100 Objects
69 Artists
7 Floors
2 Sensations 

a nrm curatorial project.

Featuring (in alphabetical order)
Cai Dongdong | Cai Yuan & Xi Jianjun | Chen Wei | Chen Yufan |  Chen Yujun | Cheng Ran | Gao Lei | Gao Ludi | Gao Weigang | Guo Hongwei | Jiang Pengyi | Jiang Zhi | Jin Shan | Li Jingxiong | Li Qing | Li Tingwei | Liu Jianhua | Liu Weijian | Liu Yujia |  Lu Zhengyuan | Lu Chao | Lv Song | Ma Ke | Jennifer Ma Wen | Nabuqi | Ni Jun | Ni Zhiqi | Ouyang Chun | Peng Wei | Qin Qi | Qiu Jie | Shao Yinong&Mu Chen | Shen Fan | Shen Liang | Shen Ruijun | Shen Shaomin | Shi Jinsong | Shi Yiran | Shi Zhiying | Song Dong&Yin Xiuzhen | Song Yuanyuan | Sun Yuan & Peng Yu | Tang NanNan | Wang Jiaxue | Wang Yi | Wang Yuyang | Wang Zhibo | Wu Di | Wu Shanzhuan & Inga Svala Thorsdottir | Xu Zhen | Xue Feng | Yan Heng | Yan Lei | Yang Jian | Yang Yongliang | Zhang Ding | Zhang Lehua | Zhang Yexing | Zheng Guogu | Zheng Lu | Tant Zhong | Zhou Wendou | Zhu Jinshi | Zhu Xinyu

“No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me it was me.” —Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu), Scott Moncrieff-Kilmartin translation.

Zheng Lu, C / Milk Bacteria C, Light Box, Collection-grade digital micro-jet, Diameter 120cm, 2019 (image courtesy the artist and SGA)
郑路, 牛奶细菌, 灯箱 收藏级数码微喷, 直径120cm, 2019 (图片致谢艺术家和SGA)

Have you eaten?

For SGA’s re-opening and re-launch, for the first time in the history of Three on the Bund, a major exhibition will take place throughout the whole building – Pal(ate)/ette/.

From September 20^th– October 31^st, over 100 objects by 69 artists will be displayed in a salon-style exhibition within SGA and peppered throughout Three on the Bund’s restaurants and bars, in dialogue with the exhibits and their surroundings.

The exhibition also marks the debut of nrm’s curatorial project as Artistic Director of the new SGA.

Gao Lei, CHEW, doormats，chewing gum，stainless steel screws，non-reflective glass, 60x90x5cm in 4 parts, 2018 (image courtesy the artist and SGA)
高磊, 咀嚼, 门垫，口香糖，不锈钢螺钉，无反光玻璃, 60x90x5cm, 4件, 2018 (图片致谢艺术家和SGA)

Pal(ate)/ette/ will show artworks throughout Three on the Bund with the exhibition’s core display in SGA. Curated by NRM,Pal(ate)/ette/ reflects the spectrum of associations of the homonyms Palateand Palette; a synthesis of the senses – taste sight hearing smell taste and touch – and presenting Three on the Bund as a cultural whole.

The exhibition title relates to two homophones. While ‘Palate’refers to the ability to distinguish between and appreciate different flavours related to food as well as relishing its taste, ‘Palette’denotes a broad range of colours or simply the board upon which artists mix pigments. Both symbolise the most significant motif in Pal(ate)/ette/, both as metaphor and experience.

Ouyang Chun, Wooden Palette, Oil on Canvas, 30x40cm, 2007
(image courtesy the artist and SGA)
欧阳春, 木调色板, 布面油画, 30x40cm, 2007 (图片致谢艺术家和SGA)

Pal(ate)/ette/ involves two distinct but intertwined worlds, those of taste and color. These worlds interact to create relations between the artists, artworks, and the halls and salons of Three on the Bund, and Shanghai itself. The exhibition explores the richness of aesthetics and materiality in colouration and the sensuousness of food and its ingredients, as medium, subject matter, in its devouring, and as communicative and social habits, experiences for which Three on the Bund is famous. The exhibition is a sumptuous journey that delights us into imagining anew the limitless ways to plunge into uncanny and alluring experiences that tease our senses of sight, smell and space, immersive experiences, encompassing and meditative. This fluidity brings the artworks to resonate with each other, adding to and ultimately enriching one another.

Pal(ate)/ette/ finallyis a journey through synesthesia. Colour and taste are always elements of the experience of art and food, affecting the sensations of the person moving in and through the show as much as ordinary life. Pal(ate)/ette/ embodies this.

Wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling, in corners and cabinets, Pal(ate)/ette/ does not merely serve the cause of art, food and drink. It is a social organ with a life of its own, a meandering walk through Three on the Bund, its history, restaurants, and its gallery, to stimulate and engage a wide range of art goers, eaters, drinkers and conversationalists, cultivating awareness from an amalgam of expressive invention and poetic association, memory and madeleine.

Liu Jianhua, Standard, porcelain, 1800x250x60cm (image courtesy the artist and SGA)
刘建华, 标准, 瓷, 1800x250x60cm,2012 (图片致谢艺术家和SGA)

SGA – an open platform for contemporary art and culture

SGA is a new model for art production and exhibition. Working with local and international partners, SGA instigates, develops and realizes cross-cultural projects for contemporary art with leading artists, institutions and international private galleries.

An open platform for exhibitions, collaborations and curatorial projects, SGA is an agent of expanding engagement between art and the wider public, connecting and contextualizing the art of greater China and South East Asia with the wider international art worlds. Our objective is to decompartmentalize the art world through situating local understanding within global conversations.

To drive this new direction, nrm.have been appointed Artistic Director of SGA. Led by Josef Ng, Andrew Ruff and Christopher Moore, Josef, Andrew and Chris, NRM. brings over 3 decades of combined experience in art curating, collecting and publishing in China and South East Asia.

Chen Yufan, Throw It in the Air 3, Old wood, ceramic, lens, copper, acrylic paint, iron, and industrial neon lights, 190x190cm+70x35x15cm, 2016-2017 (image courtesy the artist and SGA)
陈彧凡, 把它抛向空中3, 老木板,陶瓷,镜片,铜片,丙烯颜料,铁板,工业霓虹灯, 190x190cm+70x35x15cm, 2016-2017 (图片致谢艺术家和SGA)

Yang Yongliang, A Bowl of Taipei No.3, Ultra-Giclee Print, 150x150cm, 2012 (image courtesy the artist and SGA)
杨泳梁, 一碗台北之三, 艺术微喷 150x150cm, 2012 (图片致谢艺术家和SGA)

Three on the Bund

Built in 1916, Three on the Bund is one of the most prominent heritage riverfront buildings comprising Shanghai’s Bund. Following acquisition by Giti group the building underwent substantial restoration at the turn of the century led by architect Michael Graves, reopening in 2004 as one of the finest locations in the city for art, dining and fashion, and continues to be to this day.

Originally launched as Shanghai Gallery of Art when Three on the Bund opened in 2004 SGA has hosted ground-breaking exhibitions of leading Chinese and international artists.

nrm is a curatorial consultancy by Josef Ng, Andrew Ruff and Chris Moore.  

Archi-Union Architecture

SGA’s relaunch includes a completely new design conceived by Archi-Union and led by Philip F. Yuan. Archi-Union is one of China’s leading contemporary architecture practices.

