Art events 艺术活动

Arret sur image Paris Sale and Young Artist Prize

The China Click sale is the opportunity to revisit thirty years of Chinese contemporary art, in particular Chinese contemporary photography. The Cheuvreux collection is in effect nothing less than a summary of the history of photography in the People’s Republic.

The proceeds of the sale will go to finance a young artist prize and residency in the Loire valley in the Cheuvreux family domain.

Rong Rong and his first clichés in the East Village, the first artists’ squat; He Yunchang, the most physical Chinese performance artist breaking out of a block of cast cementwith only a mallet, Cang Xin exchanging outfits and lives, or samsara, with people (jockey, artist, waiter, etc) in Barcelona “Identity Exchange,” and once more captured in the iconic "Trampling Faces" photos in which the artist tramples on his own plaster image, and then lets Ma Liuming, another East Village artist hold up the mask as photographed by Rong Rong, a sort of artists’ slight-of-hand. Chen Lingyang, the first feminist and revolutionary photographer, one of the only women, posing in Twelve Flower Months, a powerful, daring inditement of the power of the vulva.

In this exhibition of photographs and charity auction, we also see the first conceptual clichés of Zhen Guogu, from the Guangzhou School, the clique around Vitamin Art Space and He An, a virulent critic of consumer society with his photographic montage and reworking of brand and fashion logos demonstrating the hypocrisy of the modern world.

Dai Guangyu, one of the New Wave pioneers, a poet and painter, drowns himself in an ocean of ink and water expressing the distress of the intellectual caught in the whirlpool of capitalism. There are also the first touching photographs of Liu Wei, the acrobatic performance artist who does his first works in Dashanzi with his wife and child, holding his swaddled baby held high above the Beijing skyscrapers.. many, many years before he suspends himself theatrically in Paris’ Grand Palais. How can one fail to mention the works of Han Bing who so lovingly embraces a bulldozer on the streets of Beijing, positing man against the machine, tradition against modernity in such a heart-rendering pose in which he puts himself at risk with police? The first photo-accumulations of Hong Hao, the first decadence photos of Wu Gaozhong, the photographic collages of Yin Yi, and the first machine photos of Zeng Yicheng. The history of Chinese contemporary photography is little known in the West and is worth a visit—at once one of the great manifestations of Chinese modernity and of a certain quest for identity.

The prestigious Hotel de l’Industrie is located on Saint-Germain-des-Prés square in the very heart of Paris. It is here the Cheuvreux charirity auction and modern and contemporary Asian sale will be held on 7 December, 2016. The artworks will be exhibited in the sale Lumière and sale Chaptal from 3-7 December 2016. An opening cocktail will bring together the luminaries of the Chinese contemporary art world: collectors, critics, museum directors and amateurs on 2nd December 2016.

Cang Xin is known for his artistic performances, rethinking the relationship between man and his environment, both his cultural environment (The Identity and Exchange and Identity as a Tourist and Communication series) and the natural environment (Man and Sky series ). One of the founders of the East village, China’s first artist squat and one of the leading lights of the Beijing art scene, Cang Xin is also a painter and sculptor.

Rong Rong is one of the pioneers of Chinese contemporary photography, documenting the performances of his peers in Beijing East Village. His performances with his wife Inri were also iconic. His work allows us to understand more fully the modest beginnings of other artists Zhang Huan, Ai Weiwei and Ma Liuming. But more than simple records, Rong Rong’s photographs express the 90’s artists’ strength and radical outlook.

He Yunchang has the reputation of an artist used to extremes, using performance to push the limits of his own body. He had himself cast into concrete cube and then broke free, endured a operation democratically voted on, slicing one meter of his body from neck to thigh, and even immolating himself. He Yunchang is a political artist who uses violence to shock the viewer, part of the radical art politics of the early 90s.

Dai Guangyu is a multi-talented artist (calligraphy, poet, photography, performance...), part of the 85 New Wave movement. His conceptual performances traditional Chinese ink and wash, generally limited to brush and paper. He lets ink seep into the ice of a lake, or drip from the roof of a courtyard house, or be painted on someone’s own body, he drowns himself in ink in a German lake, plastering his face white like a character from a Chinese opera. He is one of the most unconventional artists of Beijing today.

Li Wei is an artist world renowned for his acrobatic performances, defying the laws of gravity. Mixing performance and theatrical staging, his photos have a particular energy, they betray a lively creativity and express the humour and absurdity of contemporary urban life.

Hong Hao is a diverse artist. He works with digital photo montage to criticize a consumerist and superficial society. He is most famous for his series of accumulated daily objects («My Things», 2001), staged and photographed with great and minute detail.

He An is a politically revolted photographer. Usingphotomontage and painting to disrupt fashion and brand stereotypes, he criticizes the consumer society and the «Made In China» concept through his art.

Chen Lingyang is one of the first feminist artists in China. She reference Chinese artistic tradition of calligraphy and transforms it into a contemporary photographic work, a self-portrait of her menses, “Twelve Flower Months”. She uses an ancient Chinese form to question contemporary Chinese society and refocus on the themes of intimacy and femininity.

Twelve Flower Months associates genitalia with the traditional flower calendar questioning the taboo of the feminine genitalia and challenging views of the place of women in patriarchal China.

Wu Gaozhong ia part of an earlier generation of multi-talented Chinese artist (painter, installation, sculptor and photographer) in the entourage of the acclaimed critic Li Xianting. His work is more conceptual, like a Surrealist “maître d’oeuvre” for his generation. His Rock and Flower series recreates traditional ceramic gardenlandscapes with organic materials. Allowing them to decay and mould and become truly beautiful, he questions the idea of decadence and the fragility of life itself .

Han Bing is another of the artists of contemporary Beijing whose works is a cry against the inhumanity and the violence of contemporary society. His series “Love in the Age of Big Construction” done in Beijing during the demolition of the hutongs is a self-portrait with a bulldoze, positing man against machine, love against loss, humanity and tradition against modernity and soul-lessness.

Zeng Yicheng work has now changed focusing on more traditional landscape themes. However, his earlier work as a student of CAFA Beijing was interested in man and machine. This series “Man and Machine” questions the impact of Chinese industrialization on the individual and the loss of humanity in the modern age.

中国现代艺术重点

Arrêt sur 影像

中国现代艺术重点

BERTRAND CHEUVREUX 藏品 2016年12月7日晚 7点正

展览 2016年12月3日 – 6日，11点- 7点

Hôtel de l’Industrie

4, Place Saint Germain-des-Prés, Paris

巴黎 - 中国当代艺术将在12月7日由Eve拍卖行在巴黎theHoteldel’Industrie, place Saint -Germain-des-Prés 举行。

这次拍卖的特点于Bertrand Cheuvreux藏品系列的历史系列，其收录了中国当代摄影史的五十幅举足清重的作品。Bertrand Cheuvreux画廊拥有者和收藏家，创办了巴塞罗那阁楼画廊，并与许多中国艺术家紧密合作，直到他在2008年去世。

此次拍卖还包括朱明，赵武基，唐海文，广义，艾未未，郑国谷，荣荣，王克平，毛旭辉，邱志杰，隋建国等重要艺术家的作品。拍卖的另外一个亮点是推介中国新一代现代艺术家：英吉，王林，蔡东东，张磊，更包扩新艺术媒介，卡通艺术家李超雄和李昆武。

拍卖的重要作品之一是艾未未于2007年在德国卡塞尔现代艺术展会展现的十张椅子，一个名为《童话》，由1001张椅子组成的大型行为艺术的一部分，艾未未從自己的博客中募集了一千零一位中國人参于其中。这个社会政治“现成”的艺术行为因其高昂成本已震惊了整个艺术界：《童话》是艾未未在2007年德国卡塞尔现代艺术展会的400万美元项目一部分。

每张《童话》椅子均有编号，售价从1至2万欧元不等。

中国当代艺术场景在这次拍卖会上呈献了其所有的活力和创造力，展现了1990 - 2000年间中国当代艺术在其高峰期最重要的一批艺术家。

拍卖将巴黎的Hôtel del’Industrie的卢米埃尔大厅（Lumière hall）举行，此大厅原为电影院，卢米埃尔兄弟（lumiere brothers）在此首映了他们的第一部电影《工廠大門》（La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière a Lyon）。

BERTRAND CHEUVREUX 系列

中国当代摄影和中国行为艺术的历史在西方是鲜为人知的。 Bertrand Cheuvreux 系列丰富了我们的视野，并展现了该时期的一些标志性的历史照片。

巴塞罗那阁楼画廊创始人和收藏家Bertrand Cheuvreux（1953-2008）是90年代中国艺术家的殷切信徒。他在中国花了几个月与艺术家建立友谊，并且想将他门的作品呈献给西方。

某些作品体现了这种共谋：沧行的身份交换系列-艺术家在巴塞罗那的一个行为艺术表演，由阁楼画廊赞助，在那里他与西班牙城市的居民交换身份拍摄了一系列照片。

阁楼画廊还导演了一个标志性表演“践踏面具”的再制作，在那里，艺术家将自己脸上的面具碾压在脚下，重现何云昌的作品：铸 Casting。

.由荣荣拍摄的“东村第一张照片”，由何云昌演出，沧行著名的身份交换系列和陈灵阳的女权主义革命系列《十二花月》等，很多Cheuvreux 收藏系列现在被认为是艺术史的一个重要组成部分。

我们还呈现诗人和行为艺术家戴光宇的“墨水游戏”，韩冰的“大建筑时代的爱情”系列，艺术家将自己赤裸身躯与摧毁北京古老胡同的推土机对立，吴高中的“腐烂的水果，腐朽的风景”，英怡的有趣的拼贴画“城市风景“，等等。

FDCA：现代艺术发展基金会

FDCA于2007年由Bertrand Cheuvreux创立，目的是推广中国现代艺术，并在西方培养更多了解中国现代艺术的欣赏者。 FDCA至力奉行 Bertrand Cheuvreux的目的，促进和传播中国艺术，使其能够在欧洲广被认受，并与旧大陆建立联系。

中国现代青年摄影奖

大奖为将此次拍买收益资助一位年轻的中国（或中国籍）摄影师。一众蓝筹股艺术家一向垄断欧洲的中国艺术市场，中国现代青年摄影奖旨在搜寻和资助能逆转这一趋势的年轻人才。

该奖项将于2017年10月颁发，地点容后公布。

Like Thunder Out of China

邱节韩冰艾未未常磊谷文达鲁飞飞吴俊勇洪慧高翔张洹何云昌戴光郁

Cang Xin Chang Lei Dai Guangyu

Gao Brothers Gao Xiang Gu Wenda

Han Bing He Yunchang Hung Tunglu

Lu Fei Fei Wu Junyong Zhang Huan

with the launch of Ai Wei Wei’s book Ai Wei Wei-isms

Chinese artists have always been considered “zhishifenzi” 知识分子, “men with thunder and lightning at their heels”. They have always been the critics, the moral safeguards of society. Restrained yet spurred on by dictatorship, artists in China have never waivered, insisting on talking about the real issues such as massive urbanization, the one child policy, the legacy of Mao, the overwhelming burden of propaganda on people’s lives, the imprisonment and exile of dissidents such as Ai Wei Wei. Others have decided to go beyond politics, and adress issues of spiritual fulfilment and love. Perhaps this ever so subtle shift is part and parcel of the modernization China is undergoing, the artist themselves have changed, focusing inward to a new reality, the relaity of the self. This exhibition attempts to give a bird’s eye view of the Chinese contemporary art landscape, a glimpse into what artists or as they used to be called « the literati »are thinking and feeling in the Middle Kingdom.

In the past ten years, China has undergone transformations more overwhelming than twenty Western-style « industrial revolutions ». The Confucian family structure has been dismantled, Buddhist doctrine has been let go, old architecture and temples have been bulldozed to make way for a unstable future, an edifice built too quickly and structurally unsound. Even the essence of the original Communist ideal, that of a people’s republic seems to have been lost, making way for a capitalist/Communist mélange, a breeding ground for corruption, inequality and injustice.

In the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake in 2009, Ai Wei Wei, criticizing the flimsy constructions of schools that left hundreds dead, many children; installed a wall graffiti at Documenta made of children’s backpacks that spelt out: “She lived happily on this earth for seven years.” His statement has far reaching implications, questioning the state’s responsibility in the disaster, endangering himself in the process (his online list of the dead leading to his incarceration) and daring to make a political statement using art. Ai Wei Wei’s book of changyu or proverbs, the little black book, are to present-day China what Pascal’s Pensées and Voltaire’s Lettres philisophoques are to Europe.

Other artists are just as bold. The Gao Brothers’ Miss Mao, which parodies the “Great Leader” representing him as a young voluptuous girl with a long braid and voluptuous breasts, has been forbidden in China. Several Miss Maos, or Mao xiaojie, also a derogatory term referring to courtesans and prostitutes, have been confiscated en route to international exhibitions. The Gaos are artist dissidents, a new breed born in the post-Mao era. Criticizing Mao is still paramount to treason, fifty years after the birth of the PRC, twenty years after his death. Miss Mao is to China what Warhol’s Brillo Broxes are to America, a reflection of the subconscious of a nation, subliminal perception.

Chang Lei, a former “yaogun” or rockstar is also not of the faint-hearted. His “Animal Farm” photograph has also never been exhibited in China. The Forbidden City features as a gigantic Noah’s ark, with all of China’s Communist leaders and army generals watching an unreal scene taking place in front of them on Tiananmen Square, a strange meeting of animals, seemingly chaotic and agitated, with Chang Lei’s naked body as the center of depiction, his hands held over his ears, like in Edward Munch’s scream. Animals tend to gather when there is a storm coming, unknown chaos and uncertainty, revolution. Chang Lei’s dreamlike digital creation is ominous.

Chang Lei’s series on propaganda, featuring pictures of young children next to the calligraphy of Maoist leaders, Deng Xiaoping through to Jiang Zemin, points to the impossible weight of propaganda, shaping generations of people and molding them forever.

Qiu Jie’s “Woman and Leader” as well as “Two Swallows” points to the humorous side of “political pop”, growing up with Marxist-Leninism and loving/hating it. His large scale pencil drawings called dazibao or “propaganda posters”set the scene for a childhood on the Yangtze, traditional life in the teahouses, gardens, of old Shanghai, echoes of the past with acrobats, majiang games and dumpling vendors but with Communist heroines lording over it all, such as the femme fatale or the woman electrician. The backdrop to his childhood reveries and life are the sleeping giant, politics.

Wu Junyong’s video “Cloud Nightmare” is a masterpiece of a master paper cutter, the desuet Chinese art. Yet he uses the most cutting edge medium, video to make these characters come to life. Wu’s characters are brainless politicians, spouting useless propaganda masqueraded as Chinese mythology. They “call a stag a horse” as the Chinese say and the stag, appears and re-appears, a motif in this dream sequence. The men, who look like the Communist party cadres, convened at the People’s Congress, advance like blind men leading the blind. They sit on wobbly palanquins. Wu’s dragon is on fire, a taboo in old China where dragons are always considered immortal.

Lu Fei Fei’s young girls in her photographs, are a mirror of her own experience. She was one the many “elder sisters”, undocumented children, unregistered either as residents or in school because their parents desired a boy. She denounces a cultural practice that has made her obsolete.

As for He Yunchang, Ai Wei Wei’s clique, his performance using his body as a tool to test democracy speaks for itself. The incision practiced on his body, one meter for democracy, voted on by friends, is chilling and very real. The scar is still visible years later in “Ai Wei Wei bikini” in which he poses with nude models, all wearing the dissident’s face on their private parts. ‘The government opposes pornography and politics, why no do both?’ the artist states.

Dai Guangyu is also part of the first generation of Chinese artists, the Chinese “new wave”, who started creating around the summer of 89. A calligrapher and poet, his work bring the traditional aesthetic into the contemporary realm. “His Landscape on Ice”, shanshui and fengshui are part of a performance he did in Germany and China, reminiscent of the technique of the Buddhist and Taoists who use water to paint ephemeral poetry on the stone slabs of temples and palaces. Dai Guangyu’s ink paintings on ice, will disappear when the spring comes, creations reflecting the impermanence of sensorial experience.

Cang Xin, one of the founders of the East Village with Zhang Huan and Rong Rong, the first artist squat outside the Yuanminyuan palace, has never been one for too many words. As an shy art student, he found it difficult to communicate and instead decided to start a series of works called “Communication” licking things with his tongue. If he could not speak, he felt, he must enter into some sort of dialogue with the universe or people.

Later, his work assumed a shamanistic side. Cang Xin decided to posit himself as the shaman, intermediary between the universe and man, the ultimate role for the artist. In doing so, he also re-asserts the power of the individual in a society where all egos are crushed to make way for the collective consciousness. Cang Xin, wears an amulet of his own face, his shaved head, distinguing himself as an artist

His giant Chinese-style scrolls in pencil are a self portrait, the artist becomes a demi-god, sitting cross-legged, in a Buddhist position, on the back of a qilin, a Chinese unicorn (identified by its scaly skin, dragon’s head), symbol of happiness and good fortune and a tortoise, symbol of Chinese longevity.

In Han Bing's "New Culture Movement" photo series, laborers, old people, and even school children, stand in front of the camera, like peons in a chess game, a red brick in their hands reminiscent of the little red book.

It is ironic that these villagers still believe in the Maoist dream of a brick house for all. In a China where glass and steel skyscrapers have overtaken the landscape, the rural working classes are lagging centuries behind the city dwellers. Han Bing did not set up these photos, the people he took photos of, are plainly and almost naively speaking of their dreams and aspirations, clinging to an ideology and a culture that has been left behind in the rush for modernization. They have no notion of what the modern era holds.

Hung Tunglu’s three-dimensionalmanga Buddhas printed on hologram paper stand for the spiritual, religions that have been stamped out in the global rat race. Having studied Renaissance art and the Madonnas of Bellini and Giotto, Hung Tunglu is fascinated by the meditative power of icons. His Buddha which moves as one approaches and moves away, allow the audience toreach the higher meditative plane, escape from reality and the world of suffering and temptations.

The video art of Waza Collective, Anonymous, Cao Fei, Hong Wai, is part of the new generation’s struggle to analyze the present. Hip hop, illegal surgeries, nuclear winter, are all part and parcel of the harsh Chinese reality.

In this respect, Gao Xiang’s red bride is a sort of postface to the exhibition. The little man in a Mao blue jacket is the artist himself, a toy prey for his muse and romance. The title, sardonic, is about freedom of the individual, as much as human freedom: “Who is the Doll?”

Pia Camilla Copper

Curator, Like Thunder Out of China

CANG XIN CV

born in 1967 in Heilongjiang

one of the founders of the Yuanminyuan East Village squat with Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, Rong Rong and others.

part of the 1995 performance of bodies piled nude on top of one another “Add a Meter to an Anonymous Mountain” in Beijing

extremely timid, spoke very little as an artist so decided to do performance and even a communication series where he licked all things, animate and inanimate, in order to engage in a dialogue

a shaman

has bathed with lizards, worn other people’s clothing“to get into their skin”, lay on icy glaciers, and bathed in lotuses all to become an Other

sculptor, photographer, performer, painter, draftsman

the only one to speak the language of spirituality in China today

went to Tianjin school of music in the 1980s

autodidact

He has participated in exhibitions such as “Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China” (Seattle Art Museum), “Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China”, the David and Alfred Smart Museum (Chicago), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) and the First Guangzhou Triennale, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangdong, “Charming China”, (Bangkok Museum), “Chinese Contemporary Sotsart”, (The State Treyakov Gallery, Moscow), “Spellbound Aura”, Taipei Photography Museum of Contemporary Art, “Virtual Future”, Guangdong Museum of Art, “Hong Kong Chinese Contemporary Photography Exhibition”, Hong Kong Art Center, “Chinese Avant-Garde Art in the ’90s”, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Today Art Museum, the Zhu Qizhan Museum, Red Mansion Foundation, “Zhuyi!” at La Vireinna, (Barcelona).

Cang Xin, on the subject of his giant scrolls, November 2012, interview by Pia Camilla Copper

When did you become an artist?

I consider that I became an artist (a performance artist) when I first arrived in the “East Village” district in Beijing in 1993. Before then, I had only had a slight experience of different art practices from outside of China. I have to say that I did not have a clear idea about art at that time until Ma Liuming, Zhang Huan and I met up in the East Village and started doing performance experiments.

Where did you go to school?

I first when to school in Tianjin studying music and lyric-writing. But that was not a very satisfactory experience, thus I moved to the visual arts and started painting.

Where were you born?

I was born in in Baotou, a city in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China.

Which part of China influenced your work the most?

I would say Inner Mongolia, the place of my ancestral origin. This is the source of my later fascination with shamanism.

Are your scrolls inspired by Mayan art?

Yes, partially Perhaps, the Chinese civilization and the Mayan civilization are very much interconnected We do not know how close China has come to South America

Why represent the artist as a god? To destroy old gods? Or to counter ideologies like communism?

The artist is not god but the representation of a shaman, a medium between the gods and humanity; they have nothing to do with destruction and communism I am just representing myself as a shaman.

What does this say about your relation to the universe?

In ancient Eastern spiritual belief systems, all things have spirit, ling, and humans are merely a part of this big system There is no boundary between life and non-life – they are interchangeable, but that requires a middle person – a medium – a shaman to engineer this exchange so that an un-inhibited crossing (flow) can take place freely through the physics of time and space, and in turn maintain the perfect harmony of the universe as a whole This series of drawings is to humanize the medium, the middle person, and in due process to represent my own individuality.

Why do you often represent yourself? as an affirmation of the individual?

My whole art practice springs from my performance art Performance art uses the artist’s body to express artistic concepts, so these works [drawing series] are traces of the way in which I understand my own body, and they are also an affirmation of my own body and my own identity…

How do you do you do these gigantic scroll drawings, on a scaffold?

These works were made with the paper laid flat on the ground and drawn in a crouching position

Why the use of traditional scroll?

Because this way of presentation pertains to a certain Eastern aesthetic and Chinese tradition.

DAI GUANGYU CV

born in in 1955 in Chengdu, China

lives and works in Beijing, China

part of New Wave 85 Chinese art movement

calligrapher historian father

autodidact

calligrapher, painter, photographer, performer

invented “ink games” submerging himself in, eating, drinking, shooting at ink and drawn on, recomposed, thrown away and repasted ink paintings

has done extreme performances such as “Incontinence” (2005), “A Sheep Lecture on Chinese Contemporary Art” (2007)

His works have been exhibited and collected by Duolun MoMA (Shanghai), Louisiana Museum, (Humlebaek, Denmark) Guangdong Museum of Art, Chinese Arts Centre (Manchester), Macau Art Museum, China Millennium Monument Art Museum,National Gallery, (Kuala Lumpur), Hong Kong Art Commune, Mantova Museum (Italy), Faust Museum, (Hannover), Chengdu Museum of Modern Art and at such historic exhibitions as “China!” (Museum of Modern Art,Bonn),”The First Biennale of Chinese Art in the 90's” (Central Hotel, Guangzhou) and the first ever Chinese contemporary exhibition, “China Avant-Garde Art Exhibition”in 1989, subsequently held at Chinese National Art Gallery, Beijing.

Dai Guangyu on his ice calligraphy, January 2013, interviewed from Beijing

When did you execute the first ice calligraphy or shanshui (landscape)? How do you do them?

“Landscape ink on ice” was executed in the winter of 2004 in Germany and “Geomancy (Fengshui) ink on ice” was carried immediately afterward, on some frozen lakes in Beijing.
Chinese characters are written with ink on the icy surface, and over time, with the changing of seasons, they vanish before our eyes, and along with them the meaning, which they carry, vanishes. Through this performance, I want to point to the ephemeral nature of things, fragility of all that which is. Only if we are able to treat these basic realities with an undisturbed mind, can we understand the nature of all things, the basic fabric of life.

Why is calligraphy so important to Chinese culture?
Snow, ice and the Chinese characters, together, allude to Chinese culture; they become part of a cultural landscape.
As an example, geomancy, or feng shui, in the original sense of the term and its connotations, when set against a background of snow and ice, evokes the relentlessness of change in nature, the inconstancy of all which is. Through this, I want to express the certainty of the aleatory, which is beyond the influence of human willpower - all this belongs in the thought system of the I Ching or Book of Changes.
To write characters with a specific sense/meaning with ink on ice, then to watch them transform until they have vanished entirely, there is a lot of depth in this experience.

You have made a number of important performances in China, can you explain them and their importance to your way of thinking. “Incontinence” (done in 2005 at 798) featured you white-faced and in a business suit hanging by a noose in gallery holding a chicken. The second “Floating Object” (2006), saw you immerse yourself in water, dressed in the same way, business suit and white paste on your face.

