Paper Exhibition

15 January - 7 March 2009, Artists Space, NYC
Paper Exhibition is an adaptation of the book of the same title - it will be released in nearest future.[Not to be confused with an exhibition focusing on paper as a material or substrate, Paper Exhibition loosely employs a metaphor parallel to "Paper Architecture" to suggest the not-yet conceived potential of art related thinking. Using the to-be-determined and latent aspects of an artists practice as a starting point, the variable and often fragmentary artworks in the exhibition consider the mysterious, impossible, and unknown in a form that remains unfulfilled and unrealized. It's an exhibition in purgatory, caught in the continual process of becoming.]

Background
Conceived during the Kaleidoscope Room seminar at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, a group of Studio, Curatorial and Social Practice graduate students participated in a collective study and series of discussions on these issues. These discussions were catalyzed by the open ended inquiry: “Why are we so attracted by the missing, the lost and impossible to know? Only because of the fact that we think that everything is available to us?”1

The seminar focused on a number of artworks that position themselves as fragments of larger, often lost, vanished or missing, sometimes not-yet-conceived narratives and other hardly verifiable structures: trailers of non-existing films, identities of disappeared artists, exhibitions that no one has ever saw, tables of contents of burnt novels, samples from inside time capsules, etc. The pursuit of this subject led to several conclusions including a statement that “being a part of the culture of potential ability2 that consistently purports the possibility of infinite expansion and upgrade of what one has already got from the market, art has been producing a looming and fragmented figure of “missing masterpiece” in order to create itself.”

“Whether this “missing masterpiece” has replaced the “unknown masterpiece” described by Balzac in the novel of the same title or is simply missing, remains a question. Yet maybe at the end of it we will be even able to answer a question whether there is a difference if the artwork positions itself as an extract of Don Quixote or Don Xuiqote.”

However instead of answering these two questions the Kaleidoscope Room has produced more questions and points of interest. Some of these questions were doubled. Others led to twelve more than twice, as the seminar contained twelve students, twelve screenings in succession of Aurelien Froment's Theatre de Poche (2007), and a twelve-hour brunch, later reduced to a five-minute poem written in Paris through nostalgic mind-travelling. Together with a growing field of study it led into the formation of the idea of Paper Exhibition, the book. It will be released in 2010 as a device that precluded the exhibition, but whose release has been delayed (thus allowing speculations that the show was adapted from nearest future.) The adaptation will consist of an exhibition, a library and a series of live programming presented at Artists Space in 2009. “Yet something fundamental remained missing there,” concludes the book.
Intended as a publication zapping through pages of other books, namely those produced by artists in the fashion of fan fiction – as excerpts, post-scriptums and covers of already existing or entirely virtual texts, the book of Paper Exhibition explores crypto-museological and para-literary drives of art. Some of the findings and statements of contributing artists and writers are presented in the adaptation that is being described as a conflation of books, paper architecture and brain circuits.

Feeding on a number of case studies Paper Exhibition leaks into other shows and projects posing a number of questions: Can an exhibition can be theoretical experiment, a paradox? A collective tool of speculating about things probable and improbable? Can it be a life-size paperless model of itself? Can two exhibitions be identical, but not related? Can one thing be another thing? Can exhibition become a part of each artists work? Why didn’t it have a whole? Whose project started from its end? Where did they exhibit damaged sculptures? How many invisible artworks can be in one room at the same time?

Regarding crypto-museology: derived from a discipline of crypto-zoology that explores fantastic, imaginary and unknown animals like Unicorn or Nessie, crypto-museology stems from a similar interest in hardly verifiable domain of fantastic manifestations of art. The most apparent link between the two disciplines is Schrödinger's cat Cat, a figure of quantum physics, whose function is to introduce the probability of a state being alive and dead at the same time. Following this model it makes sense to ask whether we can have an interesting conversation claiming that exhibition is and is not at the same time?

