See+ Gallery, Beijing, China

December 05, 2015–January 30, 2016

Organizer: Hua’er, Director of See+ Gallery

Moderator: Antonie Angerer

Translator (Chinese): Zwei Fan

Date: December 04, 2015

Q (aka Kyoo Lee, hereafter Q): Thanks, everybody, for being here. Special thanks to Hua’er for organizing this event, Antonie and Zwei for moderating and translating, and Gabriela for creating this beautiful work so that we can all come here talk photography and philosophy! We will have a general conversation first and then open the space up for you all to participate later.

When I first saw Vanishing Deconstructions, I asked Hua’er: “How did you get to meet Gabriela, how did this encounter happen?” Hua’er told me this micro-story of their first meeting—she walked into a photo exhibition in Paris, saw this wonderful work, and spoke with the artist, who ended up saying, “we don’t need words because images connect us.” Indeed, images somehow travel in such a way that we become connected by what we see before or without what we say.

In this show, we encounter so many images. In particular, what we encounter photographically is not only intersubjective in itself but perhaps the inter-subjective itself, as in an inter-view. A communication happens in such an interim space, between the viewers, that is, through this work: now then, how? I will ask this first question, against that background.

As the title of our conversation today indicates, we begin by reflecting on the philosophical and poetic aspect of photography, a kind of philophotopoetics, on a photograph that makes itself or herself: what does this photographic scene see and show? Gabriela, as a photographer, you take or create a photographic image, you create something you saw or something you see, and you make the work show that seeing. How is this act of photographic seeing different from the usual seeing? What is a photographic vision?

Gabriela (Morawetz, hereafter G): That is a great question. I think that the first important thing for me is to get pictures which are not perfect because in that case there is a new field, an open space. I don’t consider myself a photographer in the usual way photographers define themselves but it’s important to note that indeed my point of departure is photography. While I am working with my camera, my negatives, and my chemicals in my darkroom in a very usual way, the approach is still paradoxical because I would like to get out of this photographic kitchen, to cross its boundaries. For me, the point is how to see what I want to see.

We can also start from that paradoxical affirmation of the moment we see (something) we don’t see. This is because we mostly see what we know already but we don’t understand it even when we can see it. My approach would be like to get close to some kind of feelings or thoughts, and following the path like it is Ariadne’s thread. So the question, the challenge, is how to get this thread to get to the place you want to get in. I always try to do this by observing elements from nature, the sphere of being, along with material particularities there.

Q: A great way in. Now then, we have this cliché, our usual metaphor, almost dead, that a photograph “captures a moment.” This phrase is very intentional—almost like animal hunting—and it’s a fairly universal concept, or at least universalized. What Gabriela is saying is countering that notion of intentional framing, right? Intentional in the sense of getting at what you want to see or have already seen in the form of knowing. The point Gabriela is highlighting is rather to let the images appear in such a way that we will be able to see what is left to see instead of what we intend to see. Such elements of contexts and accidents, those otherwise invisible or visible, become very important, “elementarily” significant.

I like to link this counterpoint on “envisioning the invisible” to the very concept of the “photographic.” Photographia or photography, in its Latinic sense, is light-inscribed, something via or with light. Photo-graphy uses light to have or keep an image appear … almost like the command “let there be light.” Just a while ago, Zwei and chatted about the Chinese notion of photography, which is more like “shadow-tracing (摄影shè-yǐng, trace-shadow).” These two aspects complement each other—light and shadow. Curiously, we use different faculties to approach the same thing: the “photo-graphia” looks at the light while “shadow-tracing” turns to the shadow.

Now, to turn to the very idea of inscription or re-presentation too: there is a subtle yet significant difference between representation and re-presentation, about which Vanishing Deconstructions says a lot. If you think about all the tracks, like animal tracks and things left behind, the artistic animals like us—many in this room—also tend to track them again.

So here is my second question. One of the things that captured my imagination and attention in the first place was the very title of the show, Vanishing Deconstructions. As a scholar of contemporary French philosophy where the word “deconstruction” is one of the key terms, I have my own sense of what de-construction usually means or has come to mean in more “academic” senses. In this context of a photographic gallery aptly named “See+,” some other lively meanings of “deconstruction” do appear too, and yet, to remind ourselves, it is about and performing Vanishing deconstructions. So now, it’s your turn, Gabriela, to explain what it could mean.

G: I understand your question on the dichotomy between vanishing and deconstruction. When we use the concept of deconstruction we should be conscious of Derrida’s theory. But what I want to explore is just more of the idea of vanishing, disappearing. I use no words, but instead images. To make images, there is a combination of elements, some well-known objects, sometimes human bodies or nature. They compose an environment which eventually can be interpreted by each of us in a different way. That construction of the world, which is individual, is vanishing through the perception from each one of us. When I do “deconstruction” I am trying to construct my own system of understanding.

“Deconstruction” sounds a bit like “destroying,” but also like constructing something else through the elements of what was “destroyed.” In that flurry of words, there are many meanings of “deconstruction.”

From my point of view, that title is based on the construction of something like spaces which would contain a possibility of metaphor—something that complements. I start with a very minimal material, almost nothing. If you put only one point in an empty space, it is something very important. If you contextualize it through other elements, some kind of narration emerges.

Framed images in my work look very rational because of the geometrical forms, but, at the same time, they are absolutely intuitive and the inner structure is reflected outward.

Q: Again, your description vividly points to this paradox you talked about: the ability of the photographic surface to indexicalize this co-existence of moment and movement. The moment becoming movement and vice versa—such a layered imposition and exposition, each time, becomes Gabriela’s signature “move” or “moment.” Each time, we see what we might call a kinetic photograph, always moving. Something is becoming almost nothing and nothing is becoming something. We have a fairly clear and distinct, semi-Cartesian “rational” moment of focus, and then it goes out of focus at the same time. Such a layered vision in and of space and time is also richly explored in the 20^th century contemporary French philosophy, phenomenology in particular, where this dialectic crossing of the visible and the invisible—I am also thinking of the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in particular—produces a constant and productive tension.

And before we invite questions and comments from the audience on what is “photographic seeing” or work, I want to ask you, Gabriela, if you could talk a little about how you would contextualize this exhibition in relation to your works in the past and something you will do in the future. Where do you think you are with your work, the one we see in the gallery today?

So my question is about the philopoetic “spatiotemporality” of your work, your meta-and or intra-photographic focus, so to speak. Martin Heidegger says that everybody has one thought they try to figure out all their life, just like one body, one body of thought. What is that one thought you have, if there is one, any “one”? That one, of course, doesn’t have to be strictly “one,” which has many meanings, itself richly layered and resonant. So what I mean by “one,” especially in your case, would be something like Adriane’s thread of yours we talked earlier: where is that thread, where does it come from, where does it leave, what is its trajectory?

G: I am searching for the way to get into the very inner space which we cannot describe just with words. It is about a desire to enrich the essence of what is impossible to get. The concept of Das Ding is probably something to define and be defined constantly.

Let’s say that I am interested in the mental sphere and in the energy of the unknown.

Q: What or where could be that core that keeps unfolding?

G: I think the creative process is like a destiny. You must continue and search for all kinds of possibilities but it is not a linear process. Once you get into the work, the material character of the things will suggest other dimensions and it is important to be sensitive to those signs. It is like trying to listen to some shimmering voices.

Q: This is a perfect moment to let some other waves to intervene.

P1 (a person, an unidentified interlocutor from the audience): You mentioned the idea of light and shadow, which is obviously the main matter in photography. There is a comparable pair of concepts: emptiness and play. It’s coming to me because just before our meeting we were talking with a group of students of photography. It appeared as a concept because I was talking about the idea of emptiness and its generosity as mirrored in this series of work.

Does the generosity of emptiness mean that emptiness is producing more emptiness, like feeling emptier? Or does emptiness generate plenitude, a plane?—the idea being that, in your culture and art, emptiness is an essential part of the image. I would say that from the occidental point of view emptiness is a kind of fear and we have a fear of emptiness, so we deal with that.

Q: It’s like we want to avoid the void. If I may add, the “cultural” or intercultural point aside, what you’re talking about touches on the absolutely essential, irreducible space in and of art. There is a space for art that cannot be filled in but must be kept empty. A space of freedom. For instance, modern mathematicians and physicists including the “foundational” philosopher Descartes, they debated on the existence of a vacuum. Our ability to imagine the world beyond the visible frame of space is reflected in our avoidance or fear of emptiness. In some sense, then, the photographic reproduction of worldly materials in the form of images, along with its differential constancy, is a fascinating counter-example of this plenitude, the fullness of this life.

G: I think about the image, what it should tell us about the emptiness or fullness. Should it show emptiness as a physical space or rather as a mental state of mind? Should it suggest something like the idea of emptiness? But how? Should that be like a white page? Why white instead of black? It’s obviously not about representation but rather a metaphor of the void. Creating emptiness is creating a possibility of filling it with something which has never been before and is not, either. Then, in order to find that “nothing” we must see through the screen of reality, which is hiding all kind of other spaces.

Q: Through the physical do we access something like the metaphysical. For the sake of comparison, in traditional Chinese paintings the empty space is not simply vacant. The empty space is part of the composition. To give space to that empty space is part of the artistic imaginary. We must bear that point in mind when discussing the importance of the empty in a photographic reproduction of the present. One example from mythology is Pandora’s Box, where the first evil woman was condemned. There is an interesting group of theorists writing about how the camera is like that box. It captures everything, anything (Pan-dora); if you unlock it, everything comes out. It’s a reproduction machine into which emptiness is built, as a condition for the possibility of reproduction. In other words, it itself has to be empty—or to empty itself (or herself) out.

G: It’s a very nice metaphor for the ancient type of Camera Obscura. But does it work for the digital type?

Q: So, has Pandora now gone digital too!

That is about machines, about how they capture the present and how they affect the way we think about photographic materials too. There is a very interesting book by Elissa Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, looking at photographic reproduction from “maternal” viewpoints. It’s a mother-metaphor, a mother’s womb, for instance. It itself, its “self,” is empty, through which figures get reproduced. This is a classical model of the camera. What is the mother in the age of mechanical reproduction? And how does she “figure”? That’s another, endless line of philosophical debate that touches on not only aesthetics but philosophy of and around the “sexes.” We have to pay attention to the material and maternal metaphor because literally this is how the mother’s body is employed and deployed as a camera. It itself should remain empty, pregnant with emptiness—also meaning potentiality.

Another point of interest, even the word, concept, suggests that: to conceive is to get pregnant. So light-writing and shadow.

P2: What I like about this conversation is that it concerns the negative. It is not about making a beautiful image but trying to show the background, an opening that sets your emotion, a certain condition of attentiveness toward something beyond any pre-conceived ideas; these days we are constantly bombarded with pictures. So instead, I wanted to stress the practice of setting yourself into an emotional stage, into a certain mood, through staging the thing. Or even just getting up brings you into a position of being able to be empty without feeling empty.

