mercredi 29 octobre 2008
EARTS SHANGHAI
http://www.shearts.org/
this year is the first time i attended to Shanghai Earts festival. it was their second edition, so i had no element of comparison, not even a lot of informations about it . All that i knew is that the festival was an initiative of Shanghai's municipality (+ Shanghai World Expo Coordination , the Bureau Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality etc...) in any case i find the initiative quite amazing ( we have nothing like that in Beijing) and another good proof that shanghai always wants to show its high tech profile to contrast with authoritarian artistic Avant garde of the Capital, héhé.
the theme of the year was : "urbanized landscape" which sounds very much like any contemporary Chinese theme because the city is the most visible and overwhelming reality in this country.
it's like some kind of motto :"the city, the mankind, the city= reflection of the nature manipulated by mankind , the city getting beyond man's control, bursting with issues and also beauty". blablabla
see the introduction below:
The festival was scattered in different zones throughout the city: Pudong , Yangpu and Xuhui.
and when you say scattered in a city with the size of Shanghai , it is for real!
Pudong, the new development area ( in the east bank of Huangpu river ) was definitely the focal center of the festival, as it has been utterly conceived to be Shanghai's pole for science and new technologies ,therefore it provides the most infra structures for this kind of events.
The night of the opening we went there with Xiongwei, Linyu, Linjian, and saw a lot of other friends there at the entrance.
The thing is that nobody could enter the site of the performance. NOBODY. the guards wouldn't let people with staff passes in! that was highly comical! artist Zhang Peili came outside to give some spare invitations to Jiang Yipeng and couldn't get back in , hahaha!
The reason the guards at the entrance gave us was that the capacity was exceeded , which was a lie of course, the site had nothing but space ...
nobody knew what to do , first it was said that no invitation was needed to attend, then even artists could let people in or get in themselves, passing phone calls was useless.... sooooo, we all stayed there patiently expecting for a Deus Ex machina which happened for me and Linyu in the shape of a sprint inside while the guards were busy with something else. i felt like a kid , it was quite fun.
The site was quite amazing. in the middle of high buildings there was a huge stage put on the top of Pudong river with about 20 meters screens above.The audience was seating on the other side of the water, so there was at least 10 meters in between. Which felt good for some shows, as you really had the impression to be looking at a interactive landscape and which was bad for other shows which needed proximity ( i bumped into Sklotz / Kogen -i never knew that they were playing there - who were a bit pissed off because their performance involved recordings of plants and sand and very precise things that would be completely damaged by this distance).
i didn't see their performance in the end because i came with Dead J and Chen xiongwei who were performing in the Xuhui Zone and that all performances of all zones started in the same time at night (7.00) and that Pudong is at least 30 minutes drive from Xuhui. Maybe it sounds lame ,but it's like that.
also i'd like to paste the whole program of artists performing on that huge stage , but i can't find it on the website and nobody that i know was given a printed program so.... i know that i saw Wang chang cun( boring), Laetitia sonami (www.sonami.net) some very good japanese act that i can't recall the name of....this kind of unveils the main problem of this festival: COMMUNICATION!!!
nobody in this town knew what was going on. Very few of my Shanghai based friends knew there was a festival.
Performances were supposed to be open to public but in the end the public wasn't informed or couldn't go in....
Extract from www.smartshanghai.com
Little did you know, a music festival is transpiring in Shanghai right under your very nose -- or maybe you did know and you just didn't really care, but then this article isn't for you I guess. The eArts Festival is happening right now and if you've never heard of it, perhaps you know it by its other name: The "Thing that Autechre is supposed to play at. Isn't that in Pudong somewhere? When is that anyways?" Festival. About Autechre: They ended up canceling for some reason or another, but who give a shit 'cause seriously... what the hell has Autechre done for you lately? Nuts to you, Autechre. Anyways the eArts thing started on October 18 and live performances by various electronic/ experimental artists will be occurring right up until October 22. That's three more nights of neat blips and bleeps, and other experimental wackiness that will leave you edified off your ass.
