way of working.

In Factory, Chen Chieh-jen invited a group of women workers to go back to “work” in their factory (and actually illegally occupy the factory), which was left abandoned for seven years after being shut down by its unscrupulous owners. The ﬁlm is interspersed with black-and-white documentary footage showing the decline of the manufacturing industry in Taiwan due to a structural transformation in the mid-1990s, in which many factories relocated to mainland China, leaving behind and abandoning workers. The women workers play themselves in the ﬁlm, and their experiences become a microcosm of the political-economic situation of Taiwan at that time.

The way Chen Chieh-jen has engaged with his participants is based on his own concept of “opening up to the other.” In his various ﬁlmic projects, he collaborated with local residents, unemployed labourers, temporary day workers, migrant workers, foreign spouses, unemployed youth, and social activists; thus he formed a temporary community and a ﬁlmmaking team with society’s marginalized. By defying the logic of the division of

92 Left: Chen Chieh-jen, Bade Area, 2005, 16 mm ﬁlm transferred to DVD, 30 mins. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Chen Chieh-jen, The Route, 2006, 35 mm ﬁlm transferred to DVD, 61 mins., 30 secs. Courtesy of the artist.

Left: Chen Chieh-jen, Empire’s Borders II—Western Enterprises, 2010, video installation. Courtesy of the artist. Right: Chen Chieh-jen, Happiness Building, 2012, video, 82 mins. Courtesy of the artist.

labour, as well as crossing the boundary between professional and amateur, he suggests that a good way to form a “community” might be through interactive learning—a belief that each individual can contribute his or her own abilities as well as learn from each other, making the idea of self- organization possible.

Chen Chieh-jen, Factory, 2003, 16 mm ﬁlm transferred to DVD, 31 mins., 9 secs. Courtesy of the artist.

Chen Chieh-jen stated that when he made the film, he created what he considers “doubles” for the women workers. When he initiated this project in 2003, the long-term protest by these involuntarily unemployed women had come almost to an end, and their hardships and recent conditions increasingly were becoming forgotten by the public. Since these women workers took part in the film, their protest could continue in another way just when it looked as though it was about to be over; therefore, film making could serve as a way to ensure the issues remain alive.3

As to the issue of “doubles,” Chen Chieh-jen has said: “Very often when we make ﬁlms about the so-called grass roots and working class, they will be accompanied by vague descriptions like ‘the artists cares about the lower levels of society and the working class; or artists show their concern by doing a ﬁeld investigation’.” However, “they don’t need us to be their spokesmen. They can talk about these issues better than us.”4 In fact, these women workers had been protesting for a long period of time. They knew how to express their own situation and also created various creative ways to gain their rights, although ultimately their protest was not successful.

93 I suggest, therefore, that the idea of “opening up to the other” in Chen Chieh-jen’s practice is different from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notion of speaking for others.5 Spivak raised the question of “can the subaltern speak?” and critiqued that although the subaltern can speak, the speaking might be based on a Western knowledge structure—an issue of violence of knowledge. In Factory, the idea of “opening up to the other” is a positive response to this issue via opening up the space of “the other.” During the ﬁlming process, the women workers were active and contributed their own ideas. For example, the women workers chose to keep silent in the ﬁlm, rather than speaking. However, in their real life within the protest movement, they presented themselves as good speakers publicly, clearly articulating their sociopolitical circumstances.

Another striking example of the Left and right: Chen Chieh-jen, Factory, 2003, 16 mm film active participation of the women transferred to DVD, 31 mins., 9 secs. Courtesy of the artist. workers is that they insisted on finishing their work. In one case, the film shows an aging female worker painstakingly threading a needle and refusing to give up. This shot took over ten minutes to complete. French philosopher Jacques Rancière, in his talk “What is the Time of Contemporary Art?,” in Beijing in 2013, analyzed Factory by identifying three kinds of “time” in this film: two female workers’ sewing, old documentary footage, and views of an abandoned factory.6 Rancière proposed that Chen Chieh-jen purposely arranged the acting of an aging woman worker threading the needle. However, in reality, Chen Chieh-jen just shot whatever she did. The patience exercised in waiting for the thread to pass through the eye of the needle turns into a tangible, sensitive, and compelling moment of the film. The shots of real-time events on site are what Chen Chieh-jen has called a “field of sensibilities” (感性田野). He stated that “many things can be seen as a field of sensibilities—why did they insist on getting the thread through? Why did they have to finish sewing those clothes? Those were the little things that touched me at the time.”7 In other words, Chen Chieh-jen sees the power of art as a way to reveal what happens within the social field. The real life of normal people is the source through which these sensibilities can be felt.