G: The idea is how to make emptiness radiate in a positive way. Usually its meaning is associated with some kind of negative feeling. While we are talking, I also sense how the process and series of work, so rich with all kinds of elements, maybe even too many, also illustrate my own fear of emptiness. There are two opposite states: emptiness and fullness. But the question could be the “emptiness or fullness” of what? What is the vessel which contains them?

There is poetry by Gherasim Luca who wonderfully developed that concept.

But the process I am interested in is the transition between the state of emptiness and the moment of taking a creative action.

Q: And not just what this emptiness means but how emptiness functions.

G: It’s very important, probably for everybody, but especially for the artist to arrive at that moment of “floating states.” Take on those eternal questions such as: Where are we? Who am I? What am I doing? Where is the sense of the existence? All of those questions are essential and they are coming from the anxiety in front of the emptiness of the universe.

Q: Running with this theme of paradox, this show offers an intriguing example of how remembering and forgetting are paired. In order for us to remember anything, we should almost be able to forget, so to speak. To re-member is to be able to make it a member of something. The human beings are those animals who keep promising because we have a sense of future and of failure. I will meet you tomorrow at 2 o’clock! I promise! I owe you $5, I will pay you back! I will do this and that—a promising animal. But that requires us to be able to forget, to get beforehand. Nietzsche, too, saw that jagged paradox coming: if we do not forget, we cannot remember. The process you relate to resonates with that. An example of this emptiness in a more performative sense would be: you reset yourself through a happy new year, or shall we say, “empty” new year. Likewise, there is a kind of existential dynamic in a photographic vision: something else gets freed when an image freezes (the moment)—in a sort of serial syncopations.

P2: I like the concept of the camera as the mother’s womb. But then, what is the image? In the end, the image is not a reality. The image is also flattening things. The three dimensionality of a certain body is described by the shadow that is moving, so the kinetic aspect is very important. When Gabriela’s images offer a view, they perform the viewing in an objective way.

This is a motherly emptiness, the actual ritual of taking the camera, putting it in position where you could get into those in-between moments. What are the different aspects among the camera, the body, the image, and the woman? What are the parallels in these metaphors?

Q: Precisely! What you’re pointing to is the mystery of photographic transition, transposition, transference, anything that moves. Something is on a plane of consciousness, carried along and over (also as in meta-phor). Like a mother’s womb, we think about the metaphor, we think about generosity in the gene, genre, gender … as Derrida also points out. It is what it is, what we cannot see.

P2: And its potential.

Q: Yes, so that’s why there’s a constant repetition of that which re-appears and re-presents. It’s a series of mediations at the heart of which is the mother’s body. I joke to my students in my gender philosophy class or dis-seminar that the word “reproduction” should be banned! It’s not re-production, it’s production.

G: That’s why I want to defend the idea of uniqueness even while using a technology of reproduction. A unique piece in photography means that it returns to its materiality. It becomes also an object—the image’s own materiality. There is only one “product” related to the mother’s body as a unique child.

Q: The mother’s body is not a Xerox machine! But somehow patriarchal politics treats the woman’s body as if it were or could be just that. The idea here is to honor and value the uniqueness of each being, in the sense of and with respect to its potentials.

P4: I believe the standard of the arts is measured by their philosophical quality. I just came to see the exhibition and I also see how the highest standard of the arts is met by these philosophical questions!

I hear wonderful metaphors, especially the photographic kitchen. In the kitchen it’s always a lady, that’s always the one reproducing also as in “social reproduction.” I see the connection you mention between the mother’s womb, the reproduction and the kitchen—it’s a lady that links.

In Chinese, we have a clear sense of an artistic birth, the birth of a work. Even a male artist, we do not tell if it is female or male. In Chinese even when we talk about a male artist, if the talk is about a creative moment, we would say that the baby is “stuck” at the moment or in the process of birthing, something to be “pulled out of the womb.” All artwork is like giving birth to a baby.

I see this connection across different cultures. In terms of that emptiness, in the Chinese context, the “hundreds” of everything coming together as a unity is also in a state of emptiness. Everything comes together and gets integrated. This state of emptiness is also Wu—there is something and nothing. Emptiness is related to nothing as in Wuwei (non-striving, inactive activity), so in the time-space, it has an original time and also the end of time. Emptiness is a background to consciousness; beginning of time, end of time, through lines.

G: I was also interested in the idea of the term, “in illo tempore.” It’s a Latin term which can be translated as “in that time” and Myrcea Iliade develops that idea of archetypes. That time means time without any time. It could be in the beginning of time, throughout, or in the end. It’s about the vision of the receptacle which contains emptiness but is not really empty. It’s filled with concepts, symbols, metaphors…from the beginning of time.

Q: It’s also about a bodily immersion, as we say in the middle of.  Of doing things, of being, so the ego has to be evacuated. I’m thinking of the Chinese notion, Zhong (middle), which for me also means something like a quietly orchestrated con-temporaneity of the concurrent.

Now, I want to loop back to the beginning of your talk, how you say you are trying not to frame things in advance. To let things be in the middle. That’s the magical, soft “catch” we are looking for. This emptiness and nothingness or middling. Middling without meddling. It has ancient resonances, both Greek and Chinese. “Middle Voice’ is like that in ancient philosophy—it is neither this nor that. In your work, I see it happening as a quiet, photographic pitch in the middle (of nowhere). You pay closer attention to where the baby’s head is stuck. A labor of meta-or intra-photographic midwifery, this kind of visual poetry, philosophy, artistic creation, that’s really helpful. The emptiness there also enables an inner shift of focus from the negative to the positive, trans-generating a sphere of creativity. That requires a certain resignation of agency, literally the agent, the “one” doing this or that or rather dying this way and that…you have to let the work work.

P5: The first word that comes to mind is an egoless perspective. All the past, present, future, design—they all start dissolving. I would see it as quite positive, similar to chemicals that lots of members from British art world take to gain emptiness, to gain exploration and space. Complete emptiness, an extreme state from which to create a new art of painting or music. So that’s another perspective on emptiness. Emptiness could be quite abstract, so I’m wondering: from your experience, how do you visualize that part of the visual layers of emptiness?

G: If I understand, you would like me to tell you the process, how this work of mine happens that way. I could answer like this: At the beginning of all, there is nothing, then some small element appears, which becomes a central point of the construction of the space. At that point, the empty space is not empty any more. It is already constructed, designed with lines, squares or circles. The objects can be really very ordinary, but at the same time I care about and take care of the emptiness of their own. Their shape should also express emptiness.

Such a constructed space at that initial stage is a kind of envelope for the other, an inner-theater. So talking about materials, there is still a symbolism of emptiness because of the in-betweeness of both layers. The idea is to convince the space to become symbolic at that point. Earlier we were just talking about it, comparing it to the fruit or an object from which you are taking out its mass. Then, the container is getting empty and gets filled again with new images, new realities. I don’t like to use the word “image” because it is flat. Rather, reality has all kinds of forms.

P5: Your remark illuminates how you construct layers, which is quite hard, and it is why, I think, your work creates distortions, using different tools to strike a new reality, an image’s own reality.

Q: So the procedural dynamism of emptiness is also quite literal, right? Such kinetic connections between pictorial spacing and photographic timing we have been exploring also help us move onto the next and final phase of our discussion, which is to look at some specific examples of Gabriela’s work. Let us see how those themes we discussed materialize, how they matter there.

Following on that question of emptiness, the life itinerary, your biography, exhibitions and locations where you worked, if we look at your work, so far it involves a lot of travels, moving around. You have various experiences in different locations. There are also artists who literally never leave their nest, but as you lived and passed through various spaces, I am interested to hear your thoughts on the role of memories, experiences and travels in your art. I imagine that these series of forms of life would force you to empty yourself out of your comfort zone. How does that “produce” your mind? Well, to experience is to live OUT OF the limit, to ex-perience.

It means you have to trust that emptiness, that space you are jumping through and sometimes into. It’s a fascinating image. You have to allow space in your lifeboat. For those of you who travel a lot, every time you travel, you must pack the absolute minimum and then you have to empty it out. Or at least that’s how I try to travel. When you leave for a new place, you must also leave some room in your luggage. If your suitcase is full, you won’t be able to add anything else when moving to a new place. Again, the wisdom of leaving some space is about underdetermination. From the way I experience your work, that kinetic, convex mirroring, that space works like a slightly empty suitcase. So the photographic kitchen itself is on the move. It enables a constant mirroring so that you won’t lose that inner eye, that inner core space, as you’re going on a space-trip, too.

So how does this literalized movement of ex-periencing impact the way you produce work? I ask this question because the work you produce is almost ritually layered and materially evocative in ways that seem to reflect and even stress various traces of time and space. There is an allegory.

G: I really agree: you have to trust that emptiness, that space we are jumping through. It is an essential feeling in every displacement and a real experience as in crisscrossing the sky. It means also: don’t be afraid, go ahead.

I don’t feel that I belong to some particular space. Although I have been living in France for a long time, enough to feel home there, it doesn’t mean that it produces something like lightness. Yet, not being attached to some particular space or community in a very tight way doesn’t produce strength, either. Still, my main working studio is in Paris where I live, and I must say that that is the material space where my ideas are taking shapes.

When traveling, being somewhere else, on the move, open to understanding others as well as others’ understanding of you … such is always a huge invasion of your own comfort zone. But this is exactly that idea of emptiness. You become the vacuum space in order to receive all kinds of new experiences—you must make space for that. Coming back to my own space, I see there is an issue of how to classify all those experiences and how to absorb all of that space, of emptiness-fullness.

Q: From what we’ve heard so far, along with many wonderful images and ideas, I feel like I am beginning to have a photographic memory of what you have been describing on that space of emptiness and that emptiness is an envelope of the other.

P3: An envelope is a space, so actually it offers a particular space and fold.

G: Something I think about is the concept of not knowing. There are moments in life and particularly in every artist’s practice of getting to the point of doing something without knowing why and what it is. How can you understand it? You probably become very afraid of that unknown object created by yourself, and you just need to follow that work. The idea of getting deeply inside this unknowledge is very interesting.

P4: Your idea of unknowing is about self-consciousness or lack thereof?

G: No, it’s really about not knowing. Something appears in front of you because you are going forward but you don’t understand why, what its real content is, what the real meaning of that object is. There is a paradoxical situation in that because if you are doing that it means you know but you don’t know why. It seems like the two sides of the brain get disconnected at that point. It is important to consider that space-time of not-knowing as a fully valuable process. It is probably something related also to emptiness as a condition of creation.

P3: I have a friend who immerses herself in a room or a strong force gives her an inspiration, so she is somewhere just writing, and unconsciously producing, whether it’s writing or not, in a state where she create something because she us possessed or emptied, I’m not sure.

G: There is something like a third thing, a third space, which is AVIDIA, something to study more about. It’s about space, this particular space in between where you can see the shape of things but you don’t know what’s inside and what it means.