Zhang Yexin Balance-Lobster, 2019 (image courtesy the artist and SGA)
张业兴, 平衡—龙虾, 80 x 60 cm, 2019 (图片致谢艺术家和SGA)

Press enquiries 

Kris Gao 高琬婷

Tel: +8621 – 6321 5757

Email: kris.gao@on-the-bund.com

Website: www.shanghaigalleryofart.com

Weibo: @外滩三号沪申画廊

Wechat: 外滩三号沪申画廊

The exhibition will feature a selection of more than 290 works from 1986 to 2018, witnessing the artists’ transition over the years.
Opening on 22March 2018, the exhibition will run through 3 May 2018.

“Quote! Quote! Quote!”
1. a content is a quoted duration.
2. a content is a content of the container.
3. container is content.
4. context is a given variable.
5. a container is in the context of a given variable.
*: man with quoted   content realizes his (or her) meaning in the given context through the customized container.

Artists Biographies

Inga Svala Thorsdottir and Wu Shanzhuan (b. 1966 / 1960)

Inga Svala Thorsdottir was born in Iceland in 1966. She graduated in 1991 from the Painting Department of the Icelandic School of Arts and Crafts, and in 1995 from the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg. In 1993 she founded Thor’s Daughter’s Pulverization Service, and in 1999 she founded BORG.

and

Wu Shanzhuan was born in China in 1960. He graduated from the Education Department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in 1986 and in 1995 from the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg. In 1985 he founded Red Humour, and in 1990 he founded Red Humour International.

Since 1991 Thorsdottir and Wu have been working and exhibiting collaboratively. They live and work in Hamburg, Shanghai and Reykjavík.

Originally part of the historic exhibition Zone of Urgency curated by Hou Hanru in the Arsenale section of the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003, this exhibition is considered a major showcase of works by artists and non-profit cultural institutions active in the Pearl River Delta since the end of the 20th Century. Highlighting the impacts on the cultural landscape of the Pearl River Delta, this initial display emphasised the dynamic and unique conceptual contemporary art practices towards the everyday life from that that area, which were in stark contrast to previous interpretations of Chinese contemporary art that placed emphasis on realism, figurative styles and various political dimensions.

A collaborative project, the exhibition presented works from 14 artists and independent art spaces which presented their views via a wide range of media, from visual art and film to publication, with aims to weave a story surrounding the unprecedented process of urbanisation since the 1990s.

As the fourth exhibition to be held at the M+ Pavilion, a permanent space in the West Kowloon Cultural District that will host the museum’s exhibitions until the opening in late 2019, Canton Express will demonstrate the extensive research, conservation efforts and the museum’s commitment in preserving contemporary artwork produced for a specific condition, unfolding the fascinating stories on communities and support behind the original exhibition. This exhibition will also trace back to the rich cultural connections between Pearl River Delta and Hong Kong highlighting the chronology and present to viewers the results from this research, complemented by exclusive insights into the back of house and conservation methods. This exhibition celebrates the donation by influential Chinese collector Guan Yi in 2013, emphasising the unique role of collectors and the art community within the realisation of the original exhibition.

Featuring a wide range of works – including photography, sculpture, video, installation and archival materials, the restaging of this exhibition enhances these far-sighted experimentations on shaping a unique artistic language from this region. The 2017 presentation will include works by Chen Shaoxiong, Duan Jianyu, Feng Qianyu, Jiang Zhi, Jin Jiangbo, Liang Juhui, Libreria Borges Bookshop (Chen Tong and Lu Yi), Lin Yilin, Liu Heng, U-theque Organisation (Ou Ning and Cao Fei), Vitamin Creative Space, Xu Tan, Yang Yong, and Zheng Guogu.

The Guan Yi donation to M+ consists of 37 works that comprises the entire exhibition of Canton Express, and spans 26 years (from 1979 to 2005). In addition to the Canton Express project, the donation also includes works by artists Chen Wenbo, Duan Jianyu, Gu Dexin, Huang Rui, Huang Yongping, the New Measurement Group, Shen Yuan, Wang Guangyi, Wang Luyan, Wang Yin, Wu Shanzhuan, Xu Zhen, Yan Lei, Zhang Peili and Zhou Tiehai.

“The generous donation by Guan Yi manifested great trust and respect from the collection on M+’s capability and vision in preserving and showcasing the artwork,” said Ms Suhanya Raffel, Executive Director of M+. “Canton Express demonstrates the museum’s commitment to the institution’s donors, and celebrates the important role of collectors in the realization and the preservation of art.”

“Canton Exrpess is an important project in two ways: it demonstrates the uniqueness of the artistic language that emerged in southern China, near where we are located, in Hong Kong; it also exemplifies how M+ as a contemporary museum plays a vital role within the ecology of artmaking through its research capabilities and institutional expertise,” said Mr Doryun Chong, Deputy Director and Chief Curator of M+.

“People often believe that the contemporary is too recent to require any deliberate maintenance. During the reinstallation of Canton Express, however, it made one realize the immediate need for documentation and conservation, because the ‘contemporary’ turns into the ‘past’ in the blink of an eye,” said Dr Pi Li, Sigg Senior Curator of M+. “It is our hope that this exhibition not only restages an important moment in the development of contemporary art, but also serves as a means by which to reflect and act upon these concerns.”

“It is my wish to see the concept of the Pearl River Delta and its art being taken forward by one of the best museums in the region,” said Guan Yi, collector. “M+ and the historically significant work seem to be the perfect match, and for the professional team at the museum to restage this exhibition, presents the ideal approach in my opinion. I look forward to the seeing the project realised again in Hong Kong, this time with the international curatorial vision of M+.”

The curatorial team consists of Dr Pi Li, Sigg Senior Curator of M+, Visual Art with Isabella Tam and Ethan Cheng, Assistant Curators, Visual Art, M+.

The Guan Yi Donation, 2013

Launched in 2001, Guan Yi’s internationally acclaimed collection — the first of its kind in mainland China — ranges in dates from the late 1970s to the present and is especially noted for its emphasis on the work of the ’85 New Wave, conceptual art and large-scale installations. The collection includes works by members of the Stars Group, a critical player in the beginning of contemporary Chinese art, and is also particularly strong in Chinese conceptual art throughout its trajectory over the last 30 years. Spanning the years from 1979 to 2005, the donation includes works by Cao Fei, Chen Shaoxiong, Chen Wenbo, Duan Jianyu, Gu Dexin, Huang Rui, Huang Yongping, Liang Juhui, Lin Yilin, the New Measurement group, Shen Yuan, Wang Guangyi, Wang Luyan, Wang Yin, Wu Shanzhuan, Xu Zhen, Yan Lei, Zhang Peili, Zheng Guogu and Zhou Tiehai. The donation also includes the complete work list of Canton Express, a historic exhibition that was a part of the 2003 Venice Biennale and was the first major presentation of contemporary art from the Pearl River Delta region on the international stage.

Inga Svala Thórsdóttir and Wu Shanzhuan’s manifesto and series of works titled Thing’s Right(s), a revision of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, cuts to the core of the Western cultural tradition—to the relationship between art and human rights, the French Revolution and aesthetic contemplation, the privileging of men and privileging of artworks. (1) I would like to use this intervention by Thórsdóttir and Wu into the Western art tradition as a starting point of my text. This intervention has the character of a protest, a contestation. Its primary target is the readymade practice as it was introduced by Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp’s art became a target for Thórsdóttir and Wu’s artistic actions early enough: in 1992, as the first collaboration with Thórsdóttir, Wu pissed into one of the urinals signed by Duchamp that was on display in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. The title of the work was “An Appreciation”.

