the curator mansion yishu may_june 2011
TRANSCRIPT
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Vol.10 No.3 1
2 Editors Note
4 Contributors
6 Critical Writing from a Local Perspective:
First Yishu Awards for Critical Writing on
Contemporary Chinese Art Conference
22 The Curator Mansion: An Impossible Placeof Innite Possibilities
BeatriceLeanza
36 Conceptual Archaeology: Performance Art
in Southwest China
SophiaKidd
47 A Conversation Between Huang Du
and Cui Xiuwen
55 Wen Fang: The Path of Art
From Observing to Getting Involved
AliceSchmatzberger
63 O Zhangs Recent Works
PatriciaEichenbaumKaretzky72 Four Discussions with Hong Kong Artists:
Leung Chi Wo, Lam Tung Pang, Morgan Wong,
and Lee KitStephanieBailey
87 A Time of Critical Reection:
Chen Chieh-jens FactoryRevisited
MilenaHoegsberg
94 Chen Chieh-jen: EmpiresBordersIIWestern
EnterprisesInc.
PamelaKember
101 Michael Lin: The Colour Is Bright,
the Beauty Is Generous
KatieHill
107 Chinese Name Index
V O L U M E 1 0 , N U M B E R 3 , M a y / J U N E 2 0 1 1
CONT ENTS
22
87
36
Cover: Cui Xiuwen, Emptiness in Non-emptiness & Being
in Non-being No. 20(detail), 2009, C-print, 95 x 300 cm.
Courtesy of the artist.
101
55
63
WethankJNBY,CanadianFoundationofAsianArt,Mr.andMrs.
EricLi,StephanieHolmquistandMarkAllisonfortheirgenerous
contributiontothepublicationanddistributionofYishu.
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Make room. Look out the window. Look onto the street. Space out. Watch
a building be. Take the time to eat your lunch. Take up time. Get a haircut.
Take your time. Massage your soul. Sleep. Dream something up. Revel in
this mood. Get lost in the empire of atmosphere. As in the unconscious,something always happens when nothing does.
Giuliana Bruno, PublicIntimacy:ArchitectureandtheVisualArts1
In March 2002, just a few months before I moved to Beijing, the
Piccolo Teatro in Milano debuted Infnities, an award-winning
dramaturgical wonder staged through the collaborative efforts of
visionary director Luca Ronconi and John D. Barrow, a cosmologist
and mathematician from the University of Cambridge. The project
was initiated by the Sigma Tau Foundation, a philanthropic institutiondedicated to promoting innovative encounters between science and the
general public. With Barrow, the playwright, and Ronconi, the stage
wizard, Infnitiesexplored the mathematical concept of innity through
ve separate scenarios, each of which functioned as a performative tableau
focusing on one singular aspect of this immediately appealing subject
matter.2 The play was hosted in the vacant spaces of Magazzini della Scala,
a large hangar-like complex that once housed the laboratories of La Scala
Opera House and is located in the citys far northern industrial zone of
Bovisa. On arrival, audiences were let inside in groups of seventy, which
would sequentially move up through the ve different scenarios so that
ve different groups were simultaneously inhabiting the space. Infnities
took the city as the theatre, creating within it a moment through which
different forms of intellectual, physical, and social movements came to be
lived and collectively performed. Barrow continues: Story-telling seemed
to be the way to penetrate its [the concept of innity] paradoxes so that
they became familiar by the device of immersing the audience into other
realities where the counter-intuitive features of the innite loomed as largeas life.3
Amid many of the spectacular and modest contemporary art events I have
experienced over the course of the past decade, Infnitiesis still the one
that has left with me a deep and most memorable impression. The play
embodies a masterful synthesis of what I envision arts doing: viscerally
reawakening both the senses and consciousness through the expanding of
elds of knowledge and life in the present tense of culture. Infnitiesevoked
and provoked an active engagement with what Giuliana Bruno calls aradical refashioning of a politics of time4 as we nowadays experience it
Beatrice Leanza
The Curator Mansion:An Impossible Place of Innite Possibilities
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through the uneven spaces of our ordinary, built environments: a hyper-
connected world in endless solution and dissolution, where notions of
proximity and distance are constantly recongured.
