By Zhang Lansheng – Following the residency programme of the 7th Asia-Europe Art Camp – Art Workshop for Visual Arts 2009/2010 at the Casino Luxembourg, the second part of this program took place in Shanghai at the ddm Warehouse for two weeks starting from August, 27 2010. A symposium was held at the Minsheng Art Museum on the same day, as well as a two-week art workshop and residency programme with ten participating artists. As the symposium proceeded with the artists’ presentations and the key speaker lectures, questions started to come up in my mind and I increasingly found myself a little disillusioned.
“Moved, mutated and disturbed identities” was the main topic of this symposium arising from the lectures of the European speakers. The participating artists in the residency program are expected to produce artwork in response to the identity topic after the symposium.
The workshop commenced with the organizer giving background information regarding the event, followed by the participating artists of different nationalities, including two local artists, giving presentations about their recent work, which may then be developed further or used to create a new work in relation to the symposium topic. These new artworks will form a show at the end of two weeks workshop in Shanghai.
The presentations of artists’ works were fascinating in terms of individual artistic explorations or experimentations. For instance, in a video work Christoph Schwartz recorded how he traveled on a satellite controlled cargo ship from Hamburg to Shanghai. A piece of performance artwork by Abhishek Hazra recorded on video shows the artist’s fascination with molecular structures and explores the relationship between science and art. Another video work by Silvie Blocher shows images of Brazilian teenagers in slow motion from a fixed viewpoint. These are only a few examples.
Upon observing the program though, I began to question the validity of such workshops in terms of their thematic relevance and the limits of artistic freedom they put on the artist.
Organized international symposiums or workshops are becoming very popular these days. Often funded by arts organizations, art foundations, museums and universities in the West, the workshops usually have a topic or theme as a starting point to inspire the artists to create art works during the workshop. The workshop from Luxemburg is typical of this kind. According to the organizer, the topic or the working title for the artists – “moved, mutated and disturbed identities” – comes from the first part of the lecture programme.