“Incontinence” and “Floating Object” were executed around the same time (or at least there was not much time between their execution). They express, on one hand, the system of capitalist privilege (the first), and a sense of mourning of cultural loss, drainage (the latter). Both works contain very strong political allusions. The chicken in “Incontinence” represents China (we say the shape of the Chinese map resembles a chicken); the identity of the drowned man in “Floating Object” is deliberately left indistinct, because in reality, it is just as anonymous, it is just like that.
Formally, the inspiration for “Floating Object” is taken from the painting “Ophelia” by the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais. But the drowning Ophelia still remembers her lover, and sings as she drowns, whereas the drowned man in “Floating Object” is drifting diagonally, not singing - but deprived of all sign of life; this is the state of Chinese culture today.

QIU JIE CV

Born in 1961 in Shanghai

Went to Shanghai School of Decorative arts and Geneva Ecole des Beaux Arts

Founder of the political pop art movement I Shanghai with Yu Youhan, Liu Dahong

Lives between Shanghai and Geneva

A romantic Blaise Pascal who recordsjournal of daily life in his drawings,

the tea he drinks, the music he listens to, etc

Works on giant dazibao pencil drawings meters high for months at a time

Invented the “Mao” cat making fun of the homonym

Prefers small-format oils

Has had solo shows at Shanghai Museum MOCA Show (most recently December-January 2013),

Arario Gallery, Hanart Gallery Hong Kong;

Has participated in famous shows such as “The Revolution Continues”, Saatchi Gallery

(London), “Borderless” Shanghai MOCA , Discover-Rediscover, Rath Museum (Geneva),

solo show on now (December –February 2012-13) at Shanghai MOCA,

Museum of Contemporary Art, Basel (with Ai Wei Wei)

Qiu Jie on his dazibao drawings, September 2011, interview by Pia Camilla Copper

Describe what the Two Swallows dazibao means to you? And the Mao cat?

“The Two Swallows” represents two Chinese working class heroines They are so capable, they can almost fly!

As for the Mao Cat, mao in Chinese also means cat So, this drawing is either the president or a cat! Whichever you prefer! The drawing is a play on words and a game at the same time

Why would you say your art is controversial?

As an artist who has lived in Europe for twenty years it is evident that my work is controversial in China and also in Europe where there is a cultural divide I am not a ‘real’ Chinese; but I am also not a ‘real’ European My home is in Geneva and my studio is in Shanghai My drawings bear the signature of a man with two identities I sign my work “the man who comes from the mountains”

What are some of the common themes you touch on in your work?

The common recurring themes in my work are the confrontation between cultures, East and West and nostalgia

Can you tell us how your childhood and the Cultural Revolution in particular has informed your art?

I think that our generation of artists is deeply marked by the influence of the Cultural Revolution There will always be a moment when we, as artists, touch upon this subject because it is a part of our history, our childhood and our experience

Do you, as an artist, still feel scared to express yourself under the watchful eye of Chinese authorities?

Over the past ten years the government and government controls are loosening One can always exhibit in private galleries But in state museums, it is still quite strict and controlled There is however still room to negotiate and discuss exhibiting works

What about China and your culture makes you proud to be Chinese?

Five thousand years of history and Chinese characters: I am very proud that such an ancient culture is coming to terms with modernity. It’s like a very old tree growing new branches and buds.

How would you describe the China of the future?

Very uncertain A lot of problems linked to rapid development As a Chinese person, I want the errors to be rectified The first issue is the environment because a centralized Communist state can develop grandiose things that have never been done before But the reverse side of the coin is that these things can have an impact on the equilibrium of the planet we live on But I have hope for my country and that enthusiastic hope is that they find innovative solutions for the future.

GAO BROTHERS CV

Gao Zhen 1956 Born in Jinan, Shandong
Gao Qiang 1962 Born in Jinan, Shandong

pair of artists brothers based in Beijing

doinginstallation, performance, sculpture, photography works and writing since the mid-1980s.works are exhibited and collected by Kemper Museum Of Contemporary Art(Kansas), Centre Pompidou, (Paris), The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Princeton University Art Museum, Wall Art Museum,Beijing. TSUM,Moscow, The State Tretyakov Museum (Moscow), Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art (Thessaloniki), Victoria and Albert Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art (Chicago), He Xiangning Art Museum (Shenzhen), Guangzhou Art Museum, National Gallery & Chinese Pavilion (Albania), the Espace d' Art Contemporain of La Rochelle, Fukuoka Art Museum, and the National Art Museum, Beijing, China.

What is the significance of Miss Mao?

In the sculpture Miss Mao, we see a bizarre image: Mao’s sacred image as the leader and as a great man in Communist Party propaganda and within the collective memory of the people has been altered, from an idol into a funny doll which has the nose of Pinocchio, the pigtail of a Manchu lord, the breasts of a young woman, This work exposes the truth that Mao’s politics are a lie. Miss Mao is the irony of Mao and his system and the people fooled by Mao’s politics.Miss Mao has been exhibited all over the world and attracted the ire of the Chinese authorities. It has been blocked and confiscated several times by Chinese customs. Our studio was forced to be closed to public because of Miss Mao.

Why the giant canvasses of OBL? OBL has always been a very mysterious public figure. Although he frequently appeared in newspapers, magazines, on television, the internet and other media, our knowledge about him has always remained limited. We aim to inspire people to delve into the real nature of bin Laden. What kind of person was he? How was his childhood? How did he turn into the person we all know today? How big are the differences between the bin Laden reported by the media and the real bin Laden? And what kind of impact did he really have on the world?”

HAN BING CV

born in 1974 in Jiangsu

often features himself in his work, self portraits

began drawing in the dirt with pieces of broken glass, because his family could not afford

art supplies

studied oil painting in college, then to the prestigious Chinese Central Academy of Art.

In Beijing notices the gulf between the rich city and poor countryside

photographer, video artist, performer, painter, sculptor

has “walked the cabbage” in LA, NY, Paris, Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo, San Fransisco,

Oakland and beyond

Han Bing answers questions, December 2012, interview Pia Copper

How did you come to be an artist?

I have been drawing since I was three years old, so I think I was an artist fromthe beginning even before knowing there was such a thing called “artist”.

Where did you go to art school?

I studied in a local university near my hometown in Jiangsu province and then came to Beijing's CAFA Central Academy of Fine Arts (best school in China) to continue my studies.

Where were you born?
I was born into a large family and raised in a village in the north of Jiangsu province, close to the harbor.

What part of China most influenced your work?

I'm deeply influenced by the fringe, where rural and urban meet, where Chinese culture is suffering great changes full of contradictions because of modernization. I am interested in common villagers left by the new modern life style. There is also the issue of people and their relationship with earth, are also been alienated, from their land, their roots.

How did you first come to Beijing? Can you tell us a story about this?
I resigned my job as an art teacher in Jiangsu and made a performance next to the sea, and left the countryside for good. I came to Beijing to continue my studies and do art works.
What inspired you to start the Walk the Cabbages Series? What is the importance of liubaicai to the Chinese peasantry?
The reason for “Walking the Cabbage” has been changing year by year. Every Chinese person has a memory related to the cabbage. Since I was a child, I've been working in the fields, sowing and harvesting Chinese cabbages and selling them in the big city. In the big cities, people buy and stock up on cabbages for the winter. The liubaicai can be kept for a long time and its the cheapest vegetable in China. It is a sort of identity badge for Chinese people. In the beginning of my performances with the cabbage, I didn't use a leash, I used a red thread which I didn’t hold it in my hand. The thread was attached to my clothes, this represented the connection between the cabbage and I. I started walking the cabbage in Beijing where I was a foreigner, a stranger and used this action to relate to people. The presence of the cabbage was a sort of friend or company. Later, this performance developed more complex and varied meanings.

Where have you walked the cabbage?
All over China, in the cities and in the countryside. It was an ongoing performance. For two years I would walk a cabbage every day, no matter where, I was and it became part of my everyday life. I've also walked the cabbage in other countries, France, Belgium, England, USA, Japan and Korea.

What is the significance of the Mating Season Series?

The Mating Season Series represent the emotional crisis of modern society. It brings out the importance of feelings, transforming hard into soft (hugging stones, kissing knifes). This performance rejects apathy.

Why do you caress such household objects as shovels, bricks, and shoes?

Daily necessities are in close contact with people's lives. I'm aware some people would think the objects I choose are too common, I believe these objects are the most sacred ones; they are directly connected to the way we build our lives. They represent people's labour, but labour without love can result in many problems (see Love in the Big Construction). We must embrace these objects and with the same attitude, we will find it easier to face environment issues and other important aspects in our existence.

Where did the term New Culture Movement originate?

A hundred years ago the intellectuals in Qing Dynasty generated a movement called “New Culture”, rejecting traditional customs and bringing in new and “Westernized” ones. Later on, Mao Zedong also led a Cultural Revolution, once again “culture” is present but this movement was more government-related. Finally, in the early 80s, Deng Xiaoping leaded what was called “the reform and opening-up policy”. Even though these three movements were initiated in different times by different kinds of people (intellectuals, labourers, officials, capitalists and bureaucrats) they have in common their origin, they were started by the elite. The symbol of an intellectual is a book, Mao's red book whereas the red brick symbolizes reform.

Where did you take these photographsfor New Culture and why are the people so keen to hold the bricks, what does it mean for them?
I've taken pictures in the countryside and in the cities in China, since the “New Culture Movement” is happening in a rural and urban context. For them, bricks represent their life, what they do for a living and how they exist in the world, it also shows that they've abandoned labour in the fields and become part of the city culture. They hold the bricks in their everyday life. So when I asked them to take picturesof them holding brick, it didn’t feel in any way strange to them.

Is China building a land of equality for all?
Obviously not equal for all.

What do you feel are the most important issues for China today?
There are many subjects of concern. I think the end of traditional culture, the schism with the past is something that we need to pay attention to. This includes the loss of traditional costume, customs, and is more deeply related to issues such as human rights and ecological issues

[from other interviews with Maya Kovskaya]

What inspires you?

Love, labour and liberation. People who struggle and still maintain their dignity. People who think and care and have the courage to act on their principles. Art that engages real peoples' real lives and provokes genuine emotion, intellectual growth and new commitment. Art that takes place in society and belongs to the public sphere, not just in galleries and before the eyes of elites.

How does it feel to be a young artist from the country in the city? Is that something you have in common with any other artists here in China ?

When I first came to the city, I was shocked by the life here. People worked like machines, squeezed together in subways, on the streets. Life was chaotic and loud and filled with pollution, noise, garbage, crowding, complicated interpersonal relationships, people struggling and striving, sometimes doing anything to get ahead.

I felt this enormous desire brewing in the city's quest for so-called “development.” What especially struck me was the pervasive power of this desire—desire for survival, desire for material, desire for power, desire for fame—propelling people forward and driving them to do all manner of things.

Life in the city is not as simple as life in the country. But while rural life is in many ways much harder than city life (physically), most rural people have fatalistic attitudes towards their lots in life, and so until recently, until the onset of progressive urbanization, people didn't have such pronounced desires, and so in some ways were more at peace.

Like so many rural migrants, I came to the city with a tiny amount of money in my pocket. Although I was lucky to be attending an Advanced Studies program at the Central Academy, I felt an affinity to those other migrants who came seeking their fortunes. The city was so unyielding, and the locals were so filled with prejudice towards migrants. In some ways, Beijing was a very unwelcoming city.

The place I first lived was Xibajianfang before it was demolished (not far from where 798 is now). It was an enclave of migrants, merchants, small-time prostitutes, manual laborers, hourly workers. My neighbors in the courtyard, which was located next to a stinking garbage infested river, included a vegetable merchant couple in one room, 9 petty thieves who lived together in another 12 sq meter room, and an older thief couple who look in apprentices, next to us. I was lucky to have a room all to myself.

Because my family had to struggle to take care of my four other siblings and grandparents, I lied and told them I had a full scholarship. In fact, when I first arrived, after paying rent and buying basic living supplies, I had no other way to survive (unless I chose to join my neighbors in petty crime), but sell some cheap items, like pens and pads of paper, spread out on a piece of cloth on the ground of a pedestrian overpass. I didn't even have the money to buy a pot to cook food in. I ate what I could afford—usually one steamed bun a day. The thieves sometimes shared their vegetables with me. When I finally made enough money to buy a little coal burner, and a pot, I made some rice. At the time I remember thinking it was the most delicious thing I'd ever eaten. But the next day when I returned from class, my coal burner, pot, and 7 oil paintings had all been stolen. All I had left was a head of Chinese cabbage. It was one of the loneliest days of my life. I began to think about what cabbage really means to so many ordinary Chinese people.

My background is something that differentiates me from most of the artists in the contemporary scene. Most artists actually come from cities, or towns, but very few from rural villages. I think most of all my rural background and experience when I first came to Beijing, made me especially sensitive to the plight of ordinary people, and able to work with them as equals rather than treating them as objects of pity or disdain from a safe distance, as some people do. For some reason, in Chinese contemporary art, there is very little work that deals with the everyday lives and concerns of the vast majority of the population—peasants. Anything regarding peasants is often relegated to the category of documentary work, rather than conceptual, contemporary art. The majority here in China, then, is marginalized. In art as in life, these people have little in the way of “discursive power,”(huayu quan) they have no space of their own in the public sphere and when they are represented, it is usually from a considerable distance. Urbanization is treated as a problem of cities, but in reality, the process and effects of urbanization are intimately tied up with the rural situation in China. It is rural people who are building the New China. They are not simply the objects of “development,” they are the ones carrying out the backbreaking labour of it. Ironically, there is little space for them and their concerns in this New China, just as migrant construction workers will never live in the fancy high-rises they build. This isn't just a Chinese problem, it's a problem that I think most of the Third World has faced or is facing as it is transformed.

GAO XIANG CV

born in 1971 in Kunming, China

first a teacher at Yunnan Art lnstitute, then received his Ph.D of Fine Arts from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2008

studies GiorgioMorandi's painting

artworks collected by Shanghai Zhengda Art Museum, China Century Museum, Yong He Art Museum, Ling Sheng Art Institute, Yuan Art Museum, Huangtie Time Art Museum, Yunnan Art Museum, Taiwan 85 Star Art Center, Norway Vestfossen Art Museum Guangzhou Art Museum

Gao Xiang comments on his canvasses the Red Bride Series and their relation to surrealism, December 2012

In your Red Bride Series, the bride is a surrealist apparition larger than life? The artist (yourself) is a tiny dwarf in her hands. Why the strange perspective?

I feel that it is natural and comfortable to draw the bride much bigger than me in the Who is the Doll? series of paintings. Although the perspective is far from real life, but it is very close to my psychological reality.

Are you inspired by the surrealists, or other Western painters?

Yes, I am inspired by surrealists like Paul Delvaux, His works are fascinating, between reality, dream and sexual desire. Also Giorgio Morandi. His works are so spiritual, the still lifes are real objects but they are beyond reality and acquire spiritual and religious meaning.

Explain why red is such an important colour in China.

Red is a cultural totem and represents the spirit in traditional China. Red is also connected to the elements: fire, the sun and thus life. In the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220) and Ming dynasty (1368－1644) two important dynasties, red represented the South and the government came from South. Only the royal family was allowed to use red at that time. So, the red became a very special colour and represented power. In the 20th century, red represents revolution and power as well. The Chinese used to love and respect red. We still take red very seriously.

The artist still wears a blue Mao outfit, why is this?

The artist always wears a blue Zhongshan or Mao suit because it represents the officials, those in power. The suit was designed by Sun Zhonshan (Sun Yatsen) and represents Chinese political official style. Many famous figures such as Jiang Zhongzheng, Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping wore this kind of suit. Westerners call it a Mao suit because they associate it with the Great Leader. Before 1980, it was the official wardrobe of all the Chinese. It has a very Chinese feeling about it.

Do you feel that women in China have gone backwards, from feminist Communist heroines to dolls and muses?

I have not thought of this before. From my perspective, this series of works does not seek to an answer but rather to ask a more complicated question. Why does the painter (me) keep asking the question “Who is the doll?” although the paintings show the bride bigger than the artist on the canvass. The painter is not exactly certain of the scene he has witnessed in the painting. In fact, I wonder if I am talking more about the relationship and balance of power between female and male from my own psychological perspective.

What do you think is the single most important factor in Chinese development? What has changed since Maoist times?

Today, I think that the culture factor is the single most important factor in Chinese development. Compared with Maoist times, China is much more open and is developing economic at great speed. But, education and culture are not developing as quickly. China is putting the emphasis on economics and ignoring the culture factor and the value of culture these past thirty years. Now, there are a lot of problems because of this and it is a great pity.

Your work features a curtain, is the curtain signifying life as a representation, “all the world's a stage”?

Because I participated invarious performance projects in Southeast Asia, I used to express my feeling by representing the stage in my paintings. The curtain also provides meaning and feeling.

How did you come to be an artist? Where did you go to school? Where were you born? What part of China most influenced your work?

I was born in Kunming, Yunnan Province. My father, two uncles and one aunt are all painters, so I studied painting early. It was a natural; I started with my father at age ten. From my three to seven years of age, I enjoyed drawing and paintings on the wall. I could only reach the wall when my parents went to work in the factory. They were angry and punished me but kept drawing this kind ofwall fresco as soon as they went out. From 1990 to 1994, I studied at the Yunnan Art institute and became a teacher in the same institute when I graduated. From 1997 to 2000 and 2003 to 2008, I studied oil painting at theChina Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing where I did myMA and PhD. I was very influenced early on by the natural landscape ofYunnan, Chinese traditional literati paintings and the early Buddhist Silk Road frescos of Dunhuang and Yungang.

CHANG LEI CV

born in Jinan Shandong

rock musician turned artist

painter, photographer

born 1977

exhibited at “[UN] forbidden city” MAC RO (Rome), Wall art Museum China, “Breathe” A Shandong Art Museum

personal music album The Setting Sun

penned poem- novel Mr The Setting Sun, Finished

main character the elephantor “Xiang » in Chinesemeaning appearances or the Communist party

often features himself in his work

Chang Lei on his Mirror images series and on being one of a pack of China’s rock stars converted to an artist, like Zuxiao Xuzhou and others.

How did you come to be a painter ?

I liked painting when I was little and still love it now. A few years after my university studies, I started to be a part of the rock and roll music scene. It is a pleasant memory.

Your series Mirror Images is a series of canvasses with calligraphy by Chinese presidents and then, a representation of a person or an elephant below? What does this mean?

“Inscription” or calligraphy in Chinese history is a cultural phenomenon. It is a symbol of power in most cases, it is also a symbol of “class” and “hierarchy”. If an inscription is the calligraphy of people in power, it takes on a political meaning. Take “China Mirror Images- New Men with Four Merits” for example. Deng Xiaoping writes in his own hand that one must “select and train successors with idealism, morals, culture and discipline for the great proletarian revolutionary cause”. He wrote this phrase for the Chinese Young Pioneer League on its 40th anniversary in 1980. He asks the children of China to become the new champions of the proletarian revolutionary cause. People were forcibly brainwashed and forced to accept his ridiculous ideology. This kind of calligraphy became a sort of command in the form of a political slogan. But what was the reality? It turned out to be a total disaster after Deng's economic reform, the lagging behind of education, the rigidity of thinking, high tuition rates, inequality of education, lack of resources and corruption in the education system. Children brought up in this environment became cynical, demoralized, furthermore they were uneducated, leading the society to the verge of collapse. The elephant in China Mirror Image ridicules Deng's inscriptions. The smoking kid in the painting makes the viewers panicky and anxious. Is this the future?

Another example is “China Mirror Image-Long March Poem”, written by Mao Zedong after the Long March. Mao treated people brutally and cruelly, even those who had fought bravely alongside him, even the youngest soldiers who died anonymously. Some are disabled for life and have little living support. So the Long March poem appears to be even more ridiculous and cruel. Mao disdained the world and was only a “smiling” Peron, a tyrant. The elephant is a homonym for “appearances” or “reality”. You can never know if it is what you know is real. It could all be your imagination.

Tell us about propaganda. Are you talking about how propaganda influences people's lives? What does the elephant as an animal mean in your work? Do you think China will evolve out of communism and liberalize?

Political propaganda is the norm for a totalitarian country. China is not alone. Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Soviet Russia and Kim Jong-Il's Dynasty are all the same. Political propaganda not only affects people's life, but also makes people serve for the interests of the rulers, the ruling party, the state and interest groups. Like the elephant in the painting, we can never know the damage caused by the political policies, even though we can feel hurt. In China, we are all blind when we face housing, medical service, insurance, education, laws, taxes, food, media, economy, environment, history, culture, politics and so on. All we can do is to imagine and misunderstand. We are the blind, the system is the elephant. Elephant is pronounced as “xiang”, exactly the same as “ reality”. So here the elephant is a paronomasia or homonym. China is the biggest country in the small group of Communist countries. We have been living under the hypothesis, the illusion of Communism. China is lingering in the uncertainty, Chinese systems are transmigrating. We are in limbo.

What do you think the impact of Mao was on the country as a whole, good or bad?

Mao ruined the Chinese mainland. The masses lived in dire poverty for a hundred years. IT WAS A DISASTER!

WU JUNYONGCV

Wu Junyongwas born 1978 in Fujian

printmaker, painter and animation expert

Beijing China Academy of Art graduate
Lives and worksin Hangzhou, China

exhibited at F2, Arario, Hanart as well as in museums such as “The Dismemberment of the Power of Flash”, Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, , MY CHINA NOW, Hayward Gallery, London, participated in The Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, RED HOT - Asian Art Today from the Chaney Family Collection, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Yelow Box, Qingpu, Gong Chan No1, Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai

Wu Junyong answers questions about his papercut animation, December 2012, interview by Pia Camilla Copper

How did you come to be an artist? Where did you go to school? Where were you born?

I was born on the cost in Fujian. I studied at the Central Academy in Hangzhou, a lakeside town, major in printmaking. Beijing is like a big stage. I started in a village, then moved to a regional city, then moved to Hangzhou – which is quite a big city – and now I’ve moved to Beijing, an even bigger city. It’s fun here. You can meet all different kinds of people: smart people, stupid people, over the top people, some crazy people. All kinds. And you can see that everyone’s performing – I’m performing too. It’s just that we all have a different performance.

Your work often feature men in dunce caps, reminiscent of the shamed intellectuals of the Cultural Revolution? Are these men politicians?

They are petty and foolish people. Presumptuous, self-righteous puppets. They flash before your eyes like the creatures Alice in Wonderland meets in the rabbit hole as my friend Gao Shiming says. Are they on parade? They are like Chinese politicians or politicians all over the world. The absurdity of reality leads me all the more to allegory, I am a narrator between reality and imagination, a world of illusions.

What about the hat?

This year the answers will probably all be the same, but they’ll be different from the answers last year, because the meaning of the hat is always changing. So it might have started with the idea of ‘daigaomao’ – to wear a tall hat – which in Chinese culture means that I might praise you and be very over the top in that praise. I give you a tall hat to wear, but in fact the praise and flattery is all false.

In China everybody’s constantly flattering each other. In the paper, you can see the government praising itself, praising China, praising the Chinese people. Chinese friends, when they’re together, are the same – just praising and flattering each other. It’s a big joke! So the hat has this kind of meaning.

Your work also features stork, horses, dragons, all symbolic? Why the use of these fantasmagorical animals?

I am interested in expressions “to call a stag a horse” (to confuse right and wrong). To me, it is not important what one says when he calls a stag a horse, but the new “species” that derives from the called—a horse with deer horns becomes a public scene, nonsensical as it might seem. Animals often have a kind of symbolic status. They represent things. So for example a dragon has a lot of meaning in China – it’s supposed to fly in the sky, to be powerful. But then I’ll often have dragons falling from the sky, or even being cut up – about to die, sapped of their energy.

Can you explain the process of your video making? You first make papercut figures, which you then film?

I was very influenced by folk art as I grew up in a village.

What do you feel is the most important issue for China in the future?

I feel my films are melancholy. You can feel the direction of the characters is probably not good – is probably getting more and more dangerous, more and more corrupt. So you start to wonder why, and what it is they’re actually doing. I don’t really know what the audience is thinking, but a lot of people say they can sense that mood. This is the mood in China today.