The question of space has been central to the transdisciplinary turn
of theoretical studies addressing the disembodied geographies of the
postmodern condition since the 1980s. It was paramount in the consequent
emergence of oppositional cultural practices that responded to changing
notions of place-bound identity and site-bound knowledge, as well as in
informing a variety of critical endeavours and artistic practices through
which ever-expanding paradigms of community and site-specicity
have been produced until today.5 The transformative nexus between
space, place, and identity and its connection to the ongoing permutations
between institutions and locations specic to the Asian context traversesmuch of the research at the basis of my own curatorial practice.
At the end of 2005, after I concluded my three-year collaboration as a
curator at the CAAW (China Art Archives and Warehouse), directed by
artist Ai Weiwei, I teamed up with architect and designer Li Naihan to
found BAO Atelier, a hybrid studio for integrated research in curatorial,
editorial, and design practices. This initiative reected a desire to create
an open-ended environment for critical activity and collaboration that
would enable a cross-fertilization among different creative disciplines and
communities that we perceived to be missing in the local context. By the
mid 2000s, Chinese art and artists had indeed moved out of the periphery
to embrace a period of progressive integration, and disproportioned
success, within the international market place while enjoying the ofcial
endorsement of its very own institutions within the local one.
The sudden, unmediated proliferation of museums, galleries, perennial
exhibitions (like biennials and triennials), and so-called creative clusters
certainly accelerated the course of professionalization needed to meet
the rapacious demands of the global cultural industry6 and allowed the
mobilization of private and public capital in the development of a local
system for the production and dissemination of art. Yet it also debased the
thereof created institutions in what curator Carlos Basualdo denes as the
ability to communicate as discrete singularities;7 that is, to retain the role
and responsibility to speak with a degree of autonomy and independence
outside of market logic and self-reexive academicism, and, therefore, with
and of their own identity.
One of the very rst projects we embarked on resonated in a moment
when the pre-Olympic construction frenzy was attracting to China
unprecedented international attentionthe sheer size and speed of the
Chinese urban miracle was undeniably presenting new intellectual and
social challenges to the envisioning of life in the cities of the twenty-rst
century. Our aim was to create a project whose spatio-temporal framework
could accommodate both critical reection and physical engagement with
the experience of this change and therefore expand the outreach of artistic
activity beyond the connes of galleries and dedicated districts. Realized
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in 2006 and 2007, Borderline/Moving Images was a radically collaborative
venture aimed at creating a habitat for cooperation among different local
spaces and educational institutions as well as an international network
of professionals and artists. Borderline was co-organized with Platform
China Contemporary Art Institute and then networked through a
constellation of public, private, commercial, and institutional venues. As
market and private-driven initiatives dominated the shaping of encounters
between art and the public, our project ideally wished to promote
alternative forms of communication and artistic expression beside those
motivated by existing interests.
Since 2002, the Beijing artistic scene has grown incrementally
into self-contained urban areas (art districts) where an
exuberant variety of both commercial and non-prot venues
are providing the artistic population and the general public
with a least common territory. A phenomenology dictatedby the citys urban setting and historical developmentone
of coexisting exibility and fragmentation, crescent seclusion
of specialized urban zones, gated quarters, and multiple
communitiesit has so far resulted in a form of conceptual
disconnection among the spaces themselves and a passive, non-
directional artistic discourse.8
Borderline/Moving Images sought to engage with the existing geopolitical
changes that were implicating the Asian region within an ever-growing
international network, furthering the horizon of the global cultural
sphere eastward. Our team worked with a exible structure and saw itself
as a participant in a continuous discursive process, one that we thought
had been prevented in the region by the imperative methods of global
cultural expediency geared to satisfy the fast consumption of new artistic
products from emerging countries, and the economics of mainstream
discourse in contemporary art.
Our project was an experimental platform unfolding over the course of
Opening event at Borderline/
Moving Images 2007, Michal
Kosakowski and Paolo
Marzocchi, Just Like the
Movies, video and live piano
performance, 30 mins., 2006,
Soho Shangdu building
complex, Beijing.