The recent Realm of Reverberation (2014) also relates to a specific social movement. With the Losheng sanatorium for lepers, its residents, and the Taipei Metro (MRT) construction site nearby as its subject, this film explores how art can keep a topic alive after the culmination of long-term protests and bring in an increasing number of participants, from the inmates, the activists, and the researchers involved in the study, to the filmmakers and audiences. Four kinds of protagonists are presented on four screens in films with four titles: old residents in Three Planters, a young woman who has accompanied sanatorium residents since 2007 in Keeping Company, a hospice nurse from China who went through the Cultural Revolution in Suspended Room, and a fictional political prisoner who travels through Taiwan’s history from the Japanese colonial period to the present in Tracing Forward. The term “reverberation” in the work’s title refers to the following condition: “a sound

94 is reﬂected and persists through further reﬂections that are, carrying on something in a slightly changed manner.”8

Chen Chieh-jen, Realm of Beginning in 2002, Chen Chieh- Reverberation, 2014, video installation. Courtesy of the jen invited the participants in each artist. project to gather at the shooting site for the premiere of their ﬁlm. He sees that the process of ﬁlming, screening, and exhibiting as a whole

Chen Chieh-jen, Realm of creates a space for returning in Reverberation, 2014, video installation. Courtesy of the which the excluded, dissidents, and artist. spectators can connect with one another. A screening event entitled Realm of Reverberation Returns to Losheng, for example, took place on the evening of January 18, 2015, as an outdoor quasi-ritualistic event on the hilltop at Losheng sanatorium. Chen Chieh-jen invited Losheng’s residents as well as the public. All the participants, including the residents, followed a screening van to reach the hilltop, where the memorial tower for Losheng sanatorium was located. The procession to the memorial tower was like a funeral ritual in Taiwanese culture. On the hilltop, there were four screens to present each story. When the ﬁlms started, it was startling to see the projected images overlapping with the real landscape that existed on site, and the MRT construction site nearby and Taipei night skyline in the distance providing a background for the screening. With interweaving images, sounds, discourse, theatre, cultural actions evolving in situ together, multiple conversations were generated and the imagination was stimulated.

With regard to the relationship between the individuality of the artist and the collectivity of society, Chen Chieh-jen offers, with his keen sense of observation, critical comment from a certain distance. In this sense, his practice could be seen as following an authored approach. His role is like an “auteur” who makes reality and makes the invisible visible. As he says: “When something is impossible, it is the beginning of fantasy and creation, as well as the beginning of action and practice,”9 and there is value in art that tries to make the impossible possible.

Art as a Soft Means of Effecting Social Change: Wu Ma-li’s Practices In contemporary Taiwanese art, Wu Ma-li is a pioneer of participatory art. In the late 1980s and early 90s, her work made scathing criticism of Taiwanese politics. Love at Its Maximum (1990) deals with social issues, while Epitaph (1997), Stories of Women from Hsinchuang (1997), and Formosa Club (1998) explore feminist art, gender issues, people, land, and history. Come for a Walk in the Fake Museum (1994) engages in institutional critique.

By the late 1990s, with changing sociopolitical circumstances, several artists changed their creative concepts from direct criticism to exploring other strategies. Also, in the same period, the concept of art and the public changed as a result of the debacle of the 1999 outdoor exhibition Heart of History, which took place in the small town of Lugangin. Two works in

95 Chen Chieh-jen, Realm of Reverberation, 2014, video installation. Courtesy of the artist.

this exhibition were seen as provocative to local residents and sparked a confrontation between artists and curator and the residents, and a debate lasted six months on whether art or the public should be the priority. After this confrontation, rather than focusing on an intervention in “space,” public art (or site-speciﬁc art) shifted its emphasis to the people—residents, viewers, public—to its “publicness” and to the idea of participation.

