7th shanghai biennale to focus on people in dynamic urban space, identity, migration, urbanization, spatial and social boundaries

 The curatorial team of the 2008 Shanghai Biennale have released the theme for this year’s event. Translocalmotion, they’ve called it. What’s all that about then? Well, they all got together and started thinking about people and their conditions in the dynamic urban space. They propose that this year’s Biennale reflects upon  the socio-economic and cultural implications of urbanization on both the local and global levels, including the issues of migration and identity. With their collective curatorial awesomeness, they will be investigating the spatial and social boundaries between the rural and urban populations, migrants and citizens, guests and hosts.

Major cities in China such as Shanghai are obviously experiencing incredible growth rates, so I applaud the curators for choosing such a dynamic and powerful theme. Art is perhaps one of the best ways to influence the urban development agenda…

Oh, sigh. Who wants to buy me a plane ticket to Shanghai this September?

 

cai guo qiang: i want to beleive

Chinese artist Cai Guo Qiang may have once wanted to beleive that his installations would reside in the Guggenheim museum in New York, but now it’s actually happened…. One of my friends was lucky enough to check this exhibition out last week, and he said it was the most amazing thing he’s ever seen in his life.

 

“CAI GUO-QIANG has literally exploded the accepted parameters of art making in our time. Drawing freely from ancient mythology, military history, Taoist cosmology, extraterrestrial observations, Maoist revolutionary tactics, Buddhist philosophy, gunpowder-related technology, Chinese medicine, and methods of terrorist violence, Cai’s art is a form of social energy, constantly mutable, linking what he refers to as “the seen and unseen worlds.” This retrospective presents the full spectrum of the artist’s protean, multimedia art in all its conceptual complexity.

Born in Quanzhou, Fujian Province, China, in 1957, Cai studied stage design at the Shanghai Drama Institute. In the 1980s he emerged as a member of the burgeoning experimental art world of China’s postreform era. After moving to Japan in 1986, Cai tapped into a rich vein of international 20th-century art and critical thought. While living there, he mastered the use of gunpowder to create his signature gunpowder drawings and the related outdoor explosion events. These practices integrate science and art in a process of creative destruction and reflect Cai’s philosophy that conflict and transformation are interdependent conditions of life, and hence art. At once intuitive and analytical, his gunpowder drawings and explosion events are intrepid, conceptual, site specific, ephemeral, time based, and interactive—performance art with a new matrix of cultural meaning.

Cai has lived in New York since 1995. While increasing his participation in the global art system of biennials, public celebrations, and museum exhibitions around the world, Cai’s social projects engage local communities to produce art events in remote, nonart sites like military bunkers, a socialist utopianism influenced by Cai’s experience growing up in Mao Zedong’s Red China and during the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76. His recent work has expanded to include large-scale installations, allegorical and sculptural, that recuperate signs and symbols of Chinese culture and expose the dialectics of local history and globalization.

Designed by the artist as a site-specific installation, the Guggenheim’s exhibition presents art as a process that unfolds in time and space, dealing with ideas of transformation, expenditure of materials, and connectivity. The structure of Cai’s art forms are inherently unstable, but his social idealism characterizes all change, however violent, as carrying the seeds of positive creation. Subverting tropes such as East versus West, traditional versus contemporary, center versus periphery, Cai offers a new cultural paradigm for the art of a global age and expands the meaning of the phrase “I want to believe.”
- Gugghenheim Museum, New York

wei hui: sex and drugs in shanghai

If it’s been banned and burned in China, you know it’s going to be good.

 

‘Shanghai Baby’ by Wei Hui is the story of a young urban woman, Coco, who waits tables by day and explores Shanghai’s intoxicating underbelly at night. She falls in love with an impotent but drug-addicted Chinese artist, but also begins a wistful affair with a rich, married Western businessman.

This book was like opium to me. I couldn’t stop reading it, it fuelled my desire for Shanghai’s luxurious and sensual lifestyle more than any other peice of literature has so far. Shanghai’s purpose for existence is pure pleasure; whether you get your kicks from sex, love, drugs or just making money. It’s all there for the taking.

