For me, the classic, single-viewpoint photograph is a seduction. It threatens to convince us that it is imparting a “truth” about the world by its seemingly straightforward presentation of a view. Art’s use (and more importantly, abuse) of the medium and its formats has been instrumental in disabusing us of the static image’s privileged status as a purveyor of truth. So these days no one should be under any illusion about these fixed perspective, mono-directional images—neither for their depiction of reality nor for the value of their meanings.

just arrived from NY, includes a text by Biljana Ciric on “Searching for Tomorrow’s Alternative China, Vietnam and Cambodia”.

Edward Sanderson: Elaine, you’ve been here three years, how did HomeShop start? Have you and Fotini been working together the whole time?

Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga: I’ve been to China a few times now, and we have collaborated on several projects, but it’s only at this moment that I’m joining in, as we are trying to think about HomeShop’s future. Elaine will be able to tell you more about what she’s been doing so far.

Elaine W. Ho: I think HomeShop really came out of my experience of living in China and my fascination with the juxtapositions between public space and private space here, which I think a lot of people notice or are intrigued by when they come here. A lot of the work that I do involves the public space and looking at alternative settings with which one is interfaced with an idea or a “work”, and because of that particular interest in negotiating a public space and a private space—not only on a spatial level but also on a social, economic level—this idea came to me: let’s play with the commercial space and see what we can do with that. So this was how it originally came about, and all the projects we’ve done here are based around this environment and the people here and are determined to a great extent by the architecture and the way that this space in particular relates to the community.

ES: What was your background prior to this?

EWH: I’m American-born, but my parents are from Hong Kong. That’s a whole different game to being a mainland Chinese person, so in many ways I’m still an outsider.

I first studied at Rice University, in Texas. At that time I was doing Art and Art History, but then I moved over into doing design work. I studied at Parsons in New York and then also transferred after that—it’s been a long ride!—to Holland, and I studied there for three years.

I think going into design was a desire to find something a bit more active and hands-on that I wasn’t finding doing Art History. I had been working in museums and I didn’t find it super interesting or stimulating. So moving into design and then coming back towards art has been influenced in a lot of ways by design issues, the ways of relating form and function to an everyday public.

I lived in Beijing for a year and then I went away for another year for other projects. After I came back I think I was here maybe six to eight months before I moved into this place.

I wouldn’t say this space was completely planned out or anything, it was quite an impulse to say: “This is my interest, let’s play with it and see what happens”. After I’d moved in, for a year I really didn’t do anything with the space. Looking back at it now, it was a necessary time to invest myself in this area and get to know the people. There’s a lot of mistrust, for sure, when they see me – this stranger living here. And of course they hear my accent and know I’m not from around here.

The first project that we did—the first big “coming out” project—was to do with the Olympics, which took place a year after I’d moved in here.

ES: You were in here for a year just setting up home, getting embedded in the environment and learning how it worked? So having a shopfront, what does that mean for you? Why is that a useful thing for you?

EWH: It’s useful on quite a lot of levels actually. On one hand—and this maybe has to do with my background in design—how people relate to one another on the basis of a commercial transaction, and how that commercial transaction allows a certain public-ness to a space that wouldn’t be there otherwise. In fact, shopping malls are not really a public space, they’re this pseudo-public space. But once that possibility is offered—that I can sell you something, or that there’s something for you to come and look at and possibly buy—they allow an openness of a relation, between a buyer and a seller, or between the owner and non-owner. Beyond the fact of a financial transaction, this level of publicness is a very interesting possibility for me.

Also, finding this space with a glass front made a nice juxtaposition – here is this living environment, but it’s made bare and visible. It becomes this screen between the outside and inside. All of these metaphors were things that I was interested to play with.

ES: So how do you work with the commercial idea of the space?

EWH: Thus far it hasn’t been a commercial project at all, it’s more engaging this idea of commercial-ness or the offering of a commercial enterprise, but without being so, necessarily. On the other hand, maybe I’m a terrible businessperson! I haven’t been able to manage this thing so well, but for me I use it in a lot of ways more as research rather than an actual business. I’m not making money from it.