One could say it was also a violent reaction. But it was obviously a reaction against a certain kind of violence that was applied by Duchamp himself to the things that were taken out of their original everyday context and then, under the name of “readymades,” moved into the space of the art museum. One can say that Duchamp’s artistic decisions have (unjustly) privileged certain things in relationship to other things: for example, a particular urinal in relationship to all the other urinals. Indeed, even if some art theorists argued that the readymade practice erased the border between museographed art and ordinary reality, or between artworks and ordinary things, the selection of a particular urinal (or several particular urinals) has not emancipated its brethren that remained on their accustomed places inside lavatories all around the world. However, this is not the main objection that Thórsdóttir and Wu have with the readymade practice. For the artists, the true “appreciation” of a thing is precisely the use of this thing. According to this view, Duchamp insulted the urinal by forbidding its use. Thórsdóttir and Wu’s reaction to Duchamp’s gesture reminds us of the opposition between “ritual value” and “exhibition value” that was introduced by Walter Benjamin. Indeed, the usual use of the urinal can be understood as a kind of ritual that is negated and destroyed by the defunctionalization of the urinal in the exhibition space.

Inga Svala Thorsdottir & Wu Shanzhuan, “An Appreciation”, Cibachrome, 124.9 x 152.7 cm,1992（Courtesy of Long March Space）
吴山专 & 英格-斯瓦拉·托斯朵蒂尔，《一个欣赏》, CB相纸，124.9 x 152.7 cm，1992（图片由长征空间提供）

Inga Svala Thorsdottir & Wu Shanzhuan, “Paradises”, Cibachrome, 126.2 x 156.7 cm, 1993（Courtesy of Long March Space）
吴山专 & 英格-斯瓦拉·托斯朵蒂尔，《天堂们》，CB相纸，126.2 x 156.7 cm，1993（图片由长征空间提供）

The act of violence that removes an object from its immediate context of everyday use, isolates it, and prevents it from being plunged back into the flow of the quotidian has its historical roots in the violence of the French Revolution and its ideology of human rights. Indeed, our contemporary notion of art has its roots in the decisions that were taken by the French revolutionary government concerning the objects that it inherited from the ancien régime. The change of a regime—especially such a radical change as was introduced by the French Revolution—is usually accompanied by a wave of iconoclasm. One could watch these waves in the cases of Protestantism, La Conquista, or recently after the fall of the socialist regimes in Eastern Europe. The French revolutionaries took a different course: instead of destroying sacral and profane objects belonging to the ancien régime, they defunctionalized them—or, in other words, aestheticized them. The French revolution turned the things of the old regime into what we call today art—i.e., into an object not of use but of pure contemplation. This violent, revolutionary act of the aestheticization of the old regime created art as we know it today.

The revolutionary origin of modern aesthetics was conceptualized by Immanuel Kant in Critique of the Power of Judgment, written in 1790. Toward the beginning of his text Kant refers (albeit indirectly) to the political context of his time. He writes: “If someone asks me whether I find the palace that I see before me beautiful, I may well say that I do not like that sort of thing [ ... ] in true Rousseauesque style I might even vilify the vanity of the great who waste the sweat of the people on such superfluous thing. [... ] All of this might be conceded to me and approved; but that is not what is at the issue here. [ ... ] One must not be in the least biased in favor of the existence of the thing, but must be entirely indifferent in this respect in order to play the judge in matters of taste.” (2) Kant does not like the palace as a representation of wealth and power. However, he is ready to accept the palace as aestheticized, which actually means defunctionalized, made nonexistent for all practical purposes—reduced to pure form. Since the French Revolution, artworks began to be understood as defunctionalized and publicly exhibited things of a past reality. This understanding of art determines artistic strategies up until today. One can say that Duchamp and other artists of the readymade expanded this strategy to include its own contemporaneity: this contemporaneity was seen by them as already past, a disappearing reality that can be easily reduced to pure form. And as pure form it became unusable. The fact that the artworks are not used means that they have their goal not outside, but inside themselves. In this sense, artworks are “humanized” things: they have a “soul” that makes them autonomous. The modern humanist ethics is based on the requirement that man can never be a means, only a goal. In this sense, artworks are treated like men among things. But one can also say that men are treated like artworks among animals. Here one can see a deep and decisive connection between the autonomy of things and their form. Things become protected artworks when they are perceived only as “forms” and not as usable objects—and animals become protected from use when they have a human form. Thus, speaking about the rights of things, Thórsdóttir and Wu point to the core of the problem—the connection between art and humanism. But what, actually, is a thing?

According to Martin Heidegger, only an artwork can manifest itself as a thing. In his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935–36), Heidegger writes that we originally encounter all things as “tools.” In other words, we always perceive them as objects of possible use—and thus overlook precisely their thingness. Art alone is able to demonstrate to us the thingness of things by taking them out of the context of their ordinary use. Thus Heidegger writes: “Nothing can be discovered about the thingly aspect of the work until the pure standing-in-itself of the work has clearly shown itself. But is the work in itself ever accessible? In order for this to happen it would be necessary to remove the work from all relation to anything other than itself in order to let it stand on its own and for itself alone.” (3) But if our ability to experience the work of art “on its own and for itself alone” depends on the decision to remove it “from all relation to anything other than itself,” such a decision must in some way be unfounded and unprecedented. Heidegger writes: “The setting-into-work of truth thrusts up the extra-ordinary (das Ungeheure) while thrusting down the ordinary, and what one takes to be such. The truth that opens itself in the work can never be verified or derived from what went before. In its exclusive reality, what went before is refuted by the work. What art founds, therefore, can never be compensated and made good in terms of what is present and available for use. The founding is an overflowing, a bestowal.” (4) And at another point: “The more essentially this thrust comes into the open, the stranger and more solitary the work becomes.” (5)

Inga Svala Thorsdottir & Wu Shanzhuan, “Posing for Swimming”, Cibachrome, 125.3 x 124.6 cm, 1994（Courtesy of Long March Space）
吴山专 & 英格-斯瓦拉·托斯朵蒂尔，《为游泳的姿势》，CB相纸，125.3 x 124.6 cm，1994（图片由长征空间提供）

Inga Svala Thorsdottir & Wu Shanzhuan, “Pouring Bottled Water into the Victoria Harbour”, Cibachrome, 181.7 x 124.5 cm, 1993（Courtesy of Long March Space）
吴山专 & 英格-斯瓦拉·托斯朵蒂尔，《往维多利亚港中倒矿泉水》，CB相纸，181.7 x 124.5 cm，1993（图片由长征空间提供）

What presents itself in these passages as a mere description is evidently a normative proposition: the work of art cannot be understood in terms of the past; it breaks with the habits of perception. Though Heidegger himself did not have particularly “progressive” artistic taste, and evidently stuck with moderate expressionism, his theory of art nonetheless privileged a radical, avant-garde, innovative art by encouraging the artist to present the decidedly “extra-ordinary.” The extra-ordinary here is obviously not merely a historical innovation, but the extraction of the artwork from the ordinary. Here Heidegger seems to speak a language that is very similar to the language of Duchamp: we can see the urinal as a thing only if we remove it from everyday use. Or, the urinal becomes a thing only after it has become an artwork. Before that it was merely a tool. In other words, to expand human rights, as understood by the French Revolution, to the realm of things means to defunctionalize them—so that these things can be only contemplated but not used. Under such a presupposition to speak about the right of things means to turn the whole of ordinary life into an artwork or a museum space, or to completely destroy it. That is the actual problem that Thórsdóttir and Wu address with Thing’s Right(s). But before we come back to this problem let us discuss the following question: Is the art system the place that guarantees things their thingness—by completely relieving them from their role of tools?

