za jia lab, Hong’En Daoist Temple, Doufuchi Hutong, Dongcheng District, Beijing

20 – 23 November, 2011

Not Only A Taoist Troublemaker! was a short-lived exhibition occupying a leaf-strewn room in a small arts space attached to a bar. A bar with a vegetable market behind; sharing a building that housed a screw factory during the Cultural Revolution. A screw factory built inside a Taoist temple, replacing the site’s original Buddhist temple. This overlapping of every kind of ideology provided an ideal backdrop for the six artists’ work in this show curated by forget art.

forget art is an organisation created by artist Ma Yongfeng, about whose “guerrilla” tactics I have written once before on ArtSlant. It has become well-known for the ironic nature of its exhibitions, interventions, and projects. These activities are knowingly aware of themselves and their contexts, and never take these or themselves too seriously.

Prior to the opening of this new show, Ma Yongfeng had already laid the conceptual and experiential groundwork by initiating a series of “naked” interviews with the artists and academics. Ma’s aims seem to be, on the one hand, to provide a forum for serious discussion that he feels is lacking in the art environment in China. On the other, by performing au naturel he is pushing the situation out of kilter. The participants’ exposure may lead to a more open discussion – at the very least it places the speakers in a new, less comfortable position.

This was also his reasoning behind collecting 20 bags of autumn leaves from a forest in Beijing’s outskirts and transporting them into the gallery. This literal groundwork had the benefit of pulling the whole space together with its softness underfoot and the earthy smell that it brought to the space. Ma explained to me that this was beyond simply an intervention – it was an effort to create an atmosphere or even some kind of aura.

Picking up on this, Liang Ban’s carved radishes rested on an open window-sill and Hu Xiaoxiao’s failed (in a good way) image made of vegetable matter hung in place of honour against a plush red velvet curtain at the back a small stage. The radishes were clumsily carved with figures, as if these were nascent within the vegetables, awaiting their revelation; and the backdrop hung where a Buddha figure or Christian cross would normally be situated, spot-lit on the raised stage, at the focal point of the room. Counteracting any particular readings, a smartly-dressed woman hired by artist Lu Zhengyuan performed as an unreliable guide to the show, providing background to the works with guesswork and rumours, creating an atmosphere of misunderstandings for her audience.

Hanging above the stage, Alessandro Rolandi’s red propaganda banner announced, “MAY YOUR MATTERS BE SAFE.” This statement is typical of the ambiguous situations in his work, subtly raising its issues with reality. These words overlooked and seemed to ironically relate to Wu Yuren’s large rock suspended from the ancient rafters. For the opening, Wu stood under this 200lb stone, forcing himself to remain in this precarious position. While perhaps not long enough to privilege this activity as “durational,” he was there long enough for a call of nature to be performed amongst the leaves – I have to recognise this as (some sort of) commitment to the (in)activity. In discussion with the curator and audience, he finished the piece by removing his clothes and standing naked under his stone – disrobing again appearing as a means of expression with its parallels to the online response to Ai Weiwei’s charges of pornography (although Ma Yongfeng’s original naked interviews antedated this particular meme).

However, I don’t want to sound dismissive of Wu Yuren’s activity, as it had a deeper rationale than its surface appearance might suggest. In 2010 Wu was jailed for ten months under questionable circumstances and since his release has intermittently been called in for “a cup of tea” by the authorities (as questioning is euphemistically referred to). This serious and continual pressure on him is expressed through this work.

Whether that makes it a “good” work, I am not sure; my immediate reaction was that I did not like it, even with the background, feeling it was too literal and unsubtle. But I have to respect the fact that it reflects Wu Yuren’s being on the blunt end of the system, aspects of his situation being more common than one might expect. He has more right than most to comment on this experience, and of course I do not know what it is like to live through his experience or what it is like to be under this continual pressure. The activity was all done in seemingly good spirits – one way to deal with such serious matters, perhaps.

This attitude was reflected in the original Chinese title of the show, “不是吃素的” or “not a vegetarian,” a euphemism for not being a push-over, which the curator described as presenting “a very simple, radical attitude.” The English title refers to the Bohemian reputation of Taoists, saying that this show is not “only” about that, in a typically open move.

Although it is obvious I had many reservations about this show, maybe because of those reservations I still felt this was a powerful show creating a strong impression on me by its scattershot nature.

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published 4 December, 2011 on ArtSlant.

What we are watching here is a video work from 2002 entitled The Swirl by Chinese artist Ma Yongfeng. This 15 minute video is one of Ma’s very first works at a point where he was displaying an interest in using what might be seen as futile behaviours, as a means of pricking the fabric of reality, and questioning it’s assumptions. Ma has more recently become known for his minimal interventions in daily life and socially aware services, but at the point at which this video was produced, these interests were still nascent.

Well, I can’t ignore the video anymore, and that of course is its problematic – this traumatic activity which is presented to us – these fish which are due for quite a ride, as we will see.

As the commentator for this work, and ostensibly representative of it and of the artist, the unfolding of the piece makes it tempting to expound my own strong opinions about the treatment of animals, which could come into conflict with my respect for the artist. But neither Ma, nor—I guess—you, as the audience, will thank me for making such apologies. What’s done is done, and we (the audience as well as the artist) must deal with the consequences.

I have known Ma and his work for a few years now, and the work I have seen produced by him and which I have written about over that period initially has seemed formally very different from this early piece.

Ma now works less with video and more with events and situations. He aims to formalise a set of projects, which seek to work directly with social reality. He is, for instance, undertaking an ongoing project called forget art, an adaptable undertaking that takes many forms, including exhibitions, art fairs, interventions, online social networks, etc. but aims to play with these institutions and find new ways to turn them to social use.

How then does one get from these fish to an interest in working with the forms of society?

