EXHIBITION PUBLIC PROGRAMME
Talk and Book Launch:
Re-print: Lets Talk About Money: Shanghai First International Fax Art Exhibition (1996)
Date/time: Saturday, 7th February 2015, 15:30-17:30
Speakers: Fayen d’Evie, Nicholas Tammens (3-ply members) and Shi Yong, with the special appearance of Hank Bull
Language: Chinese﹠English (consecutive interpretation provided)
Event Synopsis
Fayen d’Evie and Nicholas Tammens from 3-ply, together with Shi Yong, will be invited to contribute a dialogue covering aspects of the exhibition Lets Talk About Money: Shanghai First International Fax Art Exhibition held 19 years ago, including the social and political environment at the time. 3-ply members and Shi Yong will also address the Re-print project and the concepts of ‘fax’ and ‘copy’ in the context of their respective practices. The book launch of Re-print #2: Shanghai Fax (1996); Lets Talk About the Money will be held during the event and the book will be available for purchase after the talk.
All public programmes are free of charge. Please RSVP to elvaxie@osagegallery.com.
About Re-print: Excerpt from 3-ply’s interview with Biljana Ciric in the exhibition guidebook of ‘Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room’:
Shanghai Fax has been described as the first artist-organised, international group exhibition held in China, which not only seems a crucial exhibition to be retained within the history of exhibition-making worldwide, but was also interesting to us since 3-ply is an artist-led publishing project and we welcome opportunities to reclaim an alternative, artist-focused history of exhibition-making. The involvement of Hank Bull from the Western Front reinforced the significance of the exhibition, given Western Front’s pivotal history and continued contemporary engagement in communications-oriented art…The use in [Lets Talk About Money: Shanghai First International Fax Art Exhibition] of an early technology for social communications, combined with the thematic (“Let’s Talk About Money”), [has] unique relevance today in terms of current debates regarding social media, trans-national artistic collaboration, economic crises and recessions, the political economy of art making, state oversight, and possibilities for grassroots conversations.
About Lets Talk About Money: abridged text by Biljana Ciric on ‘Lets Talk About Money:Shanghai First International Fax Art Exhibition’ (1996) from the book ‘A History of Exhibitions: Shanghai-1979-2006’
Lets Talk About Money: First International Fax Art Exhibition (1996) was initiated by Hank Bull, who was the director of Western Front, an artist-run space in Vancouver, BC at the time. The exhibition involved a group of artists in Shanghai, including Ding Yi, Shi Yong, Shen Fan, and Zhou Tiehai as curators. This exhibition is important as the first international exhibition to show work by artists from abroad along with Chinese artists’ works, which arrived to the show via fax. The faxes would transmit and be pasted on the walls on a daily basis during the exhibition period.
This innovative approach to exhibition-making, with a specific focus on the nature of its format, its communication, and how information is circulated in the public realm, went far beyond providing recognition to the international artists, but in fact influenced artist-organized exhibitions in the coming generation. This exhibition could be understood as a marking point for the beginning of experimentation within the format of exhibitions in Shanghai. It also affected display strategies, which began to be even more clear in the Art For Sale Exhibition, years later.
The event is part of the public program of Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room curated by Biljana Ciric
ARTISTS FEATURED:
3-PLY (FAYEN D’EVIE, MATT HINKLEY & NICHOLAS TAMMENS) | CHARDA ADYTAMA
YASON BANAL | GONG JIANHUA | HU YUN | IRWIN
MARYSIA LEWANDOWSKA | LI RAN
SHI YONG | LUKE WILLIS THOMPSON | MONA VATAMANU & FLORIN TUDOR
YU YOUHAN with contributions from DING YI, FAN JIMAN, FENG LIANGHONG, QIN YIFENG, SHEN FAN and ZHANG JIAN-JUN | ZHANG PEILI | ZHOU ZIXI
EXHIBITION PERIOD: 20.11.2014 – 28.2.2015
VENUE: Osage Shanghai
Room 101, Block 5, Wang Zu City, 251 Cao Xi Road, Xuhui District, Shanghai
(Gallery entrance at Caodongsan Road)
EXHIBITION OPENING HOURS: Tue – Sat: 10.30 am – 6.30 pm
Sun: 2:30 – 6:30 pm
Open to special appointments outside of these times.