Still in Pudong area was another stage responding to the name of ,the details are on the website (thanks). this show mostly featured the chinese scene: gogo, kafka zhang, B6, Memo,Long2 etc..
this year is the first time i attended to Shanghai Earts festival. it was their second edition, so i had no element of comparison, not even a lot of informations about it . All that i knew is that the festival was an initiative of Shanghai's municipality (+ Shanghai World Expo Coordination , the Bureau Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality etc...) in any case i find the initiative quite amazing ( we have nothing like that in Beijing) and another good proof that shanghai always wants to show its high tech profile to contrast with authoritarian artistic Avant garde of the Capital, héhé.
the theme of the year was : "urbanized landscape" which sounds very much like any contemporary Chinese theme because the city is the most visible and overwhelming reality in this country.
it's like some kind of motto :"the city, the mankind, the city= reflection of the nature manipulated by mankind , the city getting beyond man's control, bursting with issues and also beauty". blablabla
see the introduction below:
Urbanized Landscape
Lisa Zhou, the General Curator of Shanghai eArts Festival
The word landscape in Chinese is not only a way of describing a physical location. The word landscape also conjures up the social, economic and cultural life of a place. To put it simply, landscape conjures up the human dimensions of a place.
In any landscape, the human presence is crucial but in an urban landscape it is particularly important. We all know that human action and behaviour have had effects on the urban landscape, whether for good or bad. This has always been the case. But now the urban landscape is undergoing ever great changes, One cause is the increasing density of population in cities. Another cause is the way digital technologies reconstitute the urban landscape, through complex communication networks. It is possible that this digital technology will enable us to reimagine the urban landscape
As cities continue to change and develop, urban landscapes remain in a state of flux - and become the subject of local and global fascination. And one issue predominates: how can we accommodate nature in these urban landscapes? It’s hard to know why this question has become so pressing. Perhaps it is a revulsion against materialism? Or a longing for a city that is closer to the notion of an organic community? Or the imperative of sustainability? At the heart of this question is the issue of ‘belonging’.
In the history of art and the humanities in China, the landscape has always been at their heart. The questions now are: can digital technologies help us to renew the urban landscape and our relationship to it; and what exactly is the relationship between a material landscape and a digital one?
In addressing these questions, artists are central for they are the ones that can help us to reimagine our own living space. It may be that digital artists can help us to reinvent the urban landscape, fill it with an inner spirit.
Last year, the theme of Shanghai eArts was ‘The Wisdowm of Crowds’; this year we develop the spirit behind that question with the focus on Urbanised Landscape’. We invite everyone to participate and help us to imagine a new urbanised landscape.
The festival was scattered in different zones throughout the city: Pudong , Yangpu and Xuhui.
and when you say scattered in a city with the size of Shanghai , it is for real!
Pudong, the new development area ( in the east bank of Huangpu river ) was definitely the focal center of the festival, as it has been utterly conceived to be Shanghai's pole for science and new technologies ,therefore it provides the most infra structures for this kind of events.
The night of the opening we went there with Xiongwei, Linyu, Linjian, and saw a lot of other friends there at the entrance.
The thing is that nobody could enter the site of the performance. NOBODY. the guards wouldn't let people with staff passes in! that was highly comical! artist Zhang Peili came outside to give some spare invitations to Jiang Yipeng and couldn't get back in , hahaha!
The reason the guards at the entrance gave us was that the capacity was exceeded , which was a lie of course, the site had nothing but space ...
nobody knew what to do , first it was said that no invitation was needed to attend, then even artists could let people in or get in themselves, passing phone calls was useless.... sooooo, we all stayed there patiently expecting for a Deus Ex machina which happened for me and Linyu in the shape of a sprint inside while the guards were busy with something else. i felt like a kid , it was quite fun.
The site was quite amazing. in the middle of high buildings there was a huge stage put on the top of Pudong river with about 20 meters screens above.The audience was seating on the other side of the water, so there was at least 10 meters in between. Which felt good for some shows, as you really had the impression to be looking at a interactive landscape and which was bad for other shows which needed proximity ( i bumped into Sklotz / Kogen -i never knew that they were playing there - who were a bit pissed off because their performance involved recordings of plants and sand and very precise things that would be completely damaged by this distance).
i didn't see their performance in the end because i came with Dead J and Chen xiongwei who were performing in the Xuhui Zone and that all performances of all zones started in the same time at night (7.00) and that Pudong is at least 30 minutes drive from Xuhui. Maybe it sounds lame ,but it's like that.
also i'd like to paste the whole program of artists performing on that huge stage , but i can't find it on the website and nobody that i know was given a printed program so.... i know that i saw Wang chang cun( boring), Laetitia sonami (www.sonami.net) some very good japanese act that i can't recall the name of....this kind of unveils the main problem of this festival: COMMUNICATION!!!
nobody in this town knew what was going on. Very few of my Shanghai based friends knew there was a festival.
Performances were supposed to be open to public but in the end the public wasn't informed or couldn't go in....
