Stepping into the exhibition, what I first noticed were two Chinese characters about a person’s height, printed in red, jumping out from the white background of the gallery. These characters provide the most distinctive visual cues in Zeng Hong’s solo exhibition “Quaderni Rossi”. A work entitled The Weak forcefully announces its presence, and it reminded me of the various large typefaces found in public spaces across China. Yet this familiar image in my head forms an awkward contrast with the meaning of the words here, producing a kind of dissonance.

On the whole, The Weak can be called problematic. Its symbolism, its direct semantic intervention, as well as its strong visual effect set it apart from other works in the show, perhaps even contradicting the rest. As a personal project entirely initiated and executed by the artist, “Quaderni Rossi” is largely consistent with Zeng Hong’s artistic language and creative peculiarities—a restrained mode of presentation that approaches “degree zero” (in the Barthesian sense), with a vigilance against spectacular effects. Maintaining a balance between the conceptual and the aesthetic, his practice avoids being hijacked by any absolute rhetoric. Such defining characteristics not only permeate Zeng Hong’s non-figurative paintings; they are also reflected in his writings, interviews, and criticism.

For example, in the two paintings shown in “Quaderni Rossi”, Divided Lines (Green) and United Lines (Red and Blue), viewers could clearly make out the artist’s recent artistic style: on a near-white background, green lines are arranged sparsely and loosely; they form a stark contrast with the red and blue lines that intersect and extend from each other on the adjacent canvas, producing tensions between the lines’ movement and trajectory. Countless tiny brushstrokes are repeatedly stacked and superimposed in an almost monotonous manner, gradually allowing different forms to take shape and float on the canvas. As forms generate a variety of connections between each other, the final resulting lines and shapes have no recognizable images to be based on, nor do they have established connections with the real world. This slow, deconstructive process devoid of individual expressivity and narrative impulses annexes any surplus value more than the labor itself. The form itself is material, distancing itself from meaning, symbolism, and emotion, as the function of the latter is more relegated to text. As such, these instances make The Weak seem like an unharmonious rupture.

However, what this essay aims to discuss is precisely this rupture, and whether the “interference” it proved for the exhibition theme indeed disguised other facts. Let us first take this rupture as a starting point, and examine other parts of the exhibition—for example, we could compare Divided Lines (Green) and United Lines (Red and Blue) with other videos or installation works in the show—what is undeniable is that, among the different works, fundamental differences in aesthetics and approach are prevalent. If we disregard such differences, only The Weak’s inconsistencies trigger difficulties and questions of understanding: this implies that perhaps the problem does not lie with the work itself, but rather something outside of the exhibition space.

We will examine two videos in the show, The Stonecutters—A Sturdy Woman and A Skinny Woman, shot in 2015, and Key-Frame Extraction: Three Actions of An Old Man. Zeng Hong set the scene of laboring at the stone quarry as the main subject. Though these two videos are two variations on the same subject, they both present very specific environments, figures, and movements without too much editing. However, these works have already distanced themselves from the paintings depicting “two sets of lines”. What the former sought after was a direct and objective cut out from reality, locating the real at the surface of reality. The latter, on the other hand, uses pure color, lines, and shapes to illustrate another real logic related to art.

The question is, can the two co-exist in the same context as was presented? Does this unity not rely on the discursive logic of the main subject to take effect at the semantic level? In my mind, the two video works—their fixed point-of-view (as though the viewer is standing right behind the laborers), limited visual range (the viewer does not see more than what the laborers could see), the most simple and basic visual grammar (intentionally reducing editing and processing to guarantee that the scenery presented to the viewer is closest to reality)—both assumed the authentic portrayal of reality, as well as an empathetic approach. Is there truly an irreconcilable difference between this authentic reality and what The Weak points to?

The last work in “Quaderni Rossi” is an installation entitled Unease. It pushes the idea of “authentic reality” to a culminating point. The work consists of a concrete platform raised above the ground at the center of the exhibition space, occupying about half of the floor space. The surface of the platform is covered with old ceramic tiles that the artist collected from the outskirts. As Zeng Hong instructed the installation workers to line the tiles according to the conventions of interior decoration that they are normally used to, it made Unease look every bit as the interior flooring common throughout cities and rural areas in China. Anywhere outside of the gallery, it would merely be a most ordinary tiled floor. If painting or video could maintain its relative independence by virtue of form, then on this ceramic tile floor, we cannot find anything that could distinguish it from the turbidity of life and the mundaneness of everyday objects. But this ceramic-tile floor injects an air of liveliness into the exhibition space. Its silent presence is akin to the ruins of a temple, bringing a sense of nobility to those forgotten by history, as well as the commonplace, invisible, “lowly labor” (diduan laodong) contributed by the latter. However, the structure and combination of concrete and ceramic tiles are by no means monopolized by art. Simply put, they are but a basic part of everyday language.  There are no fundamental differences between the tiled floor and the two Chinese characters in terms of the way they are presented here, the way they have been inserted into the exhibition space.