Heidegger was famously more than skeptical about the role of the art system. He writes: “Well, then, the works themselves are located and hang in collections and exhibitions. But are they themselves, in this context, are they the works they are, or are they, rather, objects of the art business? […] Official agencies assume responsibility for the care and maintenance of the works. Art connoisseurs and critics busy themselves with them. The art dealer looks after the market. The art-historical researcher turns the works into the objects of a science. But in all this many-sided activity do we ever encounter the work itself?” (6) The answer, of course, is no. Paradoxically, the art system turns the artworks back into tools—their thingness is overlooked again. For Heidegger, the artwork is an event that takes place in the “clearance of Being.” However, entering this clearance, this opening of Being, the artist immediately sees its closure. Of course, the art system is not a supermarket. When I buy a thing in a supermarket I can use it as I please—I can even destroy it. But I cannot freely use or destroy a work of art —I cannot “enslave” it, turn it into a tool instead of keeping its status as a goal. Such a behavior would be judged as barbaric by contemporary society.

Nevertheless, I can use an artwork as a sign of power and wealth. Even if the art system negates the ordinary use value of a thing, it keeps its exchange value intact. From the Marxist point of view (as formulated in the first volume of Marx’s Capital), art can be seen as the ultimate stage of “commodity fetishism,” and the readymade practice as the final triumph of exchange value over use value: the moment at which a readymade ceases to remain as a pure object of contemplation and begins to circulate inside the globalized art world, the soul of the thing is substituted by its price. Thus, the actual accusation directed against the art system is this: the art system uses art as art—whereas art should not be used in any way, including as art. It is precisely this use of art as art that has produced so much criticism and negative reaction recently against the art system all over the world. The Heideggerian return to the truth of art as an opening of the world seems increasingly improbable in our days. So the answer to the use of art as art is mostly: the use of art as nonart. Art becomes politicized and subjected to “good” social goals.

However, in Thing’s Right(s), Thórsdóttir and Wu offer a different way of dealing with the same problem: the aestheticization of the use of things as such. Or, in other words, the aestheticization of ordinary life in its totality. In the context of the reflection on the relationship between the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of aesthetics, undertaken in the epilogue to “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), Walter Benjamin critiques the aestheticization of politics as the Fascist project par excellence. Namely, Benjamin interprets the aestheticization of life, including politics, as a proclamation of the war of art against life, and summarizes the Fascist political program by the words: Fiat ars—pereat mundus. Benjamin writes further that Fascism is the fulfillment of the l’art pour l’art movement. (7)

Inga Svala Thorsdottir & Wu Shanzhuan, “Thing’s Right(s) Printed 2013, Article 1”, lithography, screen print on Stonehenge paper, 55.5 x 73 cm, 2013（Courtesy of Long March Space）
吴山专 & 英格-斯瓦拉·托斯朵蒂尔，《物权版画2013 第一条》，纸上丝网、平板印刷，55.5 x 73 cm，2013（图片由长征空间提供）

Inga Svala Thorsdottir & Wu Shanzhuan, “Thing’s Right(s) Printed 2013, Article 2”, lithography, screen print on Stonehenge paper, 55.5 x 73 cm, 2013 Ed. 3/6（Courtesy of Long March Space）
吴山专 & 英格-斯瓦拉·托斯朵蒂尔，《物权版画2013 第二条》，纸上丝网、平板印刷，55.5 x 73 cm，2013 Ed. 3/6（图片由长征空间提供）

Benjamin comes to this conclusion because he still understands art as pure contemplation beyond any use. In that case the aestheticization of the totality of everyday life would indeed amount to stopping and destroying it. However, the aestheticization of the use value of things changes this equation in the most radical way. Wu has the experience of Chinese communism behind him—in other words, he has experienced a total aestheticization of reality to a degree that Western artists never have. And one should not forget: economically speaking, communism is nothing other than victory of use value over exchange value. Under the conditions of communism, the market, including the art market, gets abolished. And that means that communism starts with the exchange value of things reduced to a zero level. The use value that earlier depended on the exchange value becomes artistically reinvented or even newly invented. Here, the ordinary itself becomes extra-ordinary—and thus, according to Heidegger, a work of art.

This constructivist character of communist society—when all things become reduced to zero and then reinvented together with their use—finds its correspondence in Suprematist, or Constructivist, art practices, as well as reductionist practices of postwar and more recent art. Not accidentally, Thórsdóttir practices the pulverization of things in her own art. Her pulverization practice reminded me of a project to burn all existing artworks, proposed by Kazimir Malevich in 1919. At that time the new Soviet government feared that the old Russian museums and art collections would be destroyed by civil war and the general collapse of state institutions and the economy. The Communist Party responded by trying to secure and save these collections. In his text “On the Museum,” Malevich protested against this pro-museum policy of Soviet power by calling on the state to not intervene on behalf of the old art collections because their destruction could open the path to true, living art. (8) Malevich proposes not to keep or save things of the past that have to go, but to let them go without sentimentality and remorse. To let the dead bury their dead. And at the same time Malevich professes his love for the new objects of ordinary use as belonging to the creation of the new world. In other words, it is the reduction to dust (or pulverization) of the old things along with the destruction of their exchange value that opens the way for new things to have a new use value.

Here one can see the difference between the French Revolution and the Communist Revolution. The French Revolution will establish human rights but it is, indeed, not interested in the rights of things. In other words, it wants to regulate the relationship among men—but not the relationships among things. That is why the French Revolution remained stuck halfway: it liberated ordinary life, but did not artistically transform or reinvent it.

When Heidegger speaks about the ability of art to show the truth of things, he means that their truth lies in their ordinary use. As an example, Heidegger cites a pair of worn-out shoes presented by Van Gogh in one of his paintings. Heidegger assumes that these shoes are so radically used that they have no exchange value any more—only use value. But the painting itself obviously has an exchange value. And a new pair of shoes, not yet worn-out, would have an exchange value too—at least in the society in which Heidegger lived. The interesting aspect of communist society is that a new pair of shoes only has a use value—and no exchange value. Thus, this pair of shoes does not need to wait to become worn-out, unwanted, or unsellable on the market in order to become aestheticized by Van Gogh and/or Heidegger. In a communist society the rule of the use value is total (what isn’t usable is forbidden; who doesn’t work doesn’t eat) and includes things and humans alike. It is this experience of the total artwork based on use value that Thórsdóttir and Wu conceptualize in Thing’s Right(s).

However, the total does not mean totalitarian here. The use of things is total—but it remains undetermined. Wu writes: “I believe art is a silent ocean. […]It is a static, formless empty box—it must accept absolutely anything, absolutely anyone, and it is destined never to be full. Its strength is in nothingness.”(9) Related to this notion of art, Wu’s concept of the “deficit (red) character”— that words or characters do not have one single meaning—-and his idea that “methodology of presentation precedes the existence of a concept, remind me of the elegant theory that was formulated by Claude Lévi-Strauss as he tried to conceptualize the notion of mana that was used by Marcel Mauss in The Gift (1925).

