Category: Writing

Posts which have some amount of my own writing included.

TEXT: 30 years of Chinese Contemporary Art – Cang Xin

A brief introduction to artist Cang Xin’s performance series entitled Identity Exchange. The photographs from this series have been included in 30 years of Chinese Contemporary Art, a large group show which opened recently at Power Station of Art in Shanghai. This text is included in the catalogue for that show. The text has been excerpted from a much longer piece I wrote about Cang Xin for a book that will be published before the end of this year (hopefully).

“The body for Cang Xin seems to be merely an outer shell for an inner being. The body acts much like clothing, which represents a temporary fixing of certain aspects of an identity, but these cannot be seen as a permanent state for the being. Identity Exchange makes this clear, and also brings in a new feature of Cang’s work, the artist as providing a type of psychological or therapeutic service to the collaborator and society as a whole – something that reflects Cang’s growing interest in shamanism at the time of these pieces.

“Later on in his works, Cang Xin’s body takes on a more active role, but then it is not about working on the body (as his peers Zhang Huan and Ma Liuming might be said to do), but working with the body in relation to the viewer/audience.”

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ArtSlant: Painting Lessons

Painting Lesson III: Elementary and Extreme Structure (curated by Bao Dong)

Gallery Yang, 798 Art District, Beijing, China

8 June – 7 July, 2013

Wang Yuyang

For the past two years Gallery Yang has hosted a series of exhibitions curated by Bao Dong, which he has titled Painting Lessons. In these Bao Dong has presented certain discrete aspects of the nature of current art production in China. In terms of format, the title places the emphasis on painting, but the results in the gallery spaces expand on this to include sculpture and installation.

The “lessons” that the curator proposes in this series aim to “go back to specific issues of painting,” divesting the artwork of its specific context as a way of understanding the piece. For Painting Lessons, Bao Dong suggests there has been an over-emphasised on context in contemporary art production, and (at least in these shows) he advocates a return to “various mediums and types” of artworks. In this way he claims: “we can more clearly understand the meaning and value of painting as it is.”

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ArtSlant: Let no one untrained in geometry enter.

What A Form – A Reportage: Wu Shanzhuan & Inga Svala Thórsdóttir

Shenzhen OCT Contemporary Art Terminal (OCAT), Building F2, Enping Road, OCT, Nanshan District, Shenzhen

21 May – 21 July, 2013

Wu Shanzhuan & Inga Svala Thorsdottir, What a Form installation view, 2013

How far do we pursue the artists’ conceptions in their work, following the lead they provide, making an assumption that the work wishes to communicate with its audience? If the work proves too difficult to relate to, or reticent in its engagement with the audience, where do we draw the line past which we are unwilling to go in our investigation of the work?

At OCAT in Shenzhen, Wu Shanzhuan and Inga Svala Thorsdottir present two rooms holding large-scale, but simple in form, installations. These are accompanied by a series of 9 drawings on A4 sheets of gridded paper showing the progressive development of the forms used in the installations. These works follow on from previous presentations of the artists’ personal theory of forms, in this case focusing on a composite form which they call “Little Fat Flesh,” which is a combination of multiple arcs of circles, forming a unique shape, somewhere between a circle and a square.

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艺术界LEAP: Chen Shaoxiong and Liu Ding – Project Without Space #6

Pékin Fine Arts, Beijing

2012.12.08–2013.02.08

The wall text characterizes Chen Shaoxiong and Liu Ding’s “Project Without Space” as an “iteration,” suggesting a serial repetition, one on top of the last, in a process of refinement. Now it has reached its sixth version with this presentation of paintings and videos, what lessons can we draw from these critical installations?

Spread over three rooms, “Project Without Space” takes a number of forms. In one room, two new walls have been constructed, providing settings for two videos and two paintings. One video records the artists in the process of installing the previous “Project Without Space ” (earlier in 2012 at Magician Space down the road in 798). The video is accelerated and subtitles appear over the image, apparently a record of the artists’ conversations regarding their work and activities (“However you want to paint this one, just go ahead and do it.” “Our intellectual production is our work.”). The other video shows the two artists sitting in a café, evidently engaging in conversation, with a similar series of subtitles. The paintings bring together forms that suggest other painted artworks from (predominantly Western?) art history over the previous century, perhaps the most recognisable being several flat coloured shapes from “The Snail” by Henri Matisse.

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