Among individual artists, Wu Ma-li went from pointed political and gender criticism to thinking about “relations” and making direct connections with communities. In 1997, she created Stories of Women from Hsinchuang to document the stories of a group of women clothing factory workers in Hsinchuang, Taipei County. This work was installed as a room with pink wallpaper on which the stories of women workers were woven and a video interview presented on the middle wall. While researching and working on this project, Wu Ma-li was confronted with ethical questions: “What is the goal of so-called ‘critical art’ or ‘political art’ in general? Is it to catalyze change by focusing the public’s attention on some social issue? Or to use social issues as raw material for art production, so I could accumulate fame as an artist?”10 She started reflecting on the subject of an artist’s work and how to “ensure a fair and mutually beneficial relationship between artist and her subjects, rather than merely treating them as the subject matter.”11 This work was a turning point towards her more specific approach of socially-engaged art.

From 2000 to 2004, Wu Ma-li worked with the Taipei Awakening Association (TAA) to set up Fun Fabric Workshops to assist women to carry out some self-reﬂection and then create their own fabric creative works. The projects Spiritual Quilt, Theatre under the Skirt, and Awake in Your Skin were produced jointly, developing another kind of relationship between art and society, an artist and a community. For the participants, it was a process of self- discovering and empowerment. The idea of “intersubjectivity” became the basis of her later projects, a distinctive feature of her work with the community.

Wu Ma-li has played an important role in introducing Western art models and theories to Taiwan since the 1980s, and after 2004 she focused on translating books about New Genre Public Art, community art, and participatory art, and in developing possible ways of engaging with local communities. The concept “community” was discussed in the 1990s in

96 Taiwan during the movement of localism (本土化) and under the cultural policy of “community empowerment.” The term “Community” was at ﬁrst translated into Chinese as shequ (社區). In terms of “community empowerment,” “community” was a spatial concept that referred to the area where a group of people live and constituted the smallest administrative unit. Since 2000, “community” has been translated as shequn (社群), meaning a group of people with common qualities and sharing similar beliefs and views, with a greater emphasis on the relationship among people than on the geographical concept. Wu Ma-li’s practice also contributed to this change in the discourse; that is, from the geographical to shared relationships.

Curated by Wu Ma-li, the project Art as Environment, A Cultural Action at the Plum Tree Creek (2010–12) can be seen as a summation of her ideas since the late 1990s. It also reflects her thinking and answers to questions she has asked herself since 2005. Of the River—A Community-Based Eco-art Project (2006) brought participants together in a boat to rediscover the river and the essence of one’s life through the sensation of one’s body; Taipei Tomorrow as a Lake Again (2008) reflects on how urban development should cope with the challenges of climate change; Tropic of Cancer Environmental Art Action (2006–07) transforms festivals into a public service. The concept of “artists becoming residents, and residents becoming artists” determines how artists can enter into a community. In line with her belief that “art does not play an aestheticizing role, but is a medium of stimulation, connection, and reflection,”12 it fulfills the function of making connections.

Wu Mali, Art as Environment, As a response to questions A Cultural Action at the Plum Tree Creek: Breakfast at Plum accumulated from practical Creek, 2012, held at a local farm during the Chinese New experience, Art as Environment, A Year. Courtesy of the artist. Cultural Action at the Plum Tree Creek received a Production Grant to Independent Curators in Visual Arts from NCAF in 2010. With this project, she carried out an intensive community action and art education program for two years. The objective was to shape public consciousness, change people’s thinking, and draw up a new blueprint for an ideal life through art. The ﬁve subprojects involving different participants included: “Breakfast at Plum Tree Creek” (community residents), “Shaping of a Village–Nomadic Museum Project” (Department of Architecture, Tamkang University), “Local Eco Life—Colorful Affairs with Plants” (Zhuwei High School), “There is a Creek in Front of My School Gate” (Zhuwei Elementary School), and “Community Theater” (community residents and the Tzi-Chang Branch of Zhuwei Elementary School), as well as other, smaller fringe activities. Through collaboration with the local government and the creation of an intervention policy, this project became a part of New Taipei City’s Vision of Grand River, thus offering possibilities for actually changing reality. This project also received the Annual Visual Arts Award of the 11th Taishin Arts Award in 2012. The prize money she was awarded was put back into the community for the deepening of the art action.