Extract from www.smartshanghai.com
Little did you know, a music festival is transpiring in Shanghai right under your very nose -- or maybe you did know and you just didn't really care, but then this article isn't for you I guess. The eArts Festival is happening right now and if you've never heard of it, perhaps you know it by its other name: The "Thing that Autechre is supposed to play at. Isn't that in Pudong somewhere? When is that anyways?" Festival. About Autechre: They ended up canceling for some reason or another, but who give a shit 'cause seriously... what the hell has Autechre done for you lately? Nuts to you, Autechre. Anyways the eArts thing started on October 18 and live performances by various electronic/ experimental artists will be occurring right up until October 22. That's three more nights of neat blips and bleeps, and other experimental wackiness that will leave you edified off your ass.
Still in Pudong area was another stage responding to the name of ,the details are on the website (thanks). this show mostly featured the chinese scene: gogo, kafka zhang, B6, Memo,Long2 etc..
“Feng•Shui Omniscience”Outdoor Interdisciplinary Project
Venue: the riverside plaza (20,000 m2), Zhangjiabang River
Time: 2008.10.18 – 10.20
Curator: Yang Lei and B6
There is a life besides Pudong (ouf!)
that 's Xujiahui area. the area curated by Davide Quadrio, Defne Ayas and their arthub crew. That's where i programed Dead J 's live act accompanied by visual artist Chenxiongwei.
Xujiahui, at the difference of Pudong's Silicon valley-esque gigantic proportions is much more on a human scale. It's just a normal neighborhood full of life, malls, markets, people walking, crossing the streets etc...
the performance area was located inside Xuhui's park , therefore it was the most public orientated event of the festival. In shanghai parks don't follow the imperial designs of Beijing, there are just wide open, with no fences or barriers, there are just what we simply call a public space in the west. the kind of place that is almost impossible to utilize on a civilian level in Beijing if you want to do more than elderlies' valse , yangge dance and aerobics ...
that's a very very good point about Shanghai i have to say. It feels like public art is just possible there, that initiatives are less submited to political paranoia...maybe it's a dream i had but from what i saw in Xuhui's park , things were going on on smoothly. Everynight at 6/7 o'clock people started to gather up around the stage , the autumn temperature was ideal, common people were going for their nightly stroll and would stop by to look at all those lights and abstract visuals they probably never saw before. Nothing felt ridiculous about it eventhough Dead J was scared that "laobaixing" (common chinese) wouldn't understand his music or even freak out.
once again the only thing is that you could feel that no targeted marketing has been done to drag young people, nightlife people, creative people...
The friend of Communikey's Kate, Pia, found me by chance there. She also was tripping on the deconnection between the actual event and its crowd.
But everything went well, Dead J put on his cosmonaute outfit and painted his face white. There was some sounds problem at the begining of the show but then it went ok, chinese grannies and grand children were all dancing at the end of the show!
AND THEY LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER!!!!
dead J at Earts /visual by CXW
back from the south
i just got back to Beijing after ten days in the south. Beijing feels more grey and rough than ever.It's cold already , i have to buy gloves for riding my bike and to organize my days according to the temperature.
When we were in Shenzhen and Guangzhou , Chen Xiongwei was cursing all the time at "beifangren" (northern people) saying they were rude, unpolite, uneducated and lazy, that they didn't know how to do business, blablabla... it was funny ,like his southern roots came back all at once with the moist and the green surrounding us.it was like all of sudden he realised the life style he lost when he moved to Beijing: the flip flap shoes attitude, the slowly but surely way of doing things, the amazing food, the organic and busy street life with its little shops: drink shops, flower shops,fruit shops, oysters stalls,meat sticks stalls,late hour munchies food stalls etc...
it is true that southern China has an amazing rythm. people seem to always be doing something that makes its little sense in the long life chain, there are a lot of people in the streets, less space than in Beijing but all motions are quite fluid.
Back to Beijing, it feels like the hibernation time is close and that this olympic summer counted for nothing...we're going to go through this dark and dry season wearing long johns and watching dvds and then we'll be in 2009, a year that doesn't predict to be an easy one when you work in culture (why did i chose to do this in China, i'm so stupid)
as a matter of fact, not a long ago i and other organiser friends suddenly realized that it would be the 20th anniversary of TianAnmen's incidents in 1989 + the 60 years of PRC....
This predicts a lot of paranoia (again), and a high probability to have a sort of giant curfew on everything like they're able to do here as soon as the public order is concerned...
if it really turns out this way (which is very possible) I MOVE SOUTH!!!!!!