Taking a step back, what is happening in this video? Six live golden Koi fish have been placed in a top-loading washing machine and the washing cycle is set off. As an aside, the top-loading style of washing machine is a very common element in Chinese apartments – perhaps because this top-loading aspect saves space over their front-loading brethren.

So the wash cycle starts innocuously enough with the bright metal drum filling with water, the water falling from all sides to douse the fish. Once filled, the drum begins to turn clockwise, then anticlockwise agitating the water and the fish in the process. This continues, back and forth, for about 10 minutes. The water then drains out of the drum, leaving the fish high and dry on the metal base of the machine. Followed by a fade to black.

But such a cold description of the facts of this video leaves out the affective aspect of the action, both on the fish in their tormenting and violent situation, and on the audience with their feelings when placed in front of such an act by the artist.

It is probably best if I say at this point, that the fish were relatively unharmed after their washing, living out the rest of their natural lives with a friend of the artist’s.

So what causes an artist to undertake such an action on these helpless animals? What does it mean?

Ma’s other works of video and photography at that time were concerned with the place of “nature” in our understanding of the world, and nature’s place and use value in our attempts to understand the world through our depictions of it. This would appear as Ma’s own creations or by his filming of natural history museum dioramas and reconstructions, sometimes with subtle interventions and changes by the artist, sometimes simply re-presenting the facts in front of us. Equally these constructions—with their original didactic purposes and the artists own twisting of them—serve to point up the arbitrary and fake nature of the presentation, a nature which often blatantly ignores the real needs of the animals and plants contained therein, giving the presentation for the audience priority over any welfare issues.

The Swirl presents a demonstration of a completely man-made, machine-like setting in which nature is placed to face its fate. The piece’s apparent simplicity leads to some broad claims about its significance. Is it possible to see The Swirl as a piece of social criticism, or a commentary on the artist’s existence, as critic Dorothée Brill has suggested? Are these claims a step too far?

Symbolic meaning is a well-developed part of culture. Especially in the visual arts, objects and scenes are interpreted based on their symbolic status, various objects have deep and significant meanings developed over the course of centuries, which the enlightened viewer can piece together as a further layer of meaning for the image.

So what can be said about these fish? Koi have value in Chinese tradition as symbols of abundance and prosperity. Traditional Chinese paintings will include Koi to represent these values within the overall symbolic schema they present. In neighbouring Japan, the meaning of Koi fish is slightly different, where they present an ideal of strength of purpose, and perseverance in adversity. A meaning that seems particularly appropriate to this artwork and a meaning the artist may well have been aware of when putting the fish into this predicament.

Does the washing machine have a symbolic meaning and value in itself, which when combined with the fish creates some new, composite symbolic value, designed to enlighten us as to the piece’s “higher” meaning? By placing them in a washing machine and subjecting the Koi to the swirling of the drum, what does that mean for this set of values?

The round opening of the washing machine could be said to have some formal connection with a common way of framing scenes with wall openings in Chinese gardens. These openings take various shapes, but are all designed to provide a viewpoint out into the landscape which presents the scene as an aid for contemplation. The video work titled Beijing Zoological Garden, produced by Ma a couple of years after The Swirl, makes reference to this technique as the artist wanders the animal houses of the eponymous Zoo presenting the animals and spectators therein through this idealising, round vignette.

So, is it fair to make comparisons between the roles of Koi or these framing methods in the Chinese view of landscape, with Ma’s work? How about out modern interpretations of animals and landscapes, which we present in our museums and in our imagery?

In his works Ma seems to be picking up on these traditional tropes of the role of these animals and settings, while putting them in new contexts to play with their ultimate meanings when they come into contact with their audiences, a context which also alters with time and knowledge.

However once stepping beyond the highly codified set of symbols which make up the various cultural systems, symbolic value becomes something of a futile task, as the values become arbitrary and open to re-interpretation at any point. Any value can be read into anything – with a bit of effort. Indeed, artists have a tendency to reinterpret symbols, and twist meanings to reveal hidden factors within their assumed status. Ma Yongfeng in particular playfully questions many of these assumptions in his work, playing off the symbols against each other to open up the possibility of new meanings to appear.

In his latest works, where Ma has taken on the social aspect of art as his tool, although his intentions are sincere in his attempts to engage and create an effect on society, I cannot help but notice that in every case the subjects are not dealt with as hard and fast rules, but with a canny sense of humour which lightens the tone and prevents them from becoming too sterile.

So Ma’s fish may or may not mean abundance, and the washing machine may or may not refer to traditional scenery; the action may mean many things which we can read into the video from our position of safety away from the actual creation of the work, a point from which we can make judgements about the responsibility of the artist that perpetrated such an act.

The relatively simple set up in this video allows one to look beyond the reality of the situation and try to piece together some kind of symbolic meaning behind it. But the piece never makes it too easy to remain focused on one or the other, the reality or the symbol. The Koi’s predicament is never far from our minds – nor should it be if we have any sense of empathy in us. But then neither should the reality that this is just a video of an incident which took place almost ten years ago, and which can now be looked at with some perspective and from many other points of view besides the shock value that the activity immediately proposed.

Inevitably Ma’s work reflects aspects of the artist’s experiences and is an expression of his thoughts and ideas about the world. But how far one should go to create a symbol out of this very real action seen in the video? Keeping these two readings in process is important I think. Certainly the fish are being tormented. But equally they come to represent something beyond themselves in the process. Being able to keep those two readings in view perhaps can prevent lapsing into an essentialist reading of the piece as either a brutal mistreatment of animals or an aesthetic display divorced from real-world travails.

The Swirl forces me to never to forget the reality of the fishes’ dilemma, but at the same time to hold that reality as one amongst a number of readings of the work, which makes the work important as going beyond itself, to take on a wider significance within the artist’s work and in society at large.

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published November, 2011 in ASPECT Magazine.