Q: I think it is linked to the question of the exteriority of the envelope, the difference between bribery and the present, for instance. Consider the notion of gifting: when you give someone a gift and also when you are “gifted.” You don’t know what it is you’re given when gifted, and what you’re gifted in. It’s a kind of pure thanking, and, as with Heidegger, Danken, to think is to thank. The difference between bribery and a gift is this: I give you ten yuan so you do something nice to me, you know what you’ve given and are receiving in return; but, I give you a gift in an envelope, you just take it, just receive it, don’t question it, and you don’t actually or fully know what could be inside, metaphorically and literally or both, even after you’ve opened it or think you have. It could be a bomb, too, including a time bomb you don’t see now; Derrida talks about this in the classical Greek, “pharmakonic” parable of writing as a gift given and to be disseminated as such, as both a medicine and a poison. That’s the limit and risk of it. That’s the aporia of gift-giving. It’s also an artistic notion, an artistic “gift” inseparable from the notion of freedom. An artist as one who responds to a call, you just follow it but you don’t know what it is.

That ties back into beginning of our discussion of not trying to do this or that, but the question then comes down to framing. All the frames in these photographs, as you say, are not very intentional. It’s there to leave the space of not knowing, leaving it active and let it speak. That seems to be the ethos, character and the momentum of your work of “shadow-tracing.”

This notion of passively powerful “gift” is very important especially today. What is the space for the arts in this hypercapitalized world of micro-transactional calculations? We talked about reproduction, some people will produce something with the preexisting model of what is acceptable, what is popular, what “sells,” what is “catchy,” etc. There is something about unknowing as a value of and vehicle for irreducible freedom no one can take away from us, which is really real. This also reflects, it must be said, a discursive tension as well as reciprocal tie between the critic and the artist, where the critic wants to know everything about a piece, taking it apart, wanting to know every move, every sign, while rendering it more visible.

G: The idea of freedom and space tied to unknowing is very intriguing. There is a great freedom for all the interpretations when there are no any instructions for understanding but it becomes also a source of anxiety because you cannot access the essential and hidden meanings.

Q: Oh, don’t worry, I will sign and seal your envelope! I can sell it for you! (Laughter) So, leave that envelope sort of half-open so that it can interact with this otherness you also describe through your own experiences.

Speaking of such deconstructive “framing,” I’m also intrigued by the geometrical figures in your work, the free-floating, naked bodies, and the very mathematical, superimposed work. It’s also your own body. Are we seeing images of your body sort of naked or semi-naked? If you are interested, would you mind talking a bit about what you have given us in that regard?

G: Maybe I am thinking about this particular idea of geometry; or maybe I am thinking against the geometry? Once again, I am in the opposite side of what it looks like! Explored here is a sensitive approach to geometrical shapes which are by definition rule-bound. But how to construct such a space with minimum elements and without mathematical calculations: my approach is a bit random without any particularly sophisticated structures and necessary systems, and it is also an autobiographical process because all those elements used here belong to my familiar environments, as they also become part of other works or part of collected objects. Why do I collect things? I am like a magician always surrounded by some artifacts to play with. Sometimes human beings take sensual approaches to the question of existence, which are important to them. And there are shadows of all those elements, another space inside the image. We have been talking about deconstruction and its meanings, all those elements penetrating one another and all those things even include something that does not exist in fact since it is an illusion or ephemeral effect, basically light and shadow.

About the process: it’s very important for me to be emotionally creative and to be able to arrive at the synthesis of everything at such emotional moments.

Q: Listening to you, I realize your work is also about the unframeable richness of framed ambiguities. We all carry our coffees or cages around, which could also be a window that frames and frees you, all sort of portals into another world within a world, both portable in themselves. In that connection, something about the rectangular, the surface of life that annexes itself, is really interesting, its inherent metaphoricity: I mean, it is and carries its own frames. That self-reflexive or self-referential tension is what remains so arresting, what forces us to look. Look! And shadows are this photographic work … another layer of ambiguity.

G: Maybe the next exhibition could be the installation of emptiness and its shadows!

P6: I want to ask about the glass you have, also the mirror. Did you deliberately choose your own materials?

G: Yes, the materials are important—it’s all about my approach to photography. It’s not only the matter of image. The image is absolutely connected with the surface because each material is producing a perception of what we can see, each time differently. It can be cold, warm, soft, pleasant, or unpleasant to touch, and so on.

P6: I notice you use a mirror a lot. Can you speak about that?

G: You are right and there are other reflecting materials like water or the black surface of shining glass, etc. There is something about something (else) being reflected inside but it’s mostly about creating another possibility of perceiving the real. Also there is certainly something from the myth of Narcissus, which always appears when we talk about the mirror. When you are reflected in something, you still see the surrounding world, so you are included in the whole image and sometimes it is much stronger to show that through a mirror than to show it frontally. It’s kind of turning everything upside-down and inside-out.

P7: I have one final question and then we can go for dinner! It is about the perception and moment of illusion or irritation. I remember the first time I saw your works on the wall and thinking: is it a shadow, is it not a shadow? We talked a lot about how the works are expressions of your inner emptiness and how your creative unknowing of what you see creates a kind of original moment that is this emptiness where you, without thinking, constantly get and get out of such images. So, I wonder how much of this is part of your working process.

G: I’m always searching for the magic moment. An important thing in general is the emotion of being close to some new, unknown point where the habitual perception reaches another level. The motion between the matter and the psyche generates those emotions, the main elements in my creative process. So such a material emotional translation has a big influence on the image that results, along with the clear and confused perception of it. This moment is crucial.

Q: Most importantly then, this is the moment for us to say: thank you! 

Kyoo Lee, a member of AICA-USA,the author of Reading Descartes Otherwise (Fordham University Press) and a forthcoming book on visual culture (The MIT Press), is a transdisciplinary philosopher, writer and critic, who currently teaches at the City University of New York where she is Professor of Philosophy. A recipient of fellowships and visiting appointments from Cambridge University, CUNY Graduate Center, KIAS, the Mellon Foundation, the NEH, Seoul National University and Yanbian University among others, her philopoetic texts have appeared in AICA-USA Magazine, Asian American Literary Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Flash Art, PN Review, Randian, The Volta and the White Review as well as various standard academic venues.

An editor active in various fields, she is the chief co-editor of philoSOPHIA: A Journal of transContinental Feminism, and serves on the editorial boards of Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics, Derrida Today,Open Humanities Press, Simon de Beauvoir Studies and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She is also on the board of directors at Litmus Press. Her Mellon-funded anthology, Queenzenglish.mp3: poetry | philosophy | performativity, with contributions from 50+ poets, musicians, theorists and performance artists from across the globe, has recently been published (2020).

Throughout her site-specific cogitographical practices and collaborative projects, Q Professor Lee explores co-generative links and zones between critical theory and creative prose.

Gabrieal Morawetz, born in Rzeszów, Poland, is a photographer and visual artist based in Paris, France, who also works in painting, graphic design, sculpture, installation, and video. A graduate from the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and the Instituto Nacional de la Cultura in Caracas, Venezuela, her works that are richly liminal, metaphorical, and dynamically intercultural, have been exhibited internationally at prominent art institutions such as Chicago Cultural Center, San Antonio Museum of Art, Yerba Buena Art Center, Rubin Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas (MACSI), Fotomuseo in Bogota, Te Papa Museum, and Art Museum in Kathmandu, as well as art fairs such as Art Paris, ARCO Madrid, Art Bologna, Paris Photo, Photo Shanghai, Aipad, and Photo London. In 2011, Descartes Et Cie published Gabriela Morawetz: Ne faire qu’un (PUBLICITÉ) as part of its celebrated AREA series, documenting her pieces from 1992-2011, with text by Anne Tronche, Marek Bartelik, Serge Fauchereau, Edward Glissant and Joanna Sitkowska-Bayle.

The upcoming exhibition of Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts (TMoFA) will be featuring the works of 17 finalists of the “Taoyuan International Art Award,” the very first international award from the city that eyes on promoting artistic creations from around the globe and to build up an exchange platform for the participating artists.

TMoFA is the foremost and the long anticipated art institution of the growing city of Taoyuan. With the city being part of the 6 special municipalities in Taiwan, the importance of the award is undeniable, and it will only be the first step among the museum’s future programs to connect with the international art scene. The opening ceremony of the exhibit will take place on 13 March 2021 with the announcement of the grand prize winners. The “Taoyuan International Art Award” exhibition is scheduled to open to the public from 13 March to 18 April 2021, at Taoyuan Arts Center.

CHIEN Yu Jen (Taiwan), Workers Holding Placards – a Portrait Project No.6
簡佑任 (臺灣), 舉牌工人肖像計劃#6

“Taoyuan International Art Award is in the foreground of the development of the Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts, and even more so, that of the vision of Taoyuan city toward the international art scene. We look forward to building a new dynamic art hub to nurture contemporary art creations. At the same time, we also aim at providing artists with another professional exhibiting platform, in the hope of opening up the possibility for dialogues and cooperation through the holding of the award.” says the Director of Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts, LIU Chun Lan.

Mizanur Rahman CHOWDHURY (Bangladesh), LAND
Mizanur Rahman CHOWDHURY (孟加拉), 土地

The 1st international award from the city to promote the power of contemporary art creations

Taoyuan International Art Award, organised by TMoFA, is an award that aims at encouraging a diversified development of art practices and cultivating talents in contemporary art. With an expectation to strengthen international exchanges and to provide full freedom of expression, the award accepts application worldwide. The entry to the competition is not limited to material, category, or size as long as the submission would be a new work that has yet been exhibited nor recognized by other awards. As a result, the open call has successfully drawn the attention of more than 600 artists from 46 countries to submit their applications. The number of submissions received has set a new record for the award, and also, an important milestone for the vision of TMoFA and its subsidiary art centres to come.

The organizer will cover the finalists’ expenses for the basic exhibit build-up and transportation. Their selected entries will be exhibited in Taoyuan Arts Center for one month while going through an on-site review to decide one winner for the “Grand Prize,” three winners for the “Honorable Mentions” and one winner for the “Sojourn Award”. With the announcement of the winners on the opening day of the exhibition, the medallist is entitled to a prize of NTD$500,000. Honorable Mention artists will receive a prize of NTD$ 120,000 each, and  Sojourn Award artist will receive a prize of NTD$ 150,000.

TING Chaong Wen (Taiwan), Going Home
丁昶文 (台湾), 魂归故里

A creative dialogue: 17 artists to showcase together in Taoyuan and to reflect on the issues of our time

17 selected artists from across the continents will be showcasing together. Their works come in different practices includes paintings, installations and new media artworks. They invite the audiences to re-discover and reflect on the various issues from cultural identity, community, history, global politics, the notion of time, and to re-experience how the artists express their thoughts and feelings through different materials and methods of creation.