ES: You also publish a journal called “Wear”, I assumed it was some kind of pamphlet, but now I see it it’s something more major.

EWH: The way of printing and the design is done on this very thick paper, so it’s actually not as big as you imagine! It is the intention that it is first approached as this huge object, as if importance were rated by volume. But when you open it and read it, it becomes much more minor, much more ambivalent, and the heavy pages are created in the style of toddlers’ books.

With the Wear project, it’s commercial in the sense that it is sold in a variety of places, but it’s moreso simply that I try to avoid losing a lot of money because it’s a completely self-funded project.

How that goes into the future is a balance we’re trying to play with right now. I mean it’s a concept hanging over everybody, you have to balance your artistic interests with being able to survive, making money. And so how we are going to pursue that line is the next stage of the project. Which may mean on the one hand, some things becoming more commercial (so to speak), but even then I think that it still remains that these transactions, whether they are financial or not, are always about the ways of relating people to people, so that is our foremost research interest.

ES: So you may well have a commercial line, and an artistic line?

EWH: I would hope that the commercial and the artistic could be rolled into one. That’s the tricky balance between all of these things.

FL-H: Maybe the question is to stay more on the line, instead of having to take a position. Actually in the first edition of Wear, I wrote a short text about the threshold, which I think is a good metaphor to understand the whole project – this condition of being in-between. There’s a sign over the door saying “家 (Jia)” or “house”. People walk by and they always look at it puzzled and probably think it’s a store. Some of them stare at us and they come inside wanting to look at these clothes behind you, because they think they are for sale, or they start asking questions, and it’s these kind of everyday encounters and interactions that we find particularly interesting.

ES: So you’re setting up a situation that appears to be one thing, but maybe isn’t that thing but then encourages people to believe in it and somehow when that happens…

EWH: It triggers a curiosity, or at least the asking of a question, and I think that asking questions is always something super-important to the work.

ES: So the projects you’ve already done, starting with the Olympics project…

EWH: This was a series of different events. The loose structure was that we did it as a reverse countdown, a sort of impending moment that had been coming for seven years, from when they announced it until 2008. So we made a joke of it and did a reverse countdown until the day that the Olympics would end. And during that time we did different events, for as many days as we could in between. They varied from public screenings of the Olympics that were projected on the store-front; reading groups; a lot of field recordings that I was doing on my own at that time; other activities where I invited artists to come and do an activity or intervention on the street, or in the neighbourhood. We did a big barbecue party, with a Nintendo “Mario versus Sonic at the Beijing Olympics” Wii competition projected on the store front; the winner, an auntie that lives across the street, won tickets to a rowing event that were donated by a friend.

I was really happy about it because it was the first thing that we did, and with this strange juxtaposition of the city being kind of empty at that time, it was just the right moment with the whole spectacle and people being more open to the unexpected. It was a big turning point for the city, for everything from Government activity, to urban planning, to media, to public/personal interest in sports (which maybe people wouldn’t have had otherwise), all of these things coming together in that very big moment is incredibly important for China and the makings of its new society.

On another level,it was this very strange process because I did it all myself at the time, gathering friends of course, but it was really just this DIY effort – “let’s put this thing together and document it and post about it” – it was this constant self-conscious process of things happening at the same time as you’re recording them and figuring out how to arrange other things for the next day. And this process was how it led to the journal project, which serves the very simple purpose of documentation of the projects that we’re doing, but also a way to expand on the thoughts that we were having and invite other artists and writers to participate.

[The journal is a good format] simply because a lot of things that we’re doing are time-based and event-based; they are ephemeral and very limited in terms of who can participate at any one moment in time. And because I’m not any sort of official institution on the art map of Beijing, I have to rely on these methods to let anyone know what’s happening, so on that level it becomes very important. Personally, I like writing very much, so that process of documenting and relating the visual to a text-based reflection is a constant working process.

