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
jeudi 25 septembre 2008
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.
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