When we were in Shenzhen and Guangzhou , Chen Xiongwei was cursing all the time at "beifangren" (northern people) saying they were rude, unpolite, uneducated and lazy, that they didn't know how to do business, blablabla... it was funny ,like his southern roots came back all at once with the moist and the green surrounding us.it was like all of sudden he realised the life style he lost when he moved to Beijing: the flip flap shoes attitude, the slowly but surely way of doing things, the amazing food, the organic and busy street life with its little shops: drink shops, flower shops,fruit shops, oysters stalls,meat sticks stalls,late hour munchies food stalls etc...
it is true that southern China has an amazing rythm. people seem to always be doing something that makes its little sense in the long life chain, there are a lot of people in the streets, less space than in Beijing but all motions are quite fluid.
Back to Beijing, it feels like the hibernation time is close and that this olympic summer counted for nothing...we're going to go through this dark and dry season wearing long johns and watching dvds and then we'll be in 2009, a year that doesn't predict to be an easy one when you work in culture (why did i chose to do this in China, i'm so stupid)
as a matter of fact, not a long ago i and other organiser friends suddenly realized that it would be the 20th anniversary of TianAnmen's incidents in 1989 + the 60 years of PRC....
This predicts a lot of paranoia (again), and a high probability to have a sort of giant curfew on everything like they're able to do here as soon as the public order is concerned...
if it really turns out this way (which is very possible) I MOVE SOUTH!!!!!!
dark days poetry
Picture by Georg Gatsas
A dark scene is holding court. Its current capital city is New York.
The Anglo-Saxon world is – and always has been – so very much darker than the rest of the world. Of course, the French have also had their dark and even dismal phases, but over a century has run its course since then. The Germans, the Scandinavians, the Dutch, the central and southern Europeans have probably never had it – this propensity for an all-embracing melancholy.
In Eastern Europe, the Russians have no doubts cultivated their own brand of devotion to darkness but nothing of the kind has penetrated our climes via dark Asians, dark Africans or dark South Americans. That makes the Anglo-Saxons veritable kings and queens of darkness.
Dark was La Belle Dame sans Merci, black romanticism, the Romantic Agony, Lou Reed at his best, Arthur Rimbaud and his colleagues, Iggy & the Stooges, Kurt Cobain and others. Caspar David Friedrich is probably a romantic but not necessarily dark. If at all, it would more likely be Gustave Moreau or Gabriele D’Annunzio (Italian, yes, but an exception), Lord Byron or August C. Swinburne. Possibly also Bas Jan Ader, Dutch expatriate and American-by choice, metaphorically balancing on the brink of the abyss in his films and photographs. On the verge of the abyss, there is something lustrous, mighty and especially seductive about dark. Except that contemporary figures are less inclined to venture beyond the abyss; instead they skillfully skirt around the danger zone, an agenda also embodied by the no longer fledgling New York (art) commune represented here.
Dark is a state of mind. Not necessarily black, but certainly offbeat; dark – unconventional and shady – also walks abroad in the twilight zone. Dark feels good in the vicinity of dopey narcotics. Opium and absinthe are classics; Coke and viagra cocktails are more contemporary. Symbols are legion: death’s heads and other tattoes, black leather coats and sunglasses, peachy skin and additional clichés. Laughing is not good, dark rings around the eyes are much more authentic, fat won’t do, the emaciated look is more appropriate (Franz Kafka – German, yes, but an exception – was supposedly anorexic) and casting a melancholy eye on the world-at-large right on target.
Dark is a state of mind, the above-mentioned ingredients its unmistakable symptoms.
mercredi 15 octobre 2008
mardi 14 octobre 2008
Feng jiangzhou's performance @ Universal studios
youtube doesn't fucking work here in Beijing since a few days.
i wanted to upload a video....here are some pics instead.
the performance was really good: feng jiangzhou, dead J , Yangtao, Jiajia, LiuYuan.
A massive dyptique made of moving chinese traditional landscapes
asian beauty!
mardi 7 octobre 2008
Shadows of your story
FILM BLICK AUGEN SCHNITT
Ein Forum für Filmemacher_innen und Film-Liebhaber_innen
A forum for film makers and film lovers
warmly invites you to:
8.10. Shadows of your story
Curated by Pauline Doutreluingne
An evening with short films from 4 remarkable young filmmakers, Patrick Carpentier (BE), Luz Diaz (BE), Iris Piers (NL) and Linus Ricard (SE), who capture sensitively the beauty, fears, daydreams, obsessions and passions of our life stories in moving images.