From there it seems most apt to continue in this way, to do a series of projects, mostly in the summer time – simply to allow us to be outside, when people are out and the weather is nice.

ES: So the very small size of the space demands that for any sizeable number of people you have to spill out?

EWH: Yes, exactly. And I want it to, so that’s what led to this loose organisation of a yearly series, around the summer time, loosely based on a certain theme or issue or interest.

I feel bad that sometimes this small space is not big enough to comfortably invite people in. But in the summer, when the doors are open, the neighbours come over all the time to chat and this is really great, I like this. There’s a lot more that could be done if we had a bigger space, but I think we’ve done well considering.

ES: What was the second project that you did?

EWH: The second series was about “Cultural Exchange” – a cynical take on what that that term means and how it is used as an empty justification. There is so much foreign interest—in both directions—between China and everyone else (as the division is commonly proposed here). This last issue of the journal is documentation of some projects and events that happened last summer, and then some newer contributions from people like Carol Lu, Michael Eddy and Mai Dian.

This season we’ve loosely tagged the series “Balls” or “Ballsy”. We try to keep it light, but in an ironic sort of way, so “ballsy” can be simply a formal reference or something more subversive, depending upon how you look at it. But the line-up of activities will really depend upon when we can get a new space and how we can get it organised.

ES: You call them “series”? Because it’s a series of things happening?

EWH: Yes, because I think that experimentation with format (as in, moving from film screening to workshop to installation) is something very important, but then I find it hard to find a proper word to describe such variation, like “huodong (活动)”, maybe?. A series allows you to know that there are several things happening that are related and built upon continuities.

ES: A world series? [laughs] OK, so let’s move onto something which is a bit imponderable – the next stage you’re in the process of deciding on. How do you see this developing?

FL-H: The main idea is to have a bigger space that will allow for more things to happen, and more people to join in in various ways or at various stages. The idea is to bring together the things that we’ve been doing the past few years with other creative projects that we want to do, in a way that’s sustainable and still allows us to engage with the neighbourhood around us. To stay on that line that we were talking about earlier, between commercial and non-commercial, or the line between public and private, to walk this very thin but blurry line through these categories and see what can come out of it.

EWH: I think it’s the difference between looking at an artist as a product maker – “one who signs their name on their thing and sells it”, versus us being artists as workers or researchers. We hope to provide or offer something to a community, with that community being very much in transition. At the same time, all of these interactions are creative jumping off points, or means of reflecting on larger issues about society and the city. This is the uniqueness of the juxtaposition of “laobaixing (老百姓)” – the people that live in this neighbourhood, with other creative people that are similar to us or that have similar ways of thinking or exploring ideas.

ES: These are two different audiences? This area, does it have a particular strength, we’re right by Fangjia Hutong (方家胡同), so do you have a creative community around here, do you think?

EWH: Yes, for sure. The funny thing about this street is its juxtaposition between Fangjia and Nanluoguxiang. You have this strange passerby population of schoolchildren from next door, the normal local Chinese people that live around here, the hipster kids that are passing through, and then because of the restaurant being on this street, the foreigners looking for Dali [Courtyard Restaurant].

I think what we’re doing is not necessarily that unique. How one positions oneself relative to the art world could make it seem unique, but I think that pursuing an artistic practice in this way is something that’s very common, actually. Whether I call it “high” art or whether it’s a community thing is where it can end up seeming more or less special, but this is not so crucial. On the one hand I present myself as an artist and I think that in many ways what I am doing has a discourse with a lot of parallel streams in art, but how much I am investing myself in the art world and art scene within China is probably a lot less deliberated. That can be seen as an advantage or a disadvantage depending on how you look at it. In the time that I’ve lived here I’ve exponentially gone less and less to see the shows and to participate in all of these things, and I do feel very much that as a sort of “outsider” artist it’s very hard to break into that Chinese art scene. So I think I just kind of said, well, okay, I’ll just continue doing my thing and not worry about it. It’s not really my place to judge whether I’m in it or not. Of course I do have a certain interest to maintain dialogues with certain people within the art world for reasons of common interest. But I don’t think the formats [I’m working with] are ever the kind of thing that will make them easily consumable by that kind of community.