Perhaps this floor can allow us to begin thinking about the real problem revealed by The Weak. Interestingly, these two characters are not really floating in space. In fact, indented shapes are first carved onto a board, then the board itself and the indented shapes are painted different colors. Such seemingly excessive procedures force the words from the flat and the abstract into the real and the substantial, hovering somewhere between three-dimensional structure and two-dimensional imagery. The Weak is both text and installation. Though it originates from the conceptual realm, it relies on a specific object anchored in the real world to manifest itself. However, we tend to neglect the potentials of language and text: why shouldn’t the latter manifest as a physical existence? If text can simultaneously be imagery, like the avant-garde experiments in the twentieth century, could they also exist as objects? It then begs the question, could objects be text at the same time? Just like the way that planes, lines, and shapes found in Zeng Hong’s paintings, which seemingly have no counterparts in reality, could be understood as substantial, sculptural forms, this kind of substantiality, in the artist’s own words, is specific and real. Conversely, “abstract painting” purely based on form risk devolving into “toys of the bourgeoisie.” (1) In the paintings depicting “two sets of lines”, lines that disperse or converge result not from a purposeful layout or an effect-driven impulse, but rather a specific generative process. In these red, green, and blue lines, we can distinguish even more miniscule lines, which extend the former into uneven entities. Constructing everything on a repetitive, utterly fundamental process of labor that verges on “degree zero”, the artist returns to the worker; in making no attempt to disguise the traces of labor; Zeng Hong’s painting draws a line between the myth of creativity and the nature of work itself. In the exhibition preface to “Quaderni Rossi”, Zeng Hong re-evaluates the work of Courbet: “When Gustave Courbet consciously revealed his radical political position in his figurative paintings, he adopted the approach of painting directly onto the canvas in depicting the common labors and realist life scenes…The realist painting that he established allowed form and content to align with each other.” In another interview, Zeng mentioned that in his paintings, he regarded planes, lines, and shapes as forms that could be shaped and sculpted, not merely abstract elements that constituted form. It was a way to keep non-figurative paintings connected to reality. (2) And it is this link to reality that fundamentally kept the paintings, videos, and installations in the show together, in that they all shared a universal ideal. Both Courbet and Rodchenko shared and explored this ideal during different historical periods. And under new contexts and threads of meaning, it attempts to reach a possible agreement between art, the mundane, and life itself.

“Over the past decade, art and architecture have been transformed from producers of illusions into receptacles for illusions…They concentrate all their attention of appearance and superficiality and are translated into a cultural phenomenon whose reality remains hidden behind the ‘theatrical’…No longer concerned with the portrayal of illusions and visual and environmental artifice, art and architecture have become illusions and artifice,” Germano Celant writes heavy-heartedly at the opening of A Visual Machine Art Installation and Its Modern Archetypes. Under the control of a cultural economics dominated by “self-display”, art has no choice but to pit self-representation as the subject of display. “Concrete monistic perceptions of the world and its activities”— a real logic anchored in reality—is instead shut out of the sealed-off theater of illusions. (3) However, Celant’s essay also provided a solution, instructing us to look for answers in the succession of history. Among the criticism and exhibitions of the 1920s, there were already numerous examples that aligned art with other cultural and political practices, thereby affirming the concordance between aesthetics and political ideologies. “This method has the merit of exhibiting not merely objects, but the connections among various cultural processes as well as their political implications. Everything is thus reduced to a document of its time…Connotations of quality disappear and hierarchical differences are destroyed.” (4) Today, we can return from early 20^th century discourses and attitudes, and wrestle art away from the control of established systems and capital back to the level of reality, once more opening up to the care of religion and ethics. In this order anchored in reality, art seeks to foretell an integral world through connections between words, image, and objects.

This explains the issue with The Weak. To some extent, it is in fact a problem derived from the cultural order and hierarchical system in which we find ourselves. In 2013, Jacques Rancière

gave a lecture entitled “What is the Time of Contemporary Art” during his visit to China. He proposed that we still need to rethink spatiality, visuality, and language through the perspective of “contemporary art” as conceived by Tatlin’s time. In that period, artists attempted to restore text, image, and movement back to the same reality. Once, art was viewed as the creation of new perceptive realms, and it is precisely this aim which is abandoned by today’s art. (5) In today’s exhibition culture and discursive realm, the present state of art is isolated from its past. Therefore, it is hard to understand a foreign presence such as the “The Weak”, which is by laid bare, without mediation and representation. As the latter’s entry is an external event, it could no longer be effectively digested by the internal logic of contemporary exhibitions. To respond to the question posed by The Weak towards “contemporary art” today, we need to redefine our practices within the narrative of history and the real as a whole. “Quaderni Rossi” is undoubtedly such an attempt, as it returned all (autonomist) autonomy back to the artist. Faced with a reality in which art production, dominated by institutions, is characterized by standardization, division of labor, and outsourcing, every step of this exhibition was executed independently by the artist, from production, preparation, to exhibition and discursive content, even including the poster design and press release. The title “Quaderni Rossi” is taken from an eponymous political journal published during the Italian Autonomist worker movements in the 1960s; even the poster design is also a variation of the journal’s publication cover. At one point, the journal had a profound impact on the worker’s movement in Italy and indeed Europe, demanding for worker a wider form of autonomous and democratic organization—a new freedom of congregation. The certainty of this political language again stated how that which lies behind art is the real. Apart from the artist’s labor, this was what jelled in the exhibition.

(1)  Excerpt from the conversation between Zeng Hong and Xiang Jing, 2015. For the full text, see http://qn.res.dome.me/Storage//6066L02X/Pdf/2017/3/f3c4abb3-1703-4ef1-a147-0950d5c1c6d1.pdf

(2)  Ibid.

(3)  Excerpt from Visual Machine—Art Installation and its Modern Archetypes, Germano Celant, translated by Du Yu, The Visual Subconscious (Tianjin: Publishing House of Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences, 2002)

(4)  Ibid.