“There is more and more paper, less and less rice” a line from a poem by Joseph Brodsky opens up the press-release of Paper Exhibition. “But how much rice grains it take to write Madame Bovary on it? […] TBC
1 - The title of the seminar run by Raimundas Malasauskas was borrowed from the novel of the same title by Elizabeth Stone re-introduced to the readers by New York artist Jonah Freeman in 2007.
2 – In explaining the culture of the “potential ability” Richard Sennet uses an example of SUV car that is designed for a ride through a stormy dessert, yet most often suburban kids are brought to school in it. While only the10 % of the force of the car is being used the rest is being “owned” by a consumer as a potential ability of that one may need some day. (Richard Sennet, “The Culture of The New Capitalism”, 2007)

For further information, please check:
http://knappen.me/paper_rye/index.php?title=Paper

Ai Weiwei’s Fairytale

Fairytale is a project of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei which consists three installations, Template, 1001 Qing Dynasty Wooden Chairs and 1001 Chinese Visitors. This project has been presented in Documenta 12 in 2007 and claimed to be one of the most ambitious projects that have ever been presented in the history of Documenta. Template is a large-scaled installation comprised of late Ming and Qing Dynasty wooden windows and doors, which were formerly part of the destroyed houses in the Shanxi area. 1001 Qing Dynasty Wooden Chairs is an installation that spread these 1001 chairs around the different exhibition venues during the Documenta.

Besides the two object-based installations, 1001 Chinese Visitors is a living installation involving 1001 Chinese citizens who visited the small town of Kassel (population 194,796) in a trip fully designed by Ai Weiwei. The 1001 Chinese travelers were tourists, viewers as well as part of the artwork. They were divided into five groups, each group traveling in succession between June 12 and July 9, 2007, and were selected from more than 3,000 people who enthusiastically reacted to the travel offer application published by Ai Weiwe on his personal blog over a three-day period. Ai was able to initiate an enormous process with several different aspects, including: the planning of the tourist and educational activities, the location of suitable infrastructures, the creation of proper living and sanitary conditions, the design of a specially created travel-set (luggage, clothes, computer related technology, etc.) and the recruiting of personnel (cooks, video makers, photographers, etc.), the processing of visa applications, the purchase of flight tickets, and travel insurance.


What interested me are the multiple layers underneath the project. It is very political and provocative in the context of global vs. local. For general public in China, globalization means unprecedented opportunities not only on a national level but also on individual level. “Traveling abroad”, especially referring to western countries, has long been a “dream” for a lot of Chinese people. It is a popular term in modern time, which reflects an obvious western-centralization ideology. People in China not only are curious about west but also refer west as a model. This “dream” has gradually come true due to the greatly improvement of personal economic situations. It is now very common to see a large Chinese tourism group in western cities buying luxury products. However, this kind of dream is like a fairytale to most Chinese people who are from rural areas. Ironically, as Ai mentioned, for villagers who participated in this project, traveling to Germany has no difference from traveling to Moon. These contradictions precisely reflect the current situations of China – great gap between poor and rich caused by incongruous development.

The other issue brought by globalization is the problem of identity accompanied by the immigration phenomenon. Before a Chinese can travel abroad, he/she must be issued a visa. The application process is extremely complicated since every western century assumes Chinese travelers have immigration tendency. The process of acquiring visas for 1001 Chinese citizen within couple days was a very provocative action that generated some kind of panic for the German embassy in Beijing. Globalization brings us certain freedom but this freedom has its strict limitation. There is always a system behind it. The process of applying visa made people realize what it means to be a man or woman and a Chinese. Fairytale was a gesture of challenging and questioning this system as well as an implication of destroying and threatening the system.

As a Chinese student live and study in a foreign country, I personally experienced these physical process and psychological changes. The notion of identity has never been so notable for me both culturally and politically. This makes me interested in art practice and exhibitions that focus on urban phenomenon and trans-culture issues. How to connect global and local without misinterpret the context also makes me rethink my curatorial practice and serves as an important direction for my future career.

San Yuan Li Project and Urbanization in China Today

The rapid urbanization of China today has no doubt caught the global attention. With the extraordinary opening of 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and grand planning of 2010 Shanghai International Exposition, China is eager to prove to the world its growing power and flourishing economy. However, behind these urban spectacles, there are other urban phenomena that are the “downside” of today’s prosperous China. The phenomenon of Village in the City (VIC) is one among many.