This environmental art action was not just extended in time but also geographically. Bringing together participants from different ﬁelds of

97 activity, it emphasized the process Wu Mali, Art as Environment, A Cultural Action at the Plum more than the result, the action Tree Creek: Shaping of a Village—Nomadic Museum and relationship building rather Project, 2012, installation view at Bamboo Curtain Studio. than the production of objects as Courtesy of the artist. works (quality is not an important consideration, and there is no obvious production of artworks). However, the question most often asked by participants and people in the art world is “What is artistic quality”? This is also a concern related to the debate about quantity vs. quality raised by British scholar Claire Bishop in her book Artiﬁcial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship.13

Here, I utilize a statement from Taiwanese scholar Chen Hong-yi to answer the question of “where does artistic quality lie?” He stated: “Actions that stem from a social position amount to politics. When art attempts to intervene in society, there will be politics involved. Only actions that stem from an aesthetic position amount to art.”14 Thus, when artists get their hands dirty (intervene or engage) in actions that stem from an aesthetic position, artistic quality, whether seen or unseen, will emerge in the process.

I also tried to answer the above question in my article, “Art as Environment, A Cultural Action at the Plum Tree Creek,” and wrote about art as an open platform to bring together those from different disciplines. As an imaginative generator, it offers the freedom to facilitate dialogue, loosen up the existing structures, and bring about change.15 The power of art is therefore derived from an openness that can connect and include different elements, people, and resources. It also exempliﬁes the original meaning of “participation”—that of sharing in a sentimental sense.

Rather than taking a provocative view of social issues, Wu Ma-li’s projects adopt another approach—a soft strategy, an eco-friendly attitude, and an emphasis on the caring power of art. A term she has mentioned “Sensible/ Emotional Connections (感性連結)” is evidence of her attitude; that is, art can be a way to glue together a fragmented and broken society. In Wu Mal- i’s view, the label of artist not important, and the role of the artist role is to help forge relations.16 In addition, in contrast to Chen Chieh-jen, I see her approach as an example of stepping back—a de-authored approach. And may be an initiator who can help bring about social change.

Art as a Platform for Exchange: Huang Po-chih Over the past ﬁve years, we can observe a trend of young artists in Taiwan actively turning toward sociopolitical issues. In mid-2007, artist and scholar Lin Hong-john pointed out the absence of political art by coining the term “the art of frustration,”17 while the scholar Huang Chien-hung described a tendency of young generation artists with the label “micro-sensible,” which is used to refer to “a state of ‘subjectivization’ that magniﬁes micro sensibilities, for which ‘eluding description within the linguistic framework’ seems to be an unwritten norm.” “Cuteness” and “detachment” are two characteristics of the “micro-sensible,” used to resist pseudo-social issues— “the total impotence of politics” and “the failure of a pluralistic democratic

98 Wu Mali, Art as Environment, society.”18 These two discourses A Cultural Action at the Plum Tree Creek: Shaping of a broadly summarize the directions Village—Nomadic Museum Project, 2012, open fair in the of contemporary Taiwanese art square of Zhuwei. Courtesy of the artist. between 2000 and 2007—artists expressed their discontent with society and reality by withdrawing into themselves.

Huang Po-chih, 500 Lemon Trees, 2015, installation view at Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester.