The term “mana” that Mauss uses derives from the relatively closed orbit of Polynesian culture. Mana can be understood as an exchange value of a thing that is given as a gift. However, it is of crucial importance to Mauss’s theory of mana that the character of this exchange value changes over time. At first, the mana within the gift is always benign, but later it necessarily begins to exert a negative effect on its new owner—because its connection to the gift-giver begins to be forgotten. Good mana is guaranteed as long as the strangeness of the gift has not been forgotten. The inevitable domestication of the gift later on not only leads to the loss of positive mana, but also to the rise of negative mana. We might say that as soon as the sign of the new and strange becomes part of the familiar surroundings, it becomes a locus of negative powers and feelings. We encounter this phenomenon as the cycle of fashion: those who dress themselves according to the latest fashion appear hip and attractive, yet nothing is more detrimental to one’s image than last year’s fashion. Decades-old fashion, by contrast, might signify “return,” and thus acquire positive mana and become attractive again. Fashion, in fact, is nothing other than a particular form of the economy of symbolic exchange, which forces all people to exchange their signs constantly in order for these signs to appear forever strange.

Inga Svala Thorsdottir & Wu Shanzhuan, “Thing’s Right(s) Printed 2013, Article 3”, lithography, screen print on Stonehenge paper, 55.5 x 73 cm, 1993（Courtesy of Long March Space）
吴山专 & 英格-斯瓦拉·托斯朵蒂尔，《物权版画2013 第三条》，纸上丝网、平板印刷，55.5 x 73 cm，1993（Courtesy of Long March Space）

Wu Shanzhuan & Inga Svala Thorsdottir, “Thing’s Right(s) Printed 2013, Article 4”, lithography, screen print on Stonehenge paper, 55.5 x 73 cm, 2013（Courtesy of Long March Space）
吴山专 & 英格 – 斯瓦拉·托斯朵蒂尔，《物权版画2013 第四条》，纸上丝网、平板印刷，55.5 x 73 cm，2013（图片由长征空间提供）

Mauss’s use of the term mana was criticized by many Commentators because its use seemed too dependent on Polynesian mythology. The most radical, most profound, and, at the same time, most theoretically important critique was formulated by Lévi-Strauss. Contrary to most critics, however, Lévi-Strauss did not want to abandon the term, but sought to endow it with a more precise definition. According to Lévi-Strauss, mana does not belong to the order of reality but solely to the order of signs. He assumes that at a certain point in time the entire universe suddenly experienced a revolution of signification, and became saturated with signs. Prior to this big bang of signification, there was no meaning at all in the world; afterward, there was only meaning. All things instantly became signs or, rather, signifiers, which ever since have each been waiting for their signified. So the world after the big bang of signification offers us an infinite number of signifiers, yet we do not know what they mean—they are signifiers without signifieds. We only know that they signify. The progress of thinking, says Lévi-Strauss, consists in “the work of equalising of the signifier to fit the signified”; that is, in the gradual filling of empty signifiers with particular meanings, with signifieds.

Yet the progress of thinking is very slow as well as always finite and partial. Although it takes place “inside a totality which is closed and complementary to itself,” or, to use Wu’s words, inside a box, it can never completely fill the infinite number of empty signifiers with signifieds, because every labor of thought is carried out in a finite lifetime. The basic condition of man in the world—understood as a world of signification—thus consists in the fact that the human always has far too many signs at his disposal to which he cannot assign meaning: “There is always a non-equivalence or ‘inadequation’ between the two [the signifier and the signified], a non-fit and overspill which divine understanding alone can soak up; this generates a signifier-surfeit relative to the signifieds to which it can be fitted.” Hence there always remains a “supplementary ration” of signifiers without signifieds that marks the difference between the infinite divine and our finite human reason—a difference humans must somehowcope with. According to Lévi-Strauss, mana is nothing else but the name for this surplus of empty signifiers that have no concrete meaning. Mana is the “floating signifier” that represents the entire infinite surplus of signifiers, and that is “the disability of all finite thought (but also the surety of all art, all poetry, every mythic and aesthetic invention), even though scientific knowledge is capable, if not of staunching it, at least of controlling it partially.” Hence, mana is “a zero symbolic value, that is, a sign marking the necessity of a supplementary symbolic content. (11)

But what are these signifiers without a signified? Using the language proposed by Thórsdóttir and Wu, one can say that they are deficit things waiting for use—and this status of waiting is precisely the mana that makes them attractive and potentially poetic. The communist revolution can be interpreted as a version of the revolution of signification that Lévi-Strauss speaks of. It creates an ocean of floating things/signs that are waiting for use. Human beings are laborers who ascribe meaning to them. This is a poetic, artistic job. But it is not the only artistic job possible. Another job is precisely to thematize the floating character of things and signs—and the impossibility of its complete domestication and familiarization. Things and signs have the right to remain forever floating, foreign, strange—and fascinating. It seems to me that this right to be strange and extra-ordinary is what Thing’s Right(s) is aiming at. Let us be reminded of some of these rights. Every individual thing, in particular, “has the right(s) to be active being, at large and existence (being) of object” (Article 3), and “None of it shall be being held in monotony or monotude; monotony and trade of mono shall not be being in any form” (Article 4). Here, monotony is equated with slavery. Things should be Used—but in dynamic, unexpected, extra-ordinary ways. Only then would the aestheticization of life mean not its destruction, but its artistic reinvention. The only true human right and the only true right of things is the right to become extra-ordinary.

“CAUSE AND EXAMPLES PROJECTED FROM IT”，installation view, 2017, Long March Space, Beijing（Courtesy of Long March Space；Photography by Thomas Fuesser）
“起因和从中投射出来的例如物”，展览现场，2017，长征空间，北京（图片由长征空间提供，拍摄：Thomas Fuesser）

“CAUSE AND EXAMPLES PROJECTED FROM IT”，installation view, 2017, Long March Space, Beijing（Courtesy of Long March Space；Photography by Thomas Fuesser）
“起因和从中投射出来的例如物”，展览现场，2017，长征空间，北京（图片由长征空间提供，拍摄：Thomas Fuesser）

“CAUSE AND EXAMPLES PROJECTED FROM IT”，installation view, 2017, Long March Space, Beijing（Courtesy of Long March Space；Photography by Thomas Fuesser）
“起因和从中投射出来的例如物”，展览现场，2017，长征空间，北京（图片由长征空间提供，拍摄：Thomas Fuesser）

“CAUSE AND EXAMPLES PROJECTED FROM IT”，installation view, 2017, Long March Space, Beijing（Courtesy of Long March Space；Photography by Thomas Fuesser）
“起因和从中投射出来的例如物”，展览现场，2017，长征空间，北京（图片由长征空间提供，拍摄：Thomas Fuesser）

“CAUSE AND EXAMPLES PROJECTED FROM IT”，installation view, 2017, Long March Space, Beijing（Courtesy of Long March Space；Photography by Thomas Fuesser）
“起因和从中投射出来的例如物”，展览现场，2017，长征空间，北京（图片由长征空间提供，拍摄：Thomas Fuesser）

Notes

1. Thorsdottir and Wu started writing the Thing’s Right(s) Declaration in the early 1990s; the first English version was published on the occasion of their show “Thing’s Right(s)—Cuxhaven 1999,” Cuxhavener Kunstverein, 1999. It has since been published in Chinese, Sanskrit, Hindi, Swedish, Malay, and Tamil, on the occasion of different exhibitions.
2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 90–91.
3. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Off the Beaten Track, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 19.
4. Ibid., 47.
5. Ibid., 40.
6. Ibid., 19.
7. Walter Benjamin, epilogue to “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 241–42.
8. Kazimir Malevich, “On the Museum,” in Essays on Art, 1915–1933, vol. 1, ed. Troels Andersen, trans. Xenia Glowacki-Prus and Arnold McMillin (London: Rapp &Whiting, 1971), 68–72.
9. Cited in Qiu Zhijie, “Introduction: Wu’s Question or the Questioning of Wu,” in Wu Shanzhuan: Red Humor International, ed. Susan Acret and Jasper Lau Kin Wah (Hong Kong: Asia Art Archive, 2005), 25.
10. Ibid., 24ff., 27.
11. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 61–63 (italics in original).