3 Sept – 16 Oct, 2011

Chasing Sites is a relatively sedate presentation for artist Weng Wei, focusing on her ink paintings on rectangles of paper and cutouts affixed to clearly delimited sections of the gallery walls. These new works and their installation in Pékin Fine Arts have calmed the spontaneity of her earlier appearances, and this aspect of spontaneity—instigated in part by the precarious conditions under which she was then working—she now treats with some ambivalence. This show has become a critique of those conditions, with the new works as close readings of past installations, rationalisations of the things which she looked for from those venues but which she feels were lacking.

Drawn from her memories of those situations, these paintings seem to visualise some of the physical and mental conditions under which she was working. The paintings themselves are in dense black ink on heavy paper, with crisp outlines but including the occasional representation of a brushed edge. The overall impression is very strong, although what these forms represent remains ambiguous. At times elements can be discerned. There are some recognisable architectural spaces in isometric or perspective projections – the regular forms of art-fair booths in SmileAngel Foundation, CIGE 2011 (2011); and the small gallery space of Slice at Arrow Factory Space, Beijing (2010). Also occurring are representations of the iconic shapes that have consistently appeared in her work, including those of her paper cutouts that now lose their freestanding nature to become graphic forms on paper or attached to the gallery walls. The blurring of boundaries between the forms of the cutouts and the artist’s paper weavings, a feature of past installations, here has become another of the symbols in these new works.

Previously, where these shapes, elements and events have all inhabited a narrative universe defined by the artist, that aspect is now not raised and they apparently stand-alone or simply serve as pointers back to their original settings, from where they can reconnect with that literary-symbolic function within the artist’s world-view. I hope the texts and stories are carrying on in the background as I always felt that these allegorical elements energised the work, adding a surreal depth to their meanings. In the current show it seems as if the previous settings and gallery sites have taken over as this allegorical energy, as many are no longer existent and have slipped into their own histories, thus providing suitable fictions for the artist to build upon.

An aspect that I must also recognise, and which makes my own relation to this show somewhat strange, is my own implication as part of the history of these works, having represented one of the venues that is now her raw material (Anti-mapping at CPU:798, Beijing (2011)). It will be interesting to see Pékin Fine Arts’ own contribution to this legacy. One might suggest that the wall drawings that the artist has layered throughout the gallery spaces are representing this. These additions are the only coloured drawings in the show, but rely on a limited palette of pink, grey, dark green, and turquoise. A loose grid of yellow strips mark out parts of the drawings, similar to the weavings mentioned before but on a much larger grid, becoming architectural, and the structure off which the circles, weavings and shapes then launch themselves and work against.

In Weng Wei’s work the most interesting moments for me come when the artist’s library of symbols and meanings come back into contact with the world (or a world) – as narrative, installation, performance, or—as here—a far more controlled set of renditions of the past and present. While this show appears to be a valuable taking stock for the artist, I look forward to future incursions of her vision into less organised surroundings, which while perhaps uncomfortable for the artist I believe provide her with the necessary friction against which her elements can react to and thrive upon.

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published October, 2011 in 艺术界LEAP Magazine.

Shan Studio, 3-2-302# Sweetness Home, No.29 Huayuan Hutong Dongxiang, Andingmennei, Dongcheng District, Beijing, China

It’s midnight, Beijing-time, and in the darkened living room of a small apartment near the city’s second ring road, two figures quietly attend to their bank of equipment. The performers, Taurin Barrera and gogoj, appear not entirely there, in a world of their own, working away in an environment with few sounds filling the room aside from the rustles of their movements. Projected on the wall beside them are gogoj’s wave form lightening strikes, reacting to some unheard input, building from simple shaped waves through to complex smears and many-dimensional structures as the feeds become ever more complex. The silence in the room contrasts starkly with the sounds and visuals each performer is producing within the walls of the equipment and immediately dispersed away online to a small audience which has gathered from around the world to experience False SIP, Shan Studio’s first Gigonline.

Sheng Jie, also known as gogoj, is a Chinese video and audio artist, who established Shan Studio in 2010 in an apartment amongst the hutongs in central Beijing. Sheng began Shan Studio as away to extend her own practice, as “like every artist there are times when you close the door and do your work, but at the same time I wanted to open the door to receive people.”

For such a small space, Shan Studio is adaptable to many purposes: as a residency space, it has living, working and sleeping areas; as a teaching workshop it provides facilities for creating and demonstrating audio and video production techniques; the living room can be repurposed for small performances, as well as used as a lecture space.

The various types of events produced and hosted here reflect Sheng’s set of interests in working with sound and visuals. Her background was originally in music, her father being a famous concert violinist, but Sheng was also drawn to the visual arts with a focus on video. Her work and her aims for the Studio cross these two areas: “those two parts are a very important part of my background: that I could study music and then drawing – the sound and the visual.”

While working as a guest teacher at The Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, she came into contact with many students who wanted to learn about these links between video and audio. But the professors were unable to devote their time to just this subject, so the students were often left to their own devices, which is where the initiative for Shan Studio arose.

Eventually, dissatisfaction with the university environment convinced Sheng to stop working there and concentrate on the Studio as a platform for knowledge and exchange. The money to support such an endeavour comes from her commercial work, and the fees paid for the artists’ residency, teaching and workshops. Aside from that, the other events are free: “they are simply ways to help people who want to learn something.”

Since opening, the Studio has hosted 4 international residencies and laid on some 17 events. These include workshops that teach software and hardware skills, and what Sheng calls Freetalks which provide more relaxed presentations of artists’ work, emphasising a two-way flow of conversation between the artists and audience.

The events at Shan Studio are open to all, and often include students from CAFA but also many students from other university departments, including cinema, fashion and industrial design. This mixture of backgrounds creates a conversation that is important for Sheng: “they meet each other because they want to learn the same things. They can also exchange the information between them and also with the artists.”

The Studio presentation room is very small and usually fits about 15 or 20 people, a number that Sheng feels encourages connections between the people more easily. The biggest audience was a standing room only event with around 30 people for a performance and discussion with Yan Jun, a well-known Chinese noise artist.