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six days and nine days, in 2006 and 2007, respectively, and that took as its
area of investigation the interconnections between visual production and
urban culture with a focus on video art and its multidisciplinary accounts.
It featured an international program of both exhibitions and public
programs such as talks, workshops, screenings, and live performances
bridging perspectives from installation, short lm, documentary,
animation, performance and music, sound art, and architecture and design.
The overall project was divided into three sections. The rst consisted
of two main exhibitions; a second section was constituted by a six-day
program articulated in what we dubbed the Mobile Lab, whose design we
commissioned to architect Neville Mars from the Beijing based Dynamic
City Foundation; and the third was a set of evening events that explored the
interdisciplinary interfaces of new media, performance, dance, and music
that is, the interactive grounds of visual art and digital culture.9
Like Infnities, Borderline usedthe city as a stage, and it quite
literally explored by means of
its projects the expression by
Saskia Sassen the global city is a
border zone, one of new urban
spatialities and temporalities
within whose interplay of their
difference, strategic openings have
emerged.10 In the 2007 edition,
the festival moved each day to a
new location, starting from the
newly opened complex of Soho
Shangdu in the growing Central
Business District area to Platform
China in Caochangdi (both were
exhibitions) and 798, to later move every two days to the Film Academy,
the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and nally the park by the drive-in
cinema near Liangmaqiao Road, one of the most active venues in the
music and sound art scene of the time.
Borderline/Moving Images
2007, entrance of Platform
China Contemporary Art
Institute, Beijing, 2007.
Borderline/Moving Images2007, view of Soho Shangdu
building complex, Beijing.
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The opening events live performances took place amid the hollow
blocks of the newly built Soho Shangdu, while in its underground
parking lot one of the two main shows was staged. SeductionA
Theory-Fiction between the Real and the Possible,which I curated,
was inspired by the homonymous book by French philosopher Jean
Baudrillard11 and featured diverse installation-based video works
by seventeen international artists displaying documentary and
experimental video, with footage appropriated from personal andpublic archival material, CCTVs, mass media, pop culture video-clips,
cinema repertory, and so on. The various installations were articulated
in a design by my studio partner Li Naihan, who grouped them
into three separate parking spaces, so cars were still allowed to drive
through. As an opening statement to the rest of the festival, the show
tackled the perpetual nature of the predominantly visual production in
contemporary culture on the backdrop of the structural transformation
of urban scale and the proliferation of information technologies in a
modernizing China. In my introduction to the show I stated:
Top: SeductionA Theory-
Fiction between the Real and
the Possible, exhibition view,
Soho Shangdu underground
parking, Beijing. Left: Claire
Fontaine, A Fire Is a Fire Is Not
a Fire, 2006, video, no sound,
2 mins., 16 secs, letters. Photo:
Xiao Weilun. Courtesy of BAO
Atelier, Beijing.
Bottom left: Seduction
A Theory-Fiction between
the Real and the Possible,
exhibition view, Soho Shangdu
underground parking, Beijing.
Gao Shiqiang, Great Bridge,
2007, video, 26 mins., 46 secs.
Photo: Xiao Weilun. Courtesy
of BAO Atelier, Beijing.
Bottom right: Seduction
A Theory-Fiction between
the Real and the Possible,
exhibition view, Soho Shangdu
underground parking, Beijing.
Photo: Xiao Weilun. Courtesy
of BAO Atelier, Beijing.
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Indeed the synthesis of global connectivity is not only
challenging our sense of space, but also that of human
presence within; while displacing the time of history in a one-
dimensional media ow, it further brings into question that of
its immanent possibilities and invisible modes of existence.12
Conversely, Seduction sought to shorten the distance between the
compounded narratives embedded in the various works and the living
landscape they inhabitedthe Beijing urban theatre, a spectacle that
never stops reworking and rethinking itself in a universe of bustling
neighbourhoods. Furthermore, the exhibition design heightened the
desired experience of destabilizing the viewers and the works own
relationship with conscious perception and illusionary simulation. The
different installations were arranged in an abstract city scene built withwooden panels and drawn as an imaginary strip moving along three main
momentsthe ruin, the park, and the suburbsmerged together
in a single continuum. The experience offered to the viewer was one of
reconsidering the way the works exposed themselves to each other (as
belonging to diverse critical/cultural/information systems and subjective
spheres) while retaining the minimum distance necessary for the latent
meaning of each image to remain while becoming a point of collective
meeting and counter-representation.