The finalists of the Taoyuan International Art Award are: LEE Tek Khean(Malaysia), WANG Yi Wei (Taiwan), KOO Bon A (Korea), Ray KIANG (U.S.A), CHUANG Li Hao (Taiwan), Ana MENDES (Portugal), LIN Yan Xiang (Taiwan), CHANG Chih Chung (Taiwan), Lewis COLBURN (U.S.A), Takahiko SUZUKI (Japan), Liva DUDAREVA (Lativia), Sara WU (Taiwan), Maria VARELA (Greece), CHIANG Chun Yi (Taiwan), TING Chaong Wen (Taiwan), Mizanur Rahman CHOWDHURY (Bangladesh), CHIEN Yu Jen (Taiwan). Further details of the artists and their submitted works can be found in the Appendix.

The awarding ceremony will take place on 13 March 2021 following the opening of the exhibition. The event will be livestreaming at the Facebook and Youtube page of TMoFA at 14:30 (GMT+8). During the period of exhibition, the museums will also be launching a series of onsite events to invite the audience to have further engagement with the artists and artworks.

The Taoyuan International Art Award is organized biannually, and the upcoming open call is scheduled to be in June 2022. For more information on the exhibition and future open call, please visit here.

Ray KIANG (U.S.A), The Invisible
Ray KIANG (美国), 不可见之物

About Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts

The Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts (TMoFA), an upcoming cultural marker, is an institution with multiple venues consisting of one main museum and three subsidiary art centers. The main art museum is located in the Qingpu area of Zhongli District, and the three subsidiary art centers are the Taoyuan Children’s Art Center, the Hengshan Calligraphy Art Center, and the Chunglu Art Center.

The architectural design and landscaping of the Taoyuan Museum of Fine Arts combines aquatic views and green zones, with history and culture integrated. The design echoes with the regional features of Taoyuan, a city that is known as the Land of a Thousand Ponds. Applying its diverse functions, the museum is going to link the heart of the city with its communities and form local and international ties. With Taoyuan as its foundation and together with an international outlook and a vision for the future, TMoFA is going to serve as a driving force for the promotion of art and become a dynamic base for innovative experimentation and cultural development. For more information on the museum, please visit this link.

CHIANG Chun Yi (Taiwan), Holobiont Project: Ji-mi
张致中 (台湾), 作鸳鸯

Maria VARELA (Greece), Rugs of Life
Maria VARELA (希腊), 生命织毯

Sara WU (Taiwan), Lived Absence of Objects
吳依宣(台湾), 事物不在场

Liva DUDAREVA (Lativia), V_br ⃤ nt* m ⃤ tt3r*
Liva DUDAREVA (拉脱维亚), 活跃的物质

Takahiko SUZUKI (Japan), Global-store.info : Taoyuan 2021

Lewis COLBURN (U.S.A.), Disposable Monument II (After the Boys Who Wore Gray)
Lewis COLBURN (美国), 抛弃式纪念碑II（仿照”穿灰衣的男孩们”

CHANG Chih Chung (Taiwan), Fabricating Mandarin Duck
张致中 (台湾), 作鸳鸯

LIN Yan Xiang (Taiwan), If Mountain Has Deities
林彥翔 (台湾 ), 山若有神

Ana MENDES (Portugal), The People’s Collection
Ana MENDES (葡萄牙), 人民的收藏

KOO Bon A (Korea), Teeth of Time.
具本妸 (韩国), 时间的牙齿

WANG Yi Wei (Taiwan), Running Fast and Slow
王译薇 (台湾 ), 快慢奔跑

Credits: all images courtesy the artist and by TMoFA

Werner Büttner, Wild Painter in Germany who changed the 1980s.

The eponymous artist Werner Büttner has been the intellectual figurehead of one of Germany´s most successful artists groups in the 80s. Together with Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen he was shaking up postwar complacency (and complicity) in Germany at the end of Germany´s Wirtschaftwunder (economic wonder) and the cusp of the Cold War period between the USA and the USSR. The three-member boy group ripped apart comfortable truths and false convictions with their acerbic commentaries, radical ways of painting and their performative clout. They were the inventors of what became known in Germany as the “Bad Painting” movement (“bad” as in “bad-ass”, of course).

Recently the artistic work by Werner Büttner, who has been the teacher of many successful artists like Daniel Richter and Jonathan Meese, has been receiving surging interest in the market. Marlborough Gallery has given Büttner a lot of exhibitions and catalogs since 2016. CFA gallery in Berlin recently held two solo back-to-back exhibitions and Simon Lee Gallery has just announced its collaboration with Werner Büttner in the British market.

Thomas Eller met Werner Büttner in October in the artist´s studio in Geesthacht outside of Hamburg to talk about art, life and the un-sublime. In essence the question: Why make art?

Werner Büttner, Self-Portrait Masturbating at the Cinema (Selbstbildnis im Kino onanierend), 1980
59,1″ × 45,3″ / 150 cm × 115 cm oil / canvas (image courtesy the artist)

Thomas Eller: Dear Werner Büttner, I’m afraid we need to begin at the very beginning. Let’s start not with Adam and Eve though, the first humans created by God, but with Cain and Abel, their first two sons, who have been a reoccurring motif in your paintings. According to the Bible, the brothers got into a fight over God’s favor. Cain, who was a farmer, was jealous of God’s apparent preference for Abel, who was a shepherd. So, Cain took a club and murdered Abel. Much has been read into this story, not least the sinfulness at the core of the human condition. But also, the ancient cultural struggle between hunter-gatherers and farmers with their different and conflicting lifestyles. Which are you, hunter-gatherer or farmer?

Werner Büttner, Bautzen Canteen Kantine Bautzen, 1993,
59,1″ × 47,3″ / 150 cm × 120 cm oil / canvas (image courtesy the artist)

Werner Büttner, Bathing Russians II Badende Russen II, 1984
59,1″ × 74,9″ / 150 cm × 190 cm oil / canvas (image courtesy the artist)

Werner Büttner: I’m like the fowls of the air and the lilies of the field. I do not sow, nor do I reap, I tend no livestock, and yet the heavenly Father feeds me. According to the teachings of the Gnostics, this God is a bungling god. With his arbitrary rejection of Cain’s sacrifice, he incited him to murder his brother, plunging him into an existential depression that culminated in a fitting disaster: God doesn’t love me, ergo I shall kill my brother. Since then, many have followed this line of argument, and many brothers have been killed. And before you ask me if I’m a Gnostic: I merely admire their technique—the rebellious reinterpretation of common truths.

Werner Büttner, Thirst Durst, 1989,
74,9″ × 74,9″ / 190 cm × 190 cm oil / canvas (image courtesy the artist)

Werner Büttner, Is Humour a Concept of Nature? (Ist Humor ein Konzept der Natur?)
1992, 94,6″ × 74,9″ / 240 cm × 190 cm oil / canvas (image courtesy the artist)

THE: Lilies and birds—you’re quoting a famous Biblical verse where Jesus calls on people to lay up treasures in heaven and not on earth: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” And, to explain this to our readers: Gnosticism was an early Christian movement that was excluded from the orthodoxy of the church. In the practical and spiritual life of the community, for example, women played a far greater role than in the usual patriarchal societies of the time. As I understand it, in your life and in your art, you have combatted orthodoxy and sought out other paths wherever possible. But knowing that you never went to art school, that you studied law—the rules that provide a binding framework for our social life, defining what we may and may not do if we wish to avoid prison—knowing that this is what you studied raises the question: How do the two fit together?

WB: I studied law for two reasons. At the time, there were no admission requirements, and I had graduated from high school with poor grades. I would always miss the first two classes in the morning because I worked at the post office from 5 to 11 pm. I had left home at 16 and I had to earn money. And secondly, I thought law was philosophy applied in practice that would allow me to help underprivileged people out of tight spots. That was adolescent naivety. Then came the reality, with five thousand law students at the Free University in Berlin, most of them arrogant little bastards whose fathers and grandfathers had already been lawyers. That wasn’t the right company for me. And the professors were authoritarian cynics with dubious pasts. In the early 1970s, German universities had yet to undergo denazification. But this experience is not one I would want to be without. My three semesters of law reinforced my mistrust of human agreements, showed me how time-bound and arbitrary they are, be they laws, traditions, or customs. My engagement with ethnology also encouraged me to take a skeptical look at this. Max Stirner, who wrote the book The Ego and Its Own and founded individualist anarchism, put it like this: “I have set my cause on nothing.” In other words: only rely on things you’ve checked for yourself and found to be fit for your own use. Sometimes, that might be something unorthodox.

Werner Büttner, Everything Is So Wonderful to See, So Terrible to Be …
(Alles so herrlich zu sehn, und so schrecklich zu sein …), 2011,
74,9″ × 74,9″ / 190 cm × 190 cm oil / canvas (image courtesy the artist)

THE: As we know, you didn’t become a lawyer. Now for another question about beginnings: what was the path that brought you to art?

WB: It all began with a one-night stand. I was young, in my mid-twenties, in Berlin, and a woman took me back to her place. She lived in a shared flat and the next morning she opened the door and a billiard ball rolled slowly and menacingly across the floorboards. That was their in-house code and it meant: “Throw this guy out, Gunda, we want to have breakfast.” One of the people living there was Albert Oehlen and we became friends. We renovated flats together, and we spent three years talking about what remained to be done in art. Then we got down to work. In 1977, we moved to Hamburg together where Albert was accepted to study with Polke at the Academy. At the time, we saw Polke, Immendorff, and Beuys as the milestones. We talked about how to develop on from that, about what hadn’t happened yet. And then we got down to work.

THE: That sounds almost like a five-year plan. First talk, then act. Or as Martin Kippenberger, who you also collaborated with, once put it: “Think today, finished tomorrow.” But it can’t have been that easy. At the time, you were part of a “boy band” as it would be called later in the 1990s. What was it like with Oehlen and Kippenberger?

WB: Yes, I met Kippenberger in Hamburg, where Oehlen and I had moved to—Kippenberger just started to have his Berlin space, “Kippenberger’s Büro.” He had inherited money and bought work and put on shows. We knew we could shout louder if we were together, a group of young men exhibiting together was more powerful than just individual painters.

Werner Büttner, March Fever (Märzfieber), 2011
59,1″ × 47,3″ / 150 cm × 120 cm oil / canvas (image courtesy the artist)

THE: This was a difficult time in Germany. The NATO Double-Track Decision pretty much installed nuclear weapons in Germany. The ecological crisis, zero economic growth. The peace movement and the founding of the Green Party tried to find answers to this. But that wasn’t enough for some. There were communist splinter groups in every city, Maoists, anarchists. Some even took to violence like the Red Army Fraction (RAF) that began terrorizing the softened souls of West German TV audiences by actually killing politicians. At the same time, Nazi perpetrators still held office in the judicial system, in politics, and in academia. How was art an option for a group of young men at this time?