Many events at the Studio have dealt with software technologies, such as Max/MSP a popular tool for the creation of sound, visual and interactive work. But Sheng is adamant that there is not only one way to work, saying that any software is just a tool: “Young Chinese people often focus too much on these tools. A question all the time is what software they should use. But I create these events to show people you have many ways to do things, maybe not with Max at all. You can do things without software, just with hardware.”

American electronic musician and sound artist Taurin Barrera was resident at the Studio just prior to the False SIP performance, conducting a three day workshop demonstrating his Max/MSP patches: “Taurin can only speak a little Chinese, so trying to explain his patches was very complicated. He finally gave up and spoke only in English with participants volunteering to translate for the others who didn’t understand. It was a very interesting ambience, because all the people are trying to guess what he was saying!”

Gigonline is the latest development at Shan Studio, developed in collaboration with Taurin: “I have a neighbour who is very sensitive to any sounds. Gigonline is a way to perform without disturbing them, and I can open the showplace to many people, and they don’t need to move from their own rooms.”

Technical limitations are accepted and deliberately incorporated into the broadcast. This first Gigonline: False SIP with Taurin incorporated “webcams, DIY synthesizers, medical equipment, projectors, busted radios, and many unconventional instruments.” For a broadcast event, the reality is that the internet can be very slow in China, but this becomes a feature and not a bug for the performance. Sheng revels in these restrictions, describing the internet as: “the best distortion box ever created.”

gogoj: http://sgogoj.com/

Shan Studio: http://shan-studio.com/?lang=en

gigonline: http://www.livestream.com/gigonline

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published 22 August, 2011 on ArtSlant.

Siemens Home Appliance Art Space, Taoci 2nd Street, 798 Art District, 100015 Beijing, China

23 July – 7 August, 2011

In 2010, on a side street behind the main drag of 798, the German appliance company Siemens opened a small art space as part of their mission to “finance young artists’ projects and provide community service around China.” As part of this worthy cause, this month the gallery is hosting Overstep, a show of two young Chinese artists Shen Yi Elsie and Lei Benben, curated by Pi Li (Director of Boers-Li Gallery).

Over the past few years both Shen Yi Elsie and Lei Benben have moved from photographic works to a more expansive approach to media – in Lei’s case into video and for Shen a practice that has developed through video into public interventions. For Pi Li, their work “oversteps” discredited boundaries of objectivity, fragmenting narrative into disjointed personal histories, creating a situation he characterises as “the inversion of time and space, [where] reality starts to drift into illusion and no longer firmly detains us.”

The video China Utopia (2009) by Lei Benben, is constructed in three short “chapters” each presenting scenes in which preoccupied figures are placed in sensuous environments. In the first chapter a riverbank scene bisected by a thin tree is interrupted by a man gazing out with us at the view. Stepping forward he removes his tie and drops it to the ground, but any thought that this might be a prelude to a full disrobing and leap into the water is denied as he sits to contemplate the scene. Following this, a two-part chapter begins with a view down another river into which a boat is paddled. On the boat four figures stand becoming dark shapes extending up from the boat, against the colourful, mountainous surroundings. The figures look around them, while the boat comes to rest in the middle of the river. The scene then changes to three figures in army fatigues in a cleared patch of field. They seem uncertain and walk in different directions, never coming into contact with each other. In the third and final chapter, a young urbanite wanders a bucolic wood, the ground covered with flowering plants. Sitting down against a tree he seems to doze, whereupon we are taken to a boldly coloured garden in blurred focus where on a traditional pavilion a duo of characters in Chinese opera dress languidly dance.

China Utopia, while giving over a clear feeling of contemplation, perhaps suffers from the lack of direction that may be representative of this “overstepping.” In many ways the purposelessness of the characters reminds me of Yang Fudong’s work, but (as with Yang Fudong) this can become tiresome without an obvious resolution or point to the activity. Taking a look at Lei’s other works (not on show), it is clear she has an eye for the purposeful/purposeless movements of figures within landscape – for example in the short video Tuanjiehu Park from 2009, where she surreptitiously films people performing their personal exercise routines in the titular Beijing park, a theme which recurs in Fresh Air (2010) but with far more emphasis on non-diegetic sounds creating an idealised backing to the gestures.

In the other rooms, Shen Yi Elsie presents works produced over the past few years that move beyond her earlier photographic tableaux, bringing in a social awareness, which greatly energises the pieces for me. The video work The Neon God (2008) takes her still shots of teenage migrant labourers performing menial work, and adds light trails which animate the figures as if revealing their hidden powers through photography. The video takes the photographs a step beyond static shots, animating the scenes through fades and tracking shots, however I am not sure that this additional manipulation adds much more than spectacle to the photos. It may be the case that the narrativity of the photographs themselves works well enough in its own right.

That said, this video reveals the artist’s urge to push her photography ever further, something that takes a leap in the public interactions of the Breath series. Her initial foray was in 2010 when she inserted little strips of pink paper, with the Chinese characters for “Breathe” on them, into closed walnuts shells. These were then mixed with unadulterated nuts on a market stall that the artist manned. These acted like messages in a bottle, sending the artist’s little reminders of life out into the world for the public to accidentally come across, beyond the control of the artist.

Shen has taken this method further with her works in other settings. Working in a dry cleaning establishment she inserted little folded paper objects—which she describes as “a common form of a folded letter or delivering a message in old times”—into the cleaned clothes. On the paper is written “please breath” ready for the client to discover. Other works in this series involve the artist creating a set of small ink stamps, whose impression she applies inside of newspapers to match the existing fonts, but highlighted in red ink. She then takes on the role of delivering these adjusted papers, the additions again reminding people to breathe. A fourth piece sees the artist handwriting signs offering to teach people to breathe if they phone the number provided. These signs are pasted on walls amongst other homemade adverts, inviting strangers to contact her for this unusual service.