What a curator realizes at the site of an exhibition through the selection
and positioning of works is a paradoxical creative equation that never
results in the sum of its parts. As forms of physical encounters with art,
unlike those mediated by discursive or archival dispositives, exhibitions
are conict-ridden environments where the perceptual dimension of the
works shares space with various, immaterial orders of interpretation. All
forms of exhibition are spatial strategies of containment that struggle
with the task of accommodating simultaneously the cognitive linearity of
a master narrative and the unpredictable patterns of intuitive association
experienced by their viewers. At its best, the exhibition represents a visual
and discursive identication with a particular moment of a living
aesthetic, a moment in culture that, as Irit Rogoff denes it, produces itself
in the convergence of different modes of creative enunciation traversing its
site, which comprises curators, artists, and audiences alike.
Debates about the position of the curator of contemporary art and
the nature of his or her practice reach back to the 1960s and continueto abound today on the theoretical and educational platforms that are
generally imbricated in a Western discourse. In his essay The Curatorial
Turn: From Practice to Discourse, Paul ONeil offers a panoramic view
of the evolving gure of the curator, the progressive establishment of
curatorial practice as a potential space for critique,13 and the rise of the
exhibition as a privileged mode for the communication and circulation
of both art and art professionals. Performed via the persona of the
austellungmacher, jet-set aneur, mediator, agent, artist, or author, curatorial
activity is today mostly understood as performing a connective function,
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operating among the spaces of art and the power relations that administer
themfrom patrons, collectors, artists, galleries, and various institutions
to the media, funding bodies, universities, and administrative ofces. The
so-called global curator wallows between the role of a hyper-connected
service provider and that of the independent intellectual, designing his or
her place on an uneven, cumulative geography of short-lived temporal
productions (like exhibitions) and public appearances to navigate the
hierarchical institutional superstructure of art at the level of discourse.14
The downside of this nomadic condition has made itself incrementally
manifest in the past decade with the emergence of Asian economic powers
like China, India, and the Middle East, which, eager to partake in the
circulatory system of art capitalism, have short-circuited the effects of
what ONeil labels the new reputational economies.15
The wealth ofnancial investments available to local administrations boosting large-
scale urban developments, and city marketing targeting global cultural
tourism, has created a specic market of which both prestigious museums
franchise and international curators circulation are an expression.
Furthermore the structure of the perennial exhibition has proven
particularly effective for the task of exposing the local while taking in the
global, often a process mediated by the presence generally of a Western
master curator and a subgroup of minion curators who are plugged
into the local context, as John Clark aptly describes them. Clark argues
that the participation of contemporary Asian art at biennials inside and
outside Asia has thrown into relief the crucial role of curator mediators16
that operate at a transnational level.
The embracing of the Asian perspective has certainly favoured the
widening of artistic horizons displayed on the stage of large-scale
international events and markets and proved benecial for the opening up
of both discursive and productive channels of communication. But it has
also removed vital energy from the local contexts, diverting the attention
of artists and curators, as well as that of institutions, from their immediate
environments and turning them towards the courting of the interests of
their overseas counterparts.
I do not believe there to be a one-model job description for the
contemporary curator, especially when the very connes of its time-and-
space realm of action and investigationthat is, the contemporary
remain as open-ended and diachronic as they are today. If thecontemporary question, as art historian Terry Smith would call it, is
posed with an interest in knowing how big-picture concepts tie to the
particularities of existence,17 then increasingly today, in the aftermath of
the modern and postmodern projects, the curators challenge, like that of
others inhabiting the archipelago of culture, remains that of continuing to
roam through the unattended, the punctual, and the subversive that
are located in the folds of everyday life, in the spaces where it is built and
assimilated as a collective pursuit.