Since 2008, however, political and economic changes in the world (e.g., the global ﬁnancial crisis) and in Taiwan (e.g., the KMT returned to power with a pro-China stance) have had an impact on the development of contemporary Taiwanese art, which is turning from frustration to positive action. In 2008, various incidents provoked widespread criticism from the art community, leading to a rethinking of the nature of the art museum, overall artistic ecology, and cultural administration. Artists experimented with different responses to social and political reality, using diverse media to examine the relationships between art and activism, politics and art, art and social movements, and so on. For instance, the 2008 Taipei Biennial presented a number of cultural activism projects that explored the idea of “politics as art.” The 2010 Taipei Biennial responded to the previous version as “art as politics.” Artists looked at the internal mechanics of art and the problems of art institutions by revealing the modes of production, consumption, and distribution of art and by engaging in institutional critique.

In 2009, the young artist Huang Po-chih started to turn his practices from an exploration of new media toward a focus on society with the work Soft Revolt. This project is a kind of protest against capitalism via some funny and misappropriated strategies. Ever since, he has been concerned with the relationship between the agricultural economy and the mechanisms that lead to consumer goods. Air Trade Ice Pop (2010) and The Red Eyes of Tom Boy (2011) both use consumerist commodities as their medium. By collaborating with an enterprise, such as an ice pop factory and a juice company, the artist attempted to give more beneﬁts to economically disadvantaged farmers through the process of art making.

In Five Hundred Lemon Trees (2013–15), wine labels were sold in advance of the Taipei Fine Art museum exhibition to raise the capital for planting lemon trees on three fallow farmlands in Beipu, Hsinchu county. When the lemons were harvested two years later, they were used to make bottles of lemon wine for those had pledged money for a wine label, which served as a form of fund raising and investment in advance. This work addresses issues such as agriculture, the economy, consumption, and production.

99 Production Line— Huang Po-chih, Production Line—Made in China & Made Made in China & in Taiwan, 2014, installation view at Shenzhen Sculpture Made in Taiwan Biennial. Courtesy of the artist and OCT Contemporary Art (2014) is based on the Terminal, Shenzhen. working life of Huang Po-chih’s mother, a former textile factory worker, and shows the outsourcing of Huang Po-chih, Production the clothing industry Line—Made in China & Made in Taiwan, 2014, installation over the past thirty view at Taipei Biennial. years from Taiwan to Courtesy of the artist and Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Shenzhen, China. This project demonstrates the universality of capitalism through the experiences of an individual. The Shenzhen Sculpture Biennial and the Taipei Biennial were used as platforms for this project. Semi-finished blue denim shirts made at the OCT Contemporary Art Terminal were shipped to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum for finishing and sales (a way of using a performance as an exchange), in the hope that “art (in the form of commodities or events) could bring out new meanings and positions in the complex social relations.19” In addition to Huang Po-chih’s mother, a former worker in the factory in Taiwan, and Auntie Wu, who played the sewing worker at the Shenzhen OCAT, the “participants” of this project included anonymous workers who had been abandoned by capitalist industries and society. Chieh-jen’s Factory is about the story of a production line that shifted from Taiwan to China and left unemployed many innocent workers. Huang Po-chih’s Production Line—Made in China & Made in Taiwan could be considered as a kind of sequel in terms of the relocation of factories and the goods they produce. In a series of exchanges in which labour, capital, commodities, and art funds from the museum (linking the Shenzhen Sculpture Biennial and the Taipei Biennial), the voluntary and involuntary participants became involved in a redefinition of the meaning of “participation.”

Huang Po-chih creatively and skillfully adapts himself to the art system, as well as to the capitalist system, and establishes an exchange platform to bring about collaboration between parties representing different disciplines or positions to create a win-win situation. In this respect, the artist functions as an interface for change. Compared to Chieh-jen’s “ﬁeld of sensibilities” and Wu Ma-li’s “emotional connections,” the designation “sensible circulation” (感性流通) that I have coined for Huang Po-chih’s work is used to articulate circulation through sensibility, rather than merely the circulatory aspect of capital.