Each piece is presented as a vertical series of photos accompanied by examples of the artefact involved – a very important and effective way of presenting the intervention without resorting to cliché. However, one point of concern for me in these pieces, is the relationship that the artist sets up with the labourers and the roles she takes on – which risks becoming patronising. The relationship between these two sections of society is an issue it is clear she is concerned with, but the focus of the pieces seems to be more on the artist performing the role interacting with the customers, which somehow precludes the body of the labourer themselves.

That criticism aside, I loved the way these actions step beyond themselves and reach out to an audience that to a large extent cannot be predetermined to bias the effect. Both Breath and The Neon God become a way for the artist to re-imagine the relationship of communication between the worker and their clients.

Pi Li, in his text for the show, describes “Overstep” as, for example, a move from “closed” to “open” narration: “from uniform to paradoxical.” This small show demonstrates the positive and negative consequences of such a move, and is a welcome demonstration of how a critical curatorial structure can productively work with it’s chosen set of works to leave room for questions and create something that takes them beyond themselves for the audience.

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published 1 August, 2011 on ArtSlant.

The Journey West Travel Office, 43 Zhonglouwan Hutong, Dongcheng District, Beijing, 100007 China

21 May – 10 July, 2011

As an agent of Spectacle, tourism fulfils manufactured desires, and you can’t get more manufactured—or at least programmed—than guided tours. Tailor-made to your requirements? Maybe so, but within your tightly regimented schedule (value-for-money!) you’ll see only what you want to see, and the tendency to cede control and the experience to the tour company itself becomes part of a demonstration of social and economic affluence. But maybe those restrictions can be put to use to provide a frame within which to re-view our understanding of the sites that we visit, through a critical engagement with the process and assumptions of tourism.

Setting up shop for the last two months in a tiny street front space in the historic Drum and Bell Tower area (once home to Beijing’s time-keeping apparatus), American artists Stephanie Rothenberg and Dan S. Wang have been running their Journey West Travel Office. The Office has been developed as a serious business, from their initial location scouting in this strategic area which sees plenty of foot traffic from potential clients, to the process of interviewing and engaging salespeople, whose subsequent travails as arbiters of the various package tours to passers-by become documentary material adding to the content of the piece as a performative intervention in the area.

The four available tours are to purposefully non-mainstream locations, and include The Majesty of Parking Lots (led by Ryan Griffis, “a leading expert on the history, economics, and aesthetics of America’s parking lots”) and The Great American Test Range Tour (led by author and expert on black-ops secret bases, Trevor Paglen). The tours serve as examples of what has become known as Critical Tourism, the seeds of which were laid in the ‘90s with the writings of Lucy Lippard and the actions of groups such as Critical Art Ensemble and REPOHistory. It serves as an exposure and antidote to the exercises in power relationships and the normalisation of historical and social meaning which tourism can embody. Critical Tourism was partly about avoiding the monumental and iconic sites that we all “know” before we even get to them, in favour of locations and methods of tourism which dug a little deeper into the sites, the tourists’ presence in those places, and the meanings and uses of tourism itself.

Although this is the first time they have worked together, Rothenberg and Wang have a shared interest in art practices that investigate modes of production and consumption. Tourism is one such process whose intricacies bear attention and critique for its tendency to homogenize our views and experiences of the places around us, what gets written into history and the hierarchies of it. As Rothenberg puts it, it’s in the nature of tourism to be an act of “social engineering”; its accoutrements and systems working with a type of “consumer propaganda” of its promised utopian experience:

“It’s interesting to question what makes something a significant landmark, what gets on the tourist map and what doesn’t. You move beyond what is iconic and start to understand more about a ‘localism.’”

Based on their experience of China, the inspiration for the Travel Office came from the artists’ awareness of the decontextualization of many cultural factors in this place.

“…it was the whole appropriation of Western iconography or cultural signifiers that then get really disconnected, decontextualized … I wanted to open up some kind of travel agency that could bring it back to where it came from.”

The result became what they describe as a “discursive platform,” a way to engage with the passers-by and investigate these utopian visions of travel versus the reality and its actual real-world impact.

The events organized in conjunction with the Travel Office served to expand its reach into the surrounding spaces and audiences. These situations garnered attention and also changed the nature of the spaces to one that perhaps reflected the ethos of the Office itself, by positioning it as an active participant in the community.

“Finding the store, setting it up, doing the worker interviews, coming up with the worker chant – it becomes about the production of a travel agency, an exposure of the system … It was really important to have our own “Journey West motivational exercise and chant”! The performances were a great way to activate the space around the Office.”

I reviewed one such event on ArtSlant a few weeks ago, Something on the Way by Alessandro Rolandi and Megumi Shimizu. For American Independence Day Rothenberg and Wang organized a celebration in the public square in front of the Office. On that balmy evening the square was packed with locals and tourists, with the ubiquitous rickshaws scooting through the narrow alleys showing people the sights. The celebration began with a dance routine prepared by members of the HomeShop community (a nearby artist collective) designed to mimic the pre-shift motivational chants and exercises workers are required to do. The HomeShop crew took on the role of “workers” dressed in “The Journey West” uniform of cowboy hat, red bandana necktie and company shirt. The event created a party-like atmosphere with drinks, pie and a small charcoal barbecue finding its place in amongst the evening life of the hutong. The dancers staked out their performance space, but had a tough time competing with the locals’ own line-dance groups that form every night in open spaces in China. Towards the end the locals began to edge the interlopers out a little, re-asserting their own space and imposing their own “normality” against the oddity of the Travel Office’s activities: “It was interesting in terms of East meets West: here comes the artist with her ironic performance of Chinese dances, and then it totally merged with the real, local thing.”