(5)  Excerpt from “What is the Time of Contemporary Art”, lecture by Jacques Rancières (UCCA, 2013, May 12)

For Hsieh Feng-Rong, “We are situated in an age where consumer culture is highly developed, our lives are filled with all manners of social spectacles constructed by various symbols. The popularization of smartphones, in particular, has accelerated and stimulated modes of thought to become centered on visuality; the cognition and imagination of the body has been weakened as a consequence. This project, through the artists’ practices, does not seek to fundamentally change people’s existing views of the body. It hopes to raise people’s awareness of the above-mentioned phenomenon. Furthermore, this project, with artistic practices as ways of cultural researches, attempts to open up new understandings of the body and how new concepts of the self might emerge along with these new horizons.” Are people ever more reliant on visuality in capturing information and thereby neglecting other faculties? However, the interaction between body and its environment always brings into play the manifold senses, which synthesizes together with the subjective body in order to generate perceptual experiences. “Is It My Body?” attempts to shift towards the body’s other perceptual systems, reflecting on questions regarding however different levels of the body and probing an array of issues relating to the body and subjectivity. This includes among others: identity politics, the standardization of bodies under cultural economic influences, dysfunctional bodies, the consumerization of the body, the relationship of body and space, neurology, subculture and the tension between being controlled or controlling the body.

There are four works featured in the exhibition. Eisa Jocson transforms into Snow White and interprets Princess Studies with her partners. In 2005, the Hong Kong Disneyland opened with large numbers of performers from the Philippines employed to repeat formatted performances of “happiness” as their daily labor. However, they are often excluded from the main roles and instead assigned to supporting roles. The artist’s performance subverts this accepted convention, interpreting Snow White with her non-white body and deconstructing this classic body icon. Nunu Kong has organized three experimental performance workshops, which she will personally lead and demonstrate to participants movements related to the issue of the “body”. For instance, in Multi-Dysfunction, the constraints and limits of the participant’s body is used to emphasize intuition; or with the work Extraction, where a special high-intensity cardiovascular training is arranged in order to extract perspiration from exercise in an exploration of whether the “consumption” of energy is lost or regained. Condition and Coordination meanwhile delves into the relationship between people and space, creating an “bodily narrative” of the individual. Electromagnetic Brainology! Brain Control Messenger! by Lu Yang draws on neurology, turning the relationship between body and the spiritual world into works integrating animation, otaku culture, game aesthetics—which the artist derives from divergent interpretations of the “body” from various cultures and religions. This time, the research team from Osaka University (“Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation”) quoted in the work is also invited to be present as a workshop in this exhibition. The public will have the chance to experience the odd sensation of controlling one’s bodily movement with a remote control. Venuri Perera and Geumhyung Jeong are adept at performing by using elusive and subtle relationships. The work Venuri n Geumhyung establishes a simple set of game rules, each time they carry out this rule, they continually interchange between moments where they either trust or doubt one another, and roles where the level of power also shifts constantly.

2017.4.20 – 2017.5.20

Artist: JIU JIU
Curator: Li Jia
Artistic Director: Tang Xin

Taikang Space (Red No.1-B2, Caochangdi, Cuigezhuang, Chaoyang District, Beijing, CHINA)

Exhibition Introduction

“Fantastic Grounds: Tomorrow”, the second exhibition of the Light Pavilion Project in 2017, is dedicated to a set of Jiu Jiu’s most recent video pieces. In a broad sense, “Fantastic Grounds” responds to multiple concepts ranging from the physical / social space constructed or transformed by human labor or relationship, to the metaphoric extension of a new world opened up in our mind, and of course, it can be interpreted as the very production of modern cities—the most significant and complex manmade space—as the result of a hybrid among technology, urban planning, imagination and the whole of our specific, quotidian experience. The production of modern city in a sense has mixed the virtual with the real, imagination with experience, knowledge with belief in the current context characterized with digital technology, the Internet and computer science. It witness the process of how this modernity, started and marked by the visualization of the world, has sinuately gains the absolute sovereign over the globe by virtue of digital technology, computer science and the Internet. Yet its dominant image, a technologized visuality is featured by a paradoxical duality of a deceptive transparency which never been actualized. This crystal-clear illusion turns the real desert of contemporary life into a sweet promise of unexhausted, universal time, therefore incurs the unsettled debts of modernity, debt that belongs to players of tomorrow.

Jiu Jiu’s work can be viewed as the attempt for the redemption of this debt, though in a dispassionate, rigid way. He used to describe his task here as an odd question, “Where did Descartes come from?“, believing the debts of modernity were built up at the cartesian moment marked not only by the birth of “ego cogito ergo sum”, but also the modern coordinate system which ferments the contemporary urban planning method such as parameter design and digital construction. It in turn defines our imagination, experience and paractice of space. The question of “Where” can no longer immediately recalls the memory of certain smell, a moment, or a site, nor the myths and stories passed on from generation to generation by the bonfire, nor a mountain routes that resurfaces in our mind and marked by dangers, clouds or preyers. It has been reduced to an abstract position that can only be made completely transparent, like those in power in the movie “The Hunger Games. They govern from the top in an abstract way, while abstract governance means inevitable destruction of the physical being.