ES: You’re also one of the organisers of the “Also Space²” show?

EWH: Yes, I was very interested in participating in “Also Space²” because I wanted to work with the curator, Reinaart Vanhoe. who has a lot of similar interests and ways of working—a sort of organised but slightly anarchic method—that I was interested to play with as well. I think it’s something very strong about Reinaart—that he’s open to letting things happen, to see where people take their own initiative.

There was also the first “Also Space” show last year. With this first show I wasn’t so involved because I wasn’t here beforehand – I came back [to Beijing] maybe one or two days before the show opened. It was [physically] very close, at this hotel near Andingmen. So after I got back I was able to be there all the time, to learn from how he was playing with this environment and how he put people together. For my own artistic play I decided to sleep there as well, to be attentive to a displaced temporal context in a city which is technically my current “home”. Discussion from the first “Also Space” led us to want to try it again. So I got more involved with organising the second one, but like I said it wasn’t something that we were struggling very hard with for months and months! It was quite open.

This is something that is very important for me as a way of finding a balance between an artists’ project, coming out of certain initiatives and interests of mine, but also as a way of building a community, which is related to both of our work. How much a community can be involved and how much it can come together without being over-organised – in one sense this can become a political question. This is for me the basis of a lot of the theories and thinking I’m doing. So that question of having a bigger space or of having more people involved, or what kind of people get involved, the question of people having the initiative to make and discuss rather than simply consume – these are things that we would like to focus upon.

ES: Obviously when you have a bigger space, that puts more overhead on you, which then feeds through into the decisions you’ll make about what you do to sustain that. Which may end up being more organised events – this kind of butterfly effect, a change in one parameter affects in different ways other aspects of the project. So it will be really interesting to see where you go, what happens because of that, because it will be a different thing at that point, it won’t be the HomeShop as it is here, it will be a completely different thing.

EWH: Well, I hope not completely different, because I think there are still a lot of threads there. But of course it won’t be exactly the same.

Elaine W. Ho and Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga were interviewed by Edward Sanderson (CPU:PRO) at the “HomeShop” Beijing, on the 11 April 2010. Interview edited by Edward Sanderson.

By using “auto-” I was trying to suggest that the sounds had some kind of automatic, or non-human activity in its formation (although it would be a mistake to think that’s all I was interested in, but I’ll get to that later). In this case I mentioned “Auto-Generative” and “Auto-Destructive” sound, and although I used these terms in the title, I didn’t make it explicit in the text what they were referring to other than a vague idea of additive versus subtractive compositions (where I was tentatively linking the former to Zhang Jian and Wu Na, and the latter to William Basinski).

My use of the term Auto-Destructive is inspired by the work of Gustav Metzger (born US, but now stateless) and the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely. Metzger popularised the term in 1959 with his First manifesto of auto-destructive art,¹ as a general principle and a way to describe his performance works using nylon and acid, a lethal combination which resulted in the destruction and disappearance of the material of the works. In a similar vein, Jean Tinguely is well known for his elaborate machines which progressively destroy and undo themselves. Both artists were working towards a dematerialisation of the artwork, a throwing into question of assumptions of the object-status of the artwork at that time. This (non- or negative-)thing that results was also one of the focii of Conceptual art, Metzger and TInguely in this case having quite an influence on their thinking. In their work Metzger and Tinguely presented the process of dematerialisation as being an end in itself, literally performing the critique of the object in front of the audience.