VIC is often viewed as part of the urban terrain of erasure and transformation: the structural shift from agrarian life to urbanity. It is most often depicted as a single surviving, washed-up rural community surrounded by a sea of urban high-rises, where ex-farmers use the vestiges of their land-rights to cash in as landlords. The VIC phenomenon has in recent years become a hot academic topic in architecture and urban planning field to generate innovations. By contrast, not long ago, this phenomenon was perceived as merely a social incident by majority of Chinese, thus being purposefully neglected and forgotten. However, early in 1999 artists Ou Ning, Cao Fei and their U-theque film organization friends have started research this phenomenon through a case study of a VIC called “San Yuan Li” in the city Guangzhou. Their artistic sensitivity has brought up the general interests and put the phenomenon into wider discussion. The result of the comprehensive research was San Yuan Li Project – a collaborative work composed of a documentary film and a publication.

The film San Yuan Li is currently on view in the exhibition Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from Sigg’s Collection at Berkeley Art Museum. Comparing to other large-scale, visually impressive work in the exhibition, this black and white video piece is played on a small monitor in the lower gallery of the museum and seems not significant at all. However, the stories behind the work deserve much more attention.

San Yuan Li is a representative of VIC situated at the edge of Guangzhou. In history, it has been considered as a landmark of China’s anti-colonial and revolutionary history because of the legendary uprising of the villagers against the British invaders in the Opium War. More than thirty years later, it has completely merged into the wave of urban expansion. San Yuan Li, which used to mark the physical and mental borderline of the city has now become a little dot in the endless urban network. All kinds of marginal activities such as illegal or unofficial immigration gathering, irregular construction, drug consumption and prostitution, etc. have rapidly spread through out this microcosm.

Using digital video as a main “weapon”, San Yuan Li not only displays the historical buildings, modernist style residential buildings, and various alternative public spheres in this little village but also recordes local people and their daily life. The opening scene of San Yuan Li is a series hectic shots and surreal montage of the skylines that are made up by a bizarre juxtaposition of historical buildings’ cornices and packed clusters of multi-stories concrete buildings. As Ou Ning mentioned in his article Shadow of Time, these skylines are actually “threads of light” because most of the daylight were blocked by buildings. There is a feeling of exceptional disorientation. These building structures also generated a usual public space – the rooftop of residential buildings. Tenant who lived in these buildings would gather on the rooftop for sunlight and fresh air. Former peasant-turn-landlords or owners of these buildings also made good use of the rooftop to grow flowers, vegetable, or even raise chickens. In a sense, the rooftops were turned into a small farm in the air, in the process of bringing back people’s pleasure of a former pastoral life, a life the former villagers no longer enjoy as city residents. Another interesting public space appeared in the film is hair salon. Hair salon in China sometimes relates to secret sex industry. Besides hairdressers, there is a kind of girls who work in salons as “hair wash girl” who are actually prostitutes.

Contrasting the heavy and serious problems it unveils, the film is in a rather vivid and poetic tone. Instead of using a journalistic documentary style, San Yuan Li is more like an analytical poem. The influence from Soviet Union filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s is obvious. Vertov was a pioneer of the Kino-Pravda (film truth) in early 1990s. He thought film should reflect the truth in life with naked eyes rather than staged performance. The surreal montage, fast moving and enthralling speed of the film as well as sequences and close-ups in the film San Yuan Li all remind us Vertov’s masterpiece Man with a Work Camera. Different from Vertov who strove to create a futuristic city with in a Marxist ideology, Ou Ning, Cai Fei and their friends reveal an essential part of China’s reality today. It might not be perfect and glorious but fresh and unaffected. If Kino’s aesthetic shined through Vertov’s work with its portrayal of electrification, industrialization and the alignments of workers through hand labor, the Kino in San Yuan Li is a portrayal of people who live in the bottom of the society and the very confrontments of their daily life.

It has been nearly 10 years past since San Yuan Li Project. The government has applied a lot of policies and rules to transform San Yuan Li village. Today’s San Yuan Li may be completely different from what it used to be. However, when most of the Chinese contemporary artists are still practicing self-indulgent or market-motivated art, practice such as the San Yuan Li Project that has strong social concern and broad social engagements is greatly deficient in today’s China. I hope more emphasis will be placed on practices like the San Yuan Li Project not only in terms of artists but also curators and critics.