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Can we curators make ourselves observers and insiders at the same time?
And what would be the place for such an endeavour? To whom would
we be talking? It is this ambivalent positioning that I have often found
myself pondering while living and working in Chinaa privileged
as much as endangered location, where culture loses xed grounds,
constantly retold and rewritten, and refracting the hopes and visions
of others who enter into it.
In 2009 I organized an exhibition in Milan, my hometown, which asked
those questions and tried to make itself available to this unspoken, open-
ended eld of contamination. The project, which has been reviewed in
the pages of this publication, was called EmporiumA New Common
Sense of Space; it included twenty-seven artists from China, Japan, and
Korea and featured mostly installation-based works spanning a range
of practices by artists who have backgrounds in visual and sound art,
architecture, and design.18Emporium attempted to communicate the
extent to which selected practices from these three countries all connected
through a not yet discursively constructed space. It was intended to
encourage the experience of latent relationships between space, work,
and objects as they collectively recall visual and aesthetic conventions
that retreat from the grand narratives of transnational critique, to rather
migrate into the expedient contingency of the quotidian and its material
expressions, by instituting a new logic of co-existence with its differential
and perpetual character.19 Emporium is part of a series of projects I am
currently working on under the thematic umbrella of what I have dubbed
States of Distraction. This is continuous with my research and interest
EmporiumA New Common
Sense of Space, exhibition
view, 2009, Museo della
Scienza e della Tecnologia
Leonardo da Vinci, Milano.
Courtesy of BAO Atelier,
Beijing.
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in the implication of spatiality (or the production of space, in Henri
Lefebvres terms) in processes of artistic production and representation
that inform historically and conceptually specic cultural perceptions
of the contemporary. The title Emporiumis appropriated in anecdotal
fashion from a text by Walter Benjamin and references the forms of spatial
consumption that the hyper-designed urban environments of the moderncity have made us accustomed to, with a comparative association to Asian
cities. Emporium was literally designed as a dense oating cloud of plinths,
walls, and hanging screens uponwhich video projectionslooped, so as to
leave the viewers to determine the whereabouts of the works belonging.
In this tightly arranged continuum, the works were left aloof, free to walk
on the margins of the conceptual perimeter of the exhibition space, so
that their tentative, incomplete qualitycharacterized by the mundane
and functional quality of their stylistic languages and materialswould
accommodate the audience to enter an ambiguous, non-deterministic
territory. Particularly, this apparently incoherent amalgamation of works
and practices aimed at communicating how new generations of artists
operating across the east Asian region are formulating new ways to deal with
the actual space of art and social action by assuming a position of open,
dynamic marginality, a subjective sphere accommodated in an unstable,
non-representational space that is enforced by a rhetoric of the unexpressed.
The essentially individualistic and self-contained nature of these types of
works speaks to a newfound impulse towards the search for protection
EmporiumA New Common
Sense of Space, exhibitionview, 2009, Museo della
Scienza e della Tecnologia
Leonardo da Vinci, Milano.
Left: Ni Haifeng/Arrow Factory
Beijing, Vive la Difference,
mixed media installation,
2008. Right: Taiyo Kimura, Big
MistakeHeadturner, 2007,
vacuum cleaner, timer, work
cloth kit. Courtesy of BAO
Atelier, Beijing.
EmporiumA New Common
Sense of Space exhibition
view, 2009, Museo della
Scienza e della Tecnologia
Leonardo da Vinci, Milano.
Foreground: Kim Gisoo,
Primitive Arms, 2006, plaster
objects and prints, dimensions
variable. Background: Kim
Gisoo, Recording, 2006, singlechannel video, 4 mins., 20
secs. Courtesy of BAO Atelier,
Beijing.
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against the totalizing, overwhelming force of master discourses and
spectacular designs in present day culture. Writing in the pages ofHarvard
DesignMagazine, Michael Meredith states:
Utopia isnt nowhere, where it used to be. In its microform,
it is temporary and localized. Younger artists, architects, and
designers arent rewiring all of society through design. They are
rewiring only bits. Everyone is ne with operating in smaller
niches, networked enclaves, and ever more remote campsites.