Closed on public holidays.
Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room takes as its focus artist-organized exhibitions between 1979 and 2006 in Shanghai. The role of artists as “curators” in today’s terminology, has since more or less vanished from the scene due to the commercialization of art and exhibition making and viewing methods; this exhibition thus attempts to re-activate this local knowledge and practice through involving a number of local and international artists, hoping to bring together common threads from the larger context of exhibition-making practices across the region to explore exhibitions as an epistemological engine and to re-think the rituals within the art system. The structure of the exhibition will be dynamic and will be developed in conversation with these local and international artists and curators.
The visual experience of the exhibition is conceived in collaboration with architect Ségolène Dubernet
Special thanks to Qian Weikang, Shi Yong, Tang Guangming, Zhang Jian-Jun, Zheng Shengtian and Zhou Zixi for providing archival materials and works.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
3-ply is an artist-led publishing initiative that focuses on publication, writing, editing and translation as an extension of art practice. 3-ply is directed by artist Fayen d’Evie in collaboration with a network of artists, writers, curators and graphic designers. Beyond production and distribution of material publications, d’Evie is fundamentally interested in mobilising artist-led publishing as an experimental and strategic device to expand and/or disrupt the production, transmission and archiving of knowledge. 3-ply publications are stocked in leading contemporary art galleries and bookstores worldwide.
3-ply’s Re-print project is a curated series that reintroduces out-of-print artist publications to a contemporary audience. The series also exploits the character of the reprints to insert interventions in public archives: introducing material that was never legally deposited, or reinserting previously archived publications in the form of mediated replications, thereby indexing the originals.
For more about 3-ply and Re-print #2: Shanghai Fax (1996); Lets Talk About the Money, see the link: http://3ply.net/forthcoming/
Shi Yong (b. 1963) lives and works in Shanghai. Shi Yong’s work embraces modernization and the ideology of consumerism as the basis for self-imagination and creation. He has produced a series of photo-based works around the concept of the ideal Shanghai citizen. It is an ongoing multifaceted project that explores images of consumption, commodity and the development of the culture industry. One series, entitled “Made in China – Welcome to China” (1999), consists of hand-painted plaster models of a young businessman in a Mao suit, sunglasses, briefcase and waving. The image of the ideal citizen used for the statue was the outcome of an Internet project through which Shi Yong asked volunteers to vote for the ideal way of looking. The individual now transforms the identity of his or her self by following the logic of commodity market surveys. It is a composite image that Shi Yong has repeatedly used in other pieces such as “Longing For” (2000) and “You Cannot Clone It, But You Can Buy It” (2001). The iconic figure is morphed through the agency of the marketplace.
Recently, Shi Yong has focused his attention on large-scale installations and architectural models imbued with an absurd twist of humor. Most notably, his mixed media installation “Flying Q” is of a UFO built with the purpose of opening up the sky. The flying object comes with no additional explanation, but might be recognized as just another signature vision of and interventions into the imaginary world of Shi Yong. His subversive approach pokes fun at architecture based on rules and pre-established schemas. Shi Yong fabricates a colorful and ironic architectural structure that is at once a parody of serious design and its synthesis. In short, his work is an amalgam of Shanghai’s eclectic ‘anything goes’ attitude towards the built environment.
