不知道 i don’t know

Isn’t it embarrassing when you get the date wrong for an opening?

I went down to Paper Restaurant last night for my friends Weng Wei and Rania Ho’s evening of paper cut-outs and projections, only to find that it had happened the previous night. The paper cut-outs were still there, so I was able to get some idea of what the event was like.

There’s a certain child-like fantasy about the piece that’s quite attractive.

Time for a meaty quote about art, I think:

Paintings and sculptures, Schapiro pointed out, were ‘the last hand-made personal objects’ within a social order dominated by the division of labour. In a world in which the life of most individuals was subordinate to unsatisfying practical activity, ‘the object of art is, therefore, more passionately than ever before, the occasion of spontaneous or intense feeling’. Abstract art met this need best, because it refused ‘communication’ in a world in which communcation had been utterly instrumentalised and reduced to a notion of the most efficient stimulus to produce a given response. More than any other art, it corresponded to ‘the pathos of the reduction or fragility of the self within a culture that has become increasingly organized through industry, economy and the state’. Although it had no specific political message, abstract painting was the ‘domain of culture in which contradiction between the professed ideals and the actuality [of our culture] is most obvious and often becomes tragic’.1,2

1. HEMINGWAY, Andrew (2006), ‘Meyer Schapiro: Marxism, Science and Art’ in HEMINGWAY, Andrew ed., Marxism and Art History: From William Morris to the New Left, London: Pluto Press. p.142
2. Quotes taken from SCHAPIRO, Meyer (1957), ‘Recent Abstract Painting’, in SCHAPIRO, Meyer (1978), Modern Art: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, New York: Braziller. pp.217–8, 222–3, 224.

Announcing that our next show at CPU:798 will be opening next weekend. This will also be the first new show in our new space, so I’m pretty excited about it.

The show is called “Frivolous” and is a set of installation by our artist Zu Jing. Zu Jing hails from Beijing and although she’s been working for a few years now on the series which we are presenting, this is the first showing of them in a gallery. She’s a very talented artist for whom we have high hopes! I’ve written a short introduction to the show on the website and will do a longer text over the next week.

So do join us next Saturday!

I classify my official beginning of Summer, here in Beijing, as being when the taxi drivers start to use their AC. And that has just happened.

The temperature reached 37˚C today. By August, when the Olympics kicks off, it will likely be hotter still.

Looking forward to that.