It is the seemingly innocent transparency that Jiu Jiu is trying to penetrate. His works seem to be dominated by “artificial” images designed by parameters and built digitally, including the graphs of human-computer interface in the early 1960s, the visualized material for the purpose of military and space industry produced in Bell labs, the Disney World as a model for urban planning, adaption of interactive computer games like virtual cities, data processing and quantitative analysis of maps, procedure of parameter design and digital construction… We can call them a new kind of montage that takes computer-generated images and virtual landscape as its major resources, tools and targets. Digital graphs have replaced film shots in the traditional sense and become basic units of narrative syntax, but at the same time, they are also explored, traced to the origin, connected and activated by narratives. More importantly, graphs represent a subjective quality that cannot give carta blanche to their contents, representation or logic, but it goes beyond the approval of its inner life and aesthetic-political power from the perspective of art history or film studies. It is rather aimed to wake up the leviathan behind modern virtual experience and virtual real experience, or the Avatar that is hidden quietly inside every life implanted by a global city-state with technology as medium and intensifier. It is the debts imposed on everyone of us by modernity that proves our loss of innocence. It is a proof that can evoke — it is our stake for tomorrow.

Jiu Jiu is born in Lanzhou in 1986. He got a BA from the Department of Art Theory, Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2011. Currently lives and works in Beijing.

Light Pavilion Project

As a site for individual project, “Light Pavilion” is initiated in 2012, based on the second floor of Taikang Space. It aims at providing a flexible platform for artists to realize their ambitions. After an interval of two years, “Light Pavilion” is restarted in 2016, embracing a vision always open to uncertainty, complicity and detournement. It’s not only a site for sensational immersion and experiential evocation but also a forum dedicated to diversity and otherness. In 2017, Light Pavilion will bring the young curators and their practice into its focus, and open to a more divisive, expanded field of contemporary art scene.

Deadline: Monday, 25 April 2017

Date: 11–13 January 2018
Organisers: Asia Art Archive in collaboration with The University of Hong Kong

This symposium asks how periodicals in Asia across the twentieth century have fostered conversations about art and emergent forms of visuality. We are interested in how periodicals constitute genealogies of language and nomenclatures around the modern, the contemporary, the indigenous, the nation, arts and crafts, and tradition.

Light, affordable, and foldable, periodicals travelled with unprecedented speed from writer and artist to printer, and from mail service to reader. These circuits of ideas, practices, and readerships created (and were created by) new sites of experimentation in print technologies, illustration, graphic design, and forms literary and artistic. Their portability opened possibilities for the translation and transposition of ideas across media, language, culture, and geography.

‘Periodical time’—the monthly, the fortnightly, the weekly, or at times, the single issue—became a way of serving and forming diverse publics, with spaces including popular, cultural, and literary magazines; newspapers; self-published zines; artist-run magazines; and journals.

For some artists and intellectuals, the print platform remains appealing for its visual, archival, discursive, and dissemination functions. We seek to understand how periodicals map, compile, translate, and republish texts as they define what it means to be modern and contemporary in specific locales.

This symposium invites contributions anchored around periodicals from Asia published between 1900 to the present.

Image: Shilpa Gupta, ‘That photo we never got’, 2015. Photo: Girish G.V.
图片: Shilpa Gupta，我们从来没有得到的那张照片，2015。图片提供: Girish G.V.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

1. How did periodicals in Asia shape and disseminate debates around discourses on modernism, aesthetics, the avant-garde, and the contemporary? How were these related to broader affinities such as those of the non-West, the post-colonial, the indigenous, or the alternative?

2. How might we chart the contexts and economies of their production, conditions of publication, circuits of distribution, and networks of readership? What kinds of material content and collection did the form of the periodical make possible?

3. In what ways did periodicals serve as sites of exhibition? What were the languages of visuality constituted within them via images of artwork, advertisements, covers, design and typography, and the very form of the periodical?

4. What intersections between art and writing did periodicals enable? How did the periodical form facilitate experiments in language and new genres of writing? Who were the writers who made significant contributions to periodicals, and what new imaginaries around art did they introduce?

5. What are the implications of digitalisation for the study of periodicals? How has large-scale digitalisation of periodicals opened new ways of seeing, perceiving, annotating, and researching the fields of modern and contemporary art?

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Material may be submitted in English or Chinese. Please submit the following by Monday, 10 April 2017, to [email protected](use the subject line: Art Periodicals Symposium):

1. A 200-word abstract
2. A two-page curriculum vitae with e-mail, phone number, and mailing address

Incomplete or late submissions will not be considered. Final papers must be in English or Chinese. There may be funding for speakers, subject to availability.

The pared-down simplicity of Boll’s work produces an artistic statement which is at odds with the visual (virtual) atmosphere surrounding us. Rather than being a point or an exclamation mark in an empty space, it can be seen as a hyphen, a connecting bridge, which instills in contemporary viewers a much needed pause in a state of flux.
Articulating something that appears to be almost lighter than air, Boll invites us into a state of contemplation. One needs to walk around the work in order to attain a more “complete” experience of the sculptures. When one encounters the extremely thin floating lines in the emptiness of space, one’s gaze is slowed down in order to take a closer look at the sculptures. Yet, the eye is unable to detect a real end: the imperceptibly fine strips of steel extend into the unknown, to which the sculptures—as impulse and guide—direct the view. The actual material extends beyond its own limitations into the realm of the potential. This potential is not only manifested by visible changes in the sculptures, but also by the viewer’s observation.