Patrick Carpentier
Les 9 mardis
27', 2005
www.intothefight.com
Iris Piers
Casmiration or the beginning of Dreaming
3'33, 2007
www.irispiers.com
Luz Diaz
Silent Bodies
17', 2007
www.myspace.com/
Linus Ricard
Sound:Isjtar
Ember
4'42, 2007
www.linusricard.com
doors open 20h, film starts 21h
Raumerweiterungshalle
Werbellinstraße 50
Berlin
U8 Boddinstraße
temporary new url: www.raumerweiterung.tk
jeudi 2 octobre 2008
MILK IS NOT FASHIONABLE ANYMORE
the holy drink of the "reforms and opening" era is about to lose the whole thing.
now everybody is going to drink soya milk again ,before they realized how much it's processed too!
man, what is going to be left to eat????
jeudi 25 septembre 2008
Thought of the day
some men wear suits to go to work
and some other wear suits because they are too cool to wear jeans.
usually these men are rock stars and they don't have the same haircut as the working men either.
that's it
and some other wear suits because they are too cool to wear jeans.
usually these men are rock stars and they don't have the same haircut as the working men either.
that's it
mercredi 24 septembre 2008
Sam Su's blog
I found the email of Sam Su through his gallery ,héhéhé.
so i wrote him and he wrote me back and i discovered his blog!
check it out , he has pretty crazy stuffs on his mind !!
http://susam921.blogspot.com
so i wrote him and he wrote me back and i discovered his blog!
check it out , he has pretty crazy stuffs on his mind !!
http://susam921.blogspot.com
download the new issue of code magazine!
Numéro 7 Automne 2008
Téléchargez le PDF
La cover: Mahawa Kandé.
Les artistes: Marc Bestué / Anthony Franklin / Yutaka Kato / Matti Kallioinen / Hung Keung / Kugelmugel / Philip Metten / Mobile Institute / Charlotte Moth / Olivier Pasqual / Frédéric Platéus / Radio Free Robot / Kilian Ruthemann / David Vives / Zheng Yunhan.
Les rédacteurs: Isabelle Alfonsi / Devrim Bayar /Florent Delval / Pauline Doutreluingne / Benoît Platéus / Alan Quireyns / Christophe Salet / Anne-Claire Schmitz / Aaron Schuster / David de Tscharner.
Les artistes: Marc Bestué / Anthony Franklin / Yutaka Kato / Matti Kallioinen / Hung Keung / Kugelmugel / Philip Metten / Mobile Institute / Charlotte Moth / Olivier Pasqual / Frédéric Platéus / Radio Free Robot / Kilian Ruthemann / David Vives / Zheng Yunhan.
Les rédacteurs: Isabelle Alfonsi / Devrim Bayar /Florent Delval / Pauline Doutreluingne / Benoît Platéus / Alan Quireyns / Christophe Salet / Anne-Claire Schmitz / Aaron Schuster / David de Tscharner.
welcome to mr democracy
To all you lawyers out there!
Welcome to Mr Democracy, the story of a British artist who set off to get a written constitution for the UK made. Understanding the changing balance of power in the world, and with a nod to Britain’s ‘democratic’ ventures across the world, he chose to get it written in China, and ship it back to the UK.
Welcome to Mr Democracy, the story of a British artist who set off to get a written constitution for the UK made. Understanding the changing balance of power in the world, and with a nod to Britain’s ‘democratic’ ventures across the world, he chose to get it written in China, and ship it back to the UK.read more on this great venture of Oliver Walker on mrdemocracy.wordpress.com
Oliver walker : My country, the UK, doesn’t have a written constitution, but we do enjoy a thriving trade with China, aswell as a notion of exporting democracy. Seeing as you can get anything and everything made in China, I want to get a constitution drawn up over there. Democracy is a late convert to globalisation, and I intend to bring the two closer together. Or perhaps it isn’t so late. In fact, the UK has had a strong notion of the import and export of ‘democracy’ for many years, one it continues to foster today. It is in this tradition that I wish to develop a constitution, or ‘basic law’ for the UK, in China, a country finding a new role for itself in the world.
I have been wanting to produce a project in China for a few years now, and last year I had this idea. At first I wanted to deal more directly with the changes happening in and around China itself. But I thought there was something in looking back at where I come from, and exploring it this way.
I met Oliver in Berlin this year. We had long nights of talks on his plan and how to accompish it, it was really an amzing venture he made possible without a notion of Chinese and no experience in China before. I think he addresses a very interesting angle to look at current worldpolitics, away from the stereotyped ways of consuming the world politics through the media we get offered. He explores it through a historic unsolved issue, takes this challenge with both hands and shows us a great story.
When I was in Xiamen last month and went to visit the touristic Guluangyu island, I got a a small historic memory of how the British Colonists would introduce opium to the Chinese and the beginning of long dark years of trade in coolies and opium to benefit themselves. Constitutions were not a topic at that time.
