2015.04.27 Mon, by Translated by: Fei Wu
Ray Art Center

Established in 2008, Ray Art Center is a non-profit organization dedicated to photo-based art. Its mission is threefold: to raise public awareness and understanding about photography and contemporary visual culture,  to support historical research into photography in China and to sponsor contemporary photographers. Randian interviewed Xiao Rui, the founder of Ray Art Center, as well as its director Shi Hantao to give readers an introduction to the organization, its background and current operations.

Xiao Rui has long been interested in video and photography; at university, he had the idea to create a platform for sharing his passion. In 2002, Shi Hantao started Origin Gallery with funding from his friends; Xiao Rui, who was working in advertising at the time, also supported Shi with manpower and resources.

They hired Gu Zheng and Lin Lu to act as academic consultants, organizing a series of photography exhibitions and related events. Origin Gallery was the first gallery focusing on photography and video works at the time, and their activities attracted a significant amount of attention.

Six years later, Xiao Rui came upon an opportunity to secure some space in the Oriental Art District (Da Dongfang Yishuqu; 大东方艺术区) in Nanhui’s Xinchang Town. The space was originally a struggling home improvement store whose owners decided to rent it out as space for artists’ studios and art organizations. The owners were willing to accept artworks as payment against rent. Xiao Rui had considerable achievements in the advertising industry, and had surplus funds at his disposal to launch operations at a new space, so they took on 200 square meters of space and started an official website for Ray Art Center. He took the lead in interviewing the “Beihe Meng” group as a springboard for research targeting contemporary photography in Shanghai during the 1980s. Successive exhibitions deriving from this interview were held in 1933 in Shanghai, at the Pingyao International Photography Festival and at the Lianzhou Foto Festival. Rather than suffering from a lack of photographers and video artists, Xiao discovered that what the art form truly lacked in China was critics. This was also why the Ray Art Space website became a platform for the introduction and analysis of contemporary photography. It currently features sections for “Articles” and “Archives” which introduce international video and photography. The organization has invited a diverse group of individuals to contribute, including those from older generations like Gu Zheng and Guo Lixin, as well as younger contributors like He Yining and Zu Yu.

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While organizing exhibitions, Ray Art Center also began their public “Ray Chat Series”, putting photographers and video artists with art critics for a series of one on one conversations. Ten such events have been held to date, and the organization has received funding from Canon.

“Artistic creation is a labor of the mind. If it is industrialized, then it is reduced to a means for profit.” In discussion of the current trend towards industrialization in art, Xiao Rui comments, “Business is business, there’s a system for it.”

In May, 2014, Ray Art Center rented two stories of a building in an “Innovation Zone” in Shanghai’s Hongkou District; they set up the first floor as a small exhibition space, and allocated the remaining areas for office space. The space was expanded in early 2015, giving Ray Art Center an independent event space they call “Ray Pub”, which has become another lively Shanghai venue for various activities including screenings, lectures, talks and workshops. All funding for the organization’s operations comes from Xiao Rui’s company. Instead of their original focus on exhibitions, the newly launched Ray Art Center places more emphasis on planning public photography and video events; the Uniqlo sponsored “Campus Tour” photography and video lecture series is one of the organization’s most important independent initiatives. Concurrently, Ray Art Center has also become a provider for events by other art organizations such as K11, Lianzhou Foto Festival, 2014 Photo Shanghai, Osage Art Foundation, Shanghai Power Station of Art, MoCA Shanghai, and more, with Shi Hantao spearheading the planning for these events. As a result, Ray Art Center has gained name recognition as it begins to pop up in the promotional channels of the large organizations they partner with.

At the time of this interview, Shi Hantao emphasized Ray Art Center’s mission of raising public awareness and understanding of video and photography, with public events and their online platform serving as two effective channels for spreading the word. In collaborating with other art organizations, Ray Art Center receives a corresponding planning fee, and selects speakers and topics for each event according to its purpose. “We work differently with each organization. For K11, we do an event every week or every other week, the time and theme of each event coincides with their exhibitions. Of course, exhibition themes do place natural limitations on the events we plan and our original proposal might cover more diverse forms of art, but we often end up with something relatively simple. Our initial proposal for Photo Shanghai was actually more systematic. It included an entire day of forums with an additional two to three days of lectures and seminars. Our plan was to focus mainly on the photographic art system while touching on independent publishing and photography and video collecting, with a special focus on giving audiences an understanding of the relative independence of photography and video, as well as the contention between digital and traditional photography and video. Personally, I see photography and video as a type of phenomenon or circumstance. Photographers and video artists must utilize or borrow power, and the methods for analyzing this are becoming more and more segmented—in terms of form, history, etc. I think video artists and photographers as well as their audiences are interested in understanding the real world. Rather than limiting ourselves to demonstrating the independent existence of video and photography, we are truly concerned with existing inside society’s realities. The allure of language certainly lies in constructing ‘a significant form’, and thereby creating images. Overall, it should not only be relevant and interesting, it should also relate to visual habits. Yeah, it’s somewhat ambiguous.”