Yonng-Hae Chang Heavy Industries

www.yhchang.com

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries is a Seoul-based Web art group consisting of Marc Voge (U.S.A.) and Young-Hae Chang (Korea). Their work is characterized by text-based animation composed in Macromedia Flash that is highly synchronized to musical score, typically jazz.

I first encountered their work was at the New Museum in New York last winter. In the lower gallery, there were couple screens in which poetry-like sentence or conversation were flashing in the form of black and white, text-based animation. The music accompanied by the text was electronic jazz which was very attractive.

There work deal with the fundamental relationship between language, technology and contemporary culture. It likes a digital version of language-base conceptual art.

Here are some quotes from their interview:


YOO: If you hear about a digial poem, you associate it immediately with a combination of the moving images and text, one that is often animated in a Flash program. But YHC HI only uses pure text, also in Flash.

YHC HI: In the beginning of Net art, we were struck by how ineffective Net artists were in communicating information -- words, images, sound. This was in the mid-90s, when few people had broadband. Typically, Net art was an image with some words that took an eternity to download and appear in the browser. Music? Forget it, it was too heavy. And when it came to streaming media such as Flash and QuickTime, the image became tiny.

We wanted to use streaming media and audio -- to use the Internet to the maximum -- probably because we wanted Net art to be as entertaining as TV. The relationship is there and can't be avoided. As for Net art's interactivity, we thought it was laughable, not unlike channel surfing. By eliminating the image and just using text, plus the small miracle of mp3, we were able to create Flash pieces of from one minute to 25 minutes that fill up the browser and start playing after just a few seconds via a 56K modem.

http://www.brown.edu/Research/dichtung-digital/2005/2/Yoo/index-engl.htm

Painting in today's context

Why are conceptual artists painting again?
Because they think it's a good idea.

Why there are more and more discuss about the return of painting recently? When painting has been sentenced to death long time ago and art has come to an end, what are we still expecting?

A series of talks and conversations organized by Jan Verwoert
Friday, Nov 14, The Building, Berlin

What is the future of medium-specific practices after Conceptualism?
What is the future of Conceptual Art after the 1990s?

How have the basic conditions of art practice changed and what words and models could we use to open up the potentials at the heart of these developments in art after Conceptualism?

The dominant models no longer satisfy. It makes no sense to melodramatically invoke the "end of painting" (or any other medium-specific practice for that part) when the continuous emergence of fascinating work obviously proves apocalyptic endgame scenarios wrong. Yet, to pretend it were possible to go back to business as usual seems equally impossible because the radical expansion of artistic possibilities through the landslide changes of the 1960s leave medium-specific practices in the odd position of being one among many modes of artistic articulation, with no preset justification. How can we describe then what medium-specific practices like painting or sculpture can do today?

Likewise, it seems, that we can still not quite convincingly describe to ourselves what Conceptual Art can be: An art of pure ideas? As if "pure" idea art were ever possible let alone desirable! An art of smart strategic moves and puns? We have advertising agencies for that. The social and political dimension of Conceptualism has been discussed, but often only in apodictic terms, not acknowledging the humour, the wit, the existential, emotional or erotic aspects, as well as the iconophile, not just iconoclast motives, that have always also been at play in the dialectics and politics of life-long conceptual practices.

The talk will start off a series of monthly talks and conversations about the conditions of contemporary practice. The idea is to invent a new language together in discussions that could describe the potentials of contemporary practice; a language that would acknowledge a shared sense of crisis and doubt, yet fight the senseless paranoia over legitimation that too much bad-faith criticism today exploits in the wake of second-generation institutional critique. In other words: how could, in response to the concerns of contemporary art practice, a critical vocabulary be developed that would break the spell of the oedipal infatuation with the laws of (institutional) legitimacy - and instead help to transform criticism into a truly gay science based on a shared sense of appreciation and irreverence?