Oliver should have been born earlier;)
have a look at the blog of sean smith, canadian sport researcher, who helped organising the homeshop#1 event in beijing with a review on the event and a funny video to watch
wii would like to play // we don't have tickets from sportsbabel on Vimeo.
his blog, sportsBabel is a blog of research notes that critically examines the aesthetics, politics and poetics of the sportocracy at the intersections between material and immaterial ;)
Issues probed include: sport, war and the militarization of society; postindustrialism and the emergence of a sporting multitude; the cyborg body athletic; interactive sports media; and the nature of postmodern sporting spaces.
wii would like to play // we don't have tickets from sportsbabel on Vimeo.
samedi 20 septembre 2008
Back to Beijing
...back to the usual rush of Beijing.
but enjoying the last days of "Beijing's blue sky" and traffic regulation!
working on Air's show (coming up at Yugongyishan 26th and 27th).
re-listening to Virgin's suicide at the office
preparing the BUC 's october issue doing a little investigation about the Olympic-post-effect: will it be like a big hang over , or will it be the beginning of a new era , or hasn't this era already started 7 years ago when Beijing's big facelift for the Games started?
It's always hard to think about the future here in China, because it's already here , melted in the present.
for this topic, we chose to interview photographer Chi Peng , whose new works revolves around the city a lot (like a lot of others of course) but we especially like his adaption of the cctv towers mixed together with japanese Transformers:
Bert de Muynck from Moving cities(www.movingcities.org) also contributed a super nice and acid article. You'll see it in the hard copy.
And i also went down the street to track down one of these thousands of nice retired volunteers with their Yanjing beer sponsored Olympic Polo shirt.
Most of them are just "laobaixing", member of the neighborhood comittee. In Jiaodaokou and on Pingan avenue you can find one at every ten meters. They just chill ,the usual way , but they feel they have a new responsability, they serve the country and the games, and they're very proud of that.
Next week they'll go back to their normal life, which consists on chilling at the same corner of the street, observing people and things, notifying whose dog shited on the pavement, whose bike is badly parked. But next week they won't be wearing the polo shirt anymore.
but enjoying the last days of "Beijing's blue sky" and traffic regulation!
working on Air's show (coming up at Yugongyishan 26th and 27th).
re-listening to Virgin's suicide at the office
preparing the BUC 's october issue doing a little investigation about the Olympic-post-effect: will it be like a big hang over , or will it be the beginning of a new era , or hasn't this era already started 7 years ago when Beijing's big facelift for the Games started?
It's always hard to think about the future here in China, because it's already here , melted in the present.
for this topic, we chose to interview photographer Chi Peng , whose new works revolves around the city a lot (like a lot of others of course) but we especially like his adaption of the cctv towers mixed together with japanese Transformers:
Bert de Muynck from Moving cities(www.movingcities.org) also contributed a super nice and acid article. You'll see it in the hard copy.
And i also went down the street to track down one of these thousands of nice retired volunteers with their Yanjing beer sponsored Olympic Polo shirt.
Most of them are just "laobaixing", member of the neighborhood comittee. In Jiaodaokou and on Pingan avenue you can find one at every ten meters. They just chill ,the usual way , but they feel they have a new responsability, they serve the country and the games, and they're very proud of that.
Next week they'll go back to their normal life, which consists on chilling at the same corner of the street, observing people and things, notifying whose dog shited on the pavement, whose bike is badly parked. But next week they won't be wearing the polo shirt anymore.
the teeth of Sam Su
At the Sh contemporary , me and belgian friend Sandrine made a new friend: Sam Su from Taiwan.
We entered the booth of LKARTgallery( www.lkartgallery.com) and soon noticed three big 3D enhanced pictures of teeth. Even the wall paper of the booth was covered of dramatically clean teeth, as if we were entering a workshop of science school.
we asked a guy at the booth what it was about . he told us the young artist who's done that was interested in pain , that's why he was using teeth. He wanted to show pain in its most surgicall aspect.
5 minutes later , the guy tells us that the young artist is nobody else that himself. So we start to joke around and promise to go out for drinks with him at Night.
We found him later at the Moca Opening.
There was Liufei's works there .
and i saw Anne Rottig and a whole bunch of people.
Sam Su was telling me that he was on a residency in Kwanju, Korea and that he was dead bored there. His only activity was to go out in the campus, stroll and come back under the air con of his room.I told him he should do a piece on boredom and that Korea was surely the best place for that.
We entered the booth of LKARTgallery( www.lkartgallery.com) and soon noticed three big 3D enhanced pictures of teeth. Even the wall paper of the booth was covered of dramatically clean teeth, as if we were entering a workshop of science school.
we asked a guy at the booth what it was about . he told us the young artist who's done that was interested in pain , that's why he was using teeth. He wanted to show pain in its most surgicall aspect.