WB: What other options were there? Abandon hope, conform, go underground? None of that suited my brooding, contemplative, anti-active disposition. I preferred to comment on the mindlessness of it all from the comfort of my own home, from my studio. So, art was a perfect match for my apathy. At last, my loathing for human entanglements had found an acceptable outlet.

THE: With slogans like “Via Puberty To Success” and “Skilled Worker Fucking,” you stirred up the newfound ills of a post-fascist society. It seems to me that at the time, you had a daily competition with Kippenberger and Oehlen to see who could capture the absurdities of the world in the most effective form …

WB: Kippenberger called it “be smart, take part.” Not a bad understatement on his part, and free of pathos” At the time, sections of the youth were gripped by a frenzy of new departures, presumably as a result of silence concerning the Nazi dictatorship. Music and fine art were the worst affected, as brazen amateurs successfully assaulted the canon. Sustained by an arrogance that found its justification in the guilt of the old and all those who sailed with it, the new was punched blinking into the world. Some resorted to guns and were punished. Others cried “Back to concrete!” Others still said, “No thank you!”(1) to this and to that. And some contented themselves with sedatives from Amsterdam. Irreparable damage was done to the nuclear family, obedience to authority, and the Humboldtian model of higher education. Using grammatical forms of politeness also became suspect. At the time I, too, wanted nothing more than to be heard and seen and to be put to bed by the right persons. What drew Kippenberger and me to each other? At some point in the 1980s we realized that we’d put people like Harald Schmidt (a German TV personality of questionable ethical standing) into positions of power, and that it was time for us to think of something new.

Werner Büttner, Singing Men (Singende Männer), 2005
74,9″ × 74,9″ / 190 cm × 190 cm oil / canvas (image courtesy the artist)

THE: “We read the newspapers in the morning and paint in the afternoon. The results are the responsibility of the state.” This sounds like caustic irony. The art you were making at the time was fast and furious. The pictures had to be finished within a single day.

WB: Back then, I painted as best I could, so yes, there are bold, rough parts. A lot of it was hastily done, I didn’t want to spend all day in front of a canvas, I had better things to do. I worked a lot in alla prima, painting wet-on-wet. I also hated signing pictures, so I tried to create elements that made my work recognizably my own. The dribbled paint, the use of black, so that people would spot my work and say: “This is a Büttner.” And it worked! But I was very much concerned with what I was painting. Take a look at my painting Bathing Russiansfor example. Here I show the soldiers’ uniforms, neatly folded near the seashore. You don’t see the soldiers. They’ve gone swimming. In German we have the expression baden gehen, literally to go swimming, meaning: you lose touch and become unsuccessful. And that was what was going to happen to Russia. I made the painting in 1982 and three years later they were dead in the water. In my opinion the Soviet Union collapsed on May 17, 1985—the day Gorbachev attempted to ban alcohol. That was the breaking point.

THE: You were born in the German Democratic Republic but grew up in West Germany. How was life under the dictatorship of the proletariat?

WB: The policemen were friendly, as were the informers, and I was a socialist bundle of joy. Sometimes I think if we’d stayed in the GDR, if my mother hadn’t kidnapped me and taken me to the West, then in 1989 I’d have been Egon Krenz (East Germany’s last head of state) and I’d have been a bit tougher about selling off the GDR. However, two months before the Berlin Wall was built, in June 1961, my mother kidnapped me. My father had already fled. He wanted to be rid of us, which my mother couldn’t accept, unfortunately. She took three helpless children and followed him. That was more or less the greatest achievement of her life. After the little family was reunited, my parents terrorized each other and she was the first to die, aged 52. So it was a shabby misalliance from which I emerged.

THE: You even made art about this, didn’t you?

WB: The picture On Thrownness and Entanglement shows me aged two on a pony against the background of a blown-up postcard of my hometown, Jena. Definitely a biographical statement. But the title points to the calamities of any existence. According to Martin Heidegger, we are thrown into being by an unknown power, into a “being-toward-death.” In such an existence we are perpetually afraid, and this fear becomes a being-toward-nothing. Heidegger’s rather touching way out of this human dilemma is, in short, the freely designed life plan of each individual. He overlooks the fact that one is also thrown into entanglements that seriously impede the being-towards-life-plan. One is thrown into a family, into a historical period, and, worse still, into a zeitgeist, into political and social orders of uncertain quality and duration, plus, if one is really unlucky, into an ice age or a global economic crisis. The freedom to plan one’s life is thus intrinsically occasionalist. And this is an insight one must endure. But I don’t go to Jena anymore, as it looks like any other city now. Everything’s the same, same petrol stations, same shopping malls. I have no relatives there anymore, either. Now I’m a widower and an orphan and that’s it. As Schopenhauer said, you have to love your solitude, it’s the only way to happiness.

Werner Büttner, For They Know How to Behave I (Denn sie wissen was sich gehört I), 1981,
49,3″ × 70,9″ / 125 cm × 180 cm oil / canvas (image courtesy the artist)

THE: But can we come back to “read in the morning, paint in the afternoon.” There’s more …

WB: No, there’s nothing more than opening your eyes, really opening them. And when you do open them, it keeps you awake at night. What you see hurts, and you want to strike back. And, to put it cryptically, you become a sieve through which your surroundings are shaken. Information from your environment gets stuck in the sieve in pieces of precisely the size you ordered. And now you can work, now you can strike back …

THE: “Truth Is Work” was the title of the exhibition you did in 1984 with Kippenberger and Oehlen at the Folkwang Museum in Essen. Was it a book or a manifesto.

WB: It was everything. Zdenek Felix, then director of the Folkwang Museum, had a great deal of faith in Albert and me. We were able to realize the book entirely on our own, and right to the end he didn’t know what he was going to get. For two thirty-year-olds putting on their first museum show, that’s a risky leap of faith. And of course, we understood “Truth Is Work” as one long manifesto, as a cry of “here we are, ready to take over.” A ruthless commentary on the world and the art of the time in crude pictures and texts. Work was not yet on the red list of endangered species. But Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were already letting financial capitalism off the leash. Due to the lingering illness and subsequent death of socialism, there was then allegedly no alternative to capitalism. And being without any alternative is probably the best thing that can happen to you. As a young person at that time, one was “genetically” left-wing, with a vague romantic love of the working class and of “the downtrodden and the slighted.” Maybe due to a guilty conscience, because as an artist one was exempt from hard, alienated labor, having exempted oneself from it. And artists suddenly started talking about their artistic “labor.” In the United States and Britain there were bloody miners’ strikes, and Martin Kippenberger’s father was the director of a mine. Perhaps that’s why we had the miner’s hammer and pick on the cover of “Truth Is Work,” although they were surrounded by flies. And flies always gather wherever there’s a strong smell. It should probably say: “We’re still not through with what we have to do.”

Daniel Richter, Werner Buettner and Jonathan Meese 2020

THE: In the catalog, you write: “We hate the truth because it is one of the dirtiest birds in the world.” After the Death of God (Friedrich Nietzsche) there’s not much left. And back to Max Stirner, the ego-anarchist. What always interested me most in your early work were the self-portraits: The Artist Takes A Chamomile Steam Bath (Der Künstler beim Kamilledampfbad) or Self-Portrait Masturbating At The Cinema. Eckhard Gillen describes you as a “modern Cynic,” a figure described in the late 1980s by the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk as someone who is “as modest in needs as a dog.” This school of philosophy founded by Antithenes strove for a humble life free of needs that despised all culture and public morals and was thus viewed as shameless.

WB: The Cynics certainly were a remarkable bunch, probably the earliest known performance artists. “Diogenes the dog” masturbated in the marketplace and then said, “If only it were so easy to soothe hunger by rubbing an empty belly!” This is a magnificent piece of theatre, well worth passing down to future generations. In a small action, many explosive elements are concealed. At the same time, beauty and the sublime are given a passing slap in the face.

THE: In this context, you have spoken of “non-sublime motifs.” What do you mean by that?

WB: Painting has always had clear subject categories: religion, landscape, history, hunting, still life, nude, self-portrait, et cetera. And the artistic avant-gardes of the last century continued to accept some of them. The only new subject they added was worldlessness. The irrefutable founding formula of this category was: “Art is art and everything else is everything else.” This led to an elegance that was risk-free, unassailable, and insufficiently complex. The vain shabbiness of the human condition was bypassed – [it was just] extra -terrestrial wallpaper. And in some cases, overwhelming in its lofty ignorance. But that was not my path. I preferred to remain in the world. And I expanded my range of subjects via behavioral research and sociology. Kaspar Hauser Ducks Follow A Decoy or Strangely, The Hate Of The Lumpen Proletariat Is Directed Towards Telephone Boxes are examples. Bathing Russians and Storming The Bastille were farewells to bombastic history painting. Every morning, I’m amazed at the funfair of earthly phenomena and I feel obliged to manically comment on them…

THE: In other words: La condition humaine. I’m still not sure if you’re being ironic or whether you’re just good at hiding behind an ironic position. Kippenberger was someone who could make fun of everything with his swift wit.

Werner Büttner, On Thrownness and Entanglement (Von Geworfenheit und Verstrickung), 2017, 74,9″ × 94,6″ / 190 cm × 240 cm, oil / canvas (image courtesy the artist)

WB: Kippenberger didn’t choose irony as his survival strategy. Free of ideology, he hit out in all directions in search of fun, love, and family connections in the art world. His work has improved with age, becoming a valid handbook for the eternal return of the banality of human beings.

THE: A number of people have said that you were the intellectual in your boy band with Kippenberger and Oehlen.

WB: You said that, not me.

THE: I think you know it came from a major collector. But to return to Cain and Abel and the beginning of our conversation—that’s a story about brothers competing for recognition.

WB: It wasn’t genuine competition because the great film director (God!) had already decided how the story would end. Ultimately, this ironie majeure was pure treachery, which is why the Gnostics called the “director” a fool and a bungler. By contrast, human irony is a sharp instrument of aesthetics. No one would criticize the plays of Aristophanes or In Praise of Folly (1509) for their use of ambiguity and their inherent laughter. Irony has the greatest distance to its object of inquiry. It is the stylistic device of the productively alienated. Only those who feel out of place in the world can be productively astonished. Those who are too close, involved, in agreement, can neither see clearly nor paint a clear picture.