The specic is the new generic.20
It is no coincidence that we are witnessing a critical resurgence of
collaborative models in artistic and curatorial practices, as well as a
revamping of critiques of socially engaged or community-orientedprojects, which Tom Holert argues is emerging as an alternative response
to the contemporary governmentality that wants the individual to be
both the singular performer of a spectacular self and the obedient and
functioning team player.21
I am not prone to envisioning all collaborative ventures in the arts or
culture as being predicated on critical resistance; I see them more as non-
antagonistic, contradictory actions that inject moments of a not-totally-
planned deviation from the status quo. To a certain extent, exhibitions can
present themselves similarly as positive pronouncements and should not
aim at becoming totalizing deeds. Regardless of their scale, the risk they
might encounter in doing so is that of reinforcing the rules of visibility
that aim at containing them rather than proposing alternative ones.
Having worked as a curator in alternative art spacesrst with CAAW
in Beijing and later an independent one in my own studioIve often
struggled with the task of nding a place for such endeavours that could
respond to the dominant trend of the big and the new by resorting to
modest strategies of intervention that engage me and the artists in a sort of
game of association. On a couple of occasions, one in Shanghai in 2009,
and then another in Beijing just recently, between November 2010 and
January 2011, Ive attempted to test out the very model of the exhibition and
the practice of exhibition making, taking them as subjects of the projects.
In the rst case, the exhibition The Shape of Things to Come included
four artists based in Beijing and took place at 140sqm Gallerylocated inan apartment of an early-twentieth-century building in Shanghais French
Concession, which retains the architectural characteristics of its past. The
exhibition was conceived in reminiscence of a Wunderkammer, or cabinets
of curiosity, to engage the task of exposing the status of artistic objects
to scientic self-inspection in a time other than the present. Cabinets of
curiosity are often regarded as ancestral prototypes of the modern museum
in that they contain an objectied reservoir of history as seen through
the eyes and experiences of their owners. Inspired by the cabinets spatial
characteristics, wherein paraphernalia and a variety of cultural artifacts
are arranged in a personied associative map of symbols and places of
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confused and overlapping timelines, the exhibition asks itself: What if we
were able to test-drive the deagration of our contemporary aesthetic
universe? What parcels of history, relics of the contemporary, would be
left as a visual repository of our present times, and in what new semiotic
order would they re-awaken so that by way of an exhilarating expansion,
stretched between experience and premonition, they would frame the
possibility of a hopeful artistic prophecy beyond its predictable end?
The show presented a series of interlocking installations and textual
interventions that was extended even to the design of the invitation by
one of the artists. The exhibition played out the idea of art as a subgenre
of science ction, as its title was taken from the eponymous novel by H. G.
Wells. Their inherent similarities, that is, the obsessive drive to jumpstart
history and break into the visual repository of a possible future, were
suggested by means of the works seamless overlapping and aesthetic
interconnectedness which were put into dialogue with the spatial quality of
the gallery itself, as if the works were found from an unknown future past.
In the second case, I collaborated with Platform China, in Beijing, to
realize a tripartite exhibition called The Third Party,22 the second in the
States of Distraction series that was hosted in their project space.The three
consecutive parts, each of which presented itself as a possible iteration of an
imaginary innite show, were installed in the same space over the course ofthree months. The Third Party in this sense signied that supplementary,
The Shape of Things to Come,
exhibition view, 140sqm
Gallery, 2009. Foreground:
Liang Shuo, I am fucking
beautiful no. 4, 2009, mixed
media installation. Courtesy
of the artist and C5 Gallery,
Beijing. Background: Elaine W.
Ho, The Cover of the Society
of the Spectacle, site-specic
installation, colour lm on
window, 2009. Courtesy of
the artist and 140sqm Gallery,
Shanghai.