One determinant of Boll’s work is his discontent with the established visions on the world around. The artist believes that a new vision can neither be originated from things perceived, nor be achieved by the synthesis of values drawn from previous experience. The artist is searching for the visible that’s not yet visible, as well as the spatial expansion of thought and feeling. While the works at first sight appear to be linear, the spaces they inscribe evoke deeper thinking about interaction between the shape of the sculpture and the space.
The work provides a silence of space for the viewer to reorient the existence of visuality and reality. While being dazed by the irresolvable questions of reality, the viewer starts to engage with the emptiness of the void. In the meantime, the sculpture can open up the viewer’s perceptions of the surroundings. It brings in “possibility” – it makes one aware. A great deal of awareness is involved in his work. Hence the void is a fullness as well – a plenitude of possibilities. Fullness and nothingness come together.
Boll’s works are timeless and offer a sense of endlessness since the hovering sculptures reside in a state of flux. Nonetheless, the viewers have their own time with the sculptures in a space. The sculptures are just like individuals with whom one shares the same dimension of time. It’s essential to experience his work in a certain time and space in order to fully understand it.
“My work – and sculptures in general – must be experienced first hand. They convey empirical values, i.e., they cannot be compared with anything but themselves. Only their proximity can bring about a pristine experience. Sharing space and time with them makes the experience unique: Sculpture demands our presence, especially in times when the “media” push themselves into the foreground, pretending to be “immediate”. This leads to diminished intimacy.” [1]
In fact, these sculptures highlight both the void and the infinite by illuminating their limits, and by making these limits imperceptible. This creates an impossibility of definition and thereby the work, by its very essence, slips beyond our grasp, eliciting fundamental questions of phenomenology. The encounter between viewer and work is a transition zone between experience and conceptualisation: the mind continues to draw the line where it has physically ended. The void is charged by this articulated absence. The floating lines drawn in space are delicately punctuating the void.
Born in 1952 in Issum/Geldern, Germany, Otto Boll studied art at the branch of Münster of the Düsseldorf Academy where he attended Ernst Hermanns’ class. Boll received various art awards include the Piepenbrock-Förderpreis for sculpture in 1990. He currently lives and works in Rheinberg, Germany.

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[1] Otto Boll, Goethe-Institute (Houston: 1998), p.16

12.02.2016–12.31.2016
Opening: 12.02.2016, Friday, 5PM–9PM

Yve YANG Gallery is pleased to present a joint exhibition Less is More More or Less, featuring recent works from the artists Emmy Bright and E.E. Ikeler. This exhibition will run from December 2 through December 31, 2016. The opening reception will be on Friday, December 2, 2016 at Yve YANG Gallery from 5:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.

Less is More More or Less brings together Emmy Bright and E.E. Ikeler, two artists who use text as the basis for their work. In everyday life, the shortcomings of language are outweighed by the desire and need to communicate. Yet both Bright and Ikeler privilege the instability and failures of language over its normative functionality in their work. So what opportunities does this failure make possible?

In this exhibition, the descriptive capacity of words gives way to abstractions, contradictions, and visual surplus. Bright’s prints use diagrammatic forms to chart the ephemeral: feeling, relationships, self, and other. While the images they create seem to speak in the language of logic, the clarity of this logic is fraught with absurdity, humor, and incongruity. The desire to understand notwithstanding, Bright’s work questions the usefulness of words to do so.

In Ikeler’s paintings, four-letter words are imbedded in grids and color fields. Their legibility comes second to the paintings visuality; as though the text is disappearing as it comes into focus. The paintings are made by the application and subtraction of many layers, so they often seem inscrutable as objects; like the text, at first the artist’s labor seems illegible. But tell-tale textural, color, and surface differences reveal themselves over time, asking viewers to look closer. For both artists, what the works “say” and what they “mean” cannot be assumed to be the same thing.

About the Artists
Emmy Bright (b. 1977) works with drawing, print and performance all inspired by ongoing research into psychology, comedy, pedagogy and art history. Recent solo exhibitions have been at David Klein Gallery in Detroit, MI; Ditch Projects in Springfield, OR; and she is one of the contributing artists in Headmaster Magazine, No. 8. She earned an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, an M.Ed. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a BA from University of Chicago. She has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, City College New York, Bryant University and at the RISD Museum. She is currently living and working in Detroit where she is represented by David Klein Gallery.

E.E. Ikeler (b.1986) received a BFA from The Cooper Union in 2008 and an MFA from Yale University in 2016. She’s had recent solo exhibitions at Jeff Bailey Gallery in Hudson, NY, and at the project space In Limbo, in Brooklyn, NY. In January 2017 she will have a solo exhibition at Kent Place Gallery in Summit, NJ. Her work has also been exhibited at Mulherin, New York and Abrons Art Center, New York. She received a Leroy Neiman Foundation Summer Fellowship at Ox-bow School of Art in 2016; a Yale FLAGS Award, a Helen Watson Winternitz Award and a Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library Research Fellowship (all Yale University, 2015). She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Painting at Indiana University.

About Yve YANG Gallery
Yve YANG Gallery is a newly established art gallery based in Boston. The gallery presents emerging and newly established artists from all over the world, and is devoted to exhibiting dynamic artwork through a diverse variety of mediums. Our artwork is characteristically conceptual and interdisciplinary in its nature. We believe great art is not just embellishment, but rather is an essential act that inspires the progression of human history.