If that is the case, then how can we go about “creating a world” or even providing an account of this act?

In an era of unbridgeable distance from Origin and impossible-to-internalize Cause, “CAUSE” becomes a working title, the work pointing to “a structure at the service of cause.”

Every spare part, texture and detail within this structure is reinvented and reimagined, defined and generated according to certain “patterns,” the signs/images invented in the work of Inga Svala Thorsdottir and Wu Shanzhuan:

Perfect Brackets, 1992

Kuo Xuan，2010

Little Fat Flesh, 2012

This is a series of “metaphysical form”: a return from description to production, a building becoming the beginning of the “Incarnation” of the patterns and structures. However, it is not a church or a temple, but a functional building—a library.

Excerpt from On Cause, manuscript, 2015

The “CAUSE” library model appears in the center of the exhibition hall. Around it are full-sized “example objects” to be used in the building, which are projected outwards to fill the exhibition space and create a radiating structure akin to a center and an universe. But this center is not the one and only. Two opposing processes of the “CAUSE” models, “perspective” and “projection,” unfold simultaneously. If the vanishing point of the perspective is overlaid with the origin point of the projection, then the myriad things in the mortal world can be seen as dividing and multiplying within an infinite reverse spindle body. These spare parts in a temporary state of “superfluosness” are the “examples” of the movement. A hollowed cube with special edge (2017) is the one end of the spindle body, the other end is a pulverized mirror (1993).

Bracket Connection manuscript, 2017

Thing’s Right(s), the long-term creation begun by Inga and Wu in the 1990s, will unfold in the library as one of the books in its collection, presenting three “pages” amidst rich and complex threads:

30 “unidentified” things — Evidence

30 prints regarding “thing’s right(s)” — Index

10 photographs from the 1990s — Reference

The 30 “Unidentified Objects” in individual plastic envelopes along with A4 drawings of said objects,item no. 3, 1993

Thing’s Right(s), print, 2013

This “library” has provided a “reference for thinking,” but it does not ensure that such thinking will be pure daydreaming. One proposed site is in Thorsdottir’ s native Iceland. On the coast not far from the capital Reykjavik, there is a rarely visited stretch of empty land. Looking out not far in the distance, you can see a mountain range. It is a dormant volcano. In Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, the professor from Hamburg and his nephew enter the earth from there.

Image of the site. Photograph: Inga Svala Thorsdottir

During the exhibition, Long March Space will maintain a small archive of many rare publications and creation materials by Inga Svala Thorsdottir and Wu Shanzhuan. This exhibition was installed by Change Design and Construction.

The 2014 group show at Long March Space “Before the Beginning and after the End” borrowed inspiration for its title from T.S. Eliot’s classic work Four Quartets, and inspired a different way of looking by researching into the temporal aspects entwined or hidden within the works exhibited. Setting out from this point of inspiration lead to a multitude of results, which ended up in very different understandings of the same work or in fully original comprehensions of the overarching elements of an artist’s creation, even inciting tremors in a state of seeming invariableness. Now in 2016, Long March Space will launch “Before the Beginning and after the End II” exhibiting rarely seen or as yet un-exhibited installations, video pieces and paintings of thirteen artists and artists group. Amongst these are counted works from artists’ early periods or works that marked a turning point in their creative production or a new direction, whereas others are conversely completely new.

As one of the most important artists of China’s ’85 New Wave, Wu Shanzhuan’s artistic practice broke through the established and accepted concepts of visual arts. His painting Little Fat Flesh Perimeter Requiem_2015 May 21 (2015), which gathers together a breadth of grassroots wisdom and the thought processes and incredible spirit of contemporary art, has never before been exhibited.

Wu Shanzhuan & Inga Svala Thorsdottir’s Fielding (2011) has its roots in the symbols of “kuoxuan” and its significance as the “most limited level of openness” in multiplicity and creation, in the unceasing self-perpetuating transformations, and in the repeated and self-propagating patterns in the repetitive back and forth up and down a sloped running track, which is ultimately similar to the white lines on the green turf of a football field.

Zhan Wang’s “Shell of Mao Suit” series of bronze sculptures are amongst the most representative works of his early experimental production which can be seen as a key linkage to the artist’s later “Artificial Rock” series and as an introductory thread towards the artist’s discernment of form and image which would continue to mark a profound influence on his later works.

The new painting by Wang Jianwei comes from his “More” Series (2015-ongoing), which alongside the “Dirty Substance” series reveals a skeptical attitude towards pre-existing objects and a wish to chip away at enforced regulations and standards.

Liu Wei’s immersive comprehensive sculptural installation Panorama (2016) that was shown at the beginning of this year at the PLATEAU Samsung Museum of Art (Seoul, 2016) will also be shown at Long March Space in this exhibition. This work marks a further development from the singular installation work Untitled (2016) in the exhibition space in terms of new materials such as colored acrylic boards and UV printing which add an extra dimension into the works just as the mutual layering between the materials and their reconfigured forms marks off a new way of viewing the pieces, with mutual yet heterogeneous matter caring for each other.

“Xu Zhen”‘s installation Graffiti (2012) displayed a cut cross section of a Santana automobile with a section of a red police light on top, resulting in something which appeared to reveal but an outline on the wall.

Zhu Yu’s Pocket Theology (1999) is the precise work the artist showed as part of the “Post-Sense Sensibility” exhibition which took the lower arm of a corpse and hung it down from the gallery ceiling. Following a similar vein to his early works this installation constructed a query into the nature of humanity and morality.

Zhang Hui’s My Former Lovers Have All Grown Old (2008) conforms to a similar structure as his painted works, in that he used a very basic scene as a substitution to express emotions in linking together different works of the same name or of the same form.

Zhou Xiaohu is considered by many as the pioneering figure in China’s animated art world by borrowing the tools and means of conceptual art to construct environments replete with contradiction. In his etched stainless steel work The Paradox Space (2014), he uses the same methods to transform the inherent understanding towards daily life.

Ran Huang’s paintings in recent years have been inspired by the works of the German artist Martin Kippenberger, whose works he transforms or recreates. The work shown in this exhibition is the newest work of this series and is more the product of a conceptual working process with the entire series being in a constant process of movement, in turn endowing it with aspects more akin to a performance based in the passage of time.

Tianzhuo Chen’s sculptural work Dear is a stage prop from “Tianzhuo Chen: Ishvara” (Long March Space, Beijing, 2016). Half-girl half-skeleton, the form is a sort of religious icon and can be seen as a key piece related to the very “Tianzhuoesque” sculptures of “Divine Forms” present in his recent practice.

Hu Xiangqian’s I will surely sail you into the Pacific Ocean (2005) is the first example of the artist using the means of performance in a documentative video work. It is a proclamation to the self and to the world that the world can be used as the material for art, and he subsequently used the islands on which he lived on at the time as the media to realize this idea. By the end of the video it truly seems as if Hu Xiangqian is rowing and moving the island himself.