LU FEIFEI CV

born in 1980 in countryside

was working in a café when she met the Gao Brothers

lives in Beijing

actress and muse of Gao Brothers for their sculpture, their photographs

has written and appeared in her own film

participated in such shows as « Post-70s generation », Beijing 798 art festival , “Change of Dragon's body” , New York China Plaza Art Space, “UN-Fordidden City”, MAC Museum (Rome)ez

Why the story of Zhuyuan?
The Zhuyuan Township in the Yimeng Mountains, has no landscape “neither mountains nor water”, only a human landscape. This is one of the reasons I decided to leave there at fifteen years of age. But it is after all, is where I was born, my parents, my brothers and my sisters are still living here. So, although I later moved to the capital as a freelance writer and artist, my dreams often return to the shadow spirits of Zhuyuan or the Bamboo Grove Village. Home for the annual Spring Festival holiday, my memories are still intense, and I am full of nostalgia and sadness for Zhuyuan where nothing ever changes. My little town has family planning. After the birth of a brother and four sisters, I still do not know why parents insisted and ran the risk of being punished severely when they gave birth to me. I was only five years old when they decided to untarnish my name and have me registered as a legitimate child. A very special fate. One cannot avoid one’s own beginnings. This beginning, unknown child, unregistered, unnamed, affected everything, the way I look at life and society, art, literature, and even politics.
I shot the Zhuyuan series in my hometown in 2009. The image was of two girls, a niece named Xuan Xuan, and her classmate Zhi Zhi or Wisdom. Both of them have a brother in the countryside, if the first child is a girl; one is allowed to have more children. But patriarchal custom persists, the girl child is not the favoured one at home. I deliberately chose to shoot the photograph with a government slogan as background. The girls always stand in front of the slogan oblivious. The way the culture thinks and the way society thinks are at odds with government policy.
In democratic countries, the flag is a symbol of glory and dignity, the symbol of the nation, in a country where people do not have the right to vote, the national flag represents the government’s will and power. The flag as well as the “One Child in Zhuyuan” slogan signify the same thing. The girl, the flag, the ice, the trinity; the girl, the flag, the haystack is very important. Like the girl, the situation of women remains unnoticed. The situation of the girl child is similar to that of the Chinese people, helpless, coerced by power, without freedom or power to choose.

I am also concerned with underprivileged women more unfortunate and their social status and problems, although I am not a feminist. I think that the consciousness of human rights is inherent to the female. Feminism is like human rights awareness. So, I hope people will better understand the situation of women and of China through my works. From an aesthetic point of view, they will also understand the lone girl, on the icy haystack. After all, the expression of social consciousness is also art which represents an individual social and political consciousness, that of the artist.

ZHANG HUAN CV

Zhang Huan needs no introduction

performer, painter, photographer, opera director (Semele in Toronto, and Brussels)

invented the ash painting and the ash Buddha

most beautiful male performance artist in China

born in 1965 in Anyang, Henan

lives and works in Shanghai and NY

graduate Central Academy Fine Arts, Beijing, China(93)

Solo exhibitions at Rockbund Museum (Shanghai), Louis Vuitton (Macao), Shanghai Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Pace Gallery (Beijing), PAC Museum (Milan), Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing), Gallery Haunch of Vension, Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Center,Asia Society (NY), Tri Postal, (Lille), Kunstverein Hamburg, Deitch Projects and so on

Zhang Huan’s « Family Tree » has been lent to us by a Montreal collector for this show. The work was done in 2000 in New York.

Zhang Huan commented at that time:

“I have been feeling pain on the left side of my chest for over a year, which lately seems to have gotten worse. I sense an ill omen and am afraid that something unpredictable might happen.
When a mother squeezes out the last bit of her energy, a new life eventually emerges. There are numerous events in our lives over which we have no control.
More culture is slowly smothering us and turning our faces black. It is impossible to take away your inborn blood and personality. From a shadow in the morning, then suddenly into the dark night, the first cry of life to a white-haired man, standing lonely in front of window, a last peek of the world and a remembrance of an illusory life.
In my serial self-portrait I found a world which Rembrandt forgot. I am trying to extend his moment.
I invited 3 calligraphers to write texts on my face from early morning until night. I told them what they should write and to always keep a serious attitude when writing the texts even when my face turns to dark. My face followed the daylight till it slowly darkened. I cannot tell who I am. My identity has disappeared.

This work speaks about a family story, a spirit of family. In the middle of my forehead, the text means “Move the Mountain by Fool (Yu Kong Yi Shan)”. This traditional Chinese story is known by all common people, it is about determination and challenge. If you really want to do something, then it could really happen. Other texts are about human fate, like a kind of divination. Your eyes, nose, mouth, ears, cheekbone, and moles indicate your future, wealth, sex, disease, etc. I always feel that some mysterious fate surrounds human life which you can do nothing about, you can do nothing to control it, it just happened.” (Zhang Huan website)

GU WENDA CV

Born in Shanghai in 1955

1980s and 1990s first generation of Chinese artists

graduate of Shanghai School of Arts

graduate of Central Academy of Arts (Hangzhou), professor there from 1981-87

expatriated to the USA

selection committee PS1 Musuem (NY), Chicago Art Institute

Works shown in Taiwn, China, Singapore, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Israel, Australia, Norway Germany, Norway, France, Russia, Canada, Korea, Mexico, Switzerland, Indonesia, Turkey, USA, Polnd, Brazil, South Africa, Sweden, Israel, Australia, to mention a few places began his fifteen-year ongoing global art project entitled United Nationsone million people from all over the world have contributed their hair to this art project

Michael K. O’Riley’s called the United Nations project “... a kind of universal tea house, a place where many cultures can assemble and transcend their national differences”. Gu Wenda American flag, UnitedNations project, made of woven black hair, was commissioned by a Montreal collector who lent it to the show.

HUNG TUNG LU

Born in Taiwan in 1968

A Tawainese artist who moved to Beijing in 2000

MFA Taiwan University

involved in computer digital work, holograms

interested in the virtual and the spiritual plastic HUNG dummies, mass-produced religious icons, artificial flowers, and electrical lighting

has invented a manga figure resembling Padmasmbhava Buddha and Svara

Buddhist adept

elaborately tattoed with a Buddha of his own design

has exhibited with Tang Gallery, Osage Singapore, Hanart HK, at MOCA Museum and

Duolun Museum (Shanghai), Fuori Biennale (Vicenza), Denver Art Museum,

Busan Biennale (Korea),Taipei Fine Arts museum among others

Where were you born? Where did you go to art school? How did that influence you? Why did you move to Beijing?
I was born and grew up in a coastal village in central Taiwan, and in high school, I became fascinated withRenaissance art. I subsequently was accepted as an art student at Tainan National University of Fine Arts.
My early art education was more focused on technology and training as an artist . It was only in graduate school, that I became interested in personal creation.
I haven’t “completely” moved to Beijing, I am currently btween Taiwan and Beijing, where I have my studio. I did this not simply migrate from a place to another place, but to expand the scope of my own life. In Beijing, I found roots because my creation needed experience and stimulation.

Did you draw the tattoo of Buddha you have on your own back and where did you get it tattoed?
The tattoo image on my back is the image of Padmasambhava, the Buddhist Tantric figure from Tibet, widely known as the second Buddha. This tattoo is from Taipei, done by Taipei’s most fame Tattoo master – designed by me.

Where are the most sacred Buddhist sites in the world today?
In my view, exploring and pursuing various religions, or variety of spiritual beliefs, and eventually, everything will return to the heart itself. I think the heart is the most sacred of shrines within which to practice the self. The heart because it will have its impurities, the presence of the impure.To return to one’s nature, people must first cultivate themselves, and then pursue selfless, pure goals.

HE YUNCHANG CV

born in 1967 in Henan

painter, performer, photographer, sculptor

graduated from the Sculpture Department of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 1991

works and lives in Beijing

ultimate performance artist

believes body is his instrument, unafraid of physical duress

almost a punk, rebel

always representing himself, he considers it a panaceato dictatorship

believes artist expresses will of individual in a repressed state

has exhibited and performed at the Galeri Nasional Indonesia in Jakarta, Pace Wildenstein gallery in Beijing, the Seoul Museum of Art, the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing, Urs Meille Gallery, the Guangdong Museum of Art, the Liverpool Biennale, The Albright-Knox Art Gallery in New York, and the Shenzhen Art Museum to name a few

What is the idea of One Meter Democracy ?

It is the opposition of an individual against the state, proven physically. I had a 0.5 to 1

centimetre deep incision cut into the right side of my body, stretching one meter from his

collarbone to his knee. A doctor assisted in this procedure without anaesthetic. We held a

“democracy-style” vote, using the asking twenty people to vote for or against. The final tally was 12 votes for, 10 against and 3 abstaining, passing by two votes. Some people were shocked. But

I used my body in this process.

What is the idea behind Ai Wei Wei swimsuit?

I stood with many people naked. In China, they think naked is pornography. Yet there is lots of pornography. But when it concerns politics, they often call it pornography too. Wearing theface of Ai Wei Wei, imprisoned for 81 days was a performance, art opposition to politics.

Like Thunder Out of China

Like Thunder Out of China, Arsenal Montreal, Division Gallery, Toronto, January 2013-July 2013

邱节韩冰艾未未常磊 谷文 达鲁飞飞 吴俊勇 洪慧高翔

张 洹何云昌戴光郁

Cang Xin Chang Lei Dai Guangyu

Gao Brothers Gao Xiang Gu Wenda

Han Bing He Yunchang Hung Tunglu

Lu Fei Fei Wu Junyong Zhang Huan

with the launch of Ai Wei Wei’s book Ai Wei Wei-isms

Preface

Chinese artists have always been considered “zhishifenzi” 知识分子, “men with thunder and lightning at their heels”. They have always been the critics, the moral safeguards of society. Restrained yet spurred on by dictatorship, artists in China have never wavered, insisting on talking about the real issues such as massive urbanization, the one child policy, the legacy of Mao, the overwhelming burden of propaganda on people’s lives, the imprisonment and exile of dissidents such as Ai Wei Wei. Others have decided to go beyond politics, and address issues of spiritual fulfilment and love. Perhaps this ever so subtle shift is part and parcel of the modernization China is undergoing, the artist themselves have changed, focusing inward to a new reality, the relaity of the self. This exhibition attempts to give a bird’s eye view of the Chinese contemporary art landscape, a glimpse into what artists or as they used to be called « the literati »are thinking and feeling in the Middle Kingdom.

In the past ten years, China has undergone transformations more overwhelming than twenty Western-style « industrial revolutions ». The Confucian family structure has been dismantled, Buddhist doctrine has been let go, old architecture and temples have been bulldozed to make way for a unstable future, an edifice built too quickly and structurally unsound. Even the essence of the original Communist ideal, that of a people’s republic seems to have been lost, making way for a capitalist/Communist mélange, a breeding ground for corruption, inequality and injustice.

Pia Camilla Copper

Curator, Like Thunder Out of China

CANG XIN CV

born in 1967 in Heilongjiang

one of the founders of the Yuanminyuan East Village squat with Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, Rong Rong and others.

part of the 1995 performance of bodies piled nude on top of one another “Add a Meter to an Anonymous Mountain” in Beijing

extremely timid, spoke very little as an artist so decided to do performance and even a communication series where he licked all things, animate and inanimate, in order to engage in a dialogue

a shaman

has bathed with lizards, worn other people’s clothing“to get into their skin”, lay on icy glaciers, and bathed in lotuses all to become an Other

sculptor, photographer, performer, painter, draftsman

the only one to speak the language of spirituality in China today

went to Tianjin school of music in the 1980s

autodidact

Cang Xin, on the subject of his giant scrolls, November 2012, interview by Pia Camilla Copper

When did you become an artist?

I first when to school in Tianjin studying music and lyric-writing. But that was not a very satisfactory experience, thus I moved to the visual arts and started painting.

Where were you born?

I was born in in Baotou, a city in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China.

Which part of China influenced your work the most?

I would say Inner Mongolia, the place of my ancestral origin. This is the source of my later fascination with shamanism.

Are your scrolls inspired by Mayan art?

Yes, partially Perhaps, the Chinese civilization and the Mayan civilization are very much interconnected We do not know how close China has come to South America

Why represent the artist as a god? To destroy old gods? Or to counter ideologies like communism?

The artist is not god but the representation of a shaman, a medium between the gods and humanity; they have nothing to do with destruction and communism I am just representing myself as a shaman.

What does this say about your relation to the universe?

Why do you often represent yourself? as an affirmation of the individual?

How do you do you do these gigantic scroll drawings, on a scaffold?

These works were made with the paper laid flat on the ground and drawn in a crouching position

Why the use of traditional scroll?

Because this way of presentation pertains to a certain Eastern aesthetic and Chinese tradition.

DAI GUANGYU CV

born in in 1955 in Chengdu, China

lives and works in Beijing, China

part of New Wave 85 Chinese art movement

calligrapher historian father

autodidact

calligrapher, painter, photographer, performer

invented “ink games” submerging himself in, eating, drinking, shooting at ink and drawn on, recomposed, thrown away and repasted ink paintings

has done extreme performances such as “Incontinence” (2005), “A Sheep Lecture on Chinese Contemporary Art” (2007)

Dai Guangyu on his ice calligraphy, January 2013, interviewed from Beijing

When did you execute the first ice calligraphy or shanshui (landscape)? How do you do them?

QIU JIE CV

Born in 1961 in Shanghai

Went to Shanghai School of Decorative arts and Geneva Ecole des Beaux Arts

Founder of the political pop art movement I Shanghai with Yu Youhan, Liu Dahong

Lives between Shanghai and Geneva

A romantic Blaise Pascal who recordsjournal of daily life in his drawings,

the tea he drinks, the music he listens to, etc

Works on giant dazibao pencil drawings meters high for months at a time

Invented the “Mao” cat making fun of the homonym

Prefers small-format oils

Has had solo shows at Shanghai Museum MOCA Show (most recently December-January 2013),

Arario Gallery, Hanart Gallery Hong Kong;

Has participated in famous shows such as “The Revolution Continues”, Saatchi Gallery

(London), “Borderless” Shanghai MOCA , Discover-Rediscover, Rath Museum (Geneva),

solo show on now (December –February 2012-13) at Shanghai MOCA,

Museum of Contemporary Art, Basel (with Ai Wei Wei)

Qiu Jie on his dazibao drawings, September 2011, interview by Pia Camilla Copper

Describe what the Two Swallows dazibao means to you? And the Mao cat?

“The Two Swallows” represents two Chinese working class heroines They are so capable, they can almost fly!

As for the Mao Cat, mao in Chinese also means cat So, this drawing is either the president or a cat! Whichever you prefer! The drawing is a play on words and a game at the same time

Why would you say your art is controversial?

What are some of the common themes you touch on in your work?

The common recurring themes in my work are the confrontation between cultures, East and West and nostalgia

Can you tell us how your childhood and the Cultural Revolution in particular has informed your art?

Do you, as an artist, still feel scared to express yourself under the watchful eye of Chinese authorities?

What about China and your culture makes you proud to be Chinese?

Five thousand years of history and Chinese characters: I am very proud that such an ancient culture is coming to terms with modernity. It’s like a very old tree growing new branches and buds.

How would you describe the China of the future?

GAO BROTHERS CV

Gao Zhen 1956 Born in Jinan, Shandong
Gao Qiang 1962 Born in Jinan, Shandong

pair of artists brothers based in Beijing

What is the significance of Miss Mao?

HAN BING CV

born in 1974 in Jiangsu

often features himself in his work, self portraits

began drawing in the dirt with pieces of broken glass, because his family could not afford

art supplies

studied oil painting in college, then to the prestigious Chinese Central Academy of Art.

In Beijing notices the gulf between the rich city and poor countryside

photographer, video artist, performer, painter, sculptor

has “walked the cabbage” in LA, NY, Paris, Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo, San Fransisco,

Oakland and beyond

Han Bing answers questions, December 2012, interview Pia Copper

How did you come to be an artist?

I have been drawing since I was three years old, so I think I was an artist fromthe beginning even before knowing there was such a thing called “artist”.

Where did you go to art school?

I resigned my job as an art teacher in Jiangsu and made a performance next to the sea, and left the countryside for good. I came to Beijing to continue my studies and do art works.

What inspired you to start the Walk the Cabbages Series? What is the importance of liubaicai to the Chinese peasantry?

The reason for “Walking the Cabbage” has been changing year by year. Every Chinese person has a memory related to the cabbage. Since I was a child, I've been working in the fields, sowing and harvesting Chinese cabbages and selling them in the big city. In the big cities, people buy and stock up on cabbages for the winter. The liubaicai can be kept for a long time and its the cheapest vegetable in China. It is a sort of identity badge for Chinese people. In the beginning of my performances with the cabbage, I didn't use a leash, I used a red thread which I didn’t hold it in my hand. The thread was attached to my clothes, this represented the connection between the cabbage and I. I started walking the cabbage in Beijing where I was a foreigner, a stranger and used this action to relate to people. The presence of the cabbage was a sort of friend or company. Later, this performance developed more complex and varied meanings.

Where have you walked the cabbage?

All over China, in the cities and in the countryside. It was an ongoing performance. For two years I would walk a cabbage every day, no matter where, I was and it became part of my everyday life. I've also walked the cabbage in other countries, France, Belgium, England, USA, Japan and Korea.

What is the significance of the Mating Season Series?

I've taken pictures in the countryside and in the cities in China, since the “New Culture Movement” is happening in a rural and urban context. For them, bricks represent their life, what they do for a living and how they exist in the world, it also shows that they've abandoned labour in the fields and become part of the city culture. They hold the bricks in their everyday life. So when I asked them to take picturesof them holding brick, it didn’t feel in any way strange to them.

Is China building a land of equality for all?

Obviously not equal for all.

What do you feel are the most important issues for China today?

There are many subjects of concern. I think the end of traditional culture, the schism with the past is something that we need to pay attention to. This includes the loss of traditional costume, customs, and is more deeply related to issues such as human rights and ecological issues.

[from other interviews]

What inspires you?

How does it feel to be a young artist from the country in the city? Is that something you have in common with any other artists here in China ?

GAO XIANG CV

born in 1971 in Kunming, China

first a teacher at Yunnan Art lnstitute, then received his Ph.D of Fine Arts from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2008

studies GiorgioMorandi's painting

Gao Xiang comments on his canvasses the Red Bride Series and their relation to surrealism, December 2012

In your Red Bride Series, the bride is a surrealist apparition larger than life? The artist (yourself) is a tiny dwarf in her hands. Why the strange perspective?

Are you inspired by the surrealists, or other Western painters?

Explain why red is such an important colour in China

The artist still wears a blue Mao outfit, why is this?

Do you feel that women in China have gone backwards, from feminist Communist heroines to dolls and muses?

What do you think is the single most important factor in Chinese development? What has changed since Maoist times?

Your work features a curtain, is the curtain signifying life as a representation, “all the world's a stage”?

Because I participated invarious performance projects in Southeast Asia, I used to express my feeling by representing the stage in my paintings. The curtain also provides meaning and feeling.

How did you come to be an artist? Where did you go to school? Where were you born? What part of China most influenced your work?

CHANG LEI CV

born in Jinan Shandong

rock musician turned artist

painter, photographer

born 1977

exhibited at “[UN] forbidden city” MAC RO (Rome), Wall art Museum China, “Breathe” A Shandong Art Museum

personal music album The Setting Sun

penned poem- novel Mr The Setting Sun, Finished

main character the elephantor “Xiang » in Chinesemeaning appearances or the Communist party

often features himself in his work

Chang Lei on his Mirror images series and on being one of a pack of China’s rock stars converted to an artist, like Zuxiao Xuzhou and others.

How did you come to be a painter ?

I liked painting when I was little and still love it now. A few years after my university studies, I started to be a part of the rock and roll music scene. It is a pleasant memory.

Your series Mirror Images is a series of canvasses with calligraphy by Chinese presidents and then, a representation of a person or an elephant below? What does this mean?

What do you think the impact of Mao was on the country as a whole, good or bad?

Mao ruined the Chinese mainland. The masses lived in dire poverty for a hundred years. IT WAS A DISASTER!

WU JUNYONGCV

Wu Junyongwas born 1978 in Fujian

printmaker, painter and animation expert

Wu Junyong answers questions about his papercut animation, December 2012, interview by Pia Camilla Copper

How did you come to be an artist? Where did you go to school? Where were you born?

Your work often feature men in dunce caps, reminiscent of the shamed intellectuals of the Cultural Revolution? Are these men politicians?

What about the hat?

Your work also features stork, horses, dragons, all symbolic? Why the use of these fantasmagorical animals?

Can you explain the process of your video making? You first make papercut figures, which you then film?

I was very influenced by folk art as I grew up in a village.

What do you feel is the most important issue for China in the future?

LU FEIFEI CV

born in 1980 in countryside

was working in a café when she met the Gao Brothers

lives in Beijing

actress and muse of Gao Brothers for their sculpture, their photographs

has written and appeared in her own film

participated in such shows as « Post-70s generation », Beijing 798 art festival , “Change of Dragon's body” , New York China Plaza Art Space, “UN-Fordidden City”, MAC Museum (Rome)ez

Why the story of Zhuyuan?

The Zhuyuan Township in the Yimeng Mountains, has no landscape “neither mountains nor water”, only a human landscape. This is one of the reasons I decided to leave there at fifteen years of age. But it is after all, is where I was born, my parents, my brothers and my sisters are still living here. So, although I later moved to the capital as a freelance writer and artist, my dreams often return to the shadow spirits of Zhuyuan or the Bamboo Grove Village. Home for the annual Spring Festival holiday, my memories are still intense, and I am full of nostalgia and sadness for Zhuyuan where nothing ever changes. My little town has family planning. After the birth of a brother and four sisters, I still do not know why parents insisted and ran the risk of being punished severely when they gave birth to me. I was only five years old when they decided to untarnish my name and have me registered as a legitimate child. A very special fate. One cannot avoid one’s own beginnings. This beginning, unknown child, unregistered, unnamed, affected everything, the way I look at life and society, art, literature, and even politics.

I shot the Zhuyuan series in my hometown in 2009. The image was of two girls, a niece named Xuan Xuan, and her classmate Zhi Zhi or Wisdom. Both of them have a brother in the countryside, if the first child is a girl; one is allowed to have more children. But patriarchal custom persists, the girl child is not the favoured one at home. I deliberately chose to shoot the photograph with a government slogan as background. The girls always stand in front of the slogan oblivious. The way the culture thinks and the way society thinks are at odds with government policy.

In democratic countries, the flag is a symbol of glory and dignity, the symbol of the nation, in a country where people do not have the right to vote, the national flag represents the government’s will and power. The flag as well as the “One Child in Zhuyuan” slogan signify the same thing. The girl, the flag, the ice, the trinity; the girl, the flag, the haystack is very important. Like the girl, the situation of women remains unnoticed. The situation of the girl child is similar to that of the Chinese people, helpless, coerced by power, without freedom or power to choose.

I am also concerned with underprivileged women more unfortunate and their social status and problems, although I am not a feminist. I think that the consciousness of human rights is inherent to the female. Feminism is like human rights awareness. So, I hope people will better understand the situation of women and of China through my works. From an aesthetic point of view, they will also understand the lone girl, on the icy haystack. After all, the expression of social consciousness is also art which represents an individual social and political consciousness, that of the artist.

ZHANG HUAN CV

Zhang Huan needs no introduction

performer, painter, photographer, opera director (Semele in Toronto, and Brussels)

invented the ash painting and the ash Buddha

most beautiful male performance artist in China

born in 1965 in Anyang, Henan

lives and works in Shanghai and NY

graduate Central Academy Fine Arts, Beijing, China(93)

Zhang Huan’s « Family Tree » has been lent to us by a Montreal collector for this show. The work was done in 2000 in New York.

Zhang Huan commented at that time:

GU WENDA CV

Born in Shanghai in 1955

1980s and 1990s first generation of Chinese artists

graduate of Shanghai School of Arts

graduate of Central Academy of Arts (Hangzhou), professor there from 1981-87

expatriated to the USA

selection committee PS1 Musuem (NY), Chicago Art Institute

Works shown in Taiwn, China, Singapore, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Israel, Australia, Norway

Germany, Norway, France, Russia, Canada, Korea, Mexico, Switzerland, Indonesia, Turkey, USA, Polnd, Brazil, South Africa, Sweden, Israel, Australia, to mention a few places

began his fifteen-year ongoing global art project entitled United Nations

one million people from all over the world have contributed their hair to this art project

Michael K. O’Riley’s called the United Nations project “... a kind of universal tea house, a place where many cultures can assemble and transcend their national differences”.

Gu Wenda American flag, UnitedNations project, made of woven black hair, was commissioned

by a Montreal collector who lent it to the show.

