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开 本: 16开纸 张: 胶版纸包 装: 平装是否套装: 否国际标准书号ISBN: 9787510058332
” As Seen is the perfect book to keep posted by the historianof the Chinese contemporary art scene. Thanks to Karen Smith, eachyear we have a great summary of what’s going on in China, as apanorama of the year’s top shows. A memory of the future, don’tmiss Karen’s eyes.”
Jér?me Sans, curator
” Published simultaneously in English and Chinese versions, anddistributed both through the official Chinese system and theinternational art world system, this volume goes a long way towardcreating a common frame of reference for recent developments inChinese art, both inside and beyond China.”
Philip Tinari, director, UCCA
As Seen is a series of publications that review the work ofChinese artists as presented in public museums and galleries inChina. As Seen is not exhaustive, but it is the result of extensiveexhibition-going. With particular focus on the achievements ofyoung artists, As Seen 2 continues to track the pulse of the timesas it underscores artistic content andform.
4 FOREWORD | Philip Tinari, director, UCCA
6 AS SEEN 2 | Introduction
14 Heman Chong | A Stack
18 Pak Sheung Chuen | The Horizon Placed at Home
22 Luo Dan | Simple Song
28 Li Ran | Mont Sainte-Victoire (and other points ofreference)
36 Chen Zhen | Same Bed, Different Dreams
44 Gu Dexin | Important is not the Meat
52 Huang Ran | Disruptive Desires, Tranquility, and the Loss ofLucidity
58 Liao Guohe | Popular Painting
62 Zhang Hui | Groundless
68 Xie Fan | The Layers
72 Wang Du | Contemporary Art Museum of China
76 Xu Bing | Book from the Ground
80 Irrelevant Commission | Why We Do Useless Things? and UnrelatedParades
86 Ma Ke | Life Most Intense
92 Jiang Zhi | If This is a Man / 5
98 Yang Fudong | Close to the Sea / Revival of the Snake
104 Jiang Xiaochun | 7
108 Li Shurui | The Shelter / A Wall
114 Zhang Ding | Buddha Jumps over the Wall
120 Hu Xiangqian | Protagonist
124 Wang Sishun | Liminal Space
128 Hai Bo | Solo
134 Zhou Tao | Collector
140 Pei Li | Generation P
146 Li Dafang | Throw-back: Jin Zhan’s Messy Growth, His Languageand His Relatives
150 Wang Wei | A Wall on the Wall—A Floor on the Floor
154 Geng Jianyi | Wu Zhi
164 Chen Wei | A Forgettable Song / Xian City
170 Li Songsong | The One
176 Hu Yun | The Secret Garden / Reeves’s Pheasant
182 Zheng Guogu | Spirits Linger With Dust
188 Liu Wei | By Order of the Artist: No Title Necessary
192 Utopia Group | Trudge: Geography of Utopia Group
200 Zhou Yilun | Our House by the Seashore
206 Hu Xiaoyuan | No Fruit at the Root
210 Cao Fei | Secret Tales from the Museum
216 INDEX OF EXHIBITIONS
219 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Karen Smith is the most important chronicler of the emergenceof Chinese art. Since she arrived in Beijing in the early 1990s,she has scrupulously attended, processed, recorded, and documentedthe birth and maturation of an entire world. Her early years inChina unfolded at a time before contemporary art was governed byformal systems, and her encounters in those days were mediated bycomplex webs of personal and professional connections. She spentthe 1990s going to exhibitions and performances, talking toartists, and going home to write down her memories andinterpretations of these encounters. In a world where things havechanged so quickly and thoroughly, Smith’s diaries are probably themost comprehensive firsthand account that remains.
Though these early jottings form the basis for Smith’s seminal bookNine Lives, a snapshot of the contemporary art scene in Chinathrough the personal and artistic stories of nine individuals whichshe authored in the early years of the twenty-first century, muchmore material from that period awaits publication in her next majorbook. Meanwhile, as the Chinese art scene has grown and flourished,so has Smith’s place in it–she is now not simply a writer but alsoa curator, an arbiter, and a mediator in the broadest sense,offering her expertise to everyone from major Western institutionsinitiating projects in the PRC to newly founded Chinese museumslooking to establish their taste and credentials. With her partnerH.S. Liu, Smith has also acquired a deep expertise in Chinesephotography, working on a major photographic history of Shanghaipublished at the time of that city’s 2010 World Expo. But forSmith, even after two decades, the immediate written accountremains the key vehicle by which she makes sense–for herself andher readers–of the complexities of Chinese art as they unfold, allaround her, in real time.