Shi Yong was born in Shanghai in 1963. He graduated from Light Industrial School, Fine Arts Department. He resides and works in Shanghai. Shi Yong has exhibited widely since the early 1990′s. Recent shows include Face, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai (2012); Grasstress 2011, Venice, Italy (2011); Negociation, The Second Today’s Documents, Today Art Museum, Beijing (2010); Shanghai Kino, Shanghai Kino, KUNSTHALLE BERN, Switzerland (2009); The 3rd Nanjing Triennial-Reflective Asia, RCM ART MUSEUM, Nanjing (2008); Think carefully, where have you been yesterday?, BizART, Shanghai (2007); The First Today’s Documents, Energy: Spirit ּ Body ּ Material, Today Art Museum, Beijing (2007); Follow Me!, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2005); Second Guangzhou Triennale, Guangsong Museum of Art, Guangdong (2005); Zooming into Focus, China National Art Museum, Beijing (2005); The Heaven, The World, ShanghART Gallery & H-Space, Shanghai (2004); 4th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai (2002); Bienal de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil (2002) and BM99, Bienal da Maya, Maya Art Center, Portugal (1999) etc.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Biljana Ciric is an independent curator based in Shanghai. Her recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition featuring Tino Sehgal held at the UCCA Beijing, an exhibition hosted by Times Museum titled One Step Forward, Two Steps Back—Us and Institution / Us as Institution and Alternatives to Ritual presented by Goethe Open Space and OCAT in Shenzhen. In 2013, Ciric initiated From History of Exhibitions towards Future of Exhibitions Making, an ongoing seminar platform that proposes to revisit the importance of exhibition making; the seminar platform will specifically be looking at the history of exhibitions in China, South East Asia, Australia and New Zealand. In 2011, Ciric initiated the project Taking the Stage OVER, a year long, ongoing investigation related to the performative aspects of art. She was co-curator of the Asia Triennial in Manchester (2011) and presented the exhibition Institution for the Future. Upcoming publications include Active Withdrawal: Weak Institutionalism and the Institutionalization of Art Practice co-edited with Nikita Yingqian Cai, to be published by Times Museum and History in the Making: Shanghai 1979-2009 published by Black Dog Publishing. Ciric is a regular contributor to Broadsheet and Yishu Journal. She was nominee of the Independent Vision Curatorial Award by Independent Curators International in 2012 and was on the jury for the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award in 2013.
ABOUT OSAGE ART FOUNDATION
The Osage Art Foundation was established in 2004 with three main goals – Creative Communities, Cultural Cooperation and Creative Capacity and has since played an active role in developing education and training of young people, broadening cultural awareness and participation in artistic endeavours, nurturing creativity and critical thinking and fostering international cultural exchange. The Osage Art Foundation is now widely recognised by the local community and internationally as having initiated many pioneering projects of international calibre.
The current focus of the Osage Art Foundation is on developing deeper discourse in and around the arts in the wider community. We believe that research, analysis, examination and promulgation of issues pertaining to society, contemporary culture and value by artists, writers, critics, curators and commentators will build better understanding of regional perspectives throughout Asia and beyond.
In order to better contextualize the work of the current generation of Asian contemporary artists, the Osage Art Foundation has helped to introduce a number of seminal contemporary Asian masters to the wider international art world. For example, Roberto Chabet (1937 – 2013) made an unparalleled contribution to Philippine contemporary art as an educator, mentor, visionary, conceptualist, innovator, alchemist, poet and tireless promoter of younger talents, but until recently was not as well known internationally.
In 2014, Osage Art Foundation co-presented Market Forces | Erasure: From Conceptualism to Abstraction, curated by Charles Merewether with the City University of Hong Kong, and Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room, curated by Biljana Ciric. In 2013, OAF presented It’s Me, Goodbye: Andy Warhol’s Cinema, jointly presented by The Andy Warhol Museum, one of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. Osage also presented the second in its series of non-profit Market Forces exhibitions that draw attention to the non-commercial intrinsic values of art: The Friction of Opposites, which opened in Hong Kong in May 2013, coinciding with the commercial art fair Art Basel Hong Kong. In May 2013, The Osage Art Foundation was honoured at the Hong Kong Arts Development Awards with an Award for Arts Sponsorship.