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iterative element that is constituted in all dialogical processes, betweena party A and a party B, between the works, the artists, concepts, and
exhibitions themselves. Each with its own title and subject matter, the
three moments of this show explored overall the shaping of relationships
between narrative and aesthetic objects to foreground an inquiry in the
realm of the ordinary specic to the Chinese context. They did so by
mobilizing overarching frames of reference and critique currently at play
through three analytical environments tackling, respectively, issues of self-
historicization, witnessing/archiving, and collaboration.
For each iteration of the project, the works were accommodated in a display
system called The Beehive, which I realized in collaboration with my partner
Li Naihan. Built in units of hexagonal cardboard boxes, this modular
structure was meant to become continuous with the exible discursive
framework of the exhibition which was intended as a eld report, one that
escapes the structural preordering of objectifying analysis to disclose all
possible conceptual and thematic associations embedded in it.
Curatorial activity might be seen as a spatio-temporal narration housing
a very specic and subjective perception that should contribute with
generosity and passion to whatever the contemporary offers itself to
besimultaneously an individual and a collective creation. In face of the
current debates surrounding the demise of the traditional institutions of
art, especially museums, as envisioned by the modern project, the role
of curatorsof individuals and not institutionsseems to be rightfully
gaining momentum. There might not be an ultimate place or nal
destination for the curator to be, no ideal or nite abode to accommodate
Left: Qiu Xiaofei, Golden Age,
2009, site-specic installation,
door, double-sided mirror,
sound. Courtesy of the artist
and 140sqm Gallery, Shanghai.
Right: Sun Xun, Ceausescus,
2009, ink on canvas. Courtesy
of the artist and 140sqm
Gallery, Shanghai.
Left: The Third PartyAn
Exhibition in Three Acts (Act1: How to Be Alone), 2010,
exhibition view of video room,
Platform China. Courtesy of
Platform China, Beijing.
Right: The Third PartyAn
Exhibition in Three Acts (Act
1: How to Be Alone), 2010,
entrance view with exhibition
title and credits, Platform
China. Li Naihan, The Beehive,
2010, hexagonal cardboard
boxes. Courtesy of the artist
and Platform China, Beijing.
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The Third PartyAn Exhibition
in Three Acts (Act 1: How to
Be Alone), 2010, exhibition
view, Platform China. Left:
Wang Wei, Samples, 2010,
site-specic installation,
ceramic tiles, black paint, 2010.
Foreground: Jin Shi, TuMu No.
1 and TuMu No. 3, 2009, old
table and stool, constructionmaterials. Background: Jin
Shi, Half Life, 2010, installation
drawings. Archway: Li Naihan,
The Beehive, hexagonal
cardboard boxes. Courtesy of
the artists and Platform China,
Beijing.
Left: The Third PartyAn
Exhibition in Three Acts (Act 2:
The Stranger), 2010, Platform
China project space, Beijing.
Chen Shaoxiong and Liu
Ding, This Is Painting, 2010,
installation detail, black, grey,and white acrylic and paint
on wood, video loop, text.
Courtesy of the artist and
Platform China, Beijing.
Right: The Third PartyAn
Exhibition in Three Acts (Act 2:
The Stranger), 2010, Platform
China. Rania Ho, Fountain
No. 4, 2010, installation,
plastic buckets, colour lights.
Courtesy of the artist and
Platform China, Beijing.
Opposite page middle: The
Third PartyAn Exhibitionin Three Acts (Act 2: The
Stranger), 2010, Platform
China. Yan Lei, Whomever
you dont know is art, 2010,
installation, photographic print
and text on wall. Courtesy of
the artist and Platform China,
Beijing.
Opposite page bottom: The
Third PartyAn Exhibition in
Three Acts (Act 3: The Third
PartyA Group Celebration!),
2011, exhibition view, Platform
China. Courtesy of Platform
China, Beijing.
-
8/3/2019 The curator Mansion Yishu May_June 2011
15/15
Vol.10 No.3 35
The Third PartyAn Exhibition
in Three Acts (Act 3: The Third
PartyA Group Celebration!),
2011, Platform China project
space, Beijing. Left: Diaodui
collective, Untitled, 2011, ink
on rice paper and cardboard
box. Right: Donkey Institute
of Contemporary Art,
documentation, T-shirt, 2011.Courtesy of the artists and
Platform China, Beijing.
his or her wanderings if these
wanderings are to remain faithful
to the perpetual movement of a
living culture and therefore allow
all forms of cultural institutions to
become recipients of new modes of
human encounter.