Mari Bastashevski, Tyler Coburn, Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, Erin Diebboll, Ferenc Gróf, Guo Xi & Zhang Jianling, James T. Hong, Christopher Page, Samson Young, Zheng Mahler

Para Site is proud to present Creative Operational Solutions, the first exhibition to emerge from Container Artist Residency 01, an artist-in-residence program by artist Maayan Strauss that takes place onboard commercial cargo ships. Curated by Prem Krishnamurthy and Cosmin Costinas, the exhibition features works by Container Artist Residency 01 artists Mari Bastashevski, Tyler Coburn, Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, Erin Diebboll, Ferenc Gróf, Christopher Page, and Samson Young, alongside artworks by James T. Hong, Zheng Mahler, Guo Xi & Zhang Jianling. Materials related to Hong Kong’s early history as a major shipping port and its role in the opium trade are presented in a historical section curated by Qu Chang, which also features work by Sawangwongse Yawnghwe. Framing the entire residency program, its financial underpinnings, and conceptual structure, a further “meta-display” makes transparent the logistics of the project.

Responding to both the residency and the conditions of increasing globalization, the projects explore technology’s effects on geopolitics, the linguistics and semiotics of maritime shipping, the role of the artist as laborer, individual and collective memory, collaborations with industrial entities, and surveillance, among other themes. Erin Diebboll’s serial drawings on paper imagine the contents of shipping containers within a highly-articulated, minimal language of representation. Christopher Page’s project, in which trompe-l’oeil panels form the faces of a shipping crate, pushes the limits of visuality in its tightly-organized structure. Appearing as a series of off-site performances, a downloadable .zip file, and an ingot made of bullet lead, Tyler Coburn’s works draw poetic connections between resonant frequency, global finance, and logistics. On the weekends before and after the opening, he will conduct a series of off-site performances—each for just a single person. (For more information about attending, email tyler.coburn@gmail.com.) Ferenc Gróf hijacks the semiotics of global maritime shipping, creating a graphic intervention that exposes the systems and nomenclature underlying the industry. Mari Bastashevski introduces a mirrored box that recorded its onboard surroundings during the artist’s residency and that continues its recording within the exhibition space, while Samson Young’s soundscape drawings capture his journey on a container ship by way of graphic scores that playfully represent language, aural stimuli, and time.

In addition to these works, several artist groups take on the history and politics of trade in different ways. Embedding themselves within the global supply chain of the abalone shell, Zheng Mahler, a collective based in Hong Kong, explore the history and politics of the porcelain trade through a collection of small-scale objects. London-based Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen employ the industrial process of electroplating in the production of a “seascape” onto stainless steel panels using metals excavated from the Democratic Republic of Congo to be used in electronics manufacturing in China. These are accompanied by a film collage drawing fragmented connections through material, place, and time from both sides of the Indian ocean. Taking the viewer on an epic voyage through spaces both real and imagined, Guo Xi & Zhang Jianling present a series of collage works around cyber-futurity. Finally, a two-channel video installation with ephemeral objects by James T. Hong plays as a counterpoint to the other works, performing the history of maritime commerce in Hong Kong with a focus on the opium trade.

The works produced by the seven residents of Container Artist Residency 01 are the starting point of this exhibition. Identifying the shipping industry as a driving cultural and economic force in the contemporary world, the program creates a space for artists to explore their practice within this context. Container Artist Residency is conceived as a distributed artwork in the form of an institutional and operational residency that foregrounds global commerce as the artist’s own immediate work environment. This first edition is realized in partnership with ZIM Integrated Shipping Services.

The seven artists-in-residence were selected by the curator of the first edition, Prem Krishnamurthy, together with a jury consisting of Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Niels Van Tomme, and Xiaoyu Weng. The selected resident artists were invited to travel with a cargo vessel on a route of their choice, and provided with an onboard studio space, accommodation in a ship’s cabin, an honorarium, a return travel allowance, and a production budget with which to produce work. Through this next phase of the project, the artworks created will be shown in a traveling exhibition that extends the journey begun by the participating artists to multiple audiences.

Exhibition and graphic design by Project Projects, New York.

Chronus Art Center (CAC) warmly welcomes Gábor Pribék as the Summer Sessions artist-in-residence of year 2016 recommended by Budapest Kitchen.

During his residency in Shanghai from 20 July to 17 August, Pribék will experiment with an audio-visual map that interprets the city’s streets as a parametrical musical score. Through a specifically developed system, the routes taken by the “map” users will be saved as data for the composition of real-time, nonlinear music with 3D visualization. The project thus aims to create an alternative and augmented audio-visual version of public spaces in Shanghai, a global city of information overflow.

About the Artist

Gábor Pribék is a fresh Media Design graduate from the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Budapest. He creates projection mappings, interactive new media installations and 3D computer animations by mixing multiple media and bringing together different disciplines. Meanwhile, he explores the borders between commercial design and arts through new technologies.

Pribék’s practice is often characterized with an interest in site-specific installations, dependent on actual space and time. His projects have been shown at international venues including Hong Kong, Moscow, Berlin, Amsterdam, Bu-dapest and Bratislava.

Previous projects by Gábor Pribék

Avant-Dress | Animation | 2015

Avant-Dress is an experimental piece from Gábor Pribék inspired by the avant‐garde free jazz movement which also had its influences in the 20th century Russia. This projection mapping consists of abstract and geometrical surface modifications as an audio‐reactive visual extension. The music piece is a customized and re-designed track (Five Hundred Boy Piano) from the Volcano the Bear. The projection is using the shades of white, blue and red (which can be found in the Russian flag). It has some custom 3D layer slicing techniques, light illuminations, smoke simulations and physical simulations with a desire to go beyond the trends and search for the core meaning of experimental audio‐visuality.