HUNG TUNG LU

Born in Taiwan in 1968

A Tawainese artist who moved to Beijing in 2000

MFA Taiwan University

involved in computer digital work, holograms

interested in the virtual and the spiritual plastic HUNG dummies, mass-produced religious icons, artificial flowers, and electrical lighting

has invented a manga figure resembling Padmasmbhava Buddha and Svara

Buddhist adept

elaborately tattoed with a Buddha of his own design

has exhibited with Tang Gallery, Osage Singapore, Hanart HK, at MOCA Museum and

Duolun Museum (Shanghai), Fuori Biennale (Vicenza), Denver Art Museum,

Busan Biennale (Korea),Taipei Fine Arts museum among others

Where were you born? Where did you go to art school? How did that influence you? Why did you move to Beijing?

I was born and grew up in a coastal village in central Taiwan, and in high school, I became fascinated withRenaissance art. I subsequently was accepted as an art student at Tainan National University of Gfine Arts.

My early art eductaion was more focused on technology and training as an artist . It was only in graduate school, that I became interested in personal creation.

I haven’t “completely” moved to Beijing, I am currently btween Taiwan and Beijing, where I have my studio. I did this not simply migrate from a place to another place, but to expand the scope of my own life. In Beijing, I found roots because my creation needed experience and stimulation.

Your works Padsambhava and Svara are Buddhist in nature, are you a practising Buddhist?

Your Buddha creation has become iconic, what inspired it?

I come from a traditional Buddhist family, monasteries, as a Buddhist growing up, were a very important part of my personal life. This cultural environment, traditional Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianismin Taiwan, has stopped unimpeded development. We have a fairly high degree of religious culture, a pluralistic dsociety, a variety of different faiths than can coexist or become fused. This part of Taiwanese daily life, this cultural background is very strong and naturally became one of the sources of my inspiration.

Are you trying to create a meditative space with these hologram works?

I hope personally that that is one of the goals reached of the artistic creation.

Did you draw the tattoo of Buddha you have on your own back and where did you get it tattoed?

The tattoo image on my back is the image of Padmasambhava, the Buddhist Tantric figure from Tibet, widely known as the second Buddha. This tattoo is from Taipei, done by Taipei’s most fame Tattoo master – designed by me.

Where are the most sacred Buddhist sites in the world today?

In my view, exploring and pursuing various religions, or variety of spiritual beliefs, and eventually, everything will return to the heart itself. I think the heart is the most sacred of shrines within which to practice the self. The heart because it will have its impurities, the presence of the impure.To return to one’s nature, people must first cultivate themselves, and then pursue selfless, pure goals.

HE YUNCHANG CV

born in 1967 in Henan

painter, performer, photographer, sculptor

graduated from the Sculpture Department of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 1991

works and lives in Beijing

ultimate performance artist

believes body is his instrument, unafraid of physical duress

almost a punk, rebel

always representing himself, he considers it a panaceato dictatorship

believes artist expresses will of individual in a repressed state

What is the idea of One Meter Democracry ?

It is the opposition of an individual against the state, proven physically. I had a 0.5 to 1

centimetre deep incision cut into the right side of my body, stretching one meter from his

collarbone to his knee. A doctor assisted in this procedure without anaesthetic. We held a

“democracy-style” vote, using the asking twenty people to vote for or against. The final tally was

12 votes for, 10 against and 3 abstaining, passing by two votes. Some people were shocked. But

I used my body in this process.

What is the idea behind Ai Wei Wei swimsuit?

I stood with many people naked. In China, they think naked is pornography. Yet there is lots

of pornography. But when it concerns politics, they often call it pornography too. Wearing the

face of Ai Wei Wei, imprisoned for 81 days was a performance, art opposition to politics.

邱节韩冰艾未未常磊

谷文达

鲁飞飞

吴俊勇 洪慧高翔张洹

何云昌

戴光郁

Cang Xin Chang Lei Dai Guangyu

Gao Brothers Gao Xiang Gu Wenda

Han Bing He Yunchang Hung Tunglu

Lu Fei Fei Wu Junyong Zhang Huan

with the launch of Ai Wei Wei’s book Ai Wei Wei-isms

Preface

Chinese artists have always been considered “zhishifenzi” 知识分子, “men with thunder and lightning at their heels”. They have always been the critics, the moral safeguards of society. Restrained yet spurred on by dictatorship, artists in China have never waivered, insisting on talking about the real issues such as massive urbanization, the one child policy, the legacy of Mao, the overwhelming burden of propaganda on people’s lives, the imprisonment and exile of dissidents such as Ai Wei Wei. Others have decided to go beyond politics, and adress issues of spiritual fulfilment and love. Perhaps this ever so subtle shift is part and parcel of the modernization China is undergoing, the artist themselves have changed, focusing inward to a new reality, the relaity of the self. This exhibition attempts to give a bird’s eye view of the Chinese contemporary art landscape, a glimpse into what artists or as they used to be called « the literati »are thinking and feeling in the Middle Kingdom.

In the past ten years, China has undergone transformations more overwhelming than twenty Western-style « industrial revolutions ». The Confucian family structure has been dismantled, Buddhist doctrine has been let go, old architecture and temples have been bulldozed to make way for a unstable future, an edifice built too quickly and structurally unsound. Even the essence of the original Communist ideal, that of a people’s republic seems to have been lost, making way for a capitalist/Communist mélange, a breeding ground for corruption, inequality and injustice.

Pia Camilla Copper

Curator, Like Thunder Out of China

CANG XIN CV

born in 1967 in Heilongjiang

one of the founders of the Yuanminyuan East Village squat with Zhang Huan, Ma Liuming, Rong Rong and others.

part of the 1995 performance of bodies piled nude on top of one another “Add a Meter to an Anonymous Mountain” in Beijing

extremely timid, spoke very little as an artist so decided to do performance and even a communication series where he licked all things, animate and inanimate, in order to engage in a dialogue

a shaman

has bathed with lizards, worn other people’s clothing“to get into their skin”, lay on icy glaciers, and bathed in lotuses all to become an Other

sculptor, photographer, performer, painter, draftsman

the only one to speak the language of spirituality in China today

went to Tianjin school of music in the 1980s

autodidact

Cang Xin, on the subject of his giant scrolls, November 2012, interview by Pia Camilla Copper

When did you become an artist?

I first when to school in Tianjin studying music and lyric-writing. But that was not a very satisfactory experience, thus I moved to the visual arts and started painting.

Where were you born?

I was born in in Baotou, a city in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China.

Which part of China influenced your work the most?

I would say Inner Mongolia, the place of my ancestral origin. This is the source of my later fascination with shamanism.

Are your scrolls inspired by Mayan art?

Yes, partially Perhaps, the Chinese civilization and the Mayan civilization are very much interconnected We do not know how close China has come to South America

Why represent the artist as a god? To destroy old gods? Or to counter ideologies like communism?

The artist is not god but the representation of a shaman, a medium between the gods and humanity; they have nothing to do with destruction and communism I am just representing myself as a shaman.

What does this say about your relation to the universe?

Why do you often represent yourself? as an affirmation of the individual?

How do you do you do these gigantic scroll drawings, on a scaffold?

These works were made with the paper laid flat on the ground and drawn in a crouching position

Why the use of traditional scroll?

Because this way of presentation pertains to a certain Eastern aesthetic and Chinese tradition.

DAI GUANGYU CV

born in in 1955 in Chengdu, China

lives and works in Beijing, China

part of New Wave 85 Chinese art movement

calligrapher historian father

autodidact

calligrapher, painter, photographer, performer

invented “ink games” submerging himself in, eating, drinking, shooting at ink and drawn on, recomposed, thrown away and repasted ink paintings

has done extreme performances such as “Incontinence” (2005), “A Sheep Lecture on Chinese Contemporary Art” (2007)

Dai Guangyu on his ice calligraphy, January 2013, interviewed from Beijing

When did you execute the first ice calligraphy or shanshui (landscape)? How do you do them?

QIU JIE CV

Born in 1961 in Shanghai

Went to Shanghai School of Decorative arts and Geneva Ecole des Beaux Arts

Founder of the political pop art movement I Shanghai with Yu Youhan, Liu Dahong

Lives between Shanghai and Geneva

A romantic Blaise Pascal who recordsjournal of daily life in his drawings,

the tea he drinks, the music he listens to, etc

Works on giant dazibao pencil drawings meters high for months at a time

Invented the “Mao” cat making fun of the homonym

Prefers small-format oils

Has had solo shows at Shanghai Museum MOCA Show (most recently December-January 2013),

Arario Gallery, Hanart Gallery Hong Kong;

Has participated in famous shows such as “The Revolution Continues”, Saatchi Gallery

(London), “Borderless” Shanghai MOCA , Discover-Rediscover, Rath Museum (Geneva),

solo show on now (December –February 2012-13) at Shanghai MOCA,

Museum of Contemporary Art, Basel (with Ai Wei Wei)

Qiu Jie on his dazibao drawings, September 2011, interview by Pia Camilla Copper

Describe what the Two Swallows dazibao means to you? And the Mao cat?

“The Two Swallows” represents two Chinese working class heroines They are so capable, they can almost fly!

As for the Mao Cat, mao in Chinese also means cat So, this drawing is either the president or a cat! Whichever you prefer! The drawing is a play on words and a game at the same time

Why would you say your art is controversial?

What are some of the common themes you touch on in your work?

The common recurring themes in my work are the confrontation between cultures, East and West and nostalgia

Can you tell us how your childhood and the Cultural Revolution in particular has informed your art?

Do you, as an artist, still feel scared to express yourself under the watchful eye of Chinese authorities?

What about China and your culture makes you proud to be Chinese?

Five thousand years of history and Chinese characters: I am very proud that such an ancient culture is coming to terms with modernity. It’s like a very old tree growing new branches and buds.

How would you describe the China of the future?

GAO BROTHERS CV

Gao Zhen 1956 Born in Jinan, Shandong
Gao Qiang 1962 Born in Jinan, Shandong

pair of artists brothers based in Beijing

What is the significance of Miss Mao?

HAN BING CV

born in 1974 in Jiangsu

often features himself in his work, self portraits

began drawing in the dirt with pieces of broken glass, because his family could not afford

art supplies

studied oil painting in college, then to the prestigious Chinese Central Academy of Art.

In Beijing notices the gulf between the rich city and poor countryside

photographer, video artist, performer, painter, sculptor

has “walked the cabbage” in LA, NY, Paris, Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo, San Fransisco,

Oakland and beyond

Han Bing answers questions, December 2012, interview Pia Copper

How did you come to be an artist?

I have been drawing since I was three years old, so I think I was an artist fromthe beginning even before knowing there was such a thing called “artist”.

Where did you go to art school?

Obviously not equal for all.

What do you feel are the most important issues for China today?

[from other interviews]

What inspires you?

How does it feel to be a young artist from the country in the city? Is that something you have in common with any other artists here in China ?

GAO XIANG CV

born in 1971 in Kunming, China

first a teacher at Yunnan Art lnstitute, then received his Ph.D of Fine Arts from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2008

studies GiorgioMorandi's painting

Gao Xiang comments on his canvasses the Red Bride Series and their relation to surrealism, December 2012

In your Red Bride Series, the bride is a surrealist apparition larger than life? The artist (yourself) is a tiny dwarf in her hands. Why the strange perspective?

Are you inspired by the surrealists, or other Western painters?

Explain why red is such an important colour in China

The artist still wears a blue Mao outfit, why is this?

Do you feel that women in China have gone backwards, from feminist Communist heroines to dolls and muses?

What do you think is the single most important factor in Chinese development? What has changed since Maoist times?

Your work features a curtain, is the curtain signifying life as a representation, “all the world's a stage”?

Because I participated invarious performance projects in Southeast Asia, I used to express my feeling by representing the stage in my paintings. The curtain also provides meaning and feeling.

How did you come to be an artist? Where did you go to school? Where were you born? What part of China most influenced your work?

CHANG LEI CV

born in Jinan Shandong

rock musician turned artist

painter, photographer

born 1977

exhibited at “[UN] forbidden city” MAC RO (Rome), Wall art Museum China, “Breathe” A Shandong Art Museum

personal music album The Setting Sun

penned poem- novel Mr The Setting Sun, Finished

main character the elephantor “Xiang » in Chinesemeaning appearances or the Communist party

often features himself in his work

Chang Lei on his Mirror images series and on being one of a pack of China’s rock stars converted to an artist, like Zuxiao Xuzhou and others.

How did you come to be a painter ?

I liked painting when I was little and still love it now. A few years after my university studies, I started to be a part of the rock and roll music scene. It is a pleasant memory.

Your series Mirror Images is a series of canvasses with calligraphy by Chinese presidents and then, a representation of a person or an elephant below? What does this mean?

What do you think the impact of Mao was on the country as a whole, good or bad?

Mao ruined the Chinese mainland. The masses lived in dire poverty for a hundred years. IT WAS A DISASTER!

WU JUNYONGCV

Wu Junyongwas born 1978 in Fujian

printmaker, painter and animation expert

Wu Junyong answers questions about his papercut animation, December 2012, interview by Pia Camilla Copper

How did you come to be an artist? Where did you go to school? Where were you born?

Your work often feature men in dunce caps, reminiscent of the shamed intellectuals of the Cultural Revolution? Are these men politicians?

What about the hat?

Your work also features stork, horses, dragons, all symbolic? Why the use of these fantasmagorical animals?

Can you explain the process of your video making? You first make papercut figures, which you then film?

I was very influenced by folk art as I grew up in a village.

What do you feel is the most important issue for China in the future?

LU FEIFEI CV

born in 1980 in countryside

was working in a café when she met the Gao Brothers

lives in Beijing

actress and muse of Gao Brothers for their sculpture, their photographs

has written and appeared in her own film

participated in such shows as « Post-70s generation », Beijing 798 art festival , “Change of Dragon's body” , New York China Plaza Art Space, “UN-Fordidden City”, MAC Museum (Rome)ez

Why the story of Zhuyuan?

ZHANG HUAN CV

Zhang Huan needs no introduction

performer, painter, photographer, opera director (Semele in Toronto, and Brussels)

invented the ash painting and the ash Buddha

most beautiful male performance artist in China

born in 1965 in Anyang, Henan

lives and works in Shanghai and NY

graduate Central Academy Fine Arts, Beijing, China(93)

Zhang Huan’s « Family Tree » has been lent to us by a Montreal collector for this show. The work was done in 2000 in New York.

Zhang Huan commented at that time:

GU WENDA CV

Born in Shanghai in 1955

1980s and 1990s first generation of Chinese artists

graduate of Shanghai School of Arts

graduate of Central Academy of Arts (Hangzhou), professor there from 1981-87

expatriated to the USA

selection committee PS1 Musuem (NY), Chicago Art Institute

Works shown in Taiwn, China, Singapore, Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Israel, Australia, Norway

Germany, Norway, France, Russia, Canada, Korea, Mexico, Switzerland, Indonesia, Turkey, USA, Polnd, Brazil, South Africa, Sweden, Israel, Australia, to mention a few places

began his fifteen-year ongoing global art project entitled United Nations

one million people from all over the world have contributed their hair to this art project

Michael K. O’Riley’s called the United Nations project “... a kind of universal tea house, a place where many cultures can assemble and transcend their national differences”.

Gu Wenda American flag, UnitedNations project, made of woven black hair, was commissioned

by a Montreal collector who lent it to the show.

HUNG TUNG LU

Born in Taiwan in 1968

A Tawainese artist who moved to Beijing in 2000

MFA Taiwan University

involved in computer digital work, holograms

interested in the virtual and the spiritual plastic HUNG dummies, mass-produced religious icons, artificial flowers, and electrical lighting

has invented a manga figure resembling Padmasmbhava Buddha and Svara

Buddhist adept

elaborately tattoed with a Buddha of his own design

has exhibited with Tang Gallery, Osage Singapore, Hanart HK, at MOCA Museum and

Duolun Museum (Shanghai), Fuori Biennale (Vicenza), Denver Art Museum,

Busan Biennale (Korea),Taipei Fine Arts museum among others

Where were you born? Where did you go to art school? How did that influence you? Why did you move to Beijing?

I was born and grew up in a coastal village in central Taiwan, and in high school, I became fascinated withRenaissance art. I subsequently was accepted as an art student at Tainan National University of Gfine Arts.

My early art eductaion was more focused on technology and training as an artist . It was only in graduate school, that I became interested in personal creation.

I haven’t “completely” moved to Beijing, I am currently btween Taiwan and Beijing, where I have my studio. I did this not simply migrate from a place to another place, but to expand the scope of my own life. In Beijing, I found roots because my creation needed experience and stimulation.

HE YUNCHANG CV

born in 1967 in Henan

painter, performer, photographer, sculptor

graduated from the Sculpture Department of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 1991

works and lives in Beijing

ultimate performance artist

believes body is his instrument, unafraid of physical duress

almost a punk, rebel

always representing himself, he considers it a panaceato dictatorship

believes artist expresses will of individual in a repressed state

What is the idea of One Meter Democracry ?

It is the opposition of an individual against the state, proven physically. I had a 0.5 to 1

centimetre deep incision cut into the right side of my body, stretching one meter from his

collarbone to his knee. A doctor assisted in this procedure without anaesthetic. We held a

“democracy-style” vote, using the asking twenty people to vote for or against. The final tally was

12 votes for, 10 against and 3 abstaining, passing by two votes. Some people were shocked. But

I used my body in this process.

What is the idea behind Ai Wei Wei swimsuit?

I stood with many people naked. In China, they think naked is pornography. Yet there is lots

of pornography. But when it concerns politics, they often call it pornography too. Wearing the

face of Ai Wei Wei, imprisoned for 81 days was a performance, art opposition to politics.

Sous le Radar

Under the Radar was an en exhibition of new artists from Iran including Mariam Ami, Shapour Pouyand, Ali Reza Massoumi, etc.. showcasing new underground ideas from the new bohemian generation living in the land of the mollahs. Hosted with JTM Galllery, Paris and Running Horse Gallery, Beirut.

Middle East Middle Kingdom

Gallery Etemad brings fot the first time a controversial wave of Chinese Art to the Middle East with an amazing show featuring the works of:

GAO BROTHERS, HAN BING, HUNG TUNGLU, LIU DAO, QIU JIE

China is an enigma. For the first time, Chinese art will now be shown in Arabia, in Dubai to be more precise. The barge of Middle Kingdom finally reaches the shores of the Middle East. Since the first contemporary artists squatted the Yuanmingyuan outside of Beijing in 1989, artists have been redefining cultural identity and politics.

The Gao Brothers have long been a thorn in the side of the Chinese authorities. Their views are, however, justified and represent a real and under-represented aspect of Chinese society. Their “Miss Mao” sculpture with the nose of Pinocchio, the pigtail of the Manchus and the breasts of young girl, poke fun at the ultimate Establishment figure, Mao Zedong, a man who arguably changed China largely for the better and at times for the worst. The Gao Brothers, whose father was executed during the Cultural Revolution for his political views, understand this ambiguity more than anyone. Their work focuses on China and its evolving place in the wider world.

Their “Forever Unfinished Building” is one such view on the outside world. Like so many unfinished buildings in China, part of the real estate boom, many figures stand on different floors of a bare, cement structure. “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight was ever built,” wrote Emmanuel Kant (The Categorical Imperative). World heroes and villains, Spiderman, Osama Bin Laden, Mao, Pol Pot, Magic Johnson, Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin, all stand side by side on the Gao Brothers’ incomplete skyscraper. They represent today’s world and all of its neurosis and achievements. The Bank of China building in Hong Kong, the Jingmao tower or Financial Center in Shanghai, young Communist pioneers in red scarves, lounging top models, athletes, business with mobile phones and peasants in Mao jackets line the floors, icons of an uncertain edifice, China in the throes of unprecedented change.

Qiu Jie’s (born in Shanghai, 1961) giant charcoal drawings might appear simple at first. But they are based upon Cultural Revolution “big character” (dazibao) posters and socialist-realist propaganda art. By representing the eternal beauty of China like a vintage poster of the European Grand Tour or the Queen Mary cruises or a Maoist propaganda, Qiu Jie challenges the China we see. His drawings, which he started doing in the late 1990s, are small poster size (due to his limited studio space at that time), but he pastes them together to form giant murals. His father and uncle worked in the ship business, a recurring theme in his work. He is part of a lost generation, having been subsumed by Communist culture and ideals in his youth; he emigrates later to Switzerland on a scholarship and discovers the rich, decadent capitalist culture of the West. He combines elements of Communist iconography with traditional Chinese images of nature and culture. “Two swallows” portrays two young women in Maoist garb (cloth shoes and Mao jackets) scaling an electricity pole to do some repairs. They hover above the landscape, smiling, happily working, and incarnating the modern, emancipated Chinese woman as idealized by the Communists. But these women also represent Old China. Their beauty, their lightheartedness, their grace reminds us of an image of yesteryear, of Chinese beauties in a pagoda landscape with its red-tinted plum blossoms. The swallow is a harbinger of spring, happiness and good fortune in the Middle Kingdom.

In another work, Mao Zedong (the “Great Leader”), is portrayed as a cat in a Mao jacket. The word “cat” or “mao” in Chinese is a homonym. This comical depiction of a historical figure in a traditional landscape, with calligraphy alongside, shows us how images can become less powerful and more commercial or fashionable. Qiu Jie works for months on each composition, using charcoal, the most simple of media and red gouache, a desuet tool, to depict China in meticulous detail.

Hung Tung Lu is a Taiwanese artist now living in Beijing, working on the dual themes of spirituality and modernity. China has always been the land of three religions: Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism. The three religions co-exist peacefully. But Buddhism is attracting more and more adepts. In ‘Padmasambhava’, Avalokitesvara or Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion, (A Daoist and Buddhist goddess) is seen floating in a bubble above a sea of lotuses. Her reflection in the water and in the sky implies that she transcends the material world. This 'shuiyue Guanyin' or Water-Moon Guanyin, with her halo of moonlight, beckons us into her calm landscape. Buddhists believe that when you die, the goddess places you in the heart of a lotus then sends you home to the Western pure land of Sukhavati. In Hung Tung Lu’s other work ‘Svara’ (‘he/she who hears sounds or listens to people’s sufferings), the traditional Buddha sitting on the lotus is also multi-dimensional, reflected in the water like a mirror, and in the sky like an echo.

In Han Bing's "New Culture Movement" 新文化运动 series, peasants laborer, families, and schoolchildren, stand in front of half-constructed homes, construction sites, and schoolyards, holding piles of bricks, the symbol of China’s capitalist dream. The ‘red clay brick’ is considered old-fashioned in urban China but for the ‘rural masses’, it still represents a home, and a future. Sometimes peasant families must chose between education for their progeny, marriage or the construction of a home of one’s own. Han Bing’s idealized portraits are reminiscent of the socialist realist portrayals of men and women workers and families in China in the Maiost era. The Mao jackets and straw hats, the beaming faces, everything breathes a certain optimism and pride. Believing in an ideal is still a potent force in a country one billion and a quarter souls.

Han Bing was born to a peasant famly in rural Jiangsu Province in 1974. When he was young, he was too poor to afford art supplies and drew in the dirt with pieces of broken glass. His father was considered an ‘intellectual’ and all of his cattle were taken away. He was forced to plough his fields with a hoe. In 1994, Han Bing was accepted as a art student at the Xuzhou Univeristy , the only child in his school in his village to be accepted. When he arrived in Beijing to the Arts Academy, he was astonished by the contrast between rich and poor, the city and the countryside. The Communist Party had decreed that in the year 2000, the "society of modest prosperity" (xiaokang shehui) was on its way. Han Bing questioned whether or not the xiaokang shehui would ever reach the countryside or indeed the migrants workers flooding to the cities. This idea inspired this series of photographs.

“The people in these works "play" the part of themselves, and yet these are staged works geared towards allowing people to represent themselves and their concerns in these works, connecting them to each other through their common predicaments and tenuous dreams.”

Liu Dao is a fascinating arts collective, born in Shanghai in 2006, taking its name from its original location the Fou Foong Flour Mill on Moganshan Lu. The building was the only one to survive the mass demolitions of the Shanghai real estate boom and looked like an island emerging from a sea of rubble, hence the name Liu Dao, Island 6. Comprised of a mix of Chinese and foreign artists, thirty in total, Liu Dao manages to produce complex digital artwork, using vinyl cutters, laser projectors, CNC routers, Java, etc… thanks to the talents and ideas of its numerous members. The LEDS used by the Liu Dao collective mirror the senses of the body, each LED triggers the other organically. “Fluttering in Xishuangbanna, 2010” is a LED display of butterflies projected through a traditional rice paper cut in a steel frame. The butterflies flutter through the bamboo forest, lending a modern touch to a sort of Song dynasty scroll painting. In “Northern Song”, a mountain landscape is enlivened by a perpetual fireworks display. In “Forgotten Form”, the paper cut represents a mannequin.