The As Seen project was initiated two years ago by Post WavePublishing Company, the publishers with whom Karen Smith had workedon several earlier titles including the Shanghai book. The idea wasstraightforward: Each year, for five years, she would choose fiftyexhibitions that she found notable and write short accountsFOREWORD Karen Smith: Witness to a WorldAs them. Accompanied byimages, these volumes would become yearly references, reliableaccounts of what had happened in a cultural field that continues tomorph and grow. The books do not focus on the institutional orcommercial developments that are all too often the way we signpostthis story; in fact, the name of the gallery or museum where eachexhibition took place is given rather secondary billing, collectedtogether into an index at the back. Rather, this is an account ofcontemporary art over the course of a year told through much as theauthor experienced it: as a string of encounters with works byindividual artists, a strand of aesthetic epiphanies, revelations,and recognitions that follow each other in chronologicalorder.
Karen Smith has been a mentor and friend since I started my ownwork in China, about ten years after she began hers. During theautumn of 2002, I worked under her to edit the English cataloguefor the first Guangzhou Triennial, and I will forever remember ourweekly Tuesday morning sessions in her studio going over mytranslation of a chronology of the 1990s that was to be included inthat volume. It was the Oxford tutorial system reinvented forearly-2000s Beijing, with me reading my usually inept attempts torender a string of exhibitions and artist names into passableEnglish, while she would expand and supplement the record with herdeep firsthand knowledge of everything it contained. It is thus agreat pleasure for me personally, and for the Ullens Center forContemporary Art as an institution, to participate in thepublication of this, the second volume in the As Seen series.Published simultaneously in English and Chinese versions, anddistributed both through the official Chinese system and theinternational art world system, this volume goes a long way towardcreating a common frame of reference for recent developments inChinese art, both inside and beyond China.
Philip Tinari
director, UCCA
AS SEEN 2
The ancients would take years to mull over the correct answer toa question. Today we have only minutes to respond.’
The words quoted above, from one of China’s leading artists—thepainter Zhang Xiaogang—were not, as might be imagined, writtenrecently against the relentless pace of life in China in the seconddecade of the twenty-first century. Instead, this diary entry comesfrom almost thirty years earlier, in 1985. At that particularmoment, viewed from the surface of society, economic reform wasstill more theory than practice. A Chinese art world was, however,beginning to emerge, signposted in the middle of that decade by theadvent of the ’85 New Wave. But even for the small number ofartists involved—a tiny number relative to the size of China’spopulation—the pace of life was far from accelerated; if anything,it was calmer than it had been in previous decades, notably duringthe last years of Mao Zedong’s rule, which were marked by afrenetic succession of bitter ideological campaigns.
So if, in 1985, it seemed to Zhang Xiaogang that there were butminutes to respond, today, given the extreme demands of life inChina—one of the few nations currently expanding in all directionsat full throttle—that response time has been reduced tonanoseconds. There is barely pause for reflection: there is no timeto pause. That seems to be true for all, be that artists, curators,critics, collectors, or even the gaze of a burgeoning publicaudience. No one intends this to be so. Rather, for those engagingwith the art world, it is just a fact of having to accommodate anextraordinary number of invites, assignments, exhibitions,lectures, tours and mundane chores. All of that whilesimultaneously trying to keep up generally with the pace of changethat is still perceived as unfolding into a bright new future, thearrival of which no one wishes to impede.
The urgency here is both fuelled by the freedom from conventionthat imbued the Chinese art world with a particular dynamism in themid-1980s, late 1990s, and early 2010s (as it regrouped after beingdriven off the rails by the explosion of the art market) andexacerbated by the lack of a cohesive, transparent art-worldsystem. Add to this the emergence of social media as a primarysource of information, promotion and publicity, as well as its roleas a platform for the exchange of views, and one that demands daily(if not hourly) attention, and time simply evaporates.
If Weibo keeps the art world busy, it also increases the pressingnature of an already urgent obsession with “the next big thing”.Thus, as artists attempt to keep their careers on track, both thecontent and execution of works suggest that, in the absence of timeto respond, they merely react. Encounters with the resultant workstend to encourage a similarly summary response in critics, curatorsand even audiences. In terms of the “contemporary”, the air of aweand meditative contemplation once associated with the experience ofart is ever more diluted; the notion of a tortured artist engagedin a passionate search for meaning in life and a sense of theeternal is, it seems, officially dead. Well, almost.