Jan Verwoert is an art critic based in Berlin. He is a contributing editor to Frieze magazine and also writes regularly about contemporary art for such art magazines as Afterall, Metropolis M. Teaches at the MA Fine Arts department at the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam.

the building
Platz der Vereinten Nationen 14a
10249 Berlin DE
T: 030 28 04 79 73

Alternative Visions of Urban Planning

The phenomena of international immigration have never been so prominent as in the last few decades on a global scale. Motivations of immigration vary. But the predominant reason for people to move from rural area to urban city, from third-world countries to first-world countries, is the economic incentive. This type of immigration is a chain reaction. It generates a series of sequential problems politically, socially, psychologically, and geographically. On the individual lever, immigrating means displacement and relocation. On a social level, urban transformations are inevitable in terms of generating or reshaping the fabric of the residential neighborhoods where they settle. New communities and alternative social spaces are formed. There is a mutual interplay between immigration and urbanization. When urbanization serves as impetus of immigration, immigration expedites the urban expansion.

While these phenomena are general on a global level, it is extreme remarkable in the city of San Diego. As an immigration-based country, America’s economic is greatly supported by its immigrants. For California, Latin American migrants’ cheap labor is an indispensable element. The border between San Diego and Tijuana is not merely a geographic boundary but a symbol of a newly reconstituted global border between the first and third worlds both economically and politically after 9/11.

Teddy Cruz is a San Diego-based architect who researches and analyzes the urban transformation occurring on both sides of the US-Mexico border. Unable to afford the high rents of downtown area or the new suburbs’ housing, immigrants choose to settle in the first ring of suburbanization in San Diego which has long been ignored by developers and city officials. As Cruz observed, “alternative social spaces spring up in large parking lots; informal economies such as flea markets and street vendors appear in vacant properties and housing additions in the shape of illegal companion units plug into existing suburban dwellings to provide affordable living.” These inspired him to question the efficiency and function of “grotesquely over-scaled” houses such as the expensive “McMansions” of the new suburbs. McMansion Retrofitted is a proposal – presented through videos, photographs, drawings, models and maps – to transform an existing 8,000 square foot single-family suburban house into a mixed-use multifamily dwelling. This work is currently presented in the exhibition Conflict Resolution – Teddy Cruz and Pedro Reyes in the Walter and Mcbean Galleries at the San Francisco Art Institute.

According to Cruz, this strategy of conventional American suburbs retrofit will eventually go through a similar process across the country because of the rapid densification of urban area. It is a recycle of not only existing materials but also existing conditions. "It's the next ring of densification," Mr. Cruz said confidently of the mega-McMansions, "so we thought it might make a perfect test case. How do you retrofit them?"

Instead of reflecting or criticizing the problem through artistic expression, Cruz has pushed forward the practice to a problem-solving level. Just as other architecture or urban planning project that might not be realized in a short term, his practice at least offers us possibilities and alternative resolutions towards the specific problem.

With the intervention of social engagement, boundaries between visual arts, daily life, social issue and other disciplines become increasingly invisible. The interdisciplinary strategies seem to gradually become a cliché. However, this generates another question and maybe hard to find a concrete answer. How to balance the relationship between visual representation and the complex social context behind it? For me, this question at least has two layers. Firstly, there is a certain level of compromise that exists. Will the visual display of this type of work be too dry because of the overwhelming context it tries to convey? Secondly is the exhibition context of displaying and interpreting these works. Is there an information gap between the visual output and the actual complexities?

Cruz's earnestness in placing his architecture outside the profession endows a sensatory effect to his work besides the architectural aesthetic. The plastic model displayed in the exhibition is embraced by mirrors. The infinite reflections of the house create a spatial illusion and visualize the future neighborhood based on this model. Although vague, there is something about Cruz’s Utopian envision and an ideal of distributive justice. Different from modernism era, Cruz’s strategy is based on sustainability. He chooses to recycle the materials as well as re-plan the existed neighborhoods instead of conducting new construction that expands the city even further outwards. On the other hand, owning a big house in the suburb is somehow a very important part of the American Dream. By dividing single-family house into multifamily house, Cruz suggests an openness to the traditions of other cultures as well as a subversion of the bourgeois version of the American Dream.