In the end, no sales were made, but success in these terms was, if not irrelevant, then would have been simply a side benefit of the project. During the interviews for potential sales-people, Rothenberg was advised by an MBA from the Yemen that their location may have actually worked against them in this respect, and Beijing’s business districts might be more suitable. Rothenberg came to reflect on the role of tourism in global business presence: “…big group tours nowadays are organized through companies, where they are sending their employees overseas so that they can experience and get to know other cultures – on those trips they’re interfacing with their potential clients.”

I think this investigation and response to the audiences in the area served as a point of clarification for the project as a whole. The hutong store sat within a hub of tourist activity, but tourists who were in consumption mode rather than research mode – would they want to buy another tour when they were already on holiday? For the local residents and workers the tours were usually too expensive for them to consider. But that provocation of out-of-reach realities had the productive potential to give some kind of interruption, encouraging a consideration of how could one be in a position to take part in these tours; what is the value of these tours to me; and, who are they really addressing? The process of weighing up your position in relation to the “utopian visions” of the Travel Office can perhaps open up a greater awareness and reassessment of one’s own wishes and possibilities.

Perhaps coming into contact with the Travel Office while on your vacation, visiting one of Beijing’s major tourist pit-stops, you may become painfully aware of your position herded with your fellow tourists and intimately disconnected with the local hutong residents that give the area their “character.” This layering of the surreal elements of the whole situation, may just give the audience pause to consider their own situation as part of the global tourist class.

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published 25 July, 2011 on ArtSlant.

Linda Gallery, 797 Street B Zone, 798 Art District, 2 Jiuxianqiao Lu, 100015 Beijing

4 June – 3 July, 2011

“Alibi,” the title in English of this group show at Linda Gallery in Beijing’s 798 Art District, seems so much more evocative than the Chinese title《不在场》which the essay by curator Wang Yifei translates as “Being Absent.” Although the adherence to the title seems a little weak at times, this show presents artists working with an absence of some sort. That being a very broad subject, the results take many forms and directions, and overall the show brings together an interesting selection of works, with some standout pieces.

Staying initially with the curator’s text, there are some points there that I think bear notice. Unsurprisingly, given where we are, the text does not delve too far into any of the contemporary social realities of “being absent.” Describing it in general terms as “like a conspiracy, an escape or a way of self-liberation.” To me this places the focus more on an individual’s agency in the matter and less on absence as a result of outside circumstances.

The text also proposes that: “In the contemporary art field nowadays, many artists have established their independent and mature styles of expression without any limit to the subject material.” This statement seems somewhat disingenuous. And that’s without commenting on the fact that the show opened on a particularly significant day, a fact that some of the exhibiting artists were obviously well aware of, but would have been unwise to attempt to deal with directly.

But there is little point dwelling on such matters, as they simply reflect the facts of working in this environment, to which I recognise I am equally beholden as I can only obliquely refer to their meaning.

Stretching across the entrance to the gallery, a long tree branch attached to the wall by a spring forces visitors to divert around or push it aside to make their entry. This piece by Yang Xinguang abstracts an experience of hiking through woods, pushing aside branches to make your way, suggesting for the curator the activity of escape from one place to another. As simple as it is, the piece has a strong effect in its evocation of the thoughtless gesture of moving through an environment far from the controlled environment of the gallery space.

Wrapping around the main wall in front of this, Liu Ren’s Searching for a sense of security is a series of thin shelves carrying around 4,000 empty eggshells, inside each of which is handwritten vocabulary from his attempts to learn English. This mass of shells arranged in their rows, are overwhelming in serial nature, their combined fragility, and the shear amount of potential learning held on their inside surface. The shells hold their information so tentatively in the emptied casings, with always the possibility of breakage and lose of the meanings held.

Perhaps the most literal demonstration of “Being Absent” is Li Wei’s painted outlines of bodies on the floor – as if evidence of some mass killing. Painted in mustard-coloured oil paint just prior to the opening, these took several hours to dry, with the outlines becoming increasingly vague and disturbed by the steps of the visitors. Li commented that this process reflected the fact that there are certain events for which the evidence may disappear, but the memory will not.

In amongst all this an additional structure has been built, mimicking the booths that appear in art fairs around the world. This serves as the setting for Ma Yongfeng’s forget art fair that takes place within the gallery for the duration of the show. Ma is known for his critical and irreverent approach to art institutions and in this case he has followed the conventions of the international art fair circuit and created his own distinct sales space, acting as a show within “Alibi.”

His curated show within a curated show perhaps marks the presence in their absence of the curator themselves, hovering over their shows while attempting not to overshadow them (a delicate balancing act which only the best pull off).

Works inside Ma’s “fair” include the minimal white canvases of Huang Jia which add ridges of stitching to their featureless painted surfaces; Alessandro Rolandi’s unassuming bamboo cane made from polished stainless steel leans up against the corner of the space; and a nice work by Yang Jian of an old armchair supporting a semi-circular section of LED signage. This sign displays a continuous moving text announcing: “… Huang Lei, male, wants to leave – Chen Xiaoxia, female, wants to leave…” etc. For me this piece presented the most appropriate, sensitive and poetic response to the theme of the show. This scrolling sign arches above the absent human form in the armchair, announcing the rather sad and impotent longings of many people to simply – leave.

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published 13 June, 2011 on ArtSlant.

forget art, Beijing, China

16 May, 2011 – 16 May, 2012

forget art is a loose artist collective, based in Beijing, and initiated in 2009 by Chinese artist Ma Yongfeng. They focus on intervention-based work, often with a touch of the absurd, promoting small-scale, subtle disturbances in the fabric of society, which they describe as their “social micro-practice.”