This question of response versus reaction arose while preparingfor this volume, and from surveying the volume of art recentlyproduced in China, but this phenomenon did not spring up overnight.The problem is partly rooted in what generally constitutespost-postmodern art; that which is termed “contemporary” art. Thereis an air of duplicity in the nature of much art that aligns itselfwith this label, and not just in China. But in China, against theongoing rush to internationalise and compete, and more, thatduplicity can seem pronounced in a seam of art that, superficially,has all the right qualities and ticks all the right boxes; thatspeaks to the moment, to the perceived socio-political mood. But,when prodded, these elements are sometimes revealed to be redherrings: like a stage set with its painted backdrops and cleverillusions. Not all art falls into this mire, of course. The key isweeding out the followers to give the leaders their full due.
In identifying strong works, one trend did suggest itself: asmall number of significant artists appears to be opting out of thefast lane, taking a step back behind the front line to carve outtime for a closer engagement with a personal value system as thecore of their work. Gu Dexin’s decision to retire entirely is anextreme example. Ditto, Geng Jianyi who has always been true to hisparticular stance, even if that meant disappearing from publicview. More recently, Zhang Xiaogang and younger artists like LiuWei, Cao Fei and even Hu Xiaoyuan have each demonstrated a desireto take back control of the creative process.
The front line in China today is dominated by highly active youngartists, a good portion of them, as I hope this volumedemonstrates, producing exciting, innovative art. The best aredefined by the energy and assertiveness they deploy throughintuitive and unhesitating gestures and actions. Their workscapture brilliant instances of vision. Their liberating andfearless path of “anything goes” leads to real innovation. Ifthat’s hard to spot at times it’s because there is a far largervolume of artists producing art—this, the duplicitous portion—thatis simply “anything you can get away with.” The problem is that theresulting artworks can appear disparagingly similar to theinnovative pieces, which is great for clever individuals with atalent for imitation, but not so great for innovators deserving ofattention.
“Anything you can get away with” as an observation of some art isnot a recent thing, but words published by the venerable MarshallMcLuhan, often described as a twentieth-century seer, in hisseminal 1964 publication Understanding Media. McLuhan also wrote:“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We marchbackwards into the future.” Events and attitudes in China show thatto be a largely Western perspective. Contemporary art in China haslittle relation to history in the Western sense of continuum.Today, in terms of the cultural sphere, there are, for example, nomuseums where an overview of modern and contemporary art can beseen. And there are too few books on the evolution of China’scontemporary art forms; not a single tome viewed by consensus asobjective or factually reliable.
The mindset of artists at work today feels unconsciously closerto that of the Italian Futurists, active a hundred years earlier,than any other state in evidence today. Yet the Futurists sought todestroy an “old world”—with museums they described asgraveyards—that was deemed irrelevant to their future. In China,the art world increasingly sees the museum as an ultimate restingplace: hence, perhaps, the astonishing volume that has, in recentyears, sprung up across the country. We need rear-view mirrors.They show succeeding generations where they came from, warn of thepitfalls of unregulated human acts, and mark what has been overcometo endure the passage of time. Sentimentality aside, they offerconfidence more than comfort per se. In China, the lack of aneffective rear-view mirror is signalled by the ongoing state ofnostalgia—a yearning for a different time that effectivelyobliterates history—revealed in the work of artists such as ZhangXiaogang, but also Chen Wei, Utopia Group, Hai Bo, and even WangWei. So although nostalgia may have little to do with an actualpast, if the Chinese art world kept a better eye on the rear-viewmirror it might see that Western art history is an exclusive andsomewhat limiting club, at odds with the diversity that is to befound within China’ s own cultural framework today; a diversitythat, due to the power of art world forces driving the“contemporary”, is in danger of being undermined. But while theabsence of a “rear-view mirror” may or may not hinder the wholesomegrowth of artistic careers and practice in general, it is impedingthe development of local critical parameters, of a factual historyof art, and of a broader public audience. By extension, thequestion of what art is, or can be, gains an urgency all itsown.
As Cao Fei demonstrates in her Secret Tales from the Museum, thatquestion is increasingly relevant to the growing number of ordinarypeople who have already demonstrated a fascination for contemporaryexpression—the strangeness of its manifestations as much as itsvalue as currency. For the best of today’s art to find a place inart history it must contain enduring values—human, aesthetic,philosophical or political—as representative of this era, whichitself will only be seen clearly with hindsight, in a rear-viewmirror. That too will be the test of the responses and reactions inthe selection of works included in this series; a test of theprocess of documenting art within a specific time frame, attemptingto record the mood of a moment, the values and fascinations thatdrive the work. These responses took a considered amount of time;but only time will tell whether that matters or not.
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