Eliot spent his life between “thought” and “poetry” searching not without difficulty for an all-encompassing “universal order”, just as the poem touches upon the thought that “In my beginning is my end… In my end is my beginning.” An artist’s work is precisely thus a cyclical backwards and forwards between beginning and ending in whose constant dedication and self-repudiation lays the pursuit of artistic creation.

The exhibition will continue to be on view until November 6th.

Opening: Nov 18th 2015 15:00

Dates: Nov 18th -23rd 2015

Venue: PIMO Contemporary Art Festival, Bldg 3, 5808 Shenzhuan Road,

Songjiang District, Shanghai CHINA

Media: Louise Lam 187 2128 6631 louise.lam@outlook.com

Alex Zhang 138 9989 5852 alex.zhangxq@gmail.com

NOV 18th Event Schedule

15：00-15：45 Inventing Ritual Premiere in China

16：30-17：15 Inventing Ritual

18：00-18：45 Inventing Ritual

NOV19th – 23rd Event Schedule

13：00-13：45 Inventing Ritual

16：00-16：45 Inventing Ritual

Inventing Ritual is a new art pattern innovated for contemporary art exhibition. As a ritual, it doesn’t only symbolize order, aesthetics and political standard; mostly it is a high recognition of contemporary art, creativity, imagination and their revolutionary nature. As such, from the artists’ practice, to the ritual structure and its displaying model, Inventing Ritual stimulates a certain reflection and willpower towards the future.

Inventing Ritual is curated by MadeIn Company, Lu Pingyuan and Zhao Yao. The whole sequence lasts for approximately thirty minutes and presents artworks by more than twenty artists including videos, performances, texts, paintings, installations, sculptures and images.

Inventing Ritual emphasizes on the existence of the works, modifies the relation between art and public and creates an utterly different spiritual perspective on time and space: it constitutes an unprecendented aesthetic experience.

Participating artists include:

Chen Xiaoyun, Chu Yun, Ding Li, He An, Hu Xiangqian, Kan Xuan, Lin Ke, Li Liao, Li Gang,

Liu Wei, Lu Pingyuan, Liu Chengrui, Miao Ying, Shi Yong, Wang Jianwei, Wang Sishun,

Wu Shanzhuan & Inga Svala Thorsdottir, Xu Zhen – Produced by MadeIn Company, Yang Zhenzhong, Yu Ji, Yuan Gong, Zhang Ding, Zhang Hui, Zhao Yao, Zhuang Hui, Zheng Guogu, Zhou Xiaohu, Zhu Yu

Super Archives

Paul Chan & Lu Pingyuan

Curator: David Chau

Artist: Paul Chan, Lu Pingyuan

Exhibition dates: Nov. 18-23, 2015

Venue: Cc Foundation, Bldg 12, 5555 Shenzhuan Road, Songjiang District, Shanghai

Media： Smile WU 150 0052 0059 smileywu@163.com

Curated by David Chau, Super Archives opening on November 18 will present major video by New York artist, Paul Chan, and new story by Shanghai artist, Lu Pingyuan, in Cc Foundation. This event will constitute Cc Foundation’s first exhibition since its establishment by David Chau. Both these two artists’ works exceed materiality: they possess a spiritual core and an ethereal form. Lu Pingyuan expresses art notions through the creation of enigmatic stories, while Paul Chan is mostly renown for his sharp critics on society and publications. They extended their practice and use archives to redefine art, thus presenting “Super Archives” from our era.

About the artists:

Paul Chan, born in 1973 in Hong Kong, moved to the U.S.A. at the age of eight. His practice includes video, performance, text and other media. He operates a publishing house in Brooklyn, “Badlands Unlimited” which gained celebrity for the originality and daring of its publications.

His works has been qualified as “constituting a major breakthrough, possessing a deep knowledge, and proposing profound critics on our History and faith system.” Paul Chan received the Hugo Boss prize in 2014.

Lu Pingyuan, born in 1984 in Zhejiang province, living and working in Shanghai, is a young, one of a kind artist. He expresses his thoughts and art concepts through “stories” he creates: a practice of his own, rare in the art world. His stories – often extraordinary, enigmatic, wondrous, eventually frightening – are all developed from art-related topics. His works have been exhibited internationally.

About the curator:

David Chau was born in Shanghai China, and lived in Hong Kong and Vancouver. He graduated from Columbia College in Canada, majoring in art history. He now lives and works in Shanghai. Since 2003, David Chau started to build an art collection and initiated multiple projects within the art world, such as supporting various young galleries and co-funding the Art021 art fair. In 2008, he established in Hong Kong the Cc Foundation. Cc Foundation is an international art foundation dedicated to the internationalization of collection and exhibitions.

Guests including Para Site co-chairs Yana Peel and Alan Lau, Shirley Hiranand, Yenn Wong and Alan Lo, Lavina and William Lim, Reyna Harilela, Claire Hsu, Reina and Kevin Chau, Paulo Pong and Sonia Cheng, Goodwin and Yama Gaw, and Benjamin and Mariko Lee watched with anticipation as Jehan Chu led an exciting Live Auction with lots that included works by highly sought after young artists Maria Taniguchi, Tianzhuo Chen, and Charwei Tsai; international names Paul Chan, Martin Creed, Antony Gormley, Ai Weiwei, and Thomas Ruff; and Chinese art stars Cao Fei, Wu Shanzhuan, Liao Guohe, Jiang Zhi, and Song Dong.

With some works selling at more than twice the estimated price, Para Site raised over HK$6 million before the evening was over. With the funding secured for 2016, Para Site will begin to develop further as well as formalising many of the programmes it initiated in 2015. Early next year, Para Site will open a major exhibition that looks at the migrant domestic workers community in Hong Kong, which will also include the launch of a publication that will be an anthology of texts related to migration and labour and available in Chinese, English, Indonesian, and Tagalog. The year will also see the commissioning of an artwork by Hong Kong artist Samson Young, which follows one year of research into the formation of orchestra as a community-based practice in Hong Kong. New works will also be commissioned for a solo exhibition in mid-2016, followed by the next iteration of Para Site’s new series of exhibitions working with emerging Hong Kong curators, as well as the annual international conference and workshops for emerging professionals.

Since moving to its 2,500-square-foot exhibition gallery earlier this year, Para Site has hosted five exhibitions as well as its international conference, which was once again a major destination on the global arts agenda. It also launched several major new educational programmes, taking advantage of its dedicated education space, including an intensive programme for emerging art professionals from Hong Kong and abroad, a new long-term project that engages with Hong Kong’s domestic workers community, and an innovative format for producing large-scale works focused on Hong Kong artists.

Para Site’s expanded exhibition programme was very well received this year. Its new space’s debut exhibition, A Hundred Years of Shame, welcomed more than 3,000 visitors and received feature reviews in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among many others. Other exhibitions included Sheela Gowda’s first solo exhibition in East Asia, Imagine there’s no country, Above us only our cities, and currently on view, A Luxury We Cannot Afford. Previous exhibitions continued to travel internationally. Of note, A Journal of the Plague Year featured at the prestigious Kadist Art Foundation and The Lab in San Francisco, while Great Crescent travelled to Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. There are plans for other exhibitions to tour to Manila, Paris and Mexico City, a.o.