Between the Verges | projection mapping, magic performance, Hong Kong | 2014

Gábor Pribék – Animation, Sound Design and Mapping

Using the language of illusion and emerging new media art, the work presents the connection between Hong Kong and Antarctica as a contemporary magic stagecraft. The hybrid techno-illusion performance abstracts the story of a mysterious stranger who ‘steals’ resources from Antarctica and passes them to Hong Kong. We believe that an entertaining performance can also provoke consideration of important issues.

Once Upon a Time ｜360° projection｜ 2014

director, animation & sound design: Gábor Pribék

supervisor: Tobias Gremmler

voice: Taylor Lam, Lyndon Polan

harp player: Soma Bognár audio mastering: Zoltán Pólos

Karproscope ｜game design & installation ｜2012

Kaproscope is an interactive installation based on the analogue animation technique of our 19th century’s well-known mechanism called ‘praxinoscope’. It is a game, designed to play with in the spaces of culutural centres and pubs. Everyone can create his own animation of words and create a message to the visitors.

Clmbstrmnt ｜interactive climbing wall ｜2014

concept programming: Gábor Pribék

arduino: Dániel Cseh, László András Halák

wood work: Ester Raček

sound design: Zoltán Pólos

About Summer Sessions

The Summer Sessions – Talent Development Network are short-term residencies for young artists initiated by V2_(institute for the Unstable Media) and organized by a network of cultural organizations all over the world. It offers a highly productive atmosphere with production support and expert feedback to jumpstart your professional art practice. The result is a pressure cooker in which you develop a project, from concept to presentable work, ready to show. CAC joined the Summer Sessions network since May 2013.

About V2_

V2_, Institute for the Unstable Media is an interdisciplinary center for art and media technology in Rotterdam (the Netherlands). V2_ presents, produces, archives and publishes research at the interface of art, technology and society. Founded in 1981, V2_ offers a platform for artists, designers, scientists, researchers, theorists, and developers of software and hardware from various disciplines to discuss their work and share their findings.

About Kitchen Budapest

Kitchen Budapest (KIBU) is a media lab based in Budapest Hungary. Founded in 2007, Kitchen Budapest is a place where ideas come alive. We offer two potential ways to start out your idea. In KIBU Talent program young talents can bring their imagination and ideas to a phase of a proof of concept or prototype. KIBU Startup program helps teams to develop businesses of the future.

At MOMENTUM
Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, 10997, Berlin
www.momentumworldwide.org

20 – 30 April 2016
Opening Hours: Wed – Sun, 13.00 – 19.00

Brunch Finissage 30 April @ 13.00
Matryoshka:
Layers of Transformation in Peking Opera
From Gender-Bending to Science Fiction:
How Contemporary Artists Look at Traditional Chinese Opera.
Brunch and Artist’s talk with Li Zhenhua & Varvara Shavrova.

The Opera

Originally commissioned as a multi-channel video projection for the Espacio Cultural El Tanque, an empty oil tank in Tenerife, and subsequently shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2014, The Opera is an insight into the fragile world as well as social and human aspects of the Peking Opera, one of the most revered cultural heritages of the Chinese national scene.

The work focuses on the transformation of the Peking Opera artists from male to female, and from female to male. Although they are admired by society as artists, their true identities and personal hardships cannot be lived out openly. Looking into the archaic and often utopian world of Chinese opera, Shavrova investigates issues of personal identity, sexuality and gender bending as they are manifested by both traditional and contemporary culture in modern day China.

Balancing moments of pure visuality with the austere formal movement codes of traditional choreography, the video underscores the striking avant-garde qualities of this most traditional of art forms.

The Opera is accompanied by a specially commissioned music score written by the Beijing based composer Benoit Granier, that incorporates elements of traditional Chinese and contemporary electronic music.

Varvara Shavrova

Website – CV

 Varvara Shavrova was born in Moscow and studied fine art at the Moscow Polygraphic Institute. After 15 years in London, she moved to Beijing, where she lived and worked for over five years. Now based in Dublin, Shavrova has shown in numerous public institutions and has curated significant exhibitions in Russia, China, Ireland and the UK. Her work is in many important public and private collections worldwide.  The Opera projection in Berlin is supported by Culture Ireland.

Li Zhenhua

Website

Li Zhenhua is a Beijing/Zurich-based multi-media artist, curator, writer and producer for international and Chinese contemporary culture. Li Zhenhua has been active in the artistic field since 1996, his practice mainly concerning curation, art creation and project management. Since 2010 he has been the nominator for the Summer Academy at the Zentrum Paul Klee Bern (Switzerland), as well as for The Prix Pictet (Switzerland). He is a member of the international advisory board for the exhibition “Digital Revolution” at the Barbican Centre in the UK in 2014, received as member of the international advisory board for Videotage and Symbiotica in 2015. Li Zhenhua has edited several artists’ publications, including Yan Lei: What I Like to Do (Documenta, 2012), Hu Jieming: One Hundred Years in One Minute (2010), Feng Mengbo: Journey to the West (2010), and Yang Fudong: Dawn Mist, Separation Faith (2009). A collection of his art reviews has been published under the title Text in 2013. He is the founding-director of Beijing Art Lab, a virtual and physical platform for art, research, and exchange, as well as of co-founder of Chronus Art Center, Shanghai. He is currently head-curator of Art Basel Hong Kong’s Film section (2015-16) and many other international initiatives.