Notes
1 Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and The Visual Arts(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press,2007), 213.
2
John D. Barrow, Where Things Happen That Dont: Staging the Innite, paper onInnities, last accessed at http://thalesandfriends.org/en/papers/pdf/barrow_paper.pdf?phpMyAdmin=rcOunTMVHvdSvjLzdNr45lZ-X09, 1.
3 Ibid.
4 Bruno, Public Intimacy, 212.
5 The politics of place and, together with it, the abundance of spatial metaphors used toaccommodate its transdisciplinary extensions, have come to dominate theoretical discourse asa mode to approach the intricate nature of new economic and social relations in the wake ofpostmodernism and its global expanse. The exibility and complexity of the new congurationsof politics, power, and ideology have therefore informed a whole new range of conceptions ofspace and place as no longer absolute, passive, and undialectical, but porous, dishomogeneous,and approximate. See, among others, Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, eds., Thinking Space(London:Routledge, 2000), and Michael Keith and Steve Pile, eds., Place and the Politics of Identity(London:Routledge, 1993).
6 The development of the so-called cultural or creative industry in twenty-rst-century China and itsimplication in the larger spatiopolitical program of the state would deserve a longer digression thanis possible here. It shall sufce to say that the concomitant projects of internationalization in theelds of architecture and design, to name only two, are remarkably disregarded by contemporaryart criticism, which fails to recognize the political and economic power of art, architecture, anddesign with growing common consumer audiences and their interconnectedness at the level of bothpractice and discourse.
7 Carlos Basualdo, The Unstable Institution, in Elena Filipovic, Marieke Van Hal, and Soveig Ovstebo,eds., The Biennale Reader: An Anthology of Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art(Bergen: HatjeCantz, 2010), 131.
8 Borderline/Moving Images, Borderline Intro, http://www.borderlinefestival.org/new/Borderline%20Intro.htm.
9 For a full list of projects, contributing curators, and artists, see www.borderlinefestival.org.
10 Saskia Sassen, Cities as frontier zones: Making informal politics, 2007, http://www.16beavergroup.
org/mtarchive/archives/002282.php.11 Jean Baudrillard, Seduction(New York: Saint Martins Press, 1991).
12 My introduction to the show was published in the free festival journal and is accessible at http://www.borderlinefestival.org/new/SEDUCTION.htm.
13 Paul ONeil, The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse, in The Biennale Reader, 245.
14 Bejnamin Buchloh, quoted in ibid., 248.
15 In his lecture entitled Of Other Spaces, Foucault states that between utopias, unreal spaces, andheterotopiasreal sites such as cemeteries, prisons, museums, theaters, libraries, brothels, ships(changeable in their forms, but more or less cohesive in their respective functions)lies the mirror,a space of absence and presence, both utopic and heterotopic. Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces,trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, spring 1986, 116125.
16 John Clark, Biennales as Structures for the Writing of Art History: The Asian Perspective in TheBiennale Reader, 175.
17 Terry Smith, Introduction: The Contemporaneity Question, in Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, andNancy Condee, eds., Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity(Duke University Press, 2008), 1.
18 Clara Galeazzi, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 9 no. 2 (March/April 2010), 96103.
19 Beatrice Leanza, Emporium: A New Common Sense of Space in Emporium: A New Common Senseof Space, 2009, 29.
20 Michael Meredith, Whatever Happened to Whatever Happened to Total Design? originallypublished in Harvard Design Magazineno. 29, republished in a supplement to Abitareno. 508(December 2010), 26.
21 Tom Holert Joint Ventures in Artforum, February 2011, accessible online at http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201102&id=27403&pagenum=2.
22 Complete texts and images of all three parts of the exhibition are available at the Platform ChinaContemporary Art Institute Web site, www.platformchina.org.