END NOTES

1. “Atomkraft – Nein Danke!” – “Nuclear energy – No thank you!” was the slogan of the green movement in Germany

Werner Büttner, Small Sagging Bust Covered in Fingerprints and a Snow-Covered VW 3
(Kleiner Hängebusen voller Fingerabdrücke und verschneiter VW 3), 1982
39,4″ × 19,7″ / 100 cm × 50 cm oil / canvas (image courtesy the artist)

Werner Büttner, Small Sagging Bust Covered in Fingerprints and a Snow-Covered VW 2
(Kleiner Hängebusen voller Fingerabdrücke und verschneiter VW 2), 1982
39,4″ × 19,7″ / 100 cm × 50 cm oil / canvas (image courtesy the artist)

Werner Büttner, Small Sagging Bust Covered in Fingerprints and a Snow-Covered VW 1
Kleiner Hängebusen voller Fingerabdrücke und verschneiter VW 1, 1982
39,4″ × 19,7″ / (image courtesy the artist)

Extended opening hours Gallery Weekend Berlin
Wednesday, September 9 to Sunday, September 13, 10 am – 7 pm

The Michel Majerus Estate is delighted to present Takashi Murakami: Michel Majerus Superflat, curated by Tobias Berger. Takashi Murakami (b. 1962) and Michel Majerus (1967–2002) both started exhibiting widely in the mid-1990s and can be considered the first generation of artists who fully embraced the post-analog. As early as 1995, Michel Majerus remarked in his notes: “unplugged (…) -> analog digitalized -> fragmented the analog,” perhaps one of the pithiest descriptions of the paradigm shift towards the full digitalization of the world at the end of the 20th century—a time that we are only starting to grasp as being one of the past decades’ most innovative periods for creative minds of all disciplines.

Strongly inspired by Michel Majerus’ treatment of street and computer culture, Murakami became interested in Majerus after observing that he was “much more mysterious” than his American counterparts, pushing forward from the “New Painting Movement” of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and “twisting things”—a general observation of German art that Murakami is intrigued by and is an approach close to his own practice. This twist is especially interesting in the work of Michel Majerus, “who mixed late ‘80s culture, gaming culture, Japanese pop—everything, but on the surface.” As Murakami states, “It is completely dry—opposite to Anselm Kiefer or Gerhard Richter. This is a new freedom in a painting.” Having only discovered the works of Michel Majerus a few years ago, Takashi Murakami devoted three years to this series; using mostly silkscreens stoked a certain kind of jealousy of how Majerus could achieve the same result with freehand painting.

Both highly influential figures and inspirations for many visual artists and other creatives, Michel Majerus and Takashi Murakami also happily absorbed everything around them, which they incorporated into their art. From contemporary graphic design to historical drawings, from machine instructions to computer game graphics and from club flyers to manga heroes—all have been consumed to serve as some sort of springboard to be appropriated wherever suitably inspired. Where Takashi Murakami has appropriated Japanese anime, post-World War II images and the Japanese art historical canon, Michel Majerus was perhaps more influenced by Capitalist Realism, making use of the newest signifiers of the ‘90s like sneakers, computer fonts, company logos and album art created for electronic music.

Takashi Murakami, Superflat Bubblewrap Michel Majerus, 2019
©2019 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of the artist studio and PERROTIN

Looking back to Michel Majerus’ works from the turn of the century and witnessing the impact that they still have and how inspirational they have been for Takashi Murakami—one of the most knowledgeable connoisseurs of art and artists that I have ever met—Michel Majerus’ wall work what looks good today may not look good tomorrow from 1999 comes to mind. In the case of both artists, one might even dare to proclaim: “What looks good today may even look better tomorrow.”

Tobias Berger

On the other hand, the long-held kernel of human nature does not seem to open up in a corrective way, but is instead more sticky and solid, conceitedly playing with facts, hoping to validate its own preconceptions in an open field of vision… The tension between these two states is driven by a variety of interesting subtleties, each of us coping with our own and inseparable.

The material abundance, cultural pluralism and technological advances brought about by globalization have led to an endless increase in the number of options, an increasing fragmentation of the community, and a fission in lifestyles to enlarge differences. But the dramatic shocks of recent years have also led to a greater union between people, no matter active or passive.

The “contemporary” is always temporary, and in the “contemporary”, where uncertainty is steeply increasing, so is people’s desire for certainty. In the narrative that many people agree with, big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and so on synthesize a new environment, Homo sapiens is becoming a “demigod-like” life form, from “maker” to “creator”, focusing on constructing a more pleasant living space creatively. Human being is a creature full of limitations. The more this narrative becomes mainstream, the more one has to be wary of the “rational conceit” that it renders people. But the outlook it describes, in both expected and unexpected ways, is currently becoming partly true, integrating into the everyday lives of ordinary people.

“Art” is also temporary; it is always infused with different connotations in a variety of needs. With the global circulation of capital, flourishing consumerist culture, and kaleidoscope of spectacles, art at this time is lonely within the warm embrace, easily lost and deformed at any time but difficult to retain. Both “contemporary” and “art” are rapidly changing their faces, and before long, there is a new scene of “contemporary art” – and the charm of “contemporary art” also lies in here.

Intuitive experience, reserves of knowledge, presuppositions, and the resulting perceptions, interests, methods, skills, etc., incubate a wealth of difference at all times. Many seemingly absolute differences, after switching perspectives, you will find that they are compatible in the same dimension, validating each other in the known and unknown, the knowable and the unknowable. “Contemporary art” has no boundaries in the first place, and the complex interaction with the situation is its driving force and result. The individual is at once unique and relevant to other individuals. Walking independently and sharing resources have never been in contradiction with each other. In a time of geopolitical hardness, sharing and association are especially important: premises, information, knowledge, skills, creativity, community, etc., grow freely and flexibly in an open consciousness, and consciously and unconsciously construct new composite scenes…

The artists invited to this exhibition have, over the years of their practice, developed a close relationship with the “contemporary”: curious about new possibilities, constantly refreshing their reserves of knowledge in a global vision, experimenting with new materials, forms and aesthetics in the unknown, and incubating refreshing works in an improvised way, with creativity flowing all the time in the process. Although they differ markedly from each other, and even from their individual works, there are quite a few overlaps in their presuppositions perceiving from their works, that continue to advance their work in an active imagining of a brand new future.

Under the current new context, compared to the globally popular “co-working” model, these artists, like creators with vision as an important medium, are constantly opening up unique and different horizons and overlapping each other, consciously and unconsciously co-constructing new spectacles, thus gradually changing the stereotypical parts of daily life. This capacity and state of co-constructing highlights multiple meanings in an atmosphere of less consensus, more barriers and more calls for sharing and union. Moreover, “co-constructing” as a driving force is inherent in contemporary art, driving contemporary artists to construct more dynamic discourses while deconstructing preconceived ideas, and to freely unite into multi-dimensionally growing constructs.

During the last decades of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21^st, Chinese avant-garde artists were challenging previous taboos on representations of nudity and sexuality. A number of women artists began to make work from a feminist standpoint, using their own bodies, or the bodies of other women, to explore female subjectivities. Examples include Chen Lingyang’s photography series Twelve Flower Months (1999-2000) depicting the artist’s bleeding genitals during her menstrual cycle, Cui Xiuwen’s notorious video of sex-workers filmed in the toilets of a Beijing nightclub, “Ladies Room” (2000), and performance artist He Chengyao’s bare-breasted walk along the Great Wall in 2001, “Opening Up the Great Wall” (1). All these works received varying degrees of public opprobrium at the time, and work by women artists (nüxing yishu) came to be characterised, rather, as focused on private, domestic and emotional concerns in contrast to the public and the political – an essentialist view that persisted until very recently.

The relationship between Chinese women artists and feminism is an ambivalent one, shadowed by memories of the state-sponsored feminism of the past, and their awareness that the concerns of women in China are distinct from those of Euro-American feminists. Attempted transcultural dialogues have often been thwarted by mutual misunderstandings. Despite the flurry of translated feminist texts and theoretical positions that entered the discourse in China from the late 1980s (thoroughly documented by Min Dongchao) (2) , and despite significant women-only exhibitions in the 1990s and early 2000s that have been analysed in the work of scholars such as Peggy Wang, Tao Yongbai, Shuqin Cui and Sasha Su-Ling Welland, few mid-career women artists today overtly identify with feminism, even those whose work examines aspects of gendered experience. (3)

Liu Xi 柳溪

There are, however, recent exceptions to this ambivalence in artists of a younger generation. Echoes of the transgressive works of the early 2000s resound in the ceramics practice of Liu Xi (b.1986, Zibo, Shandong). Liu’s frank exploration of gender and sexuality is courageous. Her work examines hidden female histories, and the sometimes fraught and complex relationship between the individual and society, at the same time challenging conventions of porcelain and ceramics production with unorthodox combinations of materials and methods of display, revealing both technical virtuosity and a willingness to engage with difficult ideas. “Our God is Great” (2018-2019), for example, is an installation of 52 porcelain vaginas — or vulvas, to be anatomically accurate. Their intricate labial folds and clitoral hoods, made with fine porcelain coloured with black ink after firing, reveal the astonishing variety and beauty of female anatomy. The work is highly sensual: the embossed textures and impressions left by the artist’s fingers as she moulds each form become a metaphor for erotic touch.

Liu Xi 柳溪, Low to earth, Overall Dimensional Variable, stoneware, raw clay, 2018, Photo: Eric Set
低至尘土，尺寸可变，炻器，泥巴，2018，
摄影：Eric Set
© Gaya Ceramic Arts Center, Bali
伽雅陶瓷艺术中心，巴厘岛

The malleability of clay and its literal earthiness are emphasised in a previous work using raw, unfired stoneware. “Low to Earth” (2018) was created during a residency in Bali. It presents less explicitly vaginal forms, although their coral-like folds and creases create visual associations with female genitalia. The work was exhibited as a floor piece, with the audience invited to walk around and through the installation, during which time inevitably some pieces were, literally, downtrodden. Liu says that both works are intended to celebrate women, but also to recognise the social structures — in China and everywhere — that continue to disempower them, rendering women “low to earth” – persistently less valued than men but also, always and everywhere, defined as “nature” to male “culture”.  Liu’s earlier Erotic Series similarly explores sexuality, but these works feel very different. The milky, luminescent ripples and folds of “Boundless Night” (2016) and “Summertime No. 2” (2017) evoke the joyful abandon of lovers in the first throes of passionate discovery.

Liu Xi 柳溪, Boundless Night No.2, Porcelain, 54x34x9cm,2016, Photo; TaoMin
夜茫茫No.2,瓷，54x34x9cm,2016,摄影：陶敏

Liu Xi’s work is directly informed by her own experiences. She was born in Zibo, in the centre of Shandong Province, at a time when the birth of a girl child was still considered a grave disappointment. Her recent travels to Indonesia, India, and Mexico have taught her that such patriarchal devaluing of the worth of women is a global problem, and a continuing issue for women in China. In a recent interview, Liu told me:

“I believe my little hometown has the same situation. We have a big percentage of the population living in countryside areas in China. I still hear stories from my elementary school classmates of domestic violence, of blaming themselves for having a daughter …” (4)

Liu Xi 柳溪, MaMa, porcelain,125x365x15cm,2015-2020. Photo:TaoMin
妈妈, 瓷, 125x365x15cm,2015-2020,摄影: 陶敏

The installation series MaMa (2020), again places women at the centre of the narrative but uses the body as a trace, or a memory, rather than as a physical presence, poetically referencing the often invisible, unacknowledged work of anonymous women. Cast in white porcelain, wooden washboards once commonly used in China stand upright like ancient memorial stele. But these fragile monuments are unembellished by any inscription or epitaph — their text is the roughened, weathered ridges on which women once scrubbed laundry. Liu says that she herself used a washboard for the five years she spent living in the dormitory of Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts, far from her hometown, missing her mother, and feeling homesick:

“…which always reminded me of the unconditional love that my mother showed for me all those years, washing clothes, cooking, taking care of me… My mother got a washing machine eventually… The washboard she used in the past was abandoned in the corner, and when I saw this scene, I brought this first washboard from my mother into my porcelain world.”