Para Site Executive Director/Curator states, “None of this could have happened without the tremendous generosity of our Patrons and supporters. We are thus extremely grateful to all of you for supporting us, as well as to all the artists, galleries, and friends who have donated this unprecedented set of works and experiences, as well as to our expanding family of Founding Friends, Friends, and Associates, to our renewed Advisory Council, and to the Board and Staff, who have made our last year possible.”

The event was kindly sponsored by Bonhams, with support from Aesop, Altaya Wines, Aviation Gin, AXA ART, Casamigos Tequila, Chivas, Clockenflap, G.H.Mumm Champagne, Gübelin, Helutrans, Hong Kong New Music Ensemble, Mandarin Oriental Hong Kong, Paddle8, and The Peninsula Hong Kong.

Opening: Nov 18th 2015 15:00

Dates: Nov 18th -23rd 2015

Venue: PIMO Contemporary Art Festival, Bldg 3, 5808 Shenzhuan Road,

Songjiang District, Shanghai CHINA

Media: Louise Lam 187 2128 6631 louise.lam@outlook.com

Alex Zhang 138 9989 5852 alex.zhangxq@gmail.com

NOV 18th Event Schedule

15：00-15：45 Inventing Ritual Premiere in China

16：30-17：15 Inventing Ritual

18：00-18：45 Inventing Ritual

NOV19th – 23rd Event Schedule

13：00-13：45 Inventing Ritual

16：00-16：45 Inventing Ritual

Inventing Ritual is a new art pattern innovated for contemporary art exhibition. As a ritual, it doesn’t only symbolize order, aesthetics and political standard; mostly it is a high recognition of contemporary art, creativity, imagination and their revolutionary nature. As such, from the artists’ practice, to the ritual structure and its displaying model, Inventing Ritual stimulates a certain reflection and willpower towards the future.

Inventing Ritual is curated by MadeIn Company, Lu Pingyuan and Zhao Yao. The whole sequence lasts for approximately thirty minutes and presents artworks by more than twenty artists including videos, performances, texts, paintings, installations, sculptures and images.

Inventing Ritual emphasizes on the existence of the works, modifies the relation between art and public and creates an utterly different spiritual perspective on time and space: it constitutes an unprecendented aesthetic experience.

Participating artists include:

Chen Xiaoyun, Chu Yun, Ding Li, He An, Hu Xiangqian, Kan Xuan, Lin Ke, Li Liao, Li Gang,

Liu Wei, Lu Pingyuan, Liu Chengrui, Miao Ying, Shi Yong, Wang Jianwei, Wang Sishun,

Wu Shanzhuan & Inga Svala Thorsdottir, Xu Zhen – Produced by MadeIn Company, Yang Zhenzhong, Yu Ji, Yuan Gong, Zhang Ding, Zhang Hui, Zhao Yao, Zhuang Hui, Zheng Guogu, Zhou Xiaohu, Zhu Yu

Super Archives

Paul Chan & Lu Pingyuan

Curator: David Chau

Artist: Paul Chan, Lu Pingyuan

Exhibition dates: Nov. 18-23, 2015

Venue: Cc Foundation, Bldg 12, 5555 Shenzhuan Road, Songjiang District, Shanghai

Media： Smile WU 150 0052 0059 smileywu@163.com

Curated by David Chau, Super Archives opening on November 18 will present major video by New York artist, Paul Chan, and new story by Shanghai artist, Lu Pingyuan, in Cc Foundation. This event will constitute Cc Foundation’s first exhibition since its establishment by David Chau. Both these two artists’ works exceed materiality: they possess a spiritual core and an ethereal form. Lu Pingyuan expresses art notions through the creation of enigmatic stories, while Paul Chan is mostly renown for his sharp critics on society and publications. They extended their practice and use archives to redefine art, thus presenting “Super Archives” from our era.

About the artists:

Paul Chan, born in 1973 in Hong Kong, moved to the U.S.A. at the age of eight. His practice includes video, performance, text and other media. He operates a publishing house in Brooklyn, “Badlands Unlimited” which gained celebrity for the originality and daring of its publications.

His works has been qualified as “constituting a major breakthrough, possessing a deep knowledge, and proposing profound critics on our History and faith system.” Paul Chan received the Hugo Boss prize in 2014.

Lu Pingyuan, born in 1984 in Zhejiang province, living and working in Shanghai, is a young, one of a kind artist. He expresses his thoughts and art concepts through “stories” he creates: a practice of his own, rare in the art world. His stories – often extraordinary, enigmatic, wondrous, eventually frightening – are all developed from art-related topics. His works have been exhibited internationally.

About the curator:

David Chau was born in Shanghai China, and lived in Hong Kong and Vancouver. He graduated from Columbia College in Canada, majoring in art history. He now lives and works in Shanghai. Since 2003, David Chau started to build an art collection and initiated multiple projects within the art world, such as supporting various young galleries and co-funding the Art021 art fair. In 2008, he established in Hong Kong the Cc Foundation. Cc Foundation is an international art foundation dedicated to the internationalization of collection and exhibitions.

In Circles Vibration—Bracket Bridge, Inga and Wu create a series of intriguing installations whose forms are inspired by a combined sense of mathematical purity and philosophical playfulness that characterizes their creative thinking and methodology. 
Among the signature works in the exhibition is a series of delicate paintings that demonstrate the geometric process by which the artists have discovered intricately structured bridge-like forms within the overlapping images of a vibrating circle. In another series of works, The Bridges Pythagoras, the artists give these almost magical forms a concrete presence by transforming them into tensile steel sculptures. The mixed media series, Little Fat Flesh, features paintings of semi-abstract forms that are a further exploration, or extrapolation, of Thorsdottir and Wu’s seminal concept of the ‘Perfect Bracket’ — a visual and a philosophical construct that questions the way we possess, contain and integrate knowledge. In Little Fat Flesh, paintings of the ‘Little Fat Flesh’ form are mounted on magnetized steel boards and manipulated like jigsaw pieces into a variety of tessellated structures, echoing the natural process of cellular growth or the synaptic networking of thought patterns.

With this new exhibition, Circles Vibration—Bracket Bridge, Thorsdottir and Wu create a world of physical forms and conceptual constructs which reaches beyond the senses to tickle the deeper levels of the thinking mind; and resonates with the larger questions of contemporary existence.

Inga Svala Thorsdottir was born in Iceland in 1966. She graduated in 1991 from the Painting Department of the Icelandic School of Arts and Crafts, and in 1995 from the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg. In 1993 she founded Thor’s Daughter’s Pulverization Service, and in 1999 she founded BORG.

Wu Shanzhuan was born in China in 1960. He graduated from the Education Department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in 1986 and in 1995 from the Hochschule für bildende Künste in Hamburg. In 1985 he founded Red Humour, and in 1990 he founded Red Humour International.

Since 1991 Thorsdottir and Wu have been working and exhibiting collaboratively. They live and work in Hamburg, Shanghai and Reykjavík.

Inga Svala Thorsdottir and Wu Shanzhuan’s recent solo exhibitions include: The Printer, The Paper, The Layer, The Thing’s Right(s), The Little Fat Flesh, Singapore Tyler Print Institute, Singapore (2014); Artic Fox Arc – Temperature War – Large Collage, Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong (2013); What A Form –  : A Reportage, OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen (2013) and kuo xuan, Long March Space, Beijing (2011). Their recent group exhibitions include: Tales from The Taiping Era, Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (2014); Surplus Authors, Witte de With, Rotterdam (2012) and Place ·Time ·Play: Contemporary Art from the West Heavens to the Middle Kingdom, Shanghai (2010).