The term “socialism” has repeatedly appeared during the discussion of new economic strategy in recent presidential campaign. Although the desire of a fundamental reform of America’s current social and economic structure is urgent, the fear of the potential to shift from capitalism to socialism is apparent (although this is not necessarily the case). Teddy Cruz’s envision faces challenges, but by focusing his attention narrowly on the border area, he has created a mutable template that could be applied far beyond the suburbs of San Diego. For him, these nascent melting pots are rich laboratories not only for architectural experimentation but also for social critique.

- text by Xiaoyu Weng

Rem Koolhass

To make connection of Rem Kuhass and Buckminster Fuller might be very arbitrary.

Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe

One of the great American visionaries of the twentieth century, R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) endeavored to see what he, a single individual, might do to benefit the largest segment of humanity while consuming the minimum of the earth's resources. Doing "more with less" was Fuller's credo. He described himself as a "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist," setting forth to solve the escalating challenges that faced humanity before they became insurmountable.

Fuller's innovative theories and designs addressed fields ranging from architecture, the visual arts, and literature to mathematics, engineering, and sustainability. He refused to treat these diverse spheres as specialized areas of investigation because it inhibited his ability to think intuitively, independently, and, in his words, "comprehensively."

Although Fuller believed in utilizing the latest technology, much of his work developed from his inquiry into "how nature builds." He believed that the tetrahedron was the most fundamental, structurally sound form found in nature; this shape is an essential part of most of his designs, which range in scale from domestic to global. As the many drawings and models in this exhibition attest, Fuller was committed to the physical exploration and visual presentation of his ideas.

The results of more than five decades of Fuller's integrated approach toward the design and technology of housing, transportation, cartography, and communication are displayed here, much of it for the first time. This exhibition offers a fresh look at Fuller's life's work for everyone who shares his sense of urgency about homelessness, poverty, diminishing natural resources, and the future of our planet.

Above is the quote from the exhibition introduction of touring exhibition Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe. Full's design and theory become extremely relevant to today's global situation. This is also probably why more and more professionals start to refer Fuller's concept: environmentalist, artists, architects, designers, economist and even politics. Besides this big retrospective exhibition, the November ArtForum issue also featured Buckminster Fuller. It is the time to re-rethink his idea and concept and extend them into much wider field.

In 1969, Buckminster Fuller's book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth was published. In this book, Fuller weaves together micro and macro concerns of the universe and how they relate to human survival, sustainability and synergy. He does so in reflection of earth as an integral whole by connecting the evolution of our past to our necessary future evolution.

Painting in today's context

Why are conceptual artists painting again?
Because they think it's a good idea.

A series of talks and conversations organized by Jan Verwoert

What is the future of medium-specific practices after Conceptualism?
What is the future of Conceptual Art after the 1990s?

How have the basic conditions of art practice changed and what words and models could we use to open up the potentials at the heart of these developments in art after Conceptualism?

The dominant models no longer satisfy. It makes no sense to melodramatically invoke the "end of painting" (or any other medium-specific practice for that part) when the continuous emergence of fascinating work obviously proves apocalyptic endgame scenarios wrong. Yet, to pretend it were possible to go back to business as usual seems equally impossible because the radical expansion of artistic possibilities through the landslide changes of the 1960s leave medium-specific practices in the odd position of being one among many modes of artistic articulation, with no preset justification. How can we describe then what medium-specific practices like painting or sculpture can do today?

Likewise, it seems, that we can still not quite convincingly describe to ourselves what Conceptual Art can be: An art of pure ideas? As if "pure" idea art were ever possible let alone desirable! An art of smart strategic moves and puns? We have advertising agencies for that. The social and political dimension of Conceptualism has been discussed, but often only in apodictic terms, not acknowledging the humour, the wit, the existential, emotional or erotic aspects, as well as the iconophile, not just iconoclast motives, that have always also been at play in the dialectics and politics of life-long conceptual practices.

The talk will start off a series of monthly talks and conversations about the conditions of contemporary practice. The idea is to invent a new language together in discussions that could describe the potentials of contemporary practice; a language that would acknowledge a shared sense of crisis and doubt, yet fight the senseless paranoia over legitimation that too much bad-faith criticism today exploits in the wake of second-generation institutional critique. In other words: how could, in response to the concerns of contemporary art practice, a critical vocabulary be developed that would break the spell of the oedipal infatuation with the laws of (institutional) legitimacy - and instead help to transform criticism into a truly gay science based on a shared sense of appreciation and irreverence?