“MaMa” is an ongoing project. After Liu Xi had cast that first board, so replete with nostalgia, she began to collect them from friends and strangers, including a very large communal washboard once used by village women beside the river, another from an ethnic minority group in the far northeast of China, one made from bamboo, and another dating back to the Cultural Revolution. Like her porcelain vaginas, each one is unique, she says, and each bumpy, weathered surface tells the story of a woman, and reveals an unwritten female history. Liu’s decision to cast the wooden washboards and re-create them in white porcelain evokes the pages of a book, but also renders them ghost-like. Lined up against the gallery wall they recall tombstones.

Liu Xi 柳溪, Low to earth, Overall Dimensional Variable, stoneware, raw clay, 2018, Photo: Eric Set
低至尘土，尺寸可变，炻器，泥巴，2018，
摄影：Eric Set
© Gaya Ceramic Arts Center, Bali
伽雅陶瓷艺术中心，巴厘岛

Liu Xi is not the only Chinese artist to have used washboards as symbols of female labour. Tao Aimin’s evocative “River of Women” (2005), “Secret Language of Women” (2008) and other installations featured washboards as found objects or used them as surfaces from which to make prints and rubbings, representing a lost history. Liu Xi’s installation is distinctive, and quite different, however, in its paradoxical materiality. The fragility and delicacy of white porcelain used to simulate the rough-hewn forms of washboards, juxtaposes the elite material of the Imperial kilns with the vernacular of domestic labour and rural life, the weathering of the wood a metaphor for the roughening of hard-working hands.

Paradox is at the heart of Liu Xi’s practice. Working between her studio in Shanghai and the ancient porcelain capital of Jingdezhen, between a Chinese aesthetics of porcelain and global contemporary art practice, her work is technically accomplished yet also innovative and experimental. The very materiality of clay is paradoxical — soft and malleable, it becomes hard and brittle once fired. Porcelain is imbued with associations of Chinese history, its imperial prestige and status, yet clay is dug from the earth. Liu Xi’s work encompasses these binaries, just as she explores paradoxes of female strength and vulnerability.

In 2017, her “Heart Dirt” series explored the possibilities of applying black ink to the fired surface. Once fired, porcelain is very porous while it remains unglazed. Liu sprayed or brushed Indian ink over each form, which was absorbed instantly. Explaining her use of this black/white, yin/yang binary she says:

“Porcelain is a pure white colour after firing, with fragility [whereas] ink is strong, dark black, with the power to dye, contaminate, and cover the surface. They both have a long history individually, but nowadays […] porcelain and ink combine to reflect the relationship between the individual and society. We were born as blank, innocent and pure, and we are educated by our surroundings, for good or bad. But authority, unspoken rules and propaganda have a very huge impact on us […] ‘Heart Dirt’ is about the helplessness of the individual, when it’s hard to confront our surroundings …”

Liu Xi 柳溪, Porcelain, Indian Ink, Overall Dimensional Variable,2017, Photo: MinChih Hung
瓷，印度墨，尺⼨可变，2017，摄影：洪明志
© Yingge Ceramics Museum,TAIWAN
台湾莺歌陶瓷博物馆

Liu Xi’s hometown has a long history of ceramic and glass production, and she has been fascinated by ceramics since her uncle gave her a small abstract piece when she was five years old. When it broke, she mended the crack with glue. Later, as a first-year student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts she happened upon a raku firing taking place in the Ceramics studio. She remembers how the students were using:

“… fire, clay, sawdust, paper, dry leaves — a magic effect was happening on the sculpture surface, I was super excited about the process and the final visual effect. Afterwards I always went to check the activities there and gradually I made the decision to work in Ceramics. Ceramic is fragile and needs more care. It reminded me of my childhood memory. I want to overcome that ‘crack’.”

This metaphor of mending, or healing, has great resonance in Liu Xi’s profoundly humanist body of work. Her feminism is underpinned by the realisation that patriarchal gender norms distort men as well as women, limiting the possibilities for us all. Likening human frailties with the risks and joys of working with porcelain, she says:

“Human beings are a paradoxical combination. Men, women, poor, rich, old, young… The fragility and strength here, I want to explore the feelings and identification of human resonance […] I want to widen the distance/space between fragility and strength as much as possible, put the person in this space, and feel the elasticity of this maximum distance […] maybe women sometimes underestimate themselves, or men are more vulnerable than women. Because of [our] fragility, each of us becomes a person with a story. Fragility is the driving force behind all energy.”

Liu Xi 柳溪, Low to earth, Overall Dimensional Variable, stoneware, raw clay, 2018, Photo: Eric Set
低至尘土，尺寸可变，炻器，泥巴，2018，
摄影：Eric Set
© Gaya Ceramic Arts Center, Bali
伽雅陶瓷艺术中心，巴厘岛

About the Artist

Liu Xi 柳溪 (b.1986, Zibo, Shandong) studied in the Sculpture Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, graduating in 2010. Liu’s innovative and experimental work in ceramics explores ideas about sexuality and gender, identity, and freedom. She has participated in exhibitions in China and internationally, including in 2019 her first solo show, ‘Earth in My Hands, Fire in My Heart’ at Art + Shanghai Gallery. Liu Xi has participated in artist residencies in Bali, Taipei, Yixing, and Mexico. Liu Xi lives and works between Shanghai and Jingdezhen.

Notes

1. The works of these artists, and interviews with them, are included in the author’s 2016 book, Half the Sky: Conversations with Women Artists in China. Sydney:  Piper Press.

2. Min Dongchao., 2017. Translation and Traveling Theory: Feminist Theory and Praxis in China. London and New York: Routledge.

3. Tao Yongbai., 2020, “Off the Margins: Twenty Years of Chinese Women’s Art (1990-2010)”. In: positions 28:1. Duke University Press, pp. 65-86; Shuqin Cui., 2016, Gendered Bodies: Towards a Women’s Visual Art in Contemporary China, University of Hawai’i Press; Sasha Su-Ling Welland., 2018, Experimental Beijing: Gender and Globalization in Chinese Contemporary Art, Duke University Press and Peggy Wang., 2013. “Interrogating “Chinese Women’s Art”. In: Breakthrough: Work by Contemporary CHinese Women Artists. Brunswick, Maine, USA: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, pp. 9-11.

4. The author’s interview (via email) with Liu Xi, April 2020. The correspondence was in English and has been lightly edited.

With hundreds of millions of people in self-isolation and quarantine, hundreds of thousands hospitalized and tens hundreds of thousands dead, and the world economy stopped, talk of art seems trivial if not deluded. But art is expression and we need to speak and to speak up, all the more when threatened and isolated. Art is about asking questions, and that won’t stop, but the places in which we ask them will change.

So what will the the contemporary art market look like?

The art world as we know it has changed forever

Art has not vanished and making art has not ceased but Art Basel Hong Kong was cancelled. In March, TEFAF Maastrict’s “VVIP” sales were down 29% and US visitors too. Art Basel itself has been moved from June to mid-September, along with numerous other art fairs and events like Gallery Weekend in Berlin (now September 13-15). The huge question, of course, is whether any large exhibition or art fair can or will take place in September. Even if they do, will anyone go? Will US collectors fly to Basel? Will they risk a sudden 2-week quarantine? Even if they do, will they still feel like spending? Will they still have anything to spend even?

No one knows.

Rat Year

Looking to China, will there still be international visitors in November for West Bund and ART021 in Shanghai? Will international galleries still want to come, even if they still have the resources to do so? Last year most international galleries sold poorly at both exhibitions, and when they did, it was mostly to collectors from the U.S., Japan, Korea and Taiwan; not local collectors. When they did sell to locals, there was the problem of payment (many sales were frustrated in the following months). For major collectors with foreign bank accounts it was less of a problem but for the great art buying majority China’s strict capital controls mean it is increasingly difficult to be able to pay for international artworks over USD50,000 (though some managed to pay in cash). All this at time when local confidence in local artists is waning. Some say it’s because, on average, local art isn’t as good as its foreign counterparts. This is twaddle. Western artists are trained how to speak; Chinese artists learn to stay quiet. Moreover, Western galleries, curators, museum directors, art writers and even art PR are all still very much better trained, more competitive, more professional. And there’s just more of them. Berlin has more serious art galleries than the whole of China and Hong Kong put together. Its population is just 3.7 million people (Basel just 171,000).

And then there’s the China-US trade war, which briefly receded on the back of a sticky-tape trade deal, now rapidly morphing into a ‘cold trade war’ due to the disingenuous Co-vid 19 blame game, a conflict which could soon easily lose the word ‘trade’.

Survivor

The line between private museum and private gallery is often relative but always opaque, particularly in China. Who will survive? Thankfully, one way or another the key founding galleries of the Mainland China art scene will all get through – Beijing Commune, ShanghART, Long March Space, Tang Contemporary, Vitamin Creative Space. So will the galleries backed by serious collectors, such as AYE Gallery. The international galleries that have strong local networks will be fine too, including Continua, Perrotin, Lisson, Almine Rech and Galerie Urs Meile. For everyone else survival is going to be a lottery. In Hong Kong, the rental costs of H Queens and the Pedder building now look like a sick joke. Here too though, the majors will be ok, including Gagosian, David Zwirner, Pace and Axel Vervoordt. That former French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, has just opened a gallery with his son Arthur on Hollywood Road is a confidence vote for the fragrant island but one with unique characteristics. The galleries in the more affordable Wong Chuk Hang district perhaps have a better chance than those in Central but it’s still going to be very tough. However, summer will no doubt also bring the return of the protests, closely followed by an ideological heavy hand. Back on the Mainland expect to see interesting smaller galleries emerge in Shenzhen and more regional centers like Nanjing and Chengdu (in Wuhan maybe not so much, more’s the pity).

(Former police officer Scottie (Jimmy Stewart) spies on Judy / Madeleine (Kim Novak) visiting the art museum (Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, 1958)

Museums or mausoleums?

Many museums will close, public and private. Some shouldn’t have been opened in the first place. Some will be sorely missed, whatever the reasons may have been. But that was already the case, from SiShang in Beijing to Zendai in Shanghai. Some of the best we hope will continue, from How Art Museum and RAM in Shanghai, Sifang in Nanjing and to Red Brick and Faurschou in Beijing. The UCCA under the leadership of Phil Tinari has become one of the great survival stories of the art world. It will survive this too. In fact, it is because of institutions like UCCA that we have hope museums in China will come back faster and better than we can currently predict (opening May 21 is UCCA’s new show “Mediations in an Emergency“). We look forward to the new Jupiter Museum of Art opening in Shenzhen this year and M+ in Hong Kong next year. We hope too that the government will eventually give all these museums the freedom to not only survive but prosper. Well, hope springs eternal.