From “Auto-Destructive” the antithesis I set up was “Auto-Generative.” In this case the word “generative” comes from its use as a form of musical composition, usually associated with computer music. I have been thinking recently in this regard specifically of the composers Conlan Nancarrow (US) and Edgard Varèse (France, US), whose work involved investigation of systems which, although of course “man-made” in their inspiration or initiation, in execution relied on the working through of a set of rules by mechanical means.

For generative work human intervention can simply be a starting point, from which systems can work themselves out, the “human touch” can be removed entirely from the actual act of music/noise making. The extent to which the human needs to be involved in the act of music/noise making is a very divisive issue. For some the human touch is pre-eminent, for others a hands-off approach is the interesting means and I think it is this subject that can be usefully pursued, an which my project is working from.

It’s an important part of the project, too, that there should be no restriction for this to sonic investigations, it can equally be applied to visual and other forms. Metzger’s words, for example, apply across the board:

Auto-destructive art is art which contains within itself an agent which automatically leads to its destruction… Other forms of auto-destructive art involve manual manipulation. There are forms of auto-destructive art where the artist has a tight control over the nature and timing of the disintegrative process, and there are other forms where the artist’s control is slight.²

I have to admit, setting up these polarities of “auto-generative” and “auto-destructive” is a deliberate straw-man tactic, to create a discursive environment for the project. They serve as ideals around which to drawing out the arguments involved in various artists’ methods. As such, I doubt any artist would commit themselves to one or the other exclusively, certainly not over their whole oeuvre (or even within a single piece of work). However what the use of these terms does do is to set up a field of argument, around which the various participants can set up their camps, like a set of Venn diagrams of creativity, covering more or less of each of the meanings in their practice and theory.

It’s early days yet, but as the project progresses, more information will get posted here.

1. Metzger, Gustav (1959). Auto-Destructive Art [first manifesto of auto-destructive art; 4 November 1959]. [Online]. Available from: http://www.luftgangster.de/audeart.html [Accessed 3 March 2010].
2. Metzger, Gustav (1960). Manifesto Auto-Destructive Art [second manifesto of auto-destructive art; 10 March 1960]. [Online]. Available from: http://www.luftgangster.de/audeart3.html [Accessed 3 March 2010].

Out in the University District of North-West of Beijing, near the South Gate of Tsinghua University, the WenJin Art Center has just opened inside the WenJin Hotel. Yesterday it was hosting a day of video and new media work curated by Wu Qiuyan, a teacher at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.

This was a great opportunity to have, if not the cream then at least a representative collection, of the last few years’ linear work on video presented. Splitting the works into the sections titled “scene,” “area,” and “emotion” presented the audience a broad range of artists, work and techniques, from the computer generated works of Miao Xiaochun and Feng Mengbo; through narrative (including a particularly subtle yet quietly sensationalist piece by Ma Qiusha, I still don’t now what I think about that…); semi/pseudo-documentary from Gao Yuan etc,; performance (for me the weakest set of works, but that’s my personal preferences). All of this was presented in a fairly tightly curated selection, which—although long—really felt like a comprehensive but concise account of the field in the time available.

Being able to devote this kind of time and attention to all this lovely material was a real luxury which I can’t often don’t give to linear video work (much less to interactive, non-linear work, but it’s usually not such a requirement of that). When I visit a gallery there is never enough time to view the whole video as I duck in and out of the screening rooms. So I really appreciate what the curator was doing here, enforcing some kind of participation, it was a real joy to experience.

Artists by section:

Scene: Miao Xiaochun 缪晓春, Feng Mengbo 冯梦波, Bo Hua 卜桦, Zhang Xiaotao 张小涛, Wu Junyong 吴俊勇, Bai Chongmin 白崇民, Ye Dan 叶丹, Wu Weihe 吴玮禾, Gu Zhenzhen 谷真真, Dai Hua 代化, Liu Qianyi 刘茜懿, Xu Ruotao 徐若涛, Chen Hailu 陈海璐.

