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.