Unfortunately, some prominent artists, curators, and collectors will also survive who really shouldn’t. Evolution is not always about the fittest and the strongest, let alone the most beautiful or most interesting, but often just about the most ethically flexible, the most ingratiatingly flattering, and just dumb luck too.

(Cao Fei, Haze and Fog, 2013, trailer. Courtesy MoMA and Vitamin Creative Space)

Online ad infinitum

Will the art world move online completely, occupying VR rooms and AI processors? No. Just look at the disastrous Art Basel online viewing rooms. As Dominique Lévy said to CNN Money recently “An interesting experiment that doesn’t work.” To be blunt, you didn’t buy the art so why buy the hype?

The freedom to explore the Louvre from half a world away is amazing but it is a poor second best to being there. And for less famous museums? ….. well, meh. The same with private galleries – online viewing rooms are now a reality but an underwhelming one. We stare at our computer screens enough already. Unless galleries are going to put porn or Joe Exotic in their viewing rooms, don’t hold your breath for a digital Renaissance.

(Ran Dian hopes Epic Games will include Art Basel in the next season of Fortnite. C’mon, you know it makes total sense.)

Similarly, online art auctions can work at USD5,000 but much less so at USD50,000. But who cares about auctions anyway? It’s not like they contribute anything to making art or the artists who make it. This must change.

Paper magazines are dead. Long live art critics!

Art publishing was already in deep trouble. Now it needs a ventilator but can’t find one.

With the exception of a few legacy publishers like The Art Newspaper and Artforum, there will be little in the way of a business model for paper art magazines to survive without a sugar daddy. The inherent compromises between sponsorship and independent writing are increasingly impossible to balance with production costs. We are also extremely skeptical that online databases like Artsy will continue to survive in the absence of Trustafarian cash injections. Paddle8 has already succumbed. So we will be back to just Artprice and Artnet.

Will there be art writing? Of course. Will it be good? Much less certain. Then again, a lot of writers and the universities that produced them, have a lot to answer for their suicidal dive into Daedalian irrelevance. It would be nice if great art criticism was also fun or even just not painful to read. Hiding behind obfuscation must end. This doesn’t mean there is no space for complex writing but it has to have a point. Rosalind Kraus is complex because she is good but others are complex because they are not.

So?

We need opinions not only to count but have weight too. Facebook likes and Instagram hearts are no more reliable than pumped and primed auction results. Mere popularity comes and goes, consumed and processed faster than fast food. In the age of social media, with the whole world ‘roasting’ and ‘flaming’, it is astonishing how bland art became. Art stopped being risky and became just entertainment. Where’s the anger? The subversion? The plain weird? Be prepared to be unpopular, ugly and wrong. And be prepared for people to be unpopular, ugly and wrong about you too.

And now?

Is it all doom and gloom? Actually no. Out of catastrophe will come great change. The seeds of the future were already germinating. Expect the crossover between art and science to continue and spread and the lines between formerly discreet and disparate disciplines to become increasingly porous. There will be far greater cooperation, not just between artists but also curators. There will be far fewer art fairs and those that remain will maybe get back to their roots as genuine markets for the best art, old and new and not simply the financial and travel roundabout of recent times (despite their critics, the best art fairs play a very important cultural role and meeting point). A lot of loud but superficial collectors will vanish. Same goes for curators.

Most importantly, art will become less polite. It needs to.

Following a career in dance, João Penalva began his second career as an artist in 1976, working initially as a painter. Today, Penalva is known for making large-scale installations in various media, as well as more intimate works that combine painting, photography, video and found objects, image, text and sound; addressing narrative modes and the relationships between each medium. His storytelling is often fractured, presenting juxtaposed narrative elements, allowing the viewer a latitude of freedom in their interpretation.

Following a career in dance, João Penalva began his second career as an artist in 1976, working initially as a painter. Today, Penalva is known for making large-scale installations in various media, as well as more intimate works that combine painting, photography, video and found objects, image, text and sound; addressing narrative modes and the relationships between each medium. His storytelling is often fractured, presenting juxtaposed narrative elements, allowing the viewer a latitude of freedom in their interpretation.

In the gallery space, two seemingly disparate series of photographic works are presented side by side, in juxtaposition, as if conceived as two super imposed exhibitions. Presented along one wall of the gallery, the curious installation of alternating work,oscillating in scale, process and form, creates a rhythmic installation that explores the ambiguous relationship between fact and fiction, and the tenuous line that separates the two.

The larger series of color images are archival pigment prints on paper depicting close-up photographs of various scenic backdrops. In a theatrical context,mediated by distance, the lights, the atmosphere, the characters, the music, and the voices, the painted backdrop is a key mechanism employed to create illusion and spectacle. In Penalva’s works, and within the framework of the exhibition, the backdrops take on a revised physical presence.The tightly cropped works create a new sense of illusion and intimacy; fictions that celebrate the materiality of the fabric and that stimulate our imaginations. The brushstrokes that are, when viewed from afar, small gestures of a larger painted surface, here, using the apparatus of the gallery, gain the authority to define ambiguous, painterly compositions.

Interspersed between each of these works are smaller, silver gelatin prints that document objects found by the artist in the theater’s scenic prop store. From milk churns to a leather armchair, electrified candlesticks, a bird-hunter’s cage, some wings, a vase with a shelf on top and a bronze urn on its side, these props, when removed from their theatrical context, become enigmatic objects that are undefined by time and belong only to the space of their photographic representation.

In this exhibition, as so often in Penalva’s practice, text is used to form the narrative framework of his works. Here, technical descriptions are used to title each work, yet they do not reveal the play, opera or ballet that these backdrops or props belong to. In doing so, Penalva constructs an equivocal relationship between factual and visual information, a strategy that lies at the heart of theatrical production, as well as the artist’s own practice.

展期：2019年11月22日至2020年1月11日

The French term Couleur, literally translated as “color”, refers figuratively to the imprint of a human being regarding its spiritual-ideological attitude. It is a figure of speech expressing that someone “belongs to a special breed of people” or is equipped with a distinctive temper or individual posture. Correspondingly, the adjective “colored” or “hued” on a metaphorical level refers to diverse shades in the range of subjective attributes.

In his work group Original Color (2016 – 2019), which consists of canvas pieces and expansive sculptural arrangements, Liu Guangyun decolorizes various garments and fabrics by using a bleaching agent. The color removal is intended to restore the original tone of the untreated textile material.

The color gradations of the fabrics in Liu Guangyun’s works reveal different stages within the bleaching process. Faded, pale parts contrast with areas of bright, rich color. Since the discoloration proceeds unevenly, slight traces of color remain. In addition to the works in which a single length of fabric or many smaller pieces cover a stretcher, Liu creates sculptural works in which the process becomes immediately tangible. Here, Liu dips large bales of material into containers containing bleach, so that this slowly seeps through layers of the fabric; the continuous loss of color leading to painterly progressions and soft transitions.

Liu Guangyun eliminates the specific color, which, as a characteristic property of the fabric has been subsequently added to enhance the plain material. As the extinguishing brightness of the bleach spreads, the variety of individual nuances vanishes, the paleness of pure materiality emerging instead. Liberated from their distinctive color, all fabrics appear equally neutralized at the end of this treatment. Their appearance is unified by the consistent loss of color.

In the slow fading of color the textiles assume a former state. The process of bleaching traces the way back from the present to the past, visualizing the return of an original condition. At the same time, the appearance of nothingness also marks a new beginning, the purity of a blank sheet, Tabula Rasa.

In particular, the symbolic impact of these works, which become legible in the context of identity formation and cultural influence, unfolds primarily in front of the biographical background of Liu Guangyun. Liu was born in China in 1962 and raised there. Since the early nineties, he commutes between the People’s Republic and Germany – where he lives with his wife and child – and is equally influenced by Western and Eastern culture. His affiliation remains ambiguous, as a traveler between the worlds he experiences both presence and absence, foreignness and familiarity, closeness and distance. At times, this ambiguous relationship to his respective center of life enables him to critically engage with the customs and traditions of the two very different countries.

During his artistic formation in China, Guangyun experiences the government-imposed orientation towards Western cultural ideals. At the art academies, students’ drawing skills are developed and evaluated by means of the exact representation of classical European Renaissance sculptures. For the series Portraits (2019), Liu Guangyun uses a saw to accurately
cut gypsum models of prominent Western sculptures into evenly thin slices, which, like chain links, are interconnected by wire or meat hooks and hung up as a strand. The ideal form of a Venus, an Apollo, or even the perfect statue “David” by Michelangelo, is broken down into segments with clean cut edges and irregular outlines. Although the perfect figure in its much invoked unity is destroyed and the presentation of the single parts may appear brutal, the process of separation does not correspond to a violent shattering, but rather constitutes a systematic fragmentation, almost a meticulous dissection. Liu Guangyun shows the rough, unprocessed interior of the hollow form as well as the smooth, even exterior. The difference between inside and outside, between exposed and concealed side becomes obsolete. Instead, the viewer is asked to take a different look at the figures, to free himselves from conventional modes of reception and the uncritical consumption of hollow clichés.

Liu Guangyun questions the intellectual attitude behind this academic appropriation of “typical” (albeit foreign) stylistic traits and the concomitant mediation of aesthetic criteria. He expresses his doubts about the absorption of the classical Western educational canon: “On the one hand, these figures have also influenced my understanding of aesthetics, on the other hand, I question why these classical, Western figures are still a necessary part of modern Chinese art education.” (Liu Guangyun) The Portraits suggest that Liu Guangyun exposes this Chinese appreciation of Western cultural values, that has degenerated into the superficial examination of an ideal type. Liu appears to counteract this customary perception of culturally devalued, “empty” shells with a new aesthetic experience, a revision of cultural values.

In Lius series Original Color the colors are accompanied by a symbolic annihilation of history, and are consequently associated with notions of cultural belonging and identity, or the loss thereof. In a similar way, the symbols of high culture, the epitomes of art history and Western cultural identity, now appear drained and devoid of meaning. The segmentation of the internationally acclaimed sculptures in Portraits indicates a questioning of historical and cultural connection – and the effort to replace the consumption of stereotypes and the entailing loss of meaning with a revaluation of elements shaping national and individual identity.

In the work of Liu Guangyun, the famous manifestations of high culture now come to represent a fundamental alienation from cultural heritage in the media age, becoming symbols of a brittle relationship to tradition. However, just like the discolored fabrics, the dismembered sculptures are imbued by the powerful spirit of freedom embodying the potential of new perspectives, the dynamics of the beginning. Liu experiences this reset with every arrival – in Germany as well as in China.

(Bettina Haiss, 2019)