“Forgotten form” (For reference: http://www.island6.org/LiuDao295.html)

''Fallen XOs'' (See http://www.island6.org/LiuDao214.html)

sheikhs qnd shiekhqs in front of liu dqo.JPG

Ye Hai, India Darling!

Ye Hai, India Darling! XVA Gallery Dubai, May 2011

Contemporary Indian art, like its counterparts in other developing countries, reflects the struggles of an ancient civilization to come to terms with industrialization, urbanization and modernity. In cities like Delhi, the flower sellers of Connaught Place, represent the past; in cities like Mumbai, the chai wallahs are symbols for what is disappearing. In more remote places like the holy city of Pushkar, sadhus wander the streets asking for alms, and snake charmers play on their flutes, evoking a spirituality the rest of the world lost years ago. In Varanasi, fakirs levitate on the banks of the Ganges. Artists always take hold of certain elements of their reality and look at them through a camera obscura, seeking new interpretations. Indian artists are no exception.

Maruti Shelke’s series “Customs” reflects a disappearing way of life. The simplicity of the rural life- sitting on carpets under the mango trees, waiting with an umbrella for a bus to pass, or even sitting on a beach watching the waves crash against the shore, playing with a kitten -show a reflective India, an India of hopes and dreams where one’s existence is like a “drop of dew”. It reminds one of the Diamond Sutra verse:

How must we contemplate our existence in this fleeting world? Like a tiny drop of dew, a bubble floating in a stream; Like a flash of lightning from a summer cloud, Or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a fantasy, a dream.

So is all conditioned existence to be seen.

Musicians strum to while away the hours, lovers embrace, a family sits on a carpet and talks, rocking a newborn babe in their arms, a woman admires herself in her sari and bracelets, women sway by with baskets balanced on their heads.

The people in Maruti Shelke’s paintings are dreamers. Their existence has an almost unreal quality, a reverie. Everything is washed clean by the monsoon rains. Even the sky is no longer a colour, cloudless. One can almost smell the crispness of the air. There is no dust only a stamped down clay. The robes of the monk or the sari of the ladies are wrapped around them like leaves around a flower or bark around a tree. Nature and people blend together. The figures in the paintings are always looking out, towards the horizon, in front of them, a thin line, which only the viewer shares. Do we know them? Are they waiting for us? Are we all just passers-by? Drifters on the wider ocean of the world? Life is this pale nothingness, this waiting, where nothing and everything always happens. One thing hold us – that is expectation.

His technique is classical, reminding one of the pale palette of a Chinese painter like Zhang Xiaogang. His choice of colours, yellows, sand colour, saffron, terracotta, indigo, remind one of the Central province of Mahrashtra from which he hails.!

Pradeep Mishra’s work are also analytical, almost conceptual. Taking things out of context, he places them at the center of his world. He extracts the essence from the world around him like a perfumer distilling a scent. He paints mostly the natural world, human or animal, showing respect and deference for Indian philosophy, Buddhism and in particular Hinduism. His work also incorporates his concerns for ecology and the environment. He recalls being deeply touched by the flooding in Mumbai in 2005. People fled their homes in panic, leaving their animals in their pens. The animals perished. He remembers how selfish he thought they were. “I used to paint a lot of cows, buffaloes, calves. But this incident added an edge to my thinking,” he says.

The idea of reincarnation or “re-entering the flesh” is perhaps at the heart of Pradeep Mishra’s work. According to the Hindu sage Adi Shankaracharya, “life is fleeting”. Every being is trapped in a perpetual cycle of births and rebirths known as “samsara”. Ignorance of samsara leads to egotism and prolongs the cycle of reincarnation. If one realizes that only the soul and spirituality matter, one can be liberated from the cycle of suffering. The idea of “karma” as it is described in the Upanishads is the sum of actions that may or may not lead to the liberation from worldly desires, enlightenment and end reincarnation for ever.

Pradeep Mishra is interested in the issue of humanity, “the fellow beings which are part of our day to day life”. His artistic struggle transcends the caste system in India and the differences in religions, delving into a more mystical view of the issues at hand. In the artist’s words, “it is not the question of who serves whom, but the relationship between people and how each shares the other’s life. We do carry an individual self, but it is the similarities between humans which allows us to live.” Pradeep Mishra’s “baby” on a large white canvass alludes to the miracle of birth. Life is about germinating, cultivating which is the source of unlimited happiness. The pale, colorless canvasses of Mishra express the spirituality of our existence. Life is an enigma, a small baby arriving from nowhere unto the white canvass of life. The baby is alone, naked. Does the white canvas represent a life, unblemished, not yet embarked upon? In India, when a child is born, a letter of the alphabet to describe him or her. The ceremony of birth is long and complicated. In Hinduism, as the soul is immortal, only the body is subjected to decay and death. Sometimes, a human being can be reincarnated as an animal or another living thing. Life and death is not the end-game.

In Pradeep Mishra’s “Fields of Labour”, a donkey, the beast of burden, carries two water or milk jars on its saddle, filled with clouds. The airiness of the painting astonishes. It seems to evoke the heavy burden of life; but the cloud-filled jars speak of otherworldliness. The background of the work is red, fiery and defiant. The owner of the animal is not depicted. Is it the life of the labourer or the life of the animal, which is depicted? Pradeep Mishra’s “Fields of Labour” series also highlights the importance of the rural life in India, the cattle, the donkeys, the goats, the chickens, the fields all in stark contrast to life in the cities, where nature is seemingly absent.

Ajay Sharma’s father was a carpenter. Migrating from Banaras to Delhi, he was part of the inexorable movement of the masses to the cities. His work hesitates between the Indian-ness of his childhood, religious rituals, the colors of the countryside and the appeal of the sprawling city, the movement of cranes, bulldozers and human interaction, traffic that represent the modern metropolis. In his own words, he talks of his work representing the silent dreams of the common people. “The man carrying the baggage of his silent dreams in a metropolis feels nothing but silence. He feels lost and isolated, this silence enveloping him like a dilemma. Like all the countless laborers in the city, he feels alone. The glamour of the city makes him twinge in his heart, representing luxury, ostentation. He feels like his own dreams are like the silencers of the Mercedes driving through the capital.”

Sharma works in layers. A cityscape is depicted, with traffic, bustle, people on the go. Another layer adds another dimension, the more religious and monumental. The scene is frozen as though in a photograph, a frozen image of life as we know it, the life of millions of people with their hopes and aspirations, their dreams and ideas.

© Pia Camilla Copper

Gan Yishu, To Hell with Art!

Gan YIshu, To Hell with Art, May 2015 Passage Choiseul

corruptionists abstractionists

eroticists dreamers and escapists

“Enough of Art. It's Art that kills us. People no longer want to do painting: they want to make art.” (Pablo Picasso)

Chang Lei Dai Guangyu Han Bing

Li Yijun Liu Zheng Qin Yifeng

Qi Wenzhang Sun Shaokun Wu Gaozhong

Wu Junyong Ye Nan Zhang Haiying

Zheng Hongxiang Zheng Min

Videos

Ma Yongfeng Irrelevant Commission Project Zhong Jinpei Chen Chenchen Wu Junyong

art has been breaking free of boundaries in China

what are the new artists thinking about?

new mediums

new subjects: eroticism, the environment, the banana republic, the individual, rock and roll, vanity

new ways of doing art, graffiti, rock and roll, abstract art

干艺术 (gan yishu) or “doing art” is a new expression in China, currently employed among artists. The verb gan sounds like “gan huo” meaning to work as a labourer, a factory worker, to work to make a living. But gan is a homonym for “feeling”, or sensuality or put more bluntly “doing it”. This makes « gan yishu » China’s newest private joke.

To “do art” is way of being, transgressing boundaries because one is and one is more than that“an artist” and in that sense, a revolutionary.

To be free and to “make art” is as to be as free as to “make love” and to take that freedom is to be self-empowered. It is also a freedom from the classical art techniques that have been the yoke of the artists since the beginning of modern art in China.

This exhibition presents 15 or more artists, some part of the 1990s avant-garde movement and others born in the ‘70s and ‘80s, artists who are doing art,” playing with new mediums or revolutionizing old mediums such as oil painting and attacking new subjects: eroticism, the environment, the banana republic, the individual, rock and roll, vanity, etc.

There are four movements I am distinguishing on the Chinese contemporary art landscape: the corruptionists, the abstractionists, the dreamers/escapists and the erotics. These four movements sum up the essential of what is happening now in art on mainland China.

The corruptionists

Young artists are concerned not only politics, but more essentially with the

corruption of politics and government. The blind devotion to Mao’s people Republic has given way to a more cynical world view. The police, the administration and the entire state apparatus has come to be questioned. The internet has changed the way young people view the relationship to power. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram adopted by such leading artists of the previous generation such as Ai Weiwei have allowed the population of China as a whole and the artists in articularto express itself as never before.

The term 黑色幽默 (heise youmo) has been used to describe part of the Weltanschaung of the younger generation. Looking at the political landscape with detachment and even a sardonic humour is the logical extension of what came about post-Tiananmen, the cynical realist movement, 玩世现实主义, (wanshi xianshi zhuyi) a movement led essentially by Beijingers Fang Lijun Liu Wei and Yue Minjun.

They single out subjects, which highlight the corruption of the government: unharnessed pollution, forced land eviction, prostitution, corruption of the police state or the banana republic.

The abstractionists:

Abstract art or 抽象绘画 (chouxiang huihua) has long been derided and even banned in China. The Stars were the first group of artists to attempt abstract art and they were blacklisted early on. However, the real originators of the abstract art movement were the artists that came out of Shanghai such as Shen Fan, Ding Yi, Qin Yifeng partly because of the nature of the city itself, a port open to Western influences.

Abstraction is itself very Oriental, the repeated patterns and strokes mimicking calligraphy, the technique overpowering the medium, reminding us of the Daoist and Buddhist philosophy of non-action. Abstract art is also a sort of non-art, a practice, a method more than an art, a way of being.

The eroticists

The nude in Chinese art and the erotic joke is a new phenomenon for

Mainlanders. Perhaps censorship, lack of intimacy and individual space in the Communist era are to blame for the disappearance of eroticism. The erotic is back.

Dreamers and escapists

There is a certain逃避 (taobi xianshi) or escapist tendency in contemporary Chinese art. The young Chinese who are manacled to rampant urbanization, a controlling government, disastrous environmental pollution and overpopulation, have a tendency to resort to fantasy, not unlike the Surrealists affected by the brutality of the Great War. Rene Magritte and Marcel Duchamp are considered the heroes of today. To escape, to dream, to imagine a different, utopic world, that doesn’t exist.

常磊 CHANG LEI (b.in 1977 in Jinan Shandong)

A rock musician turned artist, painter, photographer; his works are almost exclusively bout the problems of the younger generation, politics, corruption, the legacy of China’s leaders, envirnromental decay.

His “Mirror Image series” is about the propaganda Chinese leaders and its impact on China’s youth, from Deng Xiaoping’s essay on Revolutionary ideals which he contrasts with a young child smoking a cigarette, the decadence of China’s communist legacy to Mao Zedong’s essay contrasted with the poverty and helplessness of the generation that survived the Long March, Chang Lei’s works are cynical realist post modern. Chang Lei has exhibited at“[UN] forbidden city” MAC RO (Rome), Wall art Museum China and “Breathe” A Shandong Art Museum as well as a recent solo shows at Hue Gallery in London. He has penned rock music with a personal music album “The Setting Sun” as well as the poem- novel version entitled “Mr. Setting Sun”.

The main character in the “Mirror Image series” is the elephant or “xiang” in Chinese meaning a homonym of the word “appearances” or an emblem for the Communist party, otherwise known as the “elephant in the room” or the old fable of the elephant appraised by three blind men who could not identify it when asked and asked if it was a teapot or some other object or animal.

戴光郁 DAI GUANGYU (b. 1955 in Chengdu, Sichuan. Lives and works in Beijing)

Dai Guangyu is part of New Wave 85 Chinese art movement. His calligrapher historian father made poetry and calligraphy an integral part of his life. He never went to art school, is an autodidact. However, he is a multi-dimensional artist: calligrapher, painter, photographer, performer. He invented “ink games” submerging himself in, eating, drinking, shooting at ink and drawn on, recomposed, thrown away and repasting ink paintings. His “Heaven Only Knows” portraits are part of this calligraphic performance work. He found a mentally deranged man on the street in front of Tiananmen and asked him to be the model for his calligraphy, painting the blood red characters of the Daoist classic the Dao Dejing on the man, “Heaven Only Knows”or the “Way of Heaven”. The Taoist phrase acquits a political meaning with this piece of art, although painted on a crazy man, a sort of Tiresias or blind prophet such as the artist himself.

This man was formerly one of the men who came to present a petition to the government on Tiananmen square (上访者shangfangzhe). His request was denied. In recent years, the number of petitions to corrupt officials has run into the millions yearly. Many petitioners end up kidnapped and sent back home or arrested and detained in black jails (黑监獄 hei jianyu). The injustice of China’s legal system and the non adherence to the Taoist principle that heaven and earth, the government and the people must be in harmony is eveident is recent years.

Dai Guangyu’s extreme performances such as “Incontinence” (2005), “A Sheep Lecture on Chinese Contemporary Art” (2007), “Floating Object" (2006) where he oftens put himself in danger have become as well known as Zhang Huan’s extraordinary performances marking the 1980s and 1990s in Beijing.

韩冰 HAN BING (b. in 1974 in Jiangsu, lives in Beijing)

Han Bing is one of the great artists of his generation. Often featuring himself in his work, using self portraits as a way of affirming his creation, he is a multi-dimensional artist using photography, performance, painting and sculpture to express himself. As a child, he began drawing in the dirt with pieces of broken glass, because his family could not afford art. supplies. As Han Bing says of himself: “I have been drawing since I was three years old, so I think I was an artist fromthe beginning even before knowing there was such a thing called artist.”
Coming to Beijing as one the many children of a peasant family, he struggled to find a place in the Beijing art community, one of his first homes shared with a gang of thieves. It is perhaps this proximity to the everyday reality of the Chinese peasants and the proletariat, his keen awareness of the drama of the eviction of peasants from their lands, and other societal problems such as environmental pollution and even animal rights that makes him so pertinent and engaging as an artist. After a few years in Beijing, in the Heiqiao art suburb, he got accepted as a mature student at the prestigious Chinese Central Academy of Art.
“I'm deeply influenced by the fringe, where rural and urban meet, where Chinese culture is suffering great changes full of contradictions because of modernization. I am interested in common villagers left by the new modern life style. There is also the issue of people and their relationship with earth, are also been alienated, from their land, their roots.”

In Watermelon series, Han Bing portrays himself as a Chinese coolie with a traditional bamboo hat sitting cross legged on the ground, encircled by the red blood lifeline (string of lights) to the watermelon, one of the main crops of China. In the subsequent shots of the performance, the watermelon has been smashed evoking the end of rural culture and by correlation the end of the Chinese peasantry, now dispatched to the cities and to the factory, where they have lost their rights as landowners and their livelihoods, depending now on the vagaries of city life. Dispossessed, disenfranchised poor and without often the right to education or medical care, they are now the peons of the Chinese industrial state machine.

He has taken his performance “walking the cabbage”, a play on the new culture of walking dogs (urban and frivolous as opposed to the cabbage which evokes a rural culture of subsistence and hardship) all over the world to LA, NY, Paris, Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo, San Fransisco, Oakland and beyond.

“The reason for “Walking the Cabbage” has been changing year by year. Every Chinese person has a memory related to the cabbage. Since I was a child, I've been working in the fields, sowing and harvesting Chinese cabbages and selling them in the big city. In the big cities, people buy and stock up on cabbages for the winter. The liubaicai can be kept for a long time and its the cheapest vegetable in China. It is a sort of identity badge for Chinese people. In the beginning of my performances with the cabbage, I didn't use a leash, I used a red thread which I didn’t hold it in my hand. The thread was attached to my clothes, this represented the connection between the cabbage and I. I started walking the cabbage in Beijing where I was a foreigner, a stranger and used this action to relate to people. The presence of the cabbage was a sort of friend or company. Later, this performance developed more complex and varied meanings.”

李易君 LI YIJUN (b. 1986 in Taiyuan, Shanxi, graduate of Tianjin University, Hangzhou Academy of Art)

Now living in Beijing, Li Yijun is a young painter who started working in watercolour. He now uses oil to portray the night landscapes of the city of Beijing, part of the new contemporary reality. His subjects are strangely familiar: migrant workers on abandoned construction sites, buses of workers being transported to factories, a man with a suitcase arriving at a fairground, in an almost David Lynch eerie evening, some figures walking, their forms blurred by the light of a bus stop. He tells the story of the end of the day, where do all the people of the day go, where do they disappear to? he asks He is part of a generation searching for answers, a way out of traditional art and a portrayal of the contemporary reality as ugly and terrifyingit may seem. Another part of the reality is the sadness and the nostalgia of the end of a moment, the day, the end of a time never recorded.

Painting with glue, with neon paintings to be looked at in the dark, Li Yijun has been experimenting with form and with content and obsessed with the idea of evening, an anti-daylight.

Li Yijun has had few exhibitionsinternationally except for the international art fair in Seoul and Surge Art Gallery, Beijing which represents him.

LIU ZHENG (b. in 1972 in Hebei, founder of Kuan yin Clan 2006, formerly part of the Yuanminyuan artists)

Originally a rapper, Liu Zheng created his first graffiti on the walls of the Sihui subway stop in Beijing. Graffiti art is still illegal and in a police state, arrests are frequent However, Kwan Yin Group has done state sponsored projects including during the Olympics, painting the walls of the Beijing Institute of Technology and Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology. The free style of graffiti is a way of re-imagining ink painting according to Liu Zheng who enjoys the spontaneous aspect of the creation of graffiti. It is also a societal manifestation, making a statement socially and in an obvious way.

His “Ai Weiwei gun” series is a takeoff on Ai Weiwei’s “Anti Terrorist” leg-gun pose to the government authorities in June 2014 after an attempted coup (several people were executed) and car crash in Tiananmen Square. Ai Weiwei instagram portrait of himself using his body to makea gun, became a media craze and people started posting pictures of themselves posing in the same way throughout .

Liu Zheng has been the object of several solo exhibitions including « Dazzling Temptation » (Open Realization Contenporary Art Center Beijing, 2009), New Painting Robert Berman (LA), « In our opinion » (Wilhem Kerseboom Gallery , Amsterdam ) « Beads On Silk », Beijing Tokyo Art Projects, (Tokyo, 2006) and « Yuan », (Galerie Loft, Paris, 2002).

He has also exhibited at some of the most important Chinese art exhibitions abroad including «Chinese Modernity » (Sao Paolo), « Paris-Pékin » (Espace Cardin, Paris), « Money and value/ The last taboo » (Basel) « Next Generation/ Art Contemporain D'Asie » (Passage de Retz, Paris) , « Ouh, la, la Kitsch!, » TEDA Contemporary Art Museum( Zurich) « Gaudy Life » (Beijing) and « The Corruptionists » (Beijing), China.

秦亿丰QIN YIFENG (born in 1961 in Shanghai, lives in Shanghai, Shanghai Academy of Arts and Crafts, Shanghai Arts Academy)

Qin Yifeng is one of the first wave of Shanghai abstract artists with Shen Fan, Ding Yi, Chen Qiang, Qiu Deshu and others. He is obsessed with the straight line and the curved line cross. By repeating patterns, he attains a state on non being, of Taoist non action, painting for him is a practice akin to meditation and helps reach another level of consciousness In his new photographic works based on his research on Ming dynasty furniture, he attepts to create a photographic print resembling an abstract painting in sahdes of grey. He only uses ntural light and photographs at different times ech day so that the light hits the surface f the wood and does not make any galaree. The surface is perfect, smooth, there ais no perspective , it is quintessially Chinese.

In 1993 he had developed his own personal style of abstraction and this resulted in the series ”Line-field”. By 1998 most of his works were more compact and colourful, often very bright. By 2002 , he created a background between the lines, applying in at least 4 thin layers of color. The continuous research he has done on Space and light make him an incredibly important artist of his generation.

Qin Yifeng’s“Line Series” like bamboo or plum blossom branches seems to derive from the abstraction of ink painting, taking this form ink to oil painting and rendering the medium of oil, intensely Chinese.

Qin Yifeng’s work has been represented by Eastlink Gallery, ShanghArt Gallery, Osage Gallery and C-Space. He was one of the first artists at the squat on Moganshan Lu in Shanghai.

His work has been presented at the Shanghai Art Museum, the first Beijing Art Biennale, Brave New World at Zee Gallery (Hong Kong), East and West (Vienna Art museum).

亓文章QI WENZHANG (b. in Laiwu, Shandong in 1981. Lives and works in Beijing)

Qi Wenzhang is struggling with the medium of oil painting, trying to liberate himself from the constraints of the brush. He is a figurative painter, painting mainly people. He is searching, often portraying himself or other men, he is struggling with the eroticism of the male subject. But he has turned back to paint.

Qi Wenzhang has had several shows including at Platform China show presented at the Palais de Tokyo K11 foundation show and Beijing and Hong Kong shows.

孫少坤SUN SHAOKUN

(born 1980 in Baoding, studied Central Academy of Fine Arts in ink painting, lives in Beijing. Died in 2016. Suicide.)

Sun Shaokun Sun is a traditional ink artist converted to photographic and performance art living in Beijing. She stages her works, often self-portraits in which she paints on herself or designs her costumes to highlight certain important issues of China’s present.

A politically involved artist, she did one portrait, her face covered entirely in grains of black rice. Black rice is a symbol of fertility, wealth and luck. On the rice grains, on the negative itself, she had scratched characters regarding eviction cases in urban areas due to redevelopment, including cases of self-immolation. “When can we have rights? People have no rights to be in Beijing if they come from somewhere else. Everyone needs rights as a people … The government can take land, they even take babies,” Sun Shaokun states.

In her “I learn from the ancient sages” series, she covers herself in nettles and cinnamon bark, becoming a part of nature. Herbs and spices are part of the ancient pharmacopeia of China and can heal every ailment. However, how can a person return to the land, and once more enter into a harmonious relationship with the soil and the earth? This subtle, feminine and very sensual critique of the lost relationship with the environment is a reminder of the never ending urbanization of China and the loss of the Chinese people’s understanding of the natural environment.

In the Confucian classic, the Zhong Yong, it is stated that: “equilibrium is the great foundation under Heaven, and harmony is the great way under Heaven. In achieving equilibrium and harmony, Heaven and Earth maintain their appropriate positions and the myriad things flourish”. The relation of man to nature is also an allegory of the relationship between the individual and the ruler or state. Only when things are harmonious can the individual grow and realize his “xing” or nature. It is also a question of the harmonious relationship between yin and yang, the male and the female, which is the very foundation of the natural world.

In the Taoist philosophy, the idea of “wu wei” is to go along with the flow of the universe. The Taoist sages lives in balance and harmony with nature. “Knowing the constant, we accept things as they are; By accepting things as they are, we are impartial, by being impartial, we are part of Nature., by being a part of the Nature, we are one with Tao. Tao is eternal, and we can therefore even survive physical death” or more concisely: “Humanity follows the earth. Earth follows Heaven. Heaven follows the Tao. The Tao follows the Nature.”

Sun Shaokun has exhibited internationally at Art Verona with Fabbrica Eos, at ArteLisboawith Arana Poveda, in Germany with Matthias Kueper and in group exhibitions including at Fenghuang museum (Guangzhou) and doing a state sponsored performance trip through Europe entitled “Diverse Universe Performance Tour 2014.”

吴高钟 WU GAOZHONG (b. 1962 inJiangsu Province. Nanjing Art College. Lives and works in Beijing)

Wu Gaozhong has a very strange persona in the Chinese art world. A photographer and performance artist, asculptor, often using a Chinese meat cleaver to sculpt giant wooden objects, and an installation artist, Wu is a sort of bête noire of the Chinese art scene. Although highly acclaimed by Li Xianting, he has not yet come into his own on the world scene.

Perhaps his world is too much that of a dreamer or an escapist. His universe is too oneiric and too strange for the public. Originally, Wu started by sculpting out of a very primitive medium wood, imagining the creatures of his nightmares, the object of the everyday, a map, a flashlight, a passport, scissors, windshield wipers, an army vest, transformed into furry animals. A sort of Kafkaesque vision of his universe emerged. Giant furry work boots, a bed lined with boar bristles, mirrors covered in pale, soft, sensuous wolf hairs, that make one want to gravitate towards them because of the fur not the reflection.