Area: Liu Xuguang 刘旭光, Chen Zhuo + Huan Keyi 陈卓+黄可一, Tan Ji 谭奇, Wu Qiuyan 吴秋龑, Ding Xin 丁昕, Cheng Jie 盛洁, Wang Gefeng 王歌风, Ma Qiusha 马秋莎, Chen Wei 陈伟.

Emotion: Feng Jiangzhou 丰江舟, Zhang Haitao 张海涛, Chao Fang 沈朝方, Tan Tan 炭叹, Tian Miaozi 田苗子, Song Song 宋松, Wang Tingting 王婷婷, Chen Zhou 陈轴, Pei Li 裴丽, Gao Yuan 高媛, Shi Jingxin 史晶歆, Deng Li 邓黎, Chen Xi 陈曦, Zhang Minjie 张敏捷, Ren Lun 任伦.

In March, the curator Wu Qiuyan will be hosting another event of film and new media, this time at UCCA. More details when I have them.

If anyone has a copy of this report, I would be very interested in taking a look (I might even cook you dinner). It would be fascinating to know what their criteria are for measuring “sentiment.” The report appears to look at a good range of artists1, so each one’s comparative results would be interesting to see. I’ve been hearing (mainly from auction results, so that’s pretty selective) that established names are recovering quickly, but the market for younger, less established artists is struggling (as one would expect). Most people I’ve talked to about this subject see these periodic downturns as, by and large, a “good” thing. I’m not denying the pain involved, but it’s a time in which everyone is forced to re-focus on their core strengths and if these aren’t sustainable then, perhaps, it’s time to move on.

The confidence in the Chinese Contemporary art market has strengthened significantly since February 2009, and is now back above the 50 level. The ArtTactic Confidence Indicator has increased from 16 in February 2009, to 57 in November 2009. The current level signals that there is more positive than negative sentiment in the art market. This is the first contemporary art market that ArtTactic has surveyed since the downturn, in which the Confidence Indicator has come in above the 50 level, which implies that the Chinese art market could be one of the quickest to recover.2

1. Ai Weiwei, Cai Guoqiang, Cao Fei, Chen Wenbo, Fang Lijun, Feng Mengbo, Feng Zhengjie, Gu Dexin, Gu Wenda, He Duoling, He Yunchang, Hong Hao, Li Shan, Li Songsong, Liang Shaoji, Lin Tianmiao, Ling Jian, Liu Wei (B. 1972), Liu Xiaodong, Liu Ye, Lv Shenzhong, Mao Yan, Nie Mu, Qiu Zhijie, Shi Jinsong, Song Dong, Sui Jianguo, Tan Ping, Wang Gongxin, Wang Guangyi, Wang Jianwei, Wang Qingsong, Wang Wei, Wang Xingwei, Wu Shanzhuan, Xu Bing, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong, Yang Shaobin, Yin Xiuzhen, Yu Hong, Yue Minjun, Zeng Fanzhi, Zhan Wang, Zhang Dali, Zhang Huan, Zhang Peili, Zhang Xiaogang, Zhong Biao, Zhou Tiehai, Zhou Xiaohu.
2. ArtTactic (2009), Chinese Art Market Confidence Survey, Dec 2009. Retrieved from http://www.arttactic.com/view-report.php?type=reports&id=23 on 12 January 2010.

These thoughts were kicked off by Allard van Hoorn’s work at Gasworks, which had the idea of the urge to involve other groups of people outside the artworld, through the sending out of meaningful objects.

A lot of my concerns about art revolve around the problem (as I see it) with adding more and more things to the world. In some way I see this as unnecessary and wasteful of resources. So I get very sensitive if an artist is making objects, and I am more likely to be sympathetic to an artist that works in intangible ways (music/sound being a good example).

But my biggest problem is with artists who want to get beyond “the art system” by sending out objects into a mythical space outside of that system, where they think some alternative audience exists, some audience that somehow will take the work to another level which the art system is unable to do. I see this as questionable (I originally said “dishonest,” but maybe that’s too harsh), in the sense that these domains, these audiences ultimately are impossible to pin down to any real set of people, and indeed may well simply be the artists very own constructions. You expect/want the two worlds (you have created) to come together at some point. But the artwork constructed these worlds as part of of it’s reality, it forces them onto the world.