 MORE INFO HERE >>

In July 2015, the London-based artist Shen Xin staged her project “Shoulders of Giants” as a symposium extended through animation, performance, and projection. During the event, when the Marxist theorist and researcher Esther Leslie described the historic avant-gardists’ impulse to liquidize themselves, the world, and the revolution, by “liquidization” she meant automatic writing as a technique that has transformed texts and images into an endless “enchanted, half-recognizable monster at the changing.” On the other side, speaking similarly through the role of a Chinese mythological creature, Goldsmiths college lecturer Mark Fisher fervently portrayed the way in which the global capitalist machine captures with precision human affect and labor. The discussion was at times heated, especially when Fisher sparred with the artist Hannah Black over whether or not a system that produces a sense of boredom has an entirely negative effect on creativity. But Shen Xin did not seem inclined to mediate the debate. Rather, she turned the lecture hall at the Senate House at the University of London into a space for a free melee of signs, where all four performers/speakers spoke, at the artist’s invitation, through their choice of avatar drawn from The Classic of Mountains and Rivers, a mythic geographical text dating back to the Han dynasty.

沈莘，《巨人的肩膀》，录像剧照（会议装置的实时动画），2015 / Shen Xin, “Shoulders of Giants”, video still (motion capture animation of symposium), 2015

For Shen Xin, whose practice includes filmmaking, performance, web-based works, and virtual reality, “Chinese-ness” implies a field of signifiers, the fluctuation of which is often disguised beneath seeming normativity as determined by Chinese societal formation. Upon examination, however, we find that her work frequently points outside this normativity and toward subjects from a variety of social groups. In this playground of gender and identity formation, Shen focuses on the ways in which the stakeholders of China-as-a-sign belong also to these “other” groups.

This artistic interest can be traced back to Shen’s student days, when her work enacted an aesthetic interrogation of her father, who specialized in naturalistic portraits of Tibetan minorities; she raised issues concerning visuality and power and the give-and-take between the producer and the subject of an image, as well as production and exploitation. For the documentary film Counting Blessings, made between 2012 and 2014, Shen took her camera and traveled into Tibetan areas with her father. While he staged photographs with local Tibetans, she sought out the gaps between his photo shoots, where traces of Han Chinese fantasies about Tibetans could be found. She covered her living expenses by making portraits of Tibetan people. For Shen, this process of image circulation and exploitation was her way of earning a living (occasionally she sold these pieces through her father’s ink painting networks).

沈莘，《细数幸福》，录像剧照，2015 / Shen Xin, “Counting Blessings”, video still, 2015

Counting Blessings perhaps also touches on another issue worthy of discussion: China’s so-called “second-generation artists” (yi’erdai), born in artistic families into “privilege”—which can be considerable under the spoils of the official (socialist and strongly state-run) art system. Arguably, this three-word phrase also manifests underlying influence from the aforementioned normativity; it borrows from the bureaucratic mentality of cronyism, and conceals the fact that the producer of art is in the end an object produced by the overall system of image production and power. In this sense, could we not say that Shen’s Oedipal prologue is equally a prologue by and on the condition of a “second-generation artist?” The works made during Shen’s student years can be seen as a manifesto for her entry into the realm of image production. Particularly delightful is the nugget of revelation hidden within the works: Shen had long surfed the maelstrom of images that is contemporary visual culture—indeed, one might even say she was born into it.

In recent years and for certain reasons—perhaps as a repercussion of the Beijing Olympics—“Chinese-ness” has frequently been subjected to a subtle linkage with a neo-imperial imaginary of a (new) “Celestial Empire”¹ (to the point where one Shanghai-born curator decided to move to Beijing, citing as the reason “shame” over Shanghai’s once-colonial past; or the number of art professionals in China who would consider dissenting views on China as “vilifying China,” regardless of whatever such words mean in their eyes). In Shen Xin’s work, however, “Chinese-ness” is manifested in other forms—not only in the description and statement of that “plateau rouge” on the cheeks of Tibetans, but also (in her 2014 work “Records of Rites”) in the 4.9 billion yuan (approximately $750 million U.S. dollars) Chinese corporate fund set to practically eclipse local London residents’ role in rebuilding the Crystal Palace, and again in the dissolute comradeship among young wastrels from Chengdu in “The Gay Critic” video project (2015). In these works, we find the mythological monsters in “Chinese-ness,” as well as a queer side of things. One might sometimes even sense that Shen likes to pair monstrosity with queerness. In “Records of Rites”, for instance, the artist overlays different layers—the reversal of roles between local Londoners and Chinese outsiders, news reports about Chinese capital, quotes from Confucius’s Analects, and visiting Chinese artists’ anecdotes about language problems abroad—to form a discussion, as if they were connected in essence.

沈莘，《付出式批评》，录像剧照，2015 / Shen Xin, “The Gay Critic”, video still, 2015

That these seemingly conflicting ideas can attract and cue reactions in the viewer owes to the freestyle navigation of Shen’s film editing. In her film essays she assembles the visual materials that extend out from pools of images, each of which is ordered and selected according to a specific keyword, then shuffles and integrates the images into the sequential space of the moving image as if each keyword selected must compete for its own symbolic territory. In Esther Leslie’s formulation, these symbols are liquid, just as identity is. In such a post-national context, the right way to present the nation-state is perhaps as Shen Xin does, connecting symbols with their various physical manifestations à la automatic writing—as it happens, like the title of her upcoming work to be shown in London at Chisenhale Gallery—manifesting how “Forms Escape”.

Note

1. Tianchao (Celestial Empire) was originally an imperial, Sinocentric term to refer to China and its centrality in the world. In recent years, beyond its chauvinistic connotations, the term has taken on a satirical dimension when used to critique those in power and the ideology of political repression, economic liberalization, and the repudiation of the legacy of the Enlightenment.