He then went on to translate that world into photography in a performance imagining himself buried in the bloodied belly of a cow, covered in rose petals, a carcass in which he had been hibernating. His clay pagodas and bridges, the attributes of the traditional Chinese garden he covered in fruit which he allowed to rot, allowing a Bosch-like paradise to emerge of mould and decay.

Indeed, it is as if everything is ready to change or decay in Wu Gaozhong’s world, on a plastered wall, he carved out the characters: “The Rivers always flow to the East”, Mao’s slogan, making the bricks appear behind the plaster like in some long forgotten building.Mao’s portrait he drew with cake icing, all in flourishes and candy coloured kitch.

So difficult to classify, Wu Gaozhonghas been the object of solo exhibitions “His strange world. Wu Gaozhong—See The Unseen Bi—Cities” (Hangzhou) and “Roving” ( Linda Gallery, Singapore).
and again “Spectral Memory” (Shanghai ZendaiMuseum, then Songzhuang Art Museum).

Other group shows include “Learning from the Literati” (OV Gallery, Shanghai)
“NOT NOW” (Songzhang Art Center, Beijing), “DARK MATTER” ( Zone LDX),

“I Believe that” (Songzhang Art Center, Beijing) , “The Documenta of Chinese Performance Art—1985-2010” (Mobile Museum of Art on the Lake, Beijing), “Shanshui-Poetry Without Sound? Landscape in Chinese Contemporary Art,” (Kunstmuseum Luzern),

His work has been presented by Eli Klein gallery, Zadok Gallery, in Art Miami, Art Chicago. Hiswork has been shown in international museum shows such asin Houston at the “Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection,” at the Miro Museum of Art (Barcelona), at“Asian Attitude / European Attitude,” (National Museum of Poznan, Poland), “ZHUYI! CHINA: Contemporary Photography from China,” (Artium Museum of Contemporary Art, Spain), “Fractured Visions: Chinese Video Art,” (Center for Asian Studies, University of SC), “Mahjong Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection” (Kunstmuseum, Bern) and “Inward Gazes – Documentaries of Chinese Performance Arts,” Museu de Arte de Macao, Macao

吴俊勇WU JUNYONG (b. 1978 in Fujian, graduated in printmaking and media art and works as a professor at the Central Academy in Hangzhou)

A printmaker by training, a painter and animation expert by choice, Wu Junyong is one of the new stars of the Chinese art world, blurring the lines of traditional art and using dark humour “heisi youmou” or “huangse youmou”(yellow humour) to critique politics and society. He makes paper cuts and then films them in stop gap films, representing a whole weltanschaung and full artistic démarche.

Wu Junyong has exhibited at F2, Arario, Hanart as well as in museums such as “The Dismemberment of the Power of Flash (Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art), y China Now (Hayward Gallery, London), participated in The Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival, RED HOT - Asian Art Today from the Chaney Family Collection ((Houston Museum), Yellow Box (Qingpu), Gong Chang No. 1 (Shanghai) and Duolun Museum of Modern Art (Shanghai).

His selected recent group exhibitions include POST POP: EAST MEETS WEST, (Saatchi Gallery, 2014); Fuck Off 2, (The Groninger Museum, Netherlands, 2013); ON | OFF: CHINA’S YOUNG ARTISTS IN CONCEPT AND PRACTICE ( Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, 2013); 9th Shanghai Biennale (Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, 2012); The First “CAFAM · Future” Exhibition (CAFA Art Museum, 2012); 15th Holland Animation Film Festival (2012); MADE IN POP LAND, (the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, 2010); Farewell to Post-Colonialism, The Third Guangzhouo Triennial (Guangdong Museum of Art, 2008).

His paper cut animation often features mythological creatures such as the dragon, snake, horses, stork, rabbit and politicians as blind men, often in the dunce caps the “daigamao” employed during the Cultural Revolution. To wear a tall hat means to praise and flatter people and the hat was used to ridicule intellectuals and the upper classes during Mao’s criticism sessions. He critiques modern society and the new businessman, soldier, Communist clique of China: He says of his paper cuts: “They portray petty and foolish people. Presumptuous, self-righteous puppets. They flash before your eyes like the creatures Alice in Wonderland, creatures like one meets in the rabbit hole as my friend Gao Shiming says. Are they on parade? They are like Chinese politicians or politicians all over the world. The absurdity of reality leads me all the more to allegory, I am a narrator between reality and imagination, a world of illusions.”

“In China; Wu Junyong says“everybody’s constantly flattering each other. In the paper, you can see the government praising itself, praising China, praising the Chinese people. Chinese friends, when they’re together, are the same – just praising and flattering each other. It’s a big joke! So the hat has this kind of meaning.”

Inthe opening scene of“Time of Stomach”, the raven, symbolic of the surveillance of the Communist party, is perched on some burn out branches watching the viewer with the CCTV camera replacing his head and eyes. He sits his hed moving left to right, robotically, to the sound of the gong, the soundtrack of doom. A naked gong man, fat and slave-like, sounds the gong which hangs on a thread from the dragon’s mouth. The dragon signifies power and by extension, China.

Then come the “daigamao or tall dunce caps (the Chinese elite) , they are enjoying themselves, flattering each other, making speeches, murdering each other with hammers, even with eyedroppers, boilinga naked woman in a pot on an open fire, even f…cking, then applauding the overall scene in a cacophony of brutality. Then, they raise their spears to kill the mythological dragon symbol, the symbol of the nation, piercing it with their arrows. Through its eyes, ink spewing, runs down unto the harlequin/diviner, the blind man who sees what the future holds.

The diviner hobbles towards a shelf with a magnifying glass, he is searching for something. He is looking at the past, the shelf of history, elements of Chinese modernity the colonialist past: the Pearl TV tower in Shanghai, the observatory of the Jesuits in old Beijing, an ink stand, a loudspeaker (the Cultural Revolution), a crown, the clock tower of the old race course in Shanghai, a skull, even a statue representing the Pyramids, knowledge, learning, etc.

In the second part of the film “Still Life is Never Still”, we meet the “daigamao” again this time dragging something through a field of sunflowers, the symbol of dissent, seeds, a homonym for democracy. They are dragging the deer, the image of the ideal, the utopic state. But now, they are weighed down, bowing down, they too are dying. The diviner is with them and the naked man who sounded the gong.

The deer is painted with flowers, gaudy, cheerful. They run through the Forbidden City, the seat of power, shattering it, sending the fragments into the sunflower fields sending a statue looking like Mao in the shape of a bird, tumbling. “In the Direction the Flowers are Blooming”, the third half, the “daigamao” raises his first to wipe off a tear, a tear of blood, the tear runs down his leg, becomes sperm-like, he crushes it, crushing the future generations perhaps, his own statue, covering the base with blood. The film ends with“the sound of dong, dong, dong”, the end phrase states, signifying the end of history.

Wu says of films: “I feel my films are melancholy. You can feel the direction of the characters is probably not good – is probably getting more and more dangerous, more and more corrupt. So you start to wonder why, and what it is they’re actually doing. I don’t really know what the audience is thinking, but a lot of people say they can sense that mood. This is the mood in China today.”

薛峰XUE FENG (b.1973 lives and works in Hangzhou, graduate of Beijing Central Academy) )

Xue Feng is part of the new generation of artists from Hangzhou that are pioneering new forms of abstraction. His works in bright colours depart from the tradition of the calligraphic brushstroke into a mad dance of intertwining lines and swirls, branches and leaves, ending in figurative depictions of people escaping in row boats.

Xue Feng has had solo shows at Boers Li in Beijing and has participated in a number of important group shows: “Future Sky” (Today Art Museum, Beijing), “Image Mashup”Shenzhen Art Museum, Xian Art Museumand “Seven Stones” Hangzhou Peace International Convention and Exhibition Center.

叶楠YE NAN (b. in Hangzhou 1984, Hanghou Central Aacademy)

A student of multi-media artist Qiu Zhijie, Ye Nan has been exploring new ways of making art and new mediums.

In his Phosphorous Red paintings, he uses phosphorous, the end of matches to paint his worldview: skeletons, wild horses, rock and roll and sunrises.

In the “Zigzag” series, he uses oil paint with an abstract brush, re-imagining China’s superhighways and ring roads and highways, vistas of the congested city as spirals, curves, forks, bifurcations, labyrinths of the mind rather than dilemmas of the modern city. His “Zig Zag” mirrors liberate the viewer from complicated circuitous maze of the asphalt, taking the problems of overpopulation and complicated urbanism to a higher plane, almost mystical and quasi-mathematical, as intricate and meandering as the Chinese language itself.

张海英ZHANG HAIYING (b. in Shouguang, Guandong 1972; lives in Songzhuang)

Zhang Haiying’s “Anti Vice” series takes as his models prostitutes, part of the bane of the government intent on eraducraing vice and pornography. He hires models, dresses them in extravagant high heels, rendering them even more appealing (shoes exhibited in his atelier) and paints them against the wall as though they are being arrested. In this way, he victimizes them; rendering them vulnerable, and grappling with issues of power, exclusion, vulnerability, and percsenssitivty. His cold greys and harsh tints evoke the glare of the police camera, the mugshot.

His international exhibitions have include the Sovereign Asia Art Foundation art exhibition, Hong-Kong and ARTOUR in Florence. His works haven been sold at Christie’s.

郑宏祥 ZHENG HONGXIANG (b. 1983 in Gaizhou, Liaoning China, graduated from Luxun Art Academy, Shenyang)

Zheng Hongxiang is part of the dreamers and escapists as well as the corruptionists, sensing the unscrupulousness of Chinese politics, he transforms a harsh reality into a surrealist painting. “As a Chinese artist born in the 1980’s, when interacting with the contemporary society, a mixed sense of enclosure and confinement arises in me. yet the enclosure does not feel entirely safe while the confinement seems self-contradictory....It is rooted in our social constructs, the hierarchy, more specifically, the superstructure.” Zheng says.
In his giant triptych, “Childhood Amnesia” , Zheng portrays a PL soldier, his head replaced by a watermelon (the persistent memory of Beijing hot summers as a child) andgigantic rhinoceros, a mythological and real animal often associated with war (since rhinoceros skin was used as shields, body armor and even for fabricating bows). Often known mysteriously as the unicorn, due to its one horn, the Asian two-horned rhinoceros now hovering on the brink of extinction, is a powerful symbol. The horn is also considered a powerful male aphrodisiac and is still purchased by amateurs.

The red colour of Zheng’s canvasses (in this case, a sort of platform on which the figures stand) make his depiction even more passionate and warlike. The kneeling rhinoceros, the headless PLA soldier with a home where his genitals should be beg the question, who is in power? And more importantly perhaps, does it even matter or is it all illusion?

Zheng Hongxiang has exhibited all over the world, at the Arte Fiera Bologna, at Young Art Taipei, at Hong Kong, at SH contemporary art fair, Contemporary Asian Art Piers (New York) and even at Art Basel Miami, Box Museum (Beijing), Shenyang Art Museum and Lin Art Center (Shanghai); He is represented by PaTa gallery (Shanghai).

ZHENG MIN (otherwise known as 郑无邪

Zheng Wuxie, b.1983 in Yonzhou, Hunan, studied sculpture at Guangzhou School of Fine Arts and Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing)

Zheng Min is young and promising sculptor and installation artist, trying to break free in the classical realm of figurative sculpture. He is part of the group, we cll the escapists in this show.

He is famous for doing a sculpture of Wang Xiaobo (1952-1997), a writer who died tragically young, but was known for his incisive and heart rendering rendition of modern life. He depicted Wang Xiaobo in the nude, as big as a Michelangelo sculpture, then smashed the sculpture to bits in a dramatic gesture, as quick and short as the artist's own life.

Wang Xiaobo struggled all of his life to get his books published and distributed, never succeeding. On April 11, 1997, he suffered a fatal heart attack, leaving his novella Black Iron Apartment unfinished on the desk of his Beijing home. His life became a sort of epitome of a wasted life or genius unrecognized.

Zheng Min, by his artists name also depicted Ai Weiwei dead in his bath like Marat in the painting by David, representing liberty assassinated.

His “Bird” series, cloud injected birdcages (sculptural installations) evoke the lost world of the junshi or scholar (who was often represented in his garden composing verses and listening to rare birds singing) yet posits the evanescence and fragility of the world iteself. He has also done a photographic portrait of himself, his head imprisoned in a cage, perhaps representing the lack of freedom as an artist.

To imprison a cloud in a cage is impossible and in this sense, his cloud-filled bird cages are the imaginary leaps of an artist, an artist who he himself cannot be pinned down or caged.

In his performance “My Space”, Zheng wandered around Beijing with a box over his shoulders like a cangue (木枷, mukia) or toture instrument of the past, poking fun at the "my space" of the internet where individual liberty is supposedly respected. The limitations of the internet in China and the limitations of the individual in Chinese society in an overpopulated, repressive country are self-evident.

Zheng Wuxie has been exhibited several times at the CAFA museum, (he participated in the group CAFA show of “ China in Made “ in 2010 and the “Blank Poetry Society” in 2008). In 2008, he was named China’s most influential young artist by China Art magazine. He has also exhibited at the Huangbian Power Station(Guangzhou)White Box Museum in Beijing and the Shanghai Sculpture Space in Shanghai.

Videos

陈陈陈 Chen Chenchen

(b. 1987 in Hangzhou, China, studied at Hangzhou Art Academy, graduate of the Total Art programme)

Chen Chenchen is part of the new generation of “total” artists, doing music, plays (Song for Meat Grinder) video, installation and breaking free of traditional mediums. “His Pavillion of Successology”, a boardgame and video on how to become a success in life is part of the new generation’s almost video game like ambition. His “Moth” video is part of the Successology drama showing the life of an artist, up and downs, the representational element of art.

He has participated in several international exhibitions including Goethe Art Festival Outdoor Theatre, (Beijing), Shanghai World Expo: City Sculpture, Modern Arts Drawing, (Japan), Caochangdi Photo Spring Festival (Beijing), Gwangju Design Biennale( Gwangju) and important shows such as “Brainstorming: Qiu Zhijie and Total Art”, in Guangzhou, the show f his professor.

Irrelevant Commission

The Irrelevant Commission, all graduated from the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou from 2006–2008, part of the younger generation of artists trying to look beyond traditional painting, sculpture ad other mediums. Their collaborations seem to have a mischievous take on modern politics and society, poking fun at the status quo and thereby affirming their position as artists, outside of society and therefore able to critique it more easily.

These videos show the“walking projects” of the group, the artists all involved in the performance including walking with ping pong balls stuck in their mouths, walking and looking left and right (mimicking political allegiance), displacing security barriers (evoking personal freedom). Their aim is first a sort of rebellion against society and propaganda of government and trying to break free from the previous generations set of values.

Their manifesto is perhaps the manifesto of the young artist today.

“Nothing to do with focus, nothing to do with glasses, nothing to do with inverted images, nothing to do with landmarks, something to do with Father, nothing to do with Mother, something to do with future, something to do with communication, something to do with misunderstanding, something to do with festivals, nothing to do with wood, nothing to do with expectations, something to do with disappointment, nothing to do with abstract, something to do with isotope, nothing to do with hobbies, nothing to do with realm, nothing to do with belief, something to do with brainwashing, nothing to do with folk art, nothing to do with beauty, nothing to do with creativity, nothing to do with Utopia, nothing to do with conflict, nothing to do with lying, nothing to do with justification, something to do with the times, something to do with meetings, something to do with distortion, something to do with the original source, something to do with the skills, something to do with roots, nothing to do with the times, something to do with life, nothing to do with attention, nothing to do with purchasing power, nothing to do with patents, something to do with devotion, nothing to do with profundity, nothing to do with sketching, nothing to do with bricks, something to do with the gut, nothing to do with standards, something to do with clothing, something to do with craft, something to do with happiness, nothing to do with boats,nothing to do with architecture”

钟锦沛 ZHONG JINPEI (Born in Yangjiang, Guangdong province, China, 1986.

Currently lives and works in Yangjiang)

Zhong Jinpei is part of the new wave of young artists exploring abstraction and new mediums. He chose to leave Beijing and head back to his homeland of Yangjiang, in Guangdong, home to one of the country’s foremost artistic movements, the irreverent Yangiang movement (founded in 2002 by artists Chen Zaiyan, Sun Qinglin and Zheng Guogu) with an emphasis on“experimentation” and “new breakthroughs.
ZhongJinpei’s video Fall of Empire, 2010, single channel colour video, 18,35 is part of the corruptionist series. In a season that is not autumn, several young men pick all the leaves off a single jack fruit tree . An artificial autumn is created. More than the man versus nature struggle, this work portrays the routine humdrum of everyday life which can sometimes change everything forever. The environment in China is being drastically transformed by urbanization and the garden of Eden of old China is being lost, giving way to a cement paradise.

Zhong’s newest series of acrylic on canvas “The Silence After Making Love” is a series of oil paintings ressembling bed sheets, crumpled and wrinkled after the act of making love. The color grid of the bedsheets reminds one of the colour patterns of Mondrian and other abstracts painters while taking on the subject with a new edge.He imitates bed sheets, curtains, tablecloths, and other everyday textiles.

Zhong Jinpei has had several solo shows: Incompatibility at Soka Art Center (Taipei) and at SZ Art Center, (Beijing). He has also participated in several group exhibitions including“Participatory Loneliness (Tainan), Pure and Intangible (Phoenix Art Center, Shanghai / Beijing), China, New Identities (VDA, Berlin), Six Chinese Artists Group Show, Soka Art (Tainan), “New Face, New Art-Chinese Emerging Contemporary Artists”, (Colorado State University), “ Emerging Contemporary Chinese ( Mizuma & One Gallery, Beijing) , “Art Forward: A Survey Exhibition of Young Artists” (Jinshang Museum, Taiyuan), FOOD AND FREEDOM, (TCG Nordica Gallery, Sweden), “Luo Zhongli Scholarship Artworks Exhibition”(Chongqing Museum of Art) , “China Narratives: The Fourth Chengdu Biennale and Journey of A Thousand Miles”(CAFA Art Museum, Beijing) and “The Program of Adolescence” (Today Art Museum, Beijing).

马永峰MA YONGFENG (b. in 1976 inShanxi, lives in Beijing)

Ma Yongfeng is part of the new generation of graffiti artists who thrives on urban interventions, guerrilla art evoking the humor of the everyday. His washing mashine full of koi fish, symbof luck in China gained attaention when it was exhibited at MOCA at Los Angeles and PS1 in New York

In one project, he interviewed factory workers and spray painted thirsentences on radombuildings in Beijing. In “Everything rises must converge”, an installation, Ma Yongfeng imagines a fire in several drawers, possibly the drawers from government officials offices, of the grievances of workers or the peasantry.

His art and the “Forget Art” collective has been called “a collective of radical social mobilization”, an“art experiment”, almost form of resistance.

He will be featured in several museum shows including « Conforming to Vicinity-A Cross-strait four-region Artistic Exchange Project 2014 »
curated by Feng Boyi,at the Macao Museum of Art, nother show at the Pingtung Art Museum yet another at the
He Xiangning as well as one at the University Museum and Art Gallery, The University of Hong Kong.

Wu Junyong, Fuck aircraft, oil on wooden board resembling slate160 x 200cm,.png

Vous Avez Dit Révolution? Maison de la Chine

Vous avez dit Révolution ?

Han Bing - Qiu Jie - Tiantai Quan - Chang Lei - Pan Yue

Maison de la Chine, place St-Sulpice, Paris Janvier 2012-May 2012

La photographie chinoise est encore jeune ; mais fait des grands bonds en avant depuis quelques années. Des jeunes photographes jouent avec la technologie, d’autres font des mises en scène photographiques en studio, encore d’autres créent des performances photographiques à la lumière du jour. « Vous avez dit révolution ? » regroupent quatre photographes et un artiste dessinateur qui abordent le thème de la révolution, sociale, politique, environnementale, communiste, capitaliste… Cette expo, en parallèle du Mois de la Photo de novembre 2011 révèle de nouveaux talents et de nouvelles tendances en photographie et en art.

Han Bing (né en 74 à la campagne) est un artiste extraordinaire. Né dans une famille de paysans, il commence à dessiner à quatre ans avec des morceaux de verre dans la terre jaune. Il est le seul du village à aller au lycée et va ensuite à Pékin où sans le sou, nourri par une famille de pickpockets, il intègre la célèbre Académie des Beaux Arts. Dans le quartier huppé et bohème rock et roll de Houhai, il note avec lucidité les grandes différences entre les pauvres, les mingonren (les travailleurs) et les riches de la ville. Son art cherche à explorer les thèmes de la mondialisation, la modernisation et son impact sur le genre humain.

La série de photos « New Culture Movement » est amorcée en 2007. Une brique en Chine signifie beaucoup. Pour certains, le rêve d’une vie nouvelle et d'une maisonà soi. Pour d’autres, la brique signifie le désespoir, de ne jamais devenir riche, de ne jamais pouvoir jouir vraiment de la société de consommation. Lorsque Han Bing demande aux travailleurs migrants de poser briques à la main en se transformant en monuments vivants à gloire de la nouvelle culture chinoise, pas un seul ne proteste. «Les briques sont l'espoir, » déclare Zhou Rui, travailleur migrant. « Il est vrai que personne aujourd'hui dans cette ville ne recherche des briques. Pour nous, les briques onttoujours une valeur. Nous pouvons les utiliser pour construire une maison pour notre famille, une maison qui est mieux faite que celle de nos ancêtres en boue et en paille. » La série “New Culture Movement” met en scène ces travailleurs, jeunes et moins jeunes, aux visages frais ou ridés. Dans les années 80, tout ouvrier et travailleur rêvait d’une modeste maison de briques "xiaokang shehui" ou de la société de réussite modeste. Maintenant les briques sont désuets, jugées insalubres, interdites dans les grandes villes, mais de retour dans les campagnes, où la vaste majorité de la population chinoise est encore très pauvre. Ces ouvriers, ces familles et même ces écoliers avec des briques à la main, comme autant de petits Livres Rouges, ont des rêves tenaces, ceux de se faire une place dans une société qui refuse de reconnaître leur valeur ou même leur contribution.

Tiantai Quan (né en 1960 à Chongqing, Sichuan) met en scène l’horreur de la Révolution Culturelle chinoise dans « Corrupt of Desire ». Ses images montrent comment même une uniformisation de la société et une révolution qui bouleverse et détruit tout sur son passage, peut cependant créer une vision messianique et signifiante sur le plan artistique. Fasciné par un cimetière près de Pékin dédié aux femmes gardes rouges mortes tous très jeunes, il décide de mettre en scène ces femmes sacrifiées sur l’autel de la nation et du communisme. Le sol est jonché de « Renmin Ribao », le Quotidien du Peuple et des corps de ces jeunes femmes parties trop tôt. Elles tiennent toujours le Petit Livre Rouge à la Main, leurs seins exposés comme des « Libertés Guidant le Peuple ». Leurs nattes noires et parfaites, leurs uniformes étoilées en font des vierges sacrifiées, des Sabines, des Amazones d’érotisme et de beauté.

Pan Yue (né en 1968, Pékin) tourne en dérision les grands classiques de la peinture occidentale dans sa série « Apology to the Masters ». Il peut se le permettre. Diplômé en peinture de l’Académie des Beaux Arts de la capitale, il a écumé les bibliothèques et les musées et copié tous les maîtres. Mais c’est à travers d’exquises mises en scène avec des acteurs réels dans un studio où tout est étudié et traduit en lumière comme au cinéma qu’il re-interprète à sa façon les classiques. Au lieu du « Déjeuner sur l’herbe de Manet », il imagine quelques éphèbes chinois assis en triangle. Il n’y a plus de jardin ni de verdure, l’action se concentre sur les personnages, peintre et muses. La jeune femme nue a les sourcils d'un papillon de nuit, le teint pâle et poudré, le visage rougi de cinabre. Maquillée comme une courtisane, elle est assise nonchalamment sur son kimono en soie brodé, un homme tout aussi maquillé à ses côtés. Le peintre, clown au pantalon rouge et bouffant, leur offre un verre de huangjiu ou de vin chinois évoquant les buveries de Li Po et de Du Fu, poetes de l’époque Tang. Au lieu de la « Gabrielle d’Estrées et de la Duchesse de Fontainebleau », Pan Yue met en scène deux acteurs de l’opéra de Pékin sur un fond de soierie rouge et dorée, décorée de phénix et de dragons, dont l’un pince le sein de l’autre. Tout est érotisme, intrigue et ambiguité. Rien ne résistera à ses transfuges. Il fera aussi des copies de Pietro de la Franscesca, de Jan Van Eyck, de la Maya de Goya, de Hans Holbein, et de Michel Ange.