Can I better define what my problem is with putting objects into the world? I mean we’ve been doing it forever, it could almost be the norm for a certain type of artist? – they leave remains of their work for posterity, there is some justification to be got if they can prove they exist by the objects they leave behind.

And when the audience for this art becomes insufficient, they search for new audiences, deliberately or by random interactions. In some cases they will do this by creating an object that can be sent out into the rest of the world, can go beyond the world they think is somehow lacking. Are they hoping to bring more people into art, or to bring themselves out of art into some glorious stage divorced from the art world, because the art world is lacking somehow? The former would simply reinforce the problems the artist perceives, if there is a problem with the art world, does bringing more people into it make any difference? The latter would just deny the very structures which created the art in the first place, which seems a perverse action (but not necessarily a meaningless action).

Maybe I’m misunderstanding the attempt. Maybe it’s just a matter of injecting an element of unpredictability into a work rather than a pursuit of a new audience. After all, the person who picks up the object could just as easily be an artist as anyone else, there is no telling.

But there seems to be an urge to go beyond the structures we have already, they are lacking in some way. Is it that art has something to give to the world, but somehow lacks suitable means to engage with that world? Is art a structure good for production but not good for reception? Maybe this is what art is all about, pushing the boundaries, real or imagined?

As well as this exhibition space, the building holds a set of three small studios, to which artists from around the world are invited for three month stints, and this weekend saw them thrown open to public view.

It’s a shame then that the audience was fairly sparse – when I visited on Friday afternoon I was one of only two other people taking advantage of the opportunity to see the work the artists have been doing whilst resident in London. I shouldn’t complain of course, a low attendance means that we could easily identify and talk to the artists. But then, again disappointingly, two out of the three studio artists weren’t present when we visited, meaning that the one artist who was there (Allard van Hoorn) kindly took on the task of explaining two sets of work to us – his and his neighbour’s (Marco Lampis), leaving the work of the third artist (whose studio was downstairs) without explanation. These works by Katarina Šević, were presented somewhat in a vacuum with no explanation or background material (and one of the monitors wasn’t working), which would have greatly helped our appreciation of the work.

So I only feel I can comment on van Hoorn’s work as we were able to have a long conversation with him. He was very friendly and articulate about his work (and that of his absent neighbour). From our conversation I learned that, simply put, he works with locations to produce the raw materials, photographs, drawings, sounds, which he then synthesises and sends back out into the world to live on in different forms and spark new developments.

For his residency he has been working on three new pieces in his series “Urban Songlines” which he describes as drawn from “tonal topographies from existing spaces and structures within the local area.” As the name suggests, these are drawn from the Australian aboriginal sense of the recording the landscape and routes through song. van Hoorn’s work applies these methods to specific locations in London, working with the place and the local sounds to create object events. The sites van Hoorn has chosen include the Thames Barrier, Battersea Power Station and the gasometers behind the Gallery and which he sees from the window of the studios.

The first two pieces, of the Barrier and the Power Station, take the form of large format photographs of the sites from which their sounds were collected, these sounds then being formed into sound works. The piece from the Thames Barrier was the most advanced of the works on show, in this case the data for the sound work had been saved to a custom made silver USB stick, shaped like a key and engraved with the latitude and longitude of that particular location. This rather beautiful object was presented in an air-tight glass jar on a small shelf next to the photograph. Once the residency ends, the jar will be thrown into the waters of the Thames at the same site where the sounds were recorded.