Art / Society This essay explores how art can respond to the changing socio-political climate: democratization, post-industrialization, and changing China- Taiwan relations. Three approaches to socially engaged art in Taiwan above

100 are presented—art as a means to manifest the reality, art as a soft way for effecting social change, and art as a platform for exchange. The role of the artists is different: Chen Chieh-jen focuses on the artist as author- centre (ﬁlm director), while Wu Ma-li regards the artist as an initiator, and Huang Po-chih sees the artist as an interface for exchange. To sum up, the imagination of art and society has expanded from the opposite position of “art←→society” since the lifting of material law in the late 1980s to the integration of “art/society” in the 2000s onwards.

This paper was presented at "Dislocations: Remapping Art History," Tate Research Centre: Asia-Pciﬁc, Tate Modern, London, December 3 and 4, 2015.

Notes

1. Lu Pei-Yi, “Towards Art/ Society: Study on Socially-Engaged Art in Taiwan,” research project for National Culture and Arts Foundation, Taiwan, 2015, http://www.ncafroc.org.tw/Upload/Study%20 on%20Socially%20engaged%20Art%20Practices_LU%20Pei-Yi.pdf/. Part of this article is based on this research project. 2. Natsuko Odate and Akira Rachi, “Chen Chieh-Jen- Memory of Time-Space,” Art-iT-Asia, 2016, http:// review.artintern.net/html.php?id=64769/, Chinese translation. 3. Chen Chieh-jen’s short biography, “Art and Society: Study of Critical Political Art Production and Curatorial Practices,” Art and Society, February 7, 2016, http://praxis.tw/archive/post-40.php/. 4. Gong Linlin and Li Xin, comp., “The Art and Politics of Chen Chieh-jen,” House News, March 24, 2014. This is a transcript of the talk “Dialogue with Chen Chieh-jen” at the Guangdong Times Museum, December 28, 2013. 5. Ibid. 6. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous discourse “Can the subaltern speak?,” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 269–71. 7. Jacques Rancière, “What Is the Time of Contemporary Art?,” lecture, May 12, 2013, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing. 8. Chen Chieh-jen’s short biography, “Art and Society: Study of Critical Political Art Production and Curatorial Practices.” 9. Chen Chieh-jen, lecture, May 18, 2014, Shenzhen OCAT. This was one of the public events of the 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennial. 10. Chen Chieh-jen’s short biography, “Art and Society: Study of Critical Political Art Production and Curatorial Practices.” 11. Zheng Bo, “An Interview with Wu Mali,” Field: A Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism, no. 3 (Winter, 2016). 12. Yu Wei, “Turning an Art Festival into a Cultural Movement: Wu Mali’s Community Art Actions,” ARTCO, June 2007, 134. 13. Wu Ma-li, “Using Water to Mend the Broken Land—Art as Environment, A Cultural Action at the Plum Tree Creek,” Creative Arts Business Community, National Culture and Arts Foundation, http:// www.ncafroc.org.tw/abc/community-content.asp?Ser_no=319/. 14. Claire Bishop, Artiﬁcial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London and New York: Verso Books, 2012). 15. Wu Ma-li, “Using Water to Mend the Broken Land—Art as Environment, A Cultural Action at the Plum Tree Creek.” 16. Lu Pei-yi, “Unseen/Seen: Exploring the Power of Art as Environment, A Cultural Action at the Plum Tree Creek,” in Art as Environment, A Cultural Action at the Plum Tree Creek (Taipei: Bamboo Curtain Studio, 2012), 295–309. 17. Wu Ma-li, “The Curatorial Statement,” in Art as Environment, A Cultural Action at the Plum Tree Creek (Taipei: Bamboo Curtain Studio, 2012), 38–41. 18. Lin Hong-john, “The Art of Frustration in Taiwan—Introduction: the Symptoms,” ARTCO 174 (March 2007), 124–25. “The Art of Frustration” attempts to link the younger generation’s penchant for “kuso, the otaku culture and the quest for self-expression without addressing an audience” to symptoms of “deliberately avoiding politics,” “resignation,” and “frustration about the present,” questioning the young artists’ apathy and alienation from society and politics. 19. Huang Chien-hung, “Micro-sensible: The Social Aspects of the New Sensibilities,” ARTCO 177 (October 2007), 166–70. 20. Huang Po-chih, artist statement.

