Alternative to Museums: Public and Independent Art Spaces in Shanghai

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.