Dans sa deuxième série « Ballet Révolutionnaire », les danseuses des grands classique du temps de Jiang Qing (la femme de Mao) se lancent avec une ferveur inouïe sur scène, qu'elles soient habillées ou nues. Les ballets-opéras de l’époque communiste, « La fille aux cheveux blancs », « L'armée des femmes rouges » n’ont jamais été aussi passionnants. On imagine, l’auditoire tout concentré sur les principes révolutionnaires qui leur ont été inculqués qu’ils oublient de regarder les danseuses mises à nu par l’artiste. Pan Yue veut nous dire que ces ballets commandités par le pouvoir faisait somnoler les jeunes gens qui rêvaient de bien étranges rêves meublés de danseuses déshabillées.

Qiu Jie (né en 1961 à Shanghai ) est le seul artiste de Shanghai représenté. Il incarne cette nostalgie particulière pour son pays au temps de Mao et de la Révolution. Il nous transmet son attachement pour la Chine de cette époque: de femmes sans fard aux nattes noires et joues fraîches, habillées comme à l’usine, de paysages de temples et de pagodes, de pruniers et de cerisiers en fleur, du Yangtze Jiang, puissante rivière quigonfle les veines de la Chine. C’est un des précurseurs du pop art à Shanghai avec Yu Youhan, Wang Ziwei et Liu Dahong. A Pékin, Wang Guangyi, Feng Zhengjie et d’autres deviennent plus célèbres, tirant parti de leur proximité de Pékin.

Dans ces fresques géantes, tracées au fusain des mois durant, puis collées comme des dazibao (dessins aux grand caractères de la Révolution Culturelle), on ressent un amour pour sa jeunesse passée sous les Communistes: souvenirs de picnics d’œufs au thé, de raviolis et de pastèque, de balades dans les montagnes sacrées avec leurs escaliers gravées dans le roc, de temples où les mares grouillent de poissons et les cicades et les hirondelles toujours encagées, de jonques sur le fleuve, de jeu de go sous les arbres, sous les cerf-volants et les lanternes magiques… Qiu Jie est un rêveur heureux. Il se définit et signe « l’homme qui vient de la montagne », il habite entre Shanghai et Genève, étranger d'époque et de lieu, ballotté entre les deux cultures. Il voit la culture occidentale et chinoise comme deux tendances qui s’entrechoquent autant dans son esprit qu’en réalité.

Sa toile de Mao Zedong en chat lui a valu beaucoup de critique. Le chat est un homonyme phonétique de Grand Timonier. C’est une de ces blagues dont Qiu Jie est friand. Il voit tout de l’extérieur ; même le culte de Mao, ces affiches reproduites par milliers avec leur poèmes calligraphiés, le font rire bien qu'ils aient volé une partie de sa jeunesse.

Chang Lei (né en 1972 au Sichuan) est une bête étrange. Comme beaucoup d’artistes chinois aujourd’hui (tel Zeng Fangzhi et ses ivoires géants) , il met en scène un éléphant. Ne dit-on pas que l’éléphant a une mémoire énorme et peut se rappeler même de sons et de senteurs. L’éléphant peut aussi communiquer par empathie avec son semblable, en émettant des vibrations très particulières, une sorte de langage. Très prisés pour leurs ivoires, ces mêmes éléphants sont massacrées en Afrique par dizaine de millions pour nourrir le commerce chinois des aphrodisiaques. Dans cette série Chang Ling s’auto-photographie entouré d' éléphants en homme sans sexe et sans cheveux, un hermaphrodite bizarre. L’homme et l’éléphant sont mis en scène dans la Cité Interdite de façon étrange. En anglais, ne mentionne-t-on pas l'« elephant in the room », toutes ces choses qu’on n’ose pas aborder, dont on ne parle jamais, taboues. « Xiang » ou éléphanten chinois est aussi homonyme d’"apparence" et de "pensée". Transgressant le caractère sacré de l'éléphant, Chang Leiaborde la liberté d’expression de l’individu face à l’état tout-puissant et celui de la liberté d'expression.

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Houses of Memory by Ahmet Ertug

Houses of Memory by Ahmet Ertug, Photo Shanghai, SEPTEMBER 2016

Theaters and libraries are the mirror images of one another. They are the houses of memory, vast inventories and collections of the human experience. One is a vast collection of the written, the transcribed, the composed, the printed, while the other is the great stage for the articulated, the expressed, the narrated.

In Ahmet Ertug’s ethereal series about libraries and theaters across the world, the buildings are always empty, ominous; except for the hundreds or thousands of narratives ‘imprisoned’[1] in the shelves and the ghosts of actors whose words have ricocheted across the stage and captivated the audience. However, there is an overwhelming feeling that here lies our collective memory, the memory of humanity. It is a universe strangely inhabited by innumerable souls. Is this what he is chasing, the intangibility of memory, world memory, the memory of humanity?

The great chasm between theater and the library has been often been considered unbroachable. The theater seems to be lively and lighthearted entertainment whereas the library seems to be studious and impossibly serious. It is also the divide between civilizations, oral and written. And yet both are records of the human experience in its infinite variety, in its comedy and tragedy, in its happinesses and sorrows. Here can the human experience reach is its culmination because it is here that it is articulated and recorded, archived and reminisced, read or heard, remembered.

Ahmet Ertug’s extensive photographic memoir of the great libraries and theaters of the Western and Eastern worlds constitutes therefore one of the greatest artistic compendiums this century of the achievements of civilization. His is a monumental view of the world taken from the point of view of an architect, a man who can sense what it is to leave something behind for posterity, to build, to construct, to leave a record or an archive. His cataloguing of the “lieux de mémoire”[2] is more than a record; it is a journey. The Greeks once called the library, the house of Mnemosyne, the goddess of Memory or“the house of the daughters of memory” or the nine muses (her daughters). It is the home of all that which is remembered and what is contained within the imagination, a utopia of ideas.

Ahmet Ertug’s photographic journey (documented in more than twenty-six books), which begins with his own birth right, Turkey, has been an audacious one[3]. It starts with the glories of Constantinople, 15th-century monuments of the architect Mimar Sinan, mosques, some formerly glorious Byzantine churches (i.e. his incredible work on Hagia Sophia and Chora), the sites of antiquity, Ephesus, the library of Celsus (one of humanity’s first libraries), Aphrodisias, Nemrud Dag and many more archeological sites. It continues with his work on the ‘Palaces of Music: Opera houses of Europe’, ‘Temples of Knowledge: Historical Libraries of the Western World’ and now theaters (starting with those of the Renaissance in Italy).

His obsession with the monumental is coupled with an unusual perspective, the flatter Byzantine perspective used by Persian and Indian miniaturists as well as Western travellers to the Orient including 16th century Flemish painter Melchior Lorich (works which Ertug republished in 2001) and Domenico de Franceschi (the Italian Renaissance woodcut of Suleiman the Magnificent’s cortege first printed in in 1563, was also republished by Ertug). Beyond photography, Ertug has published a remarkable canon on architectural heritage, yet unrivalled in particular for Anatolia. And beyond architecture, he has photographed carpets, tiles and ceramics, imperial Ottoman clothing; Byzantine and Greek sculpture as well as done extremely meticulous portraits of the Buddhist icons in the Guimet Museum in Paris.

Some of these architectural monuments, including the domes Ertug captures so well, are the works of Mimar Sinan (c. 1489/1490 – July 17, 1588) the chief Ottoman architect and engineer for three sultans including Suleiman the Magnificent. Sinan, a janissary, most probably of Armenian or Greek origin, built more than three hundred of Istanbul’s monuments and like Ertug himself always had a foot in East and West, even corresponding with the genius of the Renaissance, Leonardo Da Vinci. Sinan, like Ertug, was obsessedwith symmetry, inculcating a geometrical purity to all this creations: mosques, schools, fountains, caravanserails, hopitals, hammams, mausoleums palaces, aqueducts, vaults and bridges including one of the first to cross the Golden Horn, the Buyukcekmece bridge, which Ertug captured in one of his first panoramic shots as a landscape photographer. His meeting with Sinan has been one could say, a meeting of minds across the centuries. One of Ertug’s contemporaneous mentors, the modernist Turkish architect Sedad Hakki Eldem, was also a great influence on his work. Eldem, the Frank Lloyd Wright of Turkey, was a proponent of indigenous culture, retaining his Ottoman approach to architecture even while adopting a more international style.

Ahmet Ertug’s photographic chronicle is a desire to record, like a great collector of architectural models, an erudite librarian of architectural paradigms. His approach is always frontal[4] with his large format camera, which necessitates a small team to operate. He is one of the few photographers continuing to use a analog camera, a 8 x 10 inch Sinar. In his interior photographic views, he prefers to use available light, which demands a particular knowledge of the light itself, and perfection in exposure. For interiors, he exposes his large format film up to five to eight minutes to capture the utmost of intricate detail. In these photographic images, the colossal scale of the architectural spaces and their cavernous ambiance as well as the minute detail come alive.

More than this, Ahmet Ertug has turned the architectural process on its head, so to speak transforming his positive, material experience (of buildings) into the immaterial negative (of the photograph). Not to build, but to capture. Not to create, but to record creation. And yet this architectural almanac compiled in his mind may yet yield plans, buildings, monuments.

As such, he is part of a larger tradition of architects turned photographers[5], for the needs of documentation, historical purposes, knowledge or in his case, pure aesthetic pleasure. Mais il s’est pris au jeu[6] He has became for now only a photographer, leaving his architectural sketches on the drawing board.

Libraries

The idea of the library lends itself to philosophy. There is the library of books “one has read” and the “anti-library” of books “one has never read” as Umberto Eco put it. There is also is the ‘library of Babel’ as Jorge Luis Borges[7] imagined, a library of all the books ever written by man in every possible language, all assembled in one place. Or there is the book, which is unique the world over, impossibly precious. There is also the overwhelming idea of the ideas, lives and fictions of so many people in one place, so many characters, so many ghosts creating a sort of an invisible city of human souls. The library is the collection of all the ideas of men and women who have ever lived, from many centuries before to the present day. It is the most perfect syllabus.

Libraries for some, embody a threat[8], unlimited knowledge and freedom, a dangerous paradise of the imagination. However, they also represent a kind of Vitruvian man of Leonardo da Vinci, perfection of the human spirit and body[9], the perfect symmetry, the apogee of the human spirit. The book-laden shelves encased in glorious woods and stone are built to glorify the ultimate achievement of humanity, knowledge. And yet this great estate, this legacy, is fragile. Is it illusory, only an appearance?

Libraries have always been the repositories of civilization and as such the first victims of wars or catastrophes. The oldest libraries still thrill our imagination: the scrolls of Timgad, the libraries of the ancient world, of Celsus, of Pergamum and of Alexandria founded by Ptolemy II, the papyrus of the Imperial libraries of Constantinople, the cuneiform tablets of Nineveh where the Epic of Gilgamesh was stored, the scrolls of Dunhuang, one of the oldest Buddhist exegesis, the Nippur temple library where the first record of the Great Flood was discovered the house of Wisdom in Baghdad , The papyri of the Villa of the Papyri in Pompei, the tablets of Ebla , the Qumran scrolls, the library of Aristotle in which Alexander and Ptolemy studied are all part of our collective memory, utopias of the human spirit, paradises of the mind. In their midst, we could find the Diamond Sutra, St Cuthbert Bible, an old Koran, the Book of Kells, the Gutenberg Bible, the Sinai Codex, the Book of Mary, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Aristotle’s comedies, The Diamond Sutra, The Book of Odes, the Shahnameh, the Avesta, Ptolemy’s world map, Avicenna’s Book of Healing? Perhaps they are there, hidden, cossetted, a binding among many ensconced somewhere in the opulent libraries photographed by Ertug. The mystery lingers. The eye travels. There is so much to take in.

To destroy a library is to annihilate a civilization, to replace one history with another. The rebel Xiang Yu and his troops on horseback swooped down on Xianyang Palace, burning the library and burying the scholars in an open act of revolt against the emperor Qin Er Shi. The library of Alexandria, beyond the lighthouse, founded by Ptolemy was accidentally burned down when the warmonger Julius Caesar set fire to his ships, a fire that spread beyond the harbor, beyond the lighthouse, committing to the flames one of the greatest founts of human knowledge in the Oriental world[10]. The library of Antioch was burnt by Emperor Jovian for its pagan texts[11]. The Nalanda[12] library was set alight by Bakhtiyar Khilji and his troops, destroying more than half of the Indian Buddhist cannon. The Mongols hordes led by Hulagu[13] besieged Baghdad and it was said that the Tigris ran black with the ink of the books and red from the blood of the scientists and philosophers massacred.

In May 1933, the Nazis held one of the most well known book autodafés in history incinerating tens of thousands of Jewish and Marxist books on the central square in Berlin.

In 2013, rebels loyal to Ansar Dine burned scrolls and parchments in ancient script in Timbuktu. The leader of the Ansar Dine rebels is currently on trial in the Hague for cultural destruction, one of the first such trials. ISIS have also committed to the flames the libraries of Mosul and Anbar province. Books and libraries are taboo, venerated, impossibly sacred.

Theaters

The philosopher Aristotle was keenly interested in memory. He pioneered mnemotechnics, the art and technique of recollection and reminiscing the past. He is perhaps the ultimate bridge between theaters and libraries. He founded one of the first libraries, the Lyceum library in Athens, designed to store and transcribe books, one of the first storehouses of memory, probably consulted by his students among which Alexander the Great, Ptolemy and Cassander.

He later formulated the rules of modern theater, the ultimate memorial and poetic expression of the human experience. His Poetics, a book on the comedy and tragedy are still considered the codex of the modern play.

Memory was highly prized among Greek actors or the act of reciting epic poems, or scripts. The rhapsodies, who recited the Homeric epics, were considered almost as historians, committing to memory the history of the Greek people, myth or fact. This mnemonic recital, which was originally part of the Dionysian festivals, became a popular form of entertainment. Theaters, the monuments created for the recital of memories, of the imitation of the human experience, were semi-circular stages carved into hillsides, often capable of hosting ten of thousands of people, symmetrical, acoustical orbs.

The semi-circular orb was later adopted almost unchanged in many classical theaters of the Renaissance such as those photographed extensively in Italy by Ahmet Ertug: the Teatro Olympico, the Teatro Bibiena, the Teatro Farnese, etc. These exquisitely symmetrical theaters, ‘cameras’, chambers of sound and memory, have been photographed by Ahmet Ertug with as much reverence as sacred spaces. The absolute simplicity of the perfectly crafted wooden stage of the Teatro Farnese in Parma built in 1618 by Giovanni Battista Aleotti contrasts with the earlier Teatro Olympico in Vicenza designed by Andrea Palladio and its incredibly ornate, trompe l’oeil sculpture laden facades leading to streets and colonnades as far as the eye can see.

Intriguingly, the baroque ceiling of the Teatro Bibiena in Mantua is not unlike the ceiling of the Topkapi harem, an interior created for the (most often foreign captive) favorites of the sultan. In one of his first photographic experiences, Ertug captured one of the rooms of the Topkapi palace harem with its Dutch tilework, Roccocco red and gilded flowered ceiling, Roman style pale blue frescoes of fountains and gardens, a paradise imagined for the imported odalisques[14]. This photograph is telling as it is not only a room but also a theater of sorts, the ultimate boudoir, antechamber of the powerful Ottoman sultans. The harem room was also glorious mélange, an eclectic mix of the Turkish and the foreign, a shelf of amorous history, like Istanbul itself, all in layers, intricate knots of East and West, overlapping civilizations.

In the theater, the actors, having committed to memory the drama express themselves through gesture, speech, song, music, or dance, exploring the deeper meaning of our life below. Beyond the curtain, above the stage, one can just imagine the great invisible puppeteer with his fingers on the strings, handling the actors with utmost care from the great heavens. The audience sits enthralled. “All the world’s a stage.[15]”

The word “theatre” is derived from the Greek “theatron”, a place for watching or to see. The theater is for the audience as is the photograph. We are all mere witnesses, watchers, voyeurs, seers, spectators, eyes. The Turkish eye, the strange quasi-diabolical symbol of the Ottomans has always fascinated me. They often speak of the “evil eye” but one cannot help but think of simply the greater mysteries of the universe, the unseen forces at work, the Gods and their counterparts. There is also in this eye, the importance of the eye itself, how one perceives and interprets reality, the eye of the artist or the poet. In the Testament d’Orphée, Jean Cocteau glues painted paper eyes unto his pupils, and blind, one senses that he sees more clearly. Like Tiresias, he is suddenly gifted with prophecy. He has looked beyond the mere act of seeing and has seen the world in his mind’s eye, the eye of the artist. The eye of Ahmet Ertug wanders and as it wanders, we wander the world over, asking ourselves what we have may or may not have missed. We long to see and to remember. To retain, to dream, to revisit the past. Photography is the ultimate act of remembering, imprinting a memory on film.

Plato imagined that we are born knowing everything already, we are simply remembering things until the moment when we die. Aristotle imagined that upon death, we are faced with the choice of forgetting everything and drinking from the waters of Lethe or remembering everything and entering paradise or the Elysian fields. Memory, it seems, is the only goal.

[1] Alain Resnais in his “Toute la mémoire du monde”, his documentary about the BNF, he says: “A Paris, c’est à la Bibliothèque Nationale que les mots sont emprisonnés. On y trouve tout ce qui s’imprime en France.”

[2] Pierre Nora, the French historian coined the term “lieux de mémoire” the idea that certain places can have special significance related to human history and memory.

[3] However, Ertug started architectural photography per se in Iran in 1974 during his two year stay. He was awarded a fellowship to photograph traditional Japanese architectureand Zen gardens in Japan in 1978.

[4] Preface to Temples of knowledge, Bruno Racine, president of the BNF: “Ahmet Ertug’s initial approach […] is always a full frontal shot coupled with a rigorous concern for symmetry. According to the laws of perspective, all which codified during the Renaissance, cupolas, minarets, columns and fixed furnishings all fold out unto either side of an invisible central axis. When faced with the imposing majesty of these monuments, conceived for the most part to exalt the majesty of the divine or the sacredness of knowledge, the onlooker cannot help to but feel just a little bit belittled by the power of architecture” ”

[5] "[... ] all heroes of the modern archaeological age, from Adolf Loos to Le Corbusier, from Walter Gropius and Erich Mendehlson toFrank Lloyd Wright, kept substantial archive photos in which they collected not only examples of their own work, but that of other architects and photographers. […] Ahmet Ertug places his work not only in the tradition of the travel photographers of in Istanbul or in the 19th century the Grand Tour, but also in the impressive history of architectural documentation that accompanies the modern age, […] " Rolf Sachsee, Grand opera through the grand lens, preface to ‘Palaces of Music’.

[6] It has become addictive.

[7] “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” Jorge Luis Borges

[8] It is no accident that forces contrary to civilization and proponents of the void have recently burned to the ground the Ahmed Baba library in Timbuktu (ironically one of the great libraries of the Islamic world). In parallel, they have trained innocent children to execute hostages on the stage of Palmyra, in Syria, one of the greatest theaters of the Graeco Roman world with Ephesus and Pompei, see Paul Veyne, ‘L’importance de Palmyre’.

[9] It is described by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius in his treatise on architecture . He stated that the human figure the principal source of proportion in architecture, eight heads high.

[10] Accounts differ about when the library was burned either by a fire set by Caesar in 48 BC, or in an attack by Aurelien in AD 270, or by the decree of the Copt pope Theophilus in AD 391.

[11] The library Antioch was destroyed in 364.

[12] The burning of the Nalanda library occurred in 1193.

[13] The Siege of Baghdad, lasted from January 29 until February 10, 1258.

[14] From conversations with the artist, March 2016.

[15] William Shakespeare

China Forward or Kitai Period, Moscow

Kitai Period in May 2008 was one of the first Chinese contemporary art exhibitions in Moscow at the TSUM Department store supported by Alfa Bank. It featured the works of Gao Brothers, Zhong Biao, Han Bing, Kang Can, Chen Wenling, Feng Zhengjie, Tiantai Quan and other artists.

Tiantai Quan, Corrupt of the desire Cprint 80 x 120 cm沉堕的欲望(小).jpg

Art show opens window on China

Russian art show

Cutting Edge Auction, Artcurial Paris

Arrêt sur images. Coup de projecteur sur l’avant-garde des pays émergents.

Artcurial Briest-Poulain-Le Fur-F. Tajan poursuit sur ses engagements très contemporains en explorant de nouveaux territoires.

Moyen-Orient, Inde, Asie du Sud-est, Corée du Nord et Corée du Sud, Chine, Japon, Russie : le 1er octobre 2007 la maison de ventes proposera une sélection de ce que la scène artistique contemporaine de ces pays offre de plus représentatif.

Art capable de réinvestir l’imaginaire traditionnel et national pour l’Iran. Art érigé en contre-pouvoir pour la Birmanie. Art très marqué par l’identité culturelle nationale pour l’Inde. Art empreint de modernité technologique qui questionne sans relâche l’individualité pour le Japon. Art emblématique d’une modernité au double visage pour la Corée du Sud. Art de la provocation pour la Russie. Art de propagande tout droit sorti d’un régime totalitaire pour la Corée du Nord dont les œuvres des artistes “officiels” franchissent pour la première fois les frontières…

Aux cotés d’artistes émergents, on retrouvera des artistes contemporains déjà reconnus sur le marché international, comme Shadi Ghadirian, Rana Javadi, Shaban Adam, Fateh al Moudaress, Devrim Nejad, Lee U Fan, Kim Tchang Yeul, Takashi Murakami, Yayoi Kusama, Ilya Kabakov, Alexander Vinogradov, Qi Wenzhang.

Au total 120 œuvres d’une centaine d’artistes, pour une estimation se situant autour de 300 000 €.

ARTISTES AU RENDEZ-VOUS

MOYEN-ORIENT

IRAN

Shadi Ghadirian, Sadegh Tirafkan, Davood Ghanbari, Rana Javadi, Golnaz Fahti, Mehraneh Atashi, Bahman Jalali, Khosrow Hassanzadeh, Rami Haerizadeh

Gros plan sur la vitalité de la photographie contemporaine iranienne. Téhéran vu de l’intérieur… Les images de Shadi Ghadirian, Khosrow Hassanzadeh, Bahman Jalali, Rana Javadi, Mehraneh Atashi, Rami Haerizadeh, Sadegh Tirafkan, interrogent l’Iran d’aujourd’hui, juxtaposant tradition, archaïsme et modernité.

Artiste phare de la jeune photographie iranienne, Shadi Ghadirian sera à l’honneur avec plusieurs clichésprovenant de ses trois principales séries, « Qajar », « Like everyday » et « Be colourful ». Si « la seule représentation que se fait un étranger de la femme iranienne est un tchador noir », l’artiste la dépeintquant à elle « dans tous ses aspects », et ce, non sans ironie. Ainsi la série « Like everyday » inspirée à l’artiste par son quotidien de jeune mariée, où chaque photographie, à mi-chemin entre portrait et nature morte, décline un ustensile ménager, paradigme interchangeable du visage voilé auquel il se surimpose… Hachoir, marmite ou pelle à tarte prennent place sur imprimés fleuris. « Témoignant » de la situation des femmes iraniennes, « citoyennes de seconde classe, victimes de la censure », Shadi Ghadirian signe une impertinente variation à l’iranienne sur le thème universel de la « femme-objet ».
Aux côtés de la série « Like everyday » dont chaque tirage sera proposé 4 400 €-5 000€, la série « Qajar », pastiche de photographies du 19e siècle, montre des femmes en costume traditionnel posant avec les emblèmes d’une certaine modernité. Symboliques d’une liberté hier encore prohibée en Iran, ces objets font aussi signe vers une autre forme d’aliénation : en perte de vraies valeurs, l’Occident est convoqué dans une mythologie consumériste dédiée au culte du paraître et de la performance. Dans la double critique d’une tradition iranienne incapable de se moderniser et d’un Occident faisant de valeurs tout aussi illusoires le principe de tout progrès, la photographe renvoie avec humour les clichésdos à dos …Qajar, tirage argentique, est estimé (est. 5 000-6 000€).

Autre artiste majeur de cette scène : Khorsrow Hassanzadeh, ancien garde révolutionnaire engagé dans la guerre contre l’Irak, dont les oeuvres multi-couches mêlant photographie, collage, peinture et techniques mixtes, ont déjà participé à de nombreuses expositions internationales. Empreintes d’une poésie résolument humaniste, ses œuvres recomposent la réalité iranienne comme le journal de sa vie. Ainsi Hommes, gouache sur papier doré et collage (est. 4 100-5 000 €).