In what for me was the weakest proposal and image, the project planned for Battersea Power Station gathers its data from weather balloons attached to each chimney (the photo-montage to illustrate this looked rather clumsy and didn’t really do the work justice). The data collected is expected to cover not just sounds, but other environmental information as well. All this data would again go towards making a new sound work which I believe would then be re-performed at the site. I don’t remember what the artist said would be the end result of this piece, but I expect that, in the same way that the key has been produced for the Thames Barrier piece, there will be some way of projecting the Battersea piece into a future life, beyond the site of performance, but offering the possibility of linking back to it for the future audience (possibly “by googling” according to the artist).

The third work, based on the large iron gasometers visible from outside the studio window (and from which the gallery gets it’s name), takes the form of a series of prints and an animation/sound work. van Hoorn, during his stay in this room has witnessed the process of the gasometer’s daily inflation and deflation as gas for the local area is pumped in and held under pressure by the weight of the structure. The artist reads this movement in and out of the gas as akin to breathing and this becomes the source for what he calls his “score” – a series of drawings of the various states of the structure, from which a sound work (which incorporates breath-like sounds) has been interpreted to accompany the animation of the score.

All the works on display in the Urban Songlines series never really have a point at which they are complete, they are initiated by the artist and then take on a life of their own once released by the artist. This is most clearly demonstrated by the USB “key” which floats away out of reach of the artist, to be picked up someone out there who may be able to interpret the object in some way which may or may not lead back to the artist.

In a way this piece is a lure, by design it draws the eventual recipient back into the art context. This idea fits nicely with the use of the river in the two pieces as a method of adding uncertainty to the process of the works’ development. van Hoorn himself compared the idea to that of the Voyager spacecraft which, in addition to its scientific payload, carries a plaque with information addressed to an alien audience, attempting to explain who, where and what the creators of this object are.

Within the works themselves, an object like the USB key sits in an uncomfortable relationship of mediation between the sound works as ephemeral things and the urge to survive, to keep the record somehow of the sounds. Working with sound and music holds this relationship, between a temporary performance—a one time only result—and it’s life before and after the performance. The scores that van Hoorn has produced for the gasometer piece reflect this interplay between the needs of the two stages: the music needs performance, the scores need to record and prepare for and allow for a future for the sound piece. The key is another method of recording and providing the possibility of a future realisation of the work.

The movement from inspiration, through the various stages and forms of an artwork raises questions about the necessity and value of these stages and forms. For an artist all the stages they realise are assumed to be necessary to the work, but are these purely internal needs, are they necessary to the reception? As soon as you involve or attempt to directly connect with an audience many other concerns affect the work and its value.

In the second part of this post I’ll follow some of my own thoughts about the necessity of object making in art.

Breaking Forecast: 8 Key Figures of China’s New Generation Artists is a groundbreaking exhibition presenting new and recent works by the most compelling emerging and mid-career artists working throughout China today: Cao Fei, Chu Yun, Liu Wei, MadeIn, Qiu Zhijie, Sun Yuan & Peng Yu, Yang Fudong and Zheng Guogu. The first of its kind, the exhibition affirms UCCA’s dedication to supporting the development of Chinese art. Combining genres of painting, performance, photography, video and installation, this exhibition will define the future of Chinese contemporary art for years to come. [emphasis mine]

And “emerging” is always a tricky word to define, too.

It’s not that I don’t recognise that this is an interesting group of artists (and, in my opinion, it’s always good to see more of Chu Yun), and we’ve all been guilty of the odd bit of hyperbole in our time, but that last sentence…

The self-aggrandisement that’s coming through in this piece, and the way UCCA are presenting the artists in this text, actually seems to be using them as a side-line to UCCA’s own historical positioning statements – and of course that’s exactly the (overt or covert) purpose of exhibitions (and—by association—the artists involved in those exhibitions). My issue is not with the uses to which exhibitions (or artists) can be put, but with this wording that seems to revel in this programme. At the end of the day, it’s quite exciting to find a text which is so blatant about this.

To be fair to UCCA, my issues with them deserve a more considered post, but this particular press release was too galling to let slip by.

• http://ucca.org.cn/portal/exhibition/view.798?id=31&menuId=20