5 minutes later , the guy tells us that the young artist is nobody else that himself. So we start to joke around and promise to go out for drinks with him at Night.
We found him later at the Moca Opening.
There was Liufei's works there .
and i saw Anne Rottig and a whole bunch of people.
Sam Su was telling me that he was on a residency in Kwanju, Korea and that he was dead bored there. His only activity was to go out in the campus, stroll and come back under the air con of his room.I told him he should do a piece on boredom and that Korea was surely the best place for that.
ART DIGESTION
It's been about ten days that i came back from Europe to China.10 days that already feel like months. China happens fast and i'm getting older too, so the two aspects put together make time fly!
After spending one day in Beijing i took a plane straight to Shanghai to spend a few days checking the SH contemporary art fair www.shcontemporary.info, galleries, people etc... actually , people wise , it was not a great change from usual as the whole Beijing crew was there! bea, claudia, federica, Douzi etc...
It was such an entertaining game to wander in the huge halls of Shanghai post Stalinian exhibition center; because i don't really work in the contemporary art field but still i know a lot of it , because it' s a sort of bubble where all "laowai" who don't work for a big firm in China find a sort of artificial international shelter runned by westerners who managed to establish in the time of a decade the rules and the prices of what is now the most hypped "art for sale".
Chinese contemporary art is already part of the icons of my subconscious, i recognized its faces and colors like the characters of some fairy tale : the pink smiling faces , the dinosaurs ,the over used chairman Mao , the credit cards... i know all of them but sometimes i forget what they mean, because there are just too much of them!
In the meantime as SH contemporary , the 7th edition of the Shanghai Biennale was taking place in the old and beautifull Shanghai museum of Fine Arts.
Entitled "Translocamotion" , the biennale intented to bring a reflexion on the citie's power of attraction, the migrations they provocated, the human fluxes throughout the planet etc...
A big locomotive was supposed to be a metaphor on the human motions in China today. Back in the 60's-70's this train was taking young intelectuals from the cities to the country side to learn from the peasants . Today it's the other way around , peasants are jumping in those trains without tickets , ready to invade the huge human supermarket that big cities have become in China.
Inside the big hall of the ground floor there was also this huge installation that was a composite vehicule , a mix between a plan, a tractor and a "sanlunche". Next to it there was a display of bags and purcells that was an evocation of migrants camping with their stuffs in front of the train stations....
A huge population of young chinese was strolling around the installations and art works , mainly to take pictures of themselves next to the art , as if it was some kind of "hello kitty" store.
I've heard the average number of visitors was 5000 per day, which is a success of course , but maybe a photo cabin with Yueminjun's dinosaurs as background set up in the middle of People's square would have been enough to fill up the hunger for art of the chinese youth....
well i don't know... who i am to judge...
the thing is that the visit of the biennale was made difficult because of the loads of people there.It made the digestion of all these representations of the current world painfull for the brain.
but actually maybe that's the whole point of these mega exhibitions : they try to grasp a snapshot of the world and end up with an heterogenous display of medias and informations.But i guess it's just a portrait of the world today. Heterogenous , scattered, over populated. Curators and artists are just like you and me , they're just vulnerable witnesses of the signs of the time.
After spending one day in Beijing i took a plane straight to Shanghai to spend a few days checking the SH contemporary art fair www.shcontemporary.info, galleries, people etc... actually , people wise , it was not a great change from usual as the whole Beijing crew was there! bea, claudia, federica, Douzi etc...
It was such an entertaining game to wander in the huge halls of Shanghai post Stalinian exhibition center; because i don't really work in the contemporary art field but still i know a lot of it , because it' s a sort of bubble where all "laowai" who don't work for a big firm in China find a sort of artificial international shelter runned by westerners who managed to establish in the time of a decade the rules and the prices of what is now the most hypped "art for sale".
Chinese contemporary art is already part of the icons of my subconscious, i recognized its faces and colors like the characters of some fairy tale : the pink smiling faces , the dinosaurs ,the over used chairman Mao , the credit cards... i know all of them but sometimes i forget what they mean, because there are just too much of them!
In the meantime as SH contemporary , the 7th edition of the Shanghai Biennale was taking place in the old and beautifull Shanghai museum of Fine Arts.
Entitled "Translocamotion" , the biennale intented to bring a reflexion on the citie's power of attraction, the migrations they provocated, the human fluxes throughout the planet etc...