Les photographies de Bahman Jalali, Image of Imagination Series (est. 3 000-5 000 €), Rana Javadi, Once upon a time (est. 700-1 000 €) et Mehraneh Atashi, Zourkaneh (est. 700-1 000 €), poursuivront l’élaboration d’une identité iranienne contemporaine dans une confrontation entre passé et présent.

La peinture sera représentée par Golnaz Fathi, jeune artiste élue « meilleure femme calligraphe » en Iran, qui connaît déjà une reconnaissance internationale. Tradition et modernité, peinture et graphisme, fusionnent littéralement dans ses œuvres. Calligraphiées, les lettres deviennent formes tandis qu’aucun mot n’est lisible… Subsiste la « tension » créée par la calligraphie qui « danse le long de la toile sans parler ». Inspirée par la musique, la peinture transporte des traces de sens, exprimant ces émotions que l’on ne peut pas transcrire avec des mots. « L’art et la culture transcendent la politique » soulignera l’artiste lors de l’inauguration en 2003 à Washington de l’exposition dédiée aux artistes iraniens qui continuera de se déplacer dans tous les Etats-Unis jusqu’à la fin de l’année 2008. Arabesques, huile sur toile (142x154cm), est estimée 5 000–6 000 €.

SYRIE

Sabhan Adam, Fateh al Moudaress

De nombreuses expositions et une vente récente à Dubaï signent la reconnaissance internationale de l’œuvre de Sabhan Adam. Corps contraints et visages marqués, présences immobiles faisant front au spectateur, les créatures de l’artiste, nées du “froid qui traverse l’humanité toute entière lorsque la nuit tombe”, se tiennent dans une existence paradoxale, incarnations d’une altérité cruelle et repoussante. “Je suis comme une pièce sans fenêtre et comme mes personnages vivent dans cette pièce, ce sont des créatures sans oxygène”, commente l’artiste. Et d’ajouter : “pauvre, criminel ou bien éduqué, je vois l’homme dans son intégralité, sans géographie, sans histoire, sans religion. Un individu est un individu du début à la fin ». Deux grands formats, Sans titre, technique mixte sur toile, et Sans titre, huile sur toile, estimé chacun 4 000-5 000 €, le représenteront.

ASIE DE L’EST

CHINE

Lu Fei Fei, Liu Ren, Lian Ming, Wang Xiaoben, Liu Fei, Qi Wenzhang, Ma Sibo

Liu Ren, née en 1980, a entamé depuis peu une carrière internationale. Chacune de ses photographies, encadrée dans une ellipse, ouvre à l’imagination et à un univers fantastique qui ne semble jamais étrange. La série “Someday, Somewhere” révèle un pur idéalisme : rêve, imagination, illusion et paysage réel s’imbriquent pour créer, grâce aux techniques digitales, un onirisme qui n’appartient qu’à l’artiste. Someday, Somewhere, 2004, tirage numérique édité à 10 exemplaires, est estimé 4 000-5 000 €.

JAPON

Nagi Noda, Ryusei Mizuno, Takashi Murakami,Yayoi Kusama, Masaya Eguchi, Ryu Itadani, Adapter

A découvrir absolument pour les passionnés du « kawaii », Nagi Noda, directrice artistique et designer graphique, touche aux domaines de la mode, de la musique et de la publicité, dans une approche emblématique du « trashy cute ». Reconnue dans son pays et à travers le monde, Nagi Noda est l’auteur de Untitled, 2003, tirage numérique en triptyque (1,03x4,36m) pièce unique (est. 3 000-4 000 €).

A partir d’images du quotidien, publicités, couvertures de magazines ou objets familiers, Ryu Itadani réanime les grandes villes comme Hong Kong ou Tokyo. Ses images audacieusement colorées aux lignes dynamiques offrent une vision optimiste de la vie urbaine et du monde de la mode. Things_That_I_Like, Hope_You_Like_It_Too (est. 8 000-10 000 €), tirage digital sur papier Canson réunissant 31 œuvres (1,68x1,51m), fait partie de la série Things that I like placée au centre de sa création.

La peinture de Ryusei Mizuno trouve sa personnalité entre le style traditionnel de la peinture japonaise et l’expression de la modernité, entre réalité et abstraction. Elle porte également l’influence de l’artiste chinois Shi Tao. Shanghai REN, peinture néon sur toile (100x190cm) est estimée 6 000–8 000 €.

COREE DU SUD

Lee U Fan, Curie Chung, Yoo Hye Sook, Park Hyung Geun, Sung Nak Hee, Yoo Seung Ho, Yoon Young Hwa, Yu Jin Young, Kim Tchang Yeul, Kim Jin Hyok, Kim Bum Su, Lee Jung Woong, Le Woo Lim, Lim Taek, Han Sung Pil, Nam Tchun Mo, Im Sang Bin, Kim Su Young, Hong Ki Yeun

Gouvernée par la Chine jusqu’à la fin du 19e siècle, sous contrôle japonais durant la première et la deuxième guerre mondiale, la Corée développe un art emprunt de traditions asiatiques mais qui s’est très tôt tourné vers les Etats-Unis, vers les valeurs et le modèle économique américains.

Hidden Emotion, 2006, pellicule de film, acrylique et colle (est. 8 000 -9 000 €), œuvre de Kim Bum Su, fait du « han », esprit sombre et terrifiant provoquant la mort dans la tradition coréenne, la force motrice à l’origine du succès capitaliste…

Dans The Weightless Dreams, 2006, acrylique sur toile (est. 6 000-7 000 €), Chung Curie projette dans une allégorie la situation de l’artiste dans l’actuelle Corée du Sud, et dépeint le rêve illusoire de papillons délivrés d’une geôle contre-nature, celui d’une création artistique libérée de la politique et des éternels sujets de la cage et de l’oiseau…

Le travail très contemporain de Yu Jin Young s’illustrera avec Colourful border, 2007 (est. 4 500-5 000 €), technique mixte, édition 1/3, « sculpture installation » représentant une femme-poupée (133cm) accompagnée de son chien. Personnage féminin sinon femme, celle-ci cache un visage triste, pâle et inexpressif, sous un masque arborant sourire rouge et yeux de biche. Le culte des apparences soumet jusqu’à son chien, simple accessoire coordonné à sa tenue !

COREE DU NORD

Kim Gon Ho, Choi Chong Hwal, Kim Hong Il, Yi Chol Ryung, Pak Kum Song

En Corée du Nord, des artistes comme Choi Chong Hwal (né en 1952), Kim Hong Il (né en 1965), Yi Chol Ryung (né en 1976), ou Kim Jin Hyok (né en 1981), reçoivent des allocations mensuelles du gouvernement pour peindre des affiches de propagande et des peintures à l’huile glorifiant une des dernières dictatures du monde. L’art de la RDCN (République Démocratique de la Corée du Nord) évoque l’art chinois et russe avant la guerre froide, étatique et soumis à la censure. C’est aussi un art qui se développe dans un régime qui pourrait bientôt s’effondrer…

Les œuvres de ces artistes franchissent aujourd’hui pour la première fois les frontières. Art de l’écart entre réalité et idéal… art pour les masses qui glorifie les paysans, les militaires et la construction du socialisme, art réactionnaire, contre l’Amérique en faveur de la classe dirigeante, qui excelle à embellir la réalité pour le plaisir du despote Kim Jong. Affiches de propagande diverses, illustrant parfois la dernière production cinématographique nationale, œuvres originales réalisées à la gouache et acrylique sur papier (69x80cm), seront proposées 600-800 €. L’artiste Yi Chong Ryul sera présent avec Railway Worker,huile sur toile (est. 1 500-1 800 €).

Nicholas Bonner, galeriste britannique investi dans l’art nord-coréen présentera son film Crossing the Line durant l’exposition… une occasion rare de voir un soldat américain exilé en Corée du Nord.

ASIE DU SUD

VIETNAM

Nguyen Nghia Cuong, Luong Anh Duong, Vu Dan Tran

En 1968, lorsque son pays entre dans la guerre, Luong Anh Duong vient de terminer ses études et commence à travailler pour le gouvernement, mettant son art au service de la propagande. Son inspiration provient de sa grande foi dans le système, dit-il : « Je crois aux idéaux socialistes. Si je n’y croyais pas, je ne pourrais pas réaliser mes peintures ». Chaque affiche (est. 150-200 €), œuvre originale à la gouache sur papier, montre la fierté d’un peuple au travail, stéthoscope, livre ou faucille à la main, honorant souhaits et instructions du gouvernement…

BIRMANIE

Kyi Wynn

Longtemps isolée du reste du monde, la Birmanie découvre l’art occidental dans les années 1990 au moment où le gouvernement du Myanmar allége les restrictions sur les sorties du territoire… Certains artistes voyagent vers l’Ouest et ramènent des techniques et des styles artistiques différents…

Sur grand format, l’acrylique sur toile de Kyi Wynn, « Help me Help me » (est. 3 000-4 000 €) dépeint le sentiment de désespoir d’un peuple prisonnier d’un régime totalitaire.
Fond rouge sang, mains levées vers le visage silencieux du Bouddha…

INDE

Gagan Singh, Ryan Paul Lobo, Shahid Datawala, Saibal Das, Minal Dabani, Delip Sharma, Manil Gupta, Rohini Singh, Ebenezer Sundar Singh, Ina Pasad, Umesh Iswalkar, Anna Palkumantu

Ryan Paul Lobo est réalisateur de documentaire et photographe. Ilvit aujourd’hui au Bangalore où il peint et écrit également. De l’aveu de l’artiste, sa passion va surtout à la photographie. Dans sa série The Wedding Season, le photographe observe invités et mariés à la recherche des « moments véritables », dira-t-il : « j’ai voulu révéler la vérité dans nos vies et saisir ces moments dans toute leur complexité, leur méchanceté, leur beauté ». Sonja's Wedding, tirage chromogénique, est estimé 500-700 €.

ENTRE EUROPE ET ASIE : LA RUSSIE

Oleg Kulik, Pavel Pepperstein, Anouchka, Ilya Kabakov, Valery Chtak, Alexei Kallima, Olga Chernysheva, Alexander Vinogradov

Une nouvelle scène contemporaine russe fait son apparition, provocatrice, décapante, libre et irrévérencieuse. Après la génération des années 1920-1940 – celle de Ilya Kabakov, notamment – qui a déjà conquis le marché international, de jeunes artistes suscitent l’intérêt des collectionneurs…

La critique internationale a fait écho des performances avant-gardistes d’Oleg Kulik, « artiste animal » excellant surtout dans le rôle de « l’artiste chien » … Approche critique de l’anthropocentrisme dans des prestations hommages au plus humanisé des animaux, celui que certains préfèrent parfois à d’autres humains. Dans le rôle du chien fou, Olek Kulik se plait encore à mimer la sauvagerie de la politique russe. Golden Family Series, ensemble de trois tirages, est estimé 4 500-5 000 €.

Collectionneur passionné, Pierre Christian Brochet vit depuis plus de quinze ans à Moscou. Il est l’un des premiers à s’être intéressé à l’art contemporain russe. Il viendra parler lors de l’exposition de l’ensemble qu’il a réuni depuis 1989.

Under the Veil, Art Paris

ART PARIS + GUESTS ifa gallery + Marie de Moussac & Pia Copper Booth C0, Grand Palais ifa gallery is pleased to announce its participation in ARTPARIS+GUESTS 2010, opening on 17 March and running 18-22 March 2010. For this very first ARTPARIS+GUESTS - an extension of the regular art fair framework - ifa gallery has invited curators Marie de Moussac and Pia Copper to join, widening its China and South-East Asia perspective, to contribute a selection of works of artists from North Africa, Iran and the Middle East. This year, ifa gallery will welcome a performance and installation by Dai Guangyu, whose focus is the use of ink in his framework of art. The performance will take place near ifa gallery booth on Thursday 18 March 7PM and on Saturday 20 March 3.30PM. ifa gallery will also be presenting the Gao Brothers Utopia of Construction, a composite of images of tiny men enclosed in infinitely duplicated windows, denouncing the urban dream of planners and architects; and a curious video describing the surreal day dreams of young artist Li Ming where an excavator combs the hair of an unidentified woman. Six pairs of Tong Yan Ru'nan's Brothers will also be on display. Aside from these works, will be sculptures by Pham Ngoc Duong - two eerily compacted members from his Gold Family series - and Dinh Y Nhi's oils on canvas that relate the harrowing stories of not only women in Asia, but of people the world over. Marie de Moussac & Pia Copper will present 'Under the Veil', an exhibition whose artists are often censored in their home countries but still manage to work out of their studios and produce outstanding work. Finally, ifa gallery will present new drawings from Arnaud de Gramont, incarnations of internal body organs hovering in space. ifa gallery + Marie de Moussac & Pia Copper bring to light artists from China and across Asia, from Beijing to Paris, via Hangzhou, Chengdu, Vietnam, Iran and the Middle East to the new edition of ARTPARIS. ifagallery ● contemporary art

Lu Fei Fei, Toi et Moi

Lu Fei Fei's first exhibition in Paris at the Reflex Gallery presenting her installation of embroidered shoes, sculptures and her photographs which imagine a world in which East and West meet on common ground.

Parallel Worlds

Parallel worlds, Galerie Cinko, passage Choiseul, May 2005
showcasing the works of Wang Ziwei, Tang Hui, Chang Lingyang, Yi Chuchen, Zhao Liang, Ai Yingxu and Xiao Fan as inspired by the news of the first Chinese astronaut Yang Liwei landing on the moon repeatedly.
In the works of the younger generation of Chinese and Taiwanese artists, genetic modification, environmental change, cloning, trransexuality, ... all of these things are part of new parallel worlds which co-exist with our present world. This exhibition presents some of the aspects of this parallel brave new world. Avanti, avanti Zhongguo!

Du Ciel à la Steppe, Mongolian Art Auction

This Mongolian art exhibition and auction heldin December 2009 was the first ever organized in Paris at the Galerie Sinitude with Gaia auctions. It featured the works of Narangerel, Munkh, Chadrabaan, Oto Tsogt, M.Batzorig, Bu Badral, Ganbold, Uurintuya, Sarantsatsralt, Adiyabazar, Rentsen, Budbayar, Bayart-Od, Ganbaatar et Tamir Undraa, Nandin-Ergene, Chimmeeddorj, among others.

Walking the Cabbage, Seoul with Han Bing

Han Bing brought his world famous performance Walking the Cabbage to Seoul in May 2016, where he walked the liubaicai, choice vegetable of the Chinese peasantry in a more capitalist setting. The walking cabbage performance signifies the end of rural life, the beginning of a capitalist era of "pets", the forgetting of rural traditions and the end of the Communist egalitarian era. In Seoul, they called it Kimchi Walk.

Why Is This Man Walking With a Cabbage? | The New York Times

Han Bing Walking the Cabbage Performance Seoul November 2015

Jason Botkin, Scope Miami

Jason Botkin, a well-known Candian graffiti artist brought his ironic animalportrait works to Miami Scope in collaboration with Muriel Eymery of Alternative Collections in December 2015.

Théâtre de la Modernité

Theater of Modernity presented the works of Chang Lei and Han Bing, two young artists from Beijing whose work asked pertinent questions about modernization in the PRC and its pitfalls.

HOTEL SCRIBE PARIS Managed by Sofitel THÉÂTRE DE LA MODERNISATION Chang Lei - Han Bing 11 mai - 30 juin 2012

Galerie des Nouvelles Images - Hôtel Scribe Paris Communiqué Paris le 2 mai 2012 - Du 11 mai au 30 juin 2012, la Galerie des Nouvelles Images de l’Hôtel Scribe présente Théâtre de ma modernisation, photographies et art vidéo de deux jeunes artistes de la génération post-révolutionnaire, Chang Lei et Han Bing. Une confrontation lucide et poétique des rêves et réalités de la Chine d’aujourd’hui. Han Bing Né en 1974 dans une famille paysane, Han Bing est le seul enfant de son village à accéder au lycée. Ses talents de peintre lui permettent de partir à Pékin et d’intègrer la célèbre Académie des Beaux Arts. Le quartier huppé et bohème de Houhai lui révèle l’ampleur du contraste entre les mingonren (les travailleurs) et les riches de la ville. Son art explore l’impact de la volonté forcenée de modernisation. La série Love in the Age of Big Construction est issue d’une perfomance multimédia de trois heures réalisée en 2006 à Pékin dans le quartier des vieux hutongs. L’artiste oppose la douceur de son physique androgyne à la puissance dévastatrice des bulldozers. Il répond par l’amour à la haine, par la vie et par sa jeunesse à la destruction, par la séduction à la brutalité. La série de photos New Culture Movement est amorcée en 2007. Une brique signifi e beaucoup en Chine, le rêve d’une vie nouvelle et d’une maison à soi, ou le désespoir de ne jamais parvenir à trouver sa place dans la société de consommation. Lorsque Han Bing demande aux travailleurs migrants, aux écoliers, aux paysans de poser briques à la main en se transformant en monuments vivants à gloire de la nouvelle culture chinoise, pas un seul ne proteste. Ils posent devant des sites en construction. «Les briques sont l’espoir, » déclare Zhou Rui, travailleur migrant. « Il est vrai que personne aujourd’hui dans cette ville ne recherche des briques. Pour nous, les briques ont toujours une valeur. Nous pouvons les utiliser pour construire une maison pour notre famille, une maison qui est mieux faite que celle de nos ancêtres.» Dans les années 80, tous rêvaient d’une modeste maison de briques «xiaokang shehui», symbole de la société de réussite modeste. Maintenant les briques sont désuètes. Interdites dans les grandes villes, on les retrouve dans les campagnes. Ces ouvriers, ces familles et même ces écoliers avec des briques à la main, comme autant de petits Livres Rouges, ont des rêves tenaces, ceux de se faire une place dans une société qui refuse de reconnaître leur valeur ou même leur contribution. 1/3 La performance Walking the Cabbage et la série d’oeuvres qui en découlent prolongent ce thème avec l’humour tendre et sensible qui caractérise l’oeuvre de Han Bing. La réserve de choux est en Chine symbole de bien-être, garantie la plus sûre pour traverser l’hiver sans craindre la famine. Si cette réalité demeure dans les camagnes, les riches chinois des villes n’ont plus besoin de compter sur leur chou. Han Bing transforme le symbole de la nécessité en ironique icône du superfl u. Le chou devient animal de compagnie, qui ne nourrit plus mais qu’on nourrit. Depuis six ans, au travers d’une série de performances, vidéos, photographies, Han Bing se met en scène promenant son chou en laisse, dans la Chine moderne et dans le monde entier, à San Francisco, New York, Amsterdam, New Delhi, Bruxelles, Tokyo, Berlin, Paris. Les carnets Moleskine ont édité le journal de voyage Diary of Walking the Cabbage Performance. L’oeuvre de Han Bing a été présentée dans le monde entier : Fotografi emuseum Amsterdam, TSUM Moscou, Columbia Museum of Art, UCLA Los Angeles, IESA center Berkeley, Must be contemporary art center Pékin ... Chang Lei Né en 1972, Chang Lei est un musicien de rock converti à la photographie et à la peinture qu’il a étudiées à l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts du Sichuan. L’oeuvre présentée, Animal Farm rmontre la place Tiananmen et la Cité Interdite étrangement peuplées de myriades d’animaux sauvages. La place Tiananmen est un véritable théâtre de l’histoire chinoise qui a vu Mao exhorter la foule de Gardes Rouges à la révolution, la procession accompagner les funérailles du Grand Timonnier en 1979, les chars écraser le mouvement estudiantin. Par sa référence à la Ferme des animaux de George Orwell, cette arche de Noé échouée renvoie à l’aveuglement du peuple par la propagande et la dictature, sur fond de chaos politique et social. L’oeuvre de Chang Lei a été exposée dans les musées de Pékin, Jinan et Nankin, à la maison de la Chine à Paris et au Musée d’art contemporain de Rome. La Galerie des nouvelles images Berceau du cinéma, l’Hôtel Scribe est depuis plus d’un siècle au coeur de l’histoire des images. C’est en effet dans le Salon Indien de son Grand Café que les frères Lumière présentèrent pour la première fois au public, le 28 décembre 1895, leur invention, le Cinématographe. Invention des rayons X, image publicitaires, grands noms du photo-journalisme ... les arts de l’image fi rent dès lors partie de l’esprit du lieu. La Galerie des Nouvelles Images, présente des œuvres photographiques, vidéo, cinématographiques, prolongeant dans la création d’aujourd’hui le rôle joué par l’Hôtel Scribe dans l’histoire de l’art et des techniques de l’image.

Abstract Asia

Abstract Asia is an exhibition in the works scheduled for December 2018 in Dubai XVA Gallery featuring the works of Arif Husain and Qin YIfeng, two leaders of Chinese and Pakistani abstraction.

Gardens of Calligraphy, scheduled May 2018

Gardens of calligraphy

Ghas, Khaled El Saai and Nasser El Aswadi

GRK Gallery, Paris May 15-July 15 2017

Iran Syria Yemen

As Ezra Pound wrote, the unique beauty of calligraphy in Asia or Arabia is that it becomes an aesthetic all by itself. “One can wander through the letters as though in a garden,” he wrote of Chinese characters. One could just imagine wandering through the flowers and trees of such a garden, like wanderings through forests of meanings. This is how the works of Nasser El Aswadi, Khaled El Saai and Ghas make me feel, transported to an Elysian field of symbols, a field of life.

Calligraphy is a way of putting the soul of words on paper or canvas. The calligrapher is not only writing but he is breathing, his heart is beating, his brush is full of his life spirit or essence. The word has become work of art.

In the words of Pablo Picasso, "If I had known there was such a thing as Islamic Calligraphy, I would never have started to paint. I have strived to reach the highest levels of artistic mastery, but I found that Islamic Calligraphy was there ages before I was." Perhaps what Picasso was saying is that all art is writing, and calligraphy is the ultimate style of the artist, his signature his or her way of expressing how they feel.

Some artists like Picasso or Matisse or San Yu were such skilled painters later in life that even their figures became a form of writing. In one unbroken stroke, they could draw a woman or a man or a landscape. Calligraphy was the end they were seeking. Calligraphy is the ultimate signature, it is the writing of the artist himself, his way of painting, his way of seeing the world.

It is no wonder that contemporary artists searching for a meaning beyond the figurative (shunned at the outset in the Islamic world) have turned to the flourishes and whirls of calligraphy, which like poetry, music and song has its own unique rhythms. It is where all art begins and all art ends in a sense. To portray reality and the figurative is a lost cause. What is real can never be wholly captured in painting or sculpture. One only ever captures the essence of a thing, its spirit. Calligraphy is that essence.

A few years ago, I was near Tangiers in a small seaside town called Asila. And although I do not speak Arabic, only Chinese, I feel upon a work I recognized as that of a friend, Khaled El Saai. I recognized his style immediately on the weather beaten white wall. I recognized his brush, his pen. Khaled's calligraphy, often poetry, resembles a style of dancing, I understood it was him at a glance. Khaled El Saai was born in Damascus and he is one of the only Syrian contemporary calligraphers I know. That dancing, that passionate swirl at Asila could only be Khaled El Saai.

Khaled El Saai's compositions remind me of music, they seem like an array of musical notes dancing across a page, waiting to be played, to be carried off in the breeze, to be listened to like compositions. I can hear the poetry being recited, the sound of the syllables, I can feel the emotion. The written word on Khaled's canvas is an intense as a musical score, andante, molto andante, pizzicato, tremolo,..

Nasser El Aswadi is an artist I first met through friends. He is from Sanaa, Yemen. His first works were in oil or on paper and always involved calligraphy. Since we met, his works have evolved into complex talismanic circles of calligraphy on paper and airy calligraphic compositions of bronze.

He uses old Arabic words, like love, peace, to encompass meaning, making them joining in a sarabande accross canvasses and sculptures, the precise and sensual dance of the Yemerni man, (only the men dance), like waves and undulations of the body. Nasser El Aswadi's words are like jambiyas, the Yemeni sheathed bejewelled sword. They are very definite, almost potent like talismans. One feels their power.

In ancient China, when people erected a house, they asked Taoist diviners to sign a contract in calligraphy with the gods of the earth, the tudi. Then more often than not, they ingested the paper. The words had become as potent as a drug, an entente between heaven and earth.

China, Mongolia, Persia, Arabia, the art of “harouf” or calligraphy is an art without borders. In China, it dates back to the first turtle bones heated and cracked to spell out oracles, becoming the first works of art. In nomadic Mongolia, Uighur script and writing is considered high art and calligraphers are often part of the naadam festivals held throughout the steppe. Yemen is where the Arabic language was born and it is for this reason, a very magical place.

The most ancient form of Arabic is spoken in Yemen, the Arabic of