As they work by and large outside of recognised gallery spaces, the creation and value of social space has become an important material for forget art. This keys into the long history of nomadism, with particular attention to the local experience in China and its mass population of migrant workers, as well as the international development of the itinerant white-collar worker. So in forget art’s “situations” ambivalence towards the fixed location comes through, feeding into their approach to production and presentation, and their feeling that sometimes it is necessary to “forget” in order to proceed. As Ma quips “That’s also why we don’t need any space – because we “forget art,” why do we need any space to do this?!”

forget art made its first appearance at the Dragon Fountain Bathhouse in September of last year, with a group show inserting a collection of minimal works into a temporarily détourned bathhouse in Beijing’s Caochangdi Art Village.

The works appeared as small situations expanding on the idea of an artwork, but always with a standpoint somewhere between the object and the situation. The light touches of the pieces infused the rooms without overly asserting their presence or nature, with male and female areas open to all for a few hours only. At the time Ma explained to me that “An ‘object’ is just this thing [indicating a cup], but if we draw a circle around it, it’s an expanded object, developed, and it becomes a situation. But we don’t want it to become bigger and bigger, we’re just in the middle, in-between.”

This sensibility has laid the groundwork for forget art’s Guerrilla Living Syndrome (created by Ma Yongfeng, Yang Xinguang and Wu Xiaojun) that began last month. Guerrilla Living Syndrome will be a series of projects continuing to attend to these subtle displacements of spatial and social constructions but applying to wider forms of subject matter. As the name suggests, all the sub-projects will build up to a renegotiation of our social relations based on lived space.

A starting point for this new project is the effect of the Hukou system on life in China. A Hukou is a residence permit, which gives you rights in the area it applies to. While not preventing you from moving around, as it did in the past, a Hukou make things like healthcare more convenient in its area, treatment for serious health issues can only be received in your Hukou.

Although certainly not as draconian as it used to be, the Hukou system represents a strong tie to a “home” area. The psychological and practical issues of accommodation outside of your area become an issue, so the first Guerrilla Living Syndrome project Youth Apartment Exchange Project (YAEP) picks up on the issues of nomadism seen in the previous projects while providing practical accommodation possibilities for the participants. As Ma says: “People move many times in their lives, and there are also a lot of temporary spaces in the city – Starbucks, hotels, restaurants. We want all spaces to become temporary.”

On a practical level YAEP takes the form of a social website that allows participants to find others who want to exchange residences, and then to share the experience and stories behind the exchange back on the site. The site is not just for apartment swapping though, anything can be shared through this open barter system forget art have constructed.

One effect of this new system is to bring people together, promoting social interaction through exchange. Ma worries about the contemporary tendency of people to live their lives online, weakening real world social bonds. As Japan has its otaku, China has its zhainan (宅男) and shengnu (剩女), recognised as potential problems for the development of society. YAEP addresses this by providing an arena for real-world socialisation through the exchange format, in what Ma characterises as “from Facebook to face-to-face.”

When I put it to Ma that in practice exchanging apartments would perhaps not be easy for many people, he was pragmatic about the issues involved, and also pointed out the part traditional Confucian family values will play on participation. These emphasise your family as your top priority while those outside of it are seen as less important or trustworthy. This background will make exchange with strangers difficult for many people, so to begin with the project will bring existing friends together to exchange with each other.

These social barriers are the things that this project seeks to address with its interventions, which forget art see as a route to adjusting society as a whole: “Chinese civil society is not like Western civil society. [Chinese society] can be very cold and selfish… We want to make our projects the starting point to let people accept their value as a citizen, to care about strangers, to care about society, about social responsibility. This is not an art project: it’s a social thing.”

Reflecting the nomadic ways of life, YAEP represents alternative living practices, and although Ma recognises this is “a very utopian way of thinking about society in the future,” nevertheless he feels that taking a lesson from art practice can provide new possibilities in the wider field:

“In the art world we talk about alternative strategies, but we can expand this to everyday life. In the traditional Beijing hutongs we have shared toilets in every alley; it’s more sociable (but maybe less convenient). But modern life says that having a toilet in your house is the only acceptable value, but that way of thinking is very much like what Marcuse addresses in ‘One-Dimensional Man.’ We want this society to have many different values of living, not just one.”

Appropriately, this is a long-term project for forget art which they see lasting 10 years (or more), and the results very much depend on circumstances; Ma is happy to leave that aspect of the project open: “China has a very sophisticated society, so the results of this are really unknown.”

Starting from the minimal roots of the Dragon Fountain Bathhouse project, Guerrilla Living Syndrome shows that the approach of forget art will always be subtle but with grand aspirations: “We want to make a very small change – to find that critical point, where we can try and get some more interesting things to appear.”

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published 30 May, 2011 on ArtSlant.
• forget art: http://www.forgetart.org/
• Youth Apartment Exchange Project: http://www.yaep.net/

A concern with the “everyday” happens to coincide for two of Beijing’s experimental spaces: both Vitamin Creative Space (whose Pavilion I addressed previously on ArtSlant) and HomeShop see it as grist to their mills. This past December, HomeShop moved into their new premises in a former Danwei dormitory in central Beijing. This move took place amidst an ongoing self-analysis of the relationship of their activities with the everyday and the sustainability of their practice.

HomeShop thrives off its central, backstreet location. A look at Beijing’s unique structure reveals residential areas still existent very much in the centre of the city. Zoning of dedicated areas for residential, industrial or shopping is not so pronounced and there are still large areas of residential housing permeating the whole of Beijing’s structure, right to the centre. In the older areas within the 2nd Ring Road this takes the form of blocks of low-rise apartment blocks or the old-fashioned (although not necessarily very old) hutong alleyways.

HomeShop began life in 2008 when artist Elaine W. Ho rented a storefront space near the Drum and Bell Towers. Over its two years of existence, this tiny space—a bedroom, bathroom and a semi-public living/working space opening directly onto the street—hosted a series of events organized by a floating community of artists under the HomeShop platform. Working within a series of broad themes, they reflected on the features and limitations of the physical spaces HomeShop inhabited.