Jan Verwoert is an art critic based in Berlin. He is a contributing editor to Frieze magazine and also writes regularly about contemporary art for such art magazines as Afterall, Metropolis M. Teaches at the MA Fine Arts department at the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam.

the building
Platz der Vereinten Nationen 14a
10249 Berlin DE
T: 030 28 04 79 73

The Problem of Curating in China

Why there is no real international curator who is from China and is based in China?

Shanghai Diary: Galleries Driven Out of Town

http://www.artreview.com/profiles/blog/show?id=1474022%3ABlogPost%3A147624

http://www.island6.org

It's a familiar story in any city in the world: artists are at the vanguard of gentrification, turning once drab or dangerous neighbourhoods into the next real estate honey pot, with prices eventually rising beyond the reach of those who brought the honey in the first place. Shanghai is currently suffering from a particularly virulent and violent strain of gentrification – a second wave in fact, fuelled by 2010 Expo-induced real estate speculation, the rapid demolition of low-rent warehouse space for malls and apartments, and the government's imposition of pricey 'Creative Clusters'.

Shanghai boasts a good number of fairly centrally located art hubs: 696 Weihai Lu, Moganshan Lu (also called M50) and the city's original 'art street', Taikang Lu – where the few remaining galleries are engulfed in a sea of boutiques. M50, the heir apparent to Taikang Lu, is now also facing steep increases in rent and an influx of fancy new shops, foretastes of art-flight to the suburbs – and beyond.

Shanghai seems to be following Beijing's model of far flung artist communities, but while many Beijingers own their own cars, Shanghai has yet to catch the auto bug. Newer developments such as Wuwei Creative Space or Number Five Fiber Factory, a former textile manufacturing compound, are a good 20 km from the city centre by expressway and take an hour and a half to reach by public transportation – a pilgrimage that is enough to test the devotion of even the most fervent art lovers. This creeping 'suburbification' puts Shanghai's art scene in danger of becoming more of an exchange between gallery and collector, rather than a dialogue with the greater public.

Shanghai's most renowned art compound, M50, nestled snugly in a bend of the wiggling Suzhou Creek, was a textile factory until 1999 when galleries such as BizART, ShanghART, Eastlink and ArtSEA Gallery moved into units in the buildings, along with artists such as Ding Yi and Zhou Tiehai moved in. Back then, the property owners charged $0.08 per square metre per day, which worked out to a bargain $255 a month for a 100 square metre space. In the past five years though, ArtSEA for one has seen its rent more than double, and most spaces now rent for $0.34 – 0.57. There are rumours of another hike this summer, which would take rents to around $3,000. That would be a 1,076 per cent increase in the space of five years. Though certain prestige tenants like painter Ding Yi still enjoy preferential rates, the latecomers, who are already paying $0.34-0.57, are getting worried.

M50 is at the centre of a complex web of real estate manoeuvring. Butting up against the back of M50 compound is another group of buildings, M120, also owned by the M50 people but managed by another group. In M120 stands the old Foo Sing Flour Mill, a gorgeous, four storey brick and beam structure isolated in scrubland, which is home to the collective Island6. Across the Suzhou Creek lies a massive residential compound called Brilliant City, and the investors are in desperate need of tenants for their scores of empty units. In an attempt to increase the desirability of the neighbourhood, the planners claimed the old flour mill across the river, and began work on plans to enclose it in a glass dome and construct a park – all to create a better view for their tenants. "They say they are building a museum but it was just to get us out of the space," says Thomas Charveriat, Island6's founder. "If it was going to be a museum, I would be very happy to go as it is for the good of everyone, but they are turning it into a park" – and Brilliant City already has parks in abundance.

Construction workers began to move in, built dormitories and even barricaded the entrance to Island6 with a corrugated steel fence that Charveriat had to drive his car through one night just to get out. When word got out that Island6 was being harassed out of its lease, several tenants at Moganshan got spooked and inquired about other spaces in the city. Ironically, artists who find M50 too expensive are moving to Brilliant City, which is offering unfinished apartments for around $450. In the past few years the artists Song Tao, Shi Yong and Liang Yue have all set up shop in the soulless apartment blocks.

