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