Discussions about how it should develop have been ever-present – the new space being one result of these inquiries. Elaine has said that “HomeShop has existed as a very small-scale project since 2008, and there have been many talks and lots of child-like excitement built up over the last years about how to carry things forward in a sustainable way. This year, the combination of getting good people together, the contract ending at the former HomeShop space and finding a suitable new space challenges us to simply (or not so simply) take the plunge.”

The new space “broadens our scope in number and potential” says Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, one of the primary collaborators. Physically, the new space is about ten times the area of the first HomeShop and comprises a series of rooms built around three-sides of a small internal courtyard, including a storefront activity space, individual studios and co-working space. A shared kitchen and dining area serve to encourage the communal aspect of the space.

The storefront space is the physical feature that remains constant between the old and new spaces. For the launch of the space in late December, this served as a communal area where a fast-turnaround, crowd-sourced newspaper was produced to celebrate (for which artist Michael Eddy created screen-printing facilities).

But subtle and significant differences are evident which will push the group into new forms of working and interaction with their community. With a larger space comes a tendency towards to institutionalization, which may go against the urge to flexibility and freedom, which the original space embodied.

A consistent feature of HomeShop, and I feel its particular strong point, is its urge to general collaboration and specifically to engagement with its immediate neighbourhood. As their front-page blurb says: “HomeShop questions existing models of economic and artistic production as an exploration of the micro-political possibilities of the everyday, and of working together.”

This negotiation and productive relationship demands a light touch, dissipating if a heavy-handed approach were adopted, or rigid expectations of what might happen in a given situation were assumed. The beauty of the original space is that its front room was its world – there simply was no room (or desire) to shut oneself off and thus the activities were forced to spill out into the street and become communal. The artists would live and work there in full view of the passers-by; encouraging interaction and unforeseen input into their own work and conversely into the neighbours lives.

Any move creates new possibilities and potential, and HomeShop’s new space brings an inevitable change to the dynamic of its activities, as Elaine recognises: “Admittedly there are a lot of pressures and changing dynamics to deal with for the new HomeShop, but all are measures in constant process, and we are trying to learn as we go.” HomeShop’s openness means this process will hopefully be self-evident and it will be instructive to see how the original HomeShop ethos is adapted to the new conditions.

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published 22 February, 2011 on ArtSlant.

Until recently, Beijing has mostly lacked the facilities for the growing number of people who work on their own or in small groups, without regular offices, but who see the social and inspirational value of working alongside like-minded people.

Co-working is one solution to this need. In Beijing there is now a handful of such spaces or groups, which have grown up over the past year offering facilities and community to the capital’s telecommuters.

Although a popular option abroad, co-working has only taken off sustainably in China in recent times.

Shanghai’s xindanwei.com blazed the trail, launching in 2009. Beijing’s 798 Library space followed suit in 2010, with the group beijingcoworkers.com.

In January of this year, artist-run space HomeShop launched its own offering, suggesting that this way of working has tapped into a reliable audience and is reaching a level of maturity in Beijing and the country as a whole.

In a backstreet behind Beixinqiao station, HomeShop provides individual studio rooms and one larger co-working space with desks and wireless Internet.

A shared kitchen and eating area encourages a community to build and there are spaces for small events or meetings, a growing library of books, tools and other items that can be borrowed.

HomeShop’s founder Elaine W. Ho, from the United States, is enthusiastic about her creation.

“Amid white-collar communities, short-term office rentals have been quite a common phenomenon all over the world and in recent years, it’s been common to see co-working spaces develop specifically geared toward creative communities,” she said.

Ho describes her target audience as “independent artists, freelancers or beipiao (floating population)”.

In her experience, collaboration is a crucial aspect to these people’s activities.

“On one hand, setting up a formal structure to co-work is a means to share the financial burden,” she said. “On the other, it provides the opportunity for different relationships to grow.”

Located in the 798 Art Zone, 798 Library was launched by Lu Dahuang in May 2010 following his return to China after studying for a master’s degree in digital publishing in Paris.

Lu describes the 798 Library as having connections to the Internet in terms of philosophy.

“Library 2.0 is an extension of the Web 2.0 concept,” he said. “It’s not only about reading but also about interacting.”

With this concept, Lu said his focus is on Chinese contemporary arts media.

“798 Library works with our company WE-ME Inc as a database and a digital publishing platform,” he said.

He predicts that in 2011, the Chinese public will increasingly get their digital content published on touch screens and mobile devices, such as tablet PCs or smartphones, and sees his project as a key supporter.

Another creative mind behind the co-working idea is Michael Daugherty, who set up beijingcoworking.com as “a semi-self-organized group of people who like to work together”.

“We could all basically do our work online or at our homes, but we’ve realized we’re more productive when we work together,” he said. “We have a core group of four to five regulars who come to our co-working sessions and about 45 people on our e-mail list who come every now and again.

Every Sunday night, Daugherty sends out an e-mail to members with the schedule for the coming week.

“We don’t charge a fee and we keep to a regular schedule, while also being open to trying new places,” he said.

Most of their members are technology- and startup-based, but they also come from fields like graphic design or NGOs.

“We have members who are working on everything from a board game website to services for museums in China,” Daugherty said, before adding that his group provides additional services.

“We offer special programs designed to help make progress on startups, such as an accountability group where we help people finish their goals, and an Inspiration Lunch, at which startup founders from around Beijing get together and talk about their experiences and projects,” he said.

For HomeShop’s Ho, co-working addresses the issue of the “precarious working identities” that are becoming more common in Beijing, paralleling issues of mobility, flexibility and the workers’ networked identity.

“Organizing a co-working space, we hope to mobilize these elements in a way that should ideally benefit both us and others,” she said. “A nice environment to work in, a supportive community and a sharing of resources, all in a convenient location.”

Author: Edward Sanderson For China Daily

• Originally published in China Daily print and online edition, 21 February, 2011.
• Download PDF (256KB)
• HomeShop
• 798 Library
• beijingcoworking.com
• xindanwei