Those looking for more character have gone to what many think will be the next M50, 696 Weihai Lu. The space, originally a private residence, has had numerous incarnations as an opium den, weapons factory and car parts warehouse, and is now home to around 30 studios and a couple or three galleries. But like Taikang Lu and M50, its fate is uncertain. The property was under the influence of former Shanghai party secretary, Chen Liangyu, who is currently under house arrest, and since Chen is no longer in the picture, the management will only sign leases for two years. On top of this, its downtown location makes it a key target for developers.

Such was the fate of the ddm Warehouse and Aura Gallery, two keystones of the Shanghai contemporary art scene. They were housed in large warehouse on Dongdaming Lu, north of the Bund, but recently the whole neighbourhood was demolished. Aura moved to a warehouse on Yangshupu Lu in the northeastern district of Yangpu, a good 45-minute taxi ride from downtown – a space so far off the map that only serious collectors would make the trek.

The problem is compounded by the upcoming 2010 Expo, for which large neighborhoods along Huangpu River are also being demolished. Nearly 20,000 households and businesses are on the move and looking for cheap rent. The 5.3 sq km Expo park area was home to a number of steel plants and warehouses, all of which are now looking for new space.

Adding to the real estate crunch is the Shanghai Creative Industry Centre, which has developed 75 mixed-use compounds, or 'Creative Clusters', since 2005. Though these clusters receive tax incentives, these newly renovated factory spaces offer little in the way of cheap rent. They cater mostly to design, architecture and advertising firms, and eat up low rent space downtown. Clusters such as Red Town (Shanghai Sculpture Space) and 1933, a strikingly converted abattoir, feature a mixture of everything from architecture firms to nightclubs. They are renting out studio and gallery space for $1.70-2.30, which works out to $6,857 for a 100 square metre space. "That might be okay for New York, where the market is more developed and you have a steady stream of buyers, but not for Shanghai", says Guido Mologni, an Italian art advisor who has been searching for the past six months for a gallery space.

At the same time landlords are hesitant to sign long-term contracts in the event that prices rise even further. As Island6 experienced, a contract offers little protection. Landlords frequently renege and the legal system which is intertwined with the government and the developers does little to protect the rights of tenants. For a small gallery with a short-term contract and renovation costs, the artists on show have to help them recoup those costs. "With a year contract and a month of renovation, what kind of art are you going to show there? You are not going to show anything out of the ordinary, not one young artist. It's not good for contemporary in art in Shanghai", says Charveriat.

Experimental art in China has little in the way of a support network: there are few foundations, and the largest funding body, the Shanghai Cultural Development Foundation, invests mostly in either commercially successful, non-controversial artists or bringing big name boxed shows of western artists to Shanghai.

The real estate situation has become so precarious that Charveriat thought of housing his gallery in a boat, the kind that usually ferries tourists up the Huangpu. Sadly the owners were asking an astronomical rent. Perhaps Charveriat and all the others should build themselves an ark, one where they could live unmolested by the tempests of the market and the whims of the government.

Imageless: The Scientific Study and Experimental Treatment of an Ad Reinhardt Black Painting
July 11–September 14, 2008

IMAGELESS: The Scientific Study and Experimental Treatment of an Ad Reinhardt Black Painting documents a comprehensive research project in the field of conservation. In 2001 an important but irreparably damaged painting by Ad Reinhardt, Black Painting (1960–66), was donated by AXA Art Insurance to the Guggenheim Museum as part of a conservation research study and collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art. Over the next five years, conservators, scientists, curators, and artists carried out a complete physical examination and scientific analyses of the work. The exhibition invites visitors to enter the world of the conservator as forensic scientist, to uncover the mystery hidden beneath the monochromatic black painting.

This exhibition is organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s Conservation Department in collaboration with the Sackler Center for Arts Education. Made possible by a generous grant from AXA Art Insurance Corporation.

Ad Reinhardt in his studio. Photo: John Loengard/TimePix