A big locomotive was supposed to be a metaphor on the human motions in China today. Back in the 60's-70's this train was taking young intelectuals from the cities to the country side to learn from the peasants . Today it's the other way around , peasants are jumping in those trains without tickets , ready to invade the huge human supermarket that big cities have become in China.
Inside the big hall of the ground floor there was also this huge installation that was a composite vehicule , a mix between a plan, a tractor and a "sanlunche". Next to it there was a display of bags and purcells that was an evocation of migrants camping with their stuffs in front of the train stations....
A huge population of young chinese was strolling around the installations and art works , mainly to take pictures of themselves next to the art , as if it was some kind of "hello kitty" store.
I've heard the average number of visitors was 5000 per day, which is a success of course , but maybe a photo cabin with Yueminjun's dinosaurs as background set up in the middle of People's square would have been enough to fill up the hunger for art of the chinese youth....
well i don't know... who i am to judge...
the thing is that the visit of the biennale was made difficult because of the loads of people there.It made the digestion of all these representations of the current world painfull for the brain.
but actually maybe that's the whole point of these mega exhibitions : they try to grasp a snapshot of the world and end up with an heterogenous display of medias and informations.But i guess it's just a portrait of the world today. Heterogenous , scattered, over populated. Curators and artists are just like you and me , they're just vulnerable witnesses of the signs of the time.
mardi 9 septembre 2008
food for thought
Today and yesterday i realised how important it is to do a job you like to do, that fills your brains with content....eheh
"I probably had to shoot these films so as to make the difference to sculpture clearer to me" said Sierra once. well, this summer i did sort of a brainless job and since yesterday i work again at my old job with radical media. We make commercials and short documentaries for the dropping knowledge project. I am in the research group and we mainly look for interesting picture and video material. Today browsed tons of interesting documentary material on globalisation themes and enjoyed it;-
My sister came on visit this weekend. We went to Haus am Waldsee where my future ideal nomadic house is located. Its the loftcube designed by Werner Aisslinger
My friend Leila helped it building, pretty cool I think.
we went for some more culture at KW where there were some nice early video works of Richard Sierra
There is in front of KW also this strange temporary hotel
Marienbad. Apparently it functions as a real hotel and they did concerts inside earlier this year. Its pretty spooky though.
and to show some of the more clichés of Berlin. We went to see some more architecture in the neighbourhood of one of the leftovers from the Berlin Wall at Bernauer Strasse. Bernauer Strasse is one of these typical streets which separates two Berlin's districts: Mitte in the East and Wedding in the West.
dimanche 31 août 2008
Here is a link to Gero's show ping!
Gero is a shopaholic, a dj, in other words , a material girl!
http://www.street-tease.com/shopping/11-le-show-ping-de-gero-01.html
Gero is a shopaholic, a dj, in other words , a material girl!
http://www.street-tease.com/shopping/11-le-show-ping-de-gero-01.html
vendredi 29 août 2008
lulu is getting married
tomorrow is the Big DAY
now she's trying on her last outfits.
i do the comments.
i'm excited and happy for her and a bit blue in the same time.
we'll see tomorrow!
now she's trying on her last outfits.
i do the comments.
i'm excited and happy for her and a bit blue in the same time.
we'll see tomorrow!
mardi 26 août 2008
Coincidence
here's the gooood blog of my Finnish friend Teemu ,more mature than ours of course, but the name is almost like ours! www.otraluna.blogspot.com : for all Brasilian sounds lovers ! check it out !
back in a place we call home
After arriving in downtown Beijing, breathing
the surprisingly fresh blue air, i felt back home immediately;)
seeing my friends back and smoking zhongnanhai, zooming in the taxi
This would be kind of a special trip: a back to china holiday to see the olympics with my parents, organising a street party for the losers of the games in a place called home and climbing the subtropic mountains of fujian province, Wuyishan.
impressions
a stadium
fucking damned glory, would Tere call it, I recorded her sounds
and saved some images
Home Shop Series # 1: Games 2008
My friend Elaine Ho, who is doing this intruiging art blog project iwishicoulddescribeitbettertoyou.org with counterparts in Berlin, Vienna, NY and some other places, organised a series of public private community events called Homeshop series #1: Games 2008.
On www.iwishicoulddescribeitbettertoyou.org/enountersleftovers you can find more on what this Homeshop series is all about.
We came up with the idea to throw sort of a street party for the losers of the Games.
A bunch of people came: friends, neighbours, journalists... we played games, had two olympic tickets to give away to the most average player on the wii games that night. An ayi got it, she was all happy and we as well.
The police called Elaine's landlord, nothing serious, we were just to loud; then we put down the music, and watched some documentaries and short films of Ralf Schmerberg, Elaine Ho, Cao Kai and Renbo.
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