101 Chinese Name Index

Bao Dong Guo Xiaoyan Lin Lu Tinari, Philip Yu Ji 鮑棟郭曉彥林路田霏宇于吉 Chau, David Hao Liang Lin Ye Tsao Hsingyuan Yu, Solomon 周大為郝量林葉曹星原余廸文 Chen Chieh-jen He, Echo Yu Liu Ding Wang Wei Yue Minjun 陳界仁何雨劉鼎王薇岳敏君 Chen Haitao Ho, Rania Liu Wei Wang Wei Zhang Ga 陳海濤何穎宜劉韡王衛張尕 Chen Shui-bian Hou Hanru Liu Xiaodong Wang Weiwei Zhang Liaoyuan 陳水扁侯瀚如劉小東王慰慰張遼源 Chen Tong Hu Jieming Liu Yiqian Wang Xinyi Zhang Peili 陳侗胡介鳴劉益謙王新一張培力 Chen Yifei Hua Yuzhou Liu Zhangbolong Wang Yiquan Zhang Xiaogang 陳逸飛華雨舟劉張鉑瀧王懿泉張曉剛 Cheng, Adrian Huang Chien-hung Liu, Atelier Yuyang Wang, Eugene Y. Zhang, Dillon 鄭志剛黃建宏劉宇揚汪悅進張慶紅 Cheng, Amy Huang Fangling Lo, Jeph Wang, Jing (Adel) Zhao Chuan 鄭慧華黄芳翎羅悅全王婧趙川 Chong Zhou Huang Po-Chih Lu Mingjun Wei Bozhi Zhao Junyuan 周艟黃博志魯明軍魏勃之趙駿園 Chuang Hsin-Mei Huang Yongping Lu Pei-Yi Wu Dayu Zhao Liang 莊新眉黄永砯呂佩怡吳大羽趙亮 Chun, Julie Ip Yuk-yiu Lu Xun Wu Jiayin Zhe Zhu 田珠莉葉旭耀魯迅武佳音朱喆 Chung She-Fong Kang Heng Lu, Carol Yinghua Wu Jie Zheng Shengtian 鍾適芳康恒盧迎華吳潔鄭勝天 Chung, Bryan Kung, Samuel Ma Ying-jeou Wu Ma-li Zhou Yi 鍾緯正龔明光馬英九吳瑪悧周毅 Dai Yun Lam Deng Mai Mai Xia Jianqiang Zhou, Joe 戴耘鄧葉明賣賣夏健強周志聰 Ding, Bruce Bo Law, Jamsen Miao Ying Xiao Rui Zhu Jia 丁博羅琛堡苗穎肖睿朱加 Fang Lu Lee Teng-hui Pau, Ellen Xu Bing Zhu, Shirley 方璐李登輝鮑藹倫徐冰朱欣茹 Feng Boyi Li Liao Peckham, Robin Xu Cheng 馮博一李燎岳鴻飛徐程 Fung, May Li Lin Pi Li Xu Zhen 馮美華李琳皮力徐震 Gao Minglu Li Zhenhua Qian Weikang Xu Zhifeng 高名潞李振華錢喟康許志鋒 Gao Mingyan Li, Alvin Qiu Anxiong Xujie 高銘研李佳桓邱黯雄徐杰 Gong Siyue Li, Otto Qiu Zhijie Yan Jun 龔斯悅李天倫邱志杰顏峻 Gu Dexin Lian Decheng Shao Yi Yang Fudong 顧德新連德誠邵一楊福東 Gu Zheng Liang Shuo Shi Hantao Yang Jiaxi 顧錚梁碩施瀚濤楊嘉茜 Guan Liang Lin Han Shu Qun Yao, Pauline J. 關良林瀚舒群姚嘉善 Guan Xiao Lin Hong-John Su Wei Young, Samson 關小林宏璋蘇偉楊嘉輝 Guo Cheng Lin Ke Sun Ning Yu Honglei 郭城林科孫寧尉洪磊

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