“The weather is getting hot. Cicadas chirp almong the poplars of the old foreign concessions. Stone stairways, spotted with dirt and soot from car exhausts, lead into the city’s secret gardens. Ancient mansions and fashionable people hide by day and come out at night. High-heeled shoes walk down mossy alleys, down streets lined with skyscrapers, past fantasies in all directions. The clack of high heels is the perfect echo of materialism ringing in the city’s ears….” – extract from ‘Shanghai Baby’ by Wei Hui

‘Shanghai Baby’ has aparently been made into a film now, although I can’t remember seeing it come down to Australia yet. Fingers crossed.

actually obsessed with the new creative china

Ni-hao ma. Wo jiao Hai Mai Lee. Wo Ai Ni, Zhongguo!

I should probably introduce myself in a more appropriate way. My name is Miss Ward, and my life happens to be consumed with an overwhelming obsession for China. I decided to make this website after noticing how easily my friends and family members eyes would glaze over once I started talking about my favourite subject in the world.

“Oh, that reminds me of something that happened this time when I discovered this really cool art neighbourhod in Shanghai….”

I’ve been there three times so far; although I’ve only really explored Guanxi, Hunan, Shanghai and Hong Kong. One of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been in my life was the Zhangjiajie national park in Wulingyuan, Hunan. The national park had only been open to the public a few years before I visited; and full of rare traditional Chinese herbs, towering limestone peaks and tigers roaring at dawn, it was a really special place.

I’ve spent a lot of time wondering why I’m so in love with China. 

On my very first day in the country as a nineteen year old, I had the urge to steal away from the Intrepid group I was travelling with, and find myself a secret spot in a field of Chinese gardenia.  Amongst the shifting shadows of the mountains and the huge masses of dragonflies hovering above the soft mossy grass, I spent the good part of an hour crying my eyes out. From that moment, with a sky-high sense of belonging, understanding and connection, I knew I had found my home for life.

And in the limited time I have spent there in the four years since, I have begun to understand in a little more detail why I am drawn so powerfully towards the Orient.

When it finally occured to me, it seemed so simple. I love China because I can see myself reflected in her.  China, with all her fury, chaos and confusion. China, who doesn’t make sense, who contradicts herself constantly.  I don’t make sense, I contradict myself constantly. My beloved China, she’s chaos like you’ve never seen chaos before, she’s completely out of order, but she still manages to operate at a dizzying pace. She’s inquisitive yet reserved, proud yet ashamed, modern yet traditional, rich yet poor, feminine and masculine. Even just to walk her streets commands full use of senses, she demands you  live fully in the present. In her interactions with the rest of the world, China demands all or nothing. She’s loads of colour and just as much black-and-white. She’s yin, she’s yang, she’s confusing, she’s chaotic, she’s me and I’m her.

To cut to the point of why I decided to make this website

Besides the country’s incredible chaos and colour and fury and confusion, another thing that really excites me about China is it’s incredible emerging creative energy.  

China is exploding with countless art galleries, lowbrow exhibitions, independent literature, instillations, zines, interesting public art, alternative music spaces, a healthy punk music scene, fantastic architecture, and a new generation of cool kids full of energy, ambition and… well… creativity.

I spend half my life earning the money to contribute towards my ‘Moving-to-China-and-never-coming-back’ fund. The rest of my life is spent reading modern Chinese literature, researching the Chinese contemporary art scene, signing up to obscure Shanghai blogs, learning Mandarin, collecting insightful quotes on China, chatting to new Chinese DJ’s and famous illustrators in Beijing, watching old Chinese movies and networking with the movers and shakers of the new Chinese creative industries scene.

I hope that ’The Speed and The Friction’ will become an important map or reference point for China’s emerging cultural and creative industries. I might even get a ‘real’ website up and running sometime in the next few months, depending on how this goes.

In the meantime, if you happen to be equally passionate and excited about China and all of her glorious creative possibilities, please be in touch.  

Zaijian.

Miss Ward