Tag: Art

opinions requested of me

Every now and again people ask for my opinions about Beijing or China in general, or the art scene in this neck of the woods. If I’m replying by email then I tend to put a lot of thought into what I write∗, and I probably take it a bit more seriously than I should. So these responses usually end up becoming mini-essays (probably not what the interlocutor expected or wanted, but they asked for it), a lot of which gets edited out towards the end of the process. I’m now thinking I shouldn’t be wasting all these pearls of wisdom which I spew forth—they’re relevant to my time and work here and may provide some kind of insight into one person’s experiences—so I’m going to repurpose them for the blog as they occur. I don’t expect them to change the world, but I post them in the hope they will be a mild diversion for others.

∗ There is of course no difference between my textual and verbal processes, just that with face-to-face communication, I can usually tell when I’m boring the other person.

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Weng Wei @ Paper Restaurant

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

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

Weng Wei @ Paper Restaurant

Weng Wei @ Paper Restaurant

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

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Meyer Schapiro and the cultural contradiction of Abstract Art

Time for a meaty quote about art, I think:

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

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

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

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

So do join us next Saturday!

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