Ray Art Center has unveiled its exhibition program for 2015, which will revolve around the core theme of “photography as a carrier/medium for social practice and cultural action”. Their spring exhibition  “The Contesting Body” opened on April 18; this explores “how artists and activists create an autonomous narrative and observe their bodies through video and photography, and the new mechanisms for production and dissemination of observational photography in social practice with case studies relating to women’s rights activism.” Their autumn program will be the Shanghai-based British artist Liz Hinkley’s individual show “Shanghai Sacred”. The artist was invited by two scholars from the Xu-Ricci Dialogue Institute and the Department of Religious Studies at Fudan University to work with them on a research project entitled “Sacred Spaces in Shanghai”. The team investigated spaces dedicated to religions including Christianity, Catholicism, Judaism, Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism in Shanghai. Their study not only took them into churches but also homes, communities, neighborhoods and even restaurants. The last exhibition of the year at Ray Art Space will originate from a Swiss anthropologist and a female scholar from Taiwan (names to be announced). Through their field work, they have concluded that the true heritage and expression of traditional Chinese culture is to be found in China’s countryside. They have compiled first-hand images from their field work in over a dozen villages and towns into a book entitled Chinas Vanishing Worlds——Countryside, Tradition and Cultural Spaces.

Running parallel to their exhibitions, Ray Art Center has invited artist Xu Jie to plan a public project entitled “Reality Matters”; the project will be comprised of six screenings of documentary photography and 15 documentaries, and aims to introduce the work of video and photography producers who continue attending to social concerns via the most direct means of street photography and documentary. This theme specifically targets the “softening” phenomenon arising from the trend of over-emphasizing individual expression and experimental language in many so-called documentaries today, as well as the core issue caused by this trend: individuals living within their own realities are reduced to tools of artistic expression. Invited guests generally come from backgrounds unrelated to art including sociology, anthropology, history, literature and urban studies. Ray Art Center hopes to “produce” new knowledge from these interactions, while documenting this “new knowledge” through paper and online publishing.

In addition, the Center’s publishing and campus lectures  revolving around “body, gender, and image” will also commence in 2015. They have invited six guests (tba) to work with three of the Center’s workshop instructors—Gu Zheng, Zhang Xian and Zhao Chuan. Gu Zheng will be exploring gender phenomena in video and photography; Zhao Chuan will explore “labor and the body”; Zhang Xian will attempt to lead students towards the liberation of their bodies via the liberation of language. All workshops will be held on Ray Art Center’s premises, and will continue to be open to the public like the “Campus Tour” program. Starting in late April, “Campus Tour” will be held once or twice a month until the end of the year. Confirmed universities on the tour schedule include Tsinghua University, Shaanxi Normal University, Hubei Academy of Fine Arts and Zhejiang University.

Xiao Rui says, “I can’t avoid business considerations because I’ve worked in advertising for so many years, but I’ve always believed that art is art—it shouldn’t be commercialized, but perhaps the derivatives of art can be commercial. There’s potential for it. So, that’s the next area my company is planning to explore. As for Ray Art Center, I hope it will stay on its current path with planning events and continue to receive funding. Take the Campus Tours, for example; they are supported by Uniqlo’s desire to fulfill their ‘corporate social responsibility’ by funding a series of academic activities in universities. This is why we have the opportunity to bring excellent content into universities across China, especially to second and third-tier cities where this type of academic activity is relatively rare. Of course, we are still doing exhibitions and publishing. For example, the book we published in conjunction with the “Trace” exhibition documents the history of photography and video in Shanghai after the 1980s and 1990s, including works by Wang Yaodong, Gu Zheng, Zhu Hao, Zhu Feng and others. Of course, we’re also constantly updating our website. I’ve been in dire straits economically before—even recently we’ve had to deal with being over budget—but I believe art is more than a good to be sold and consumed. Ray Art Center is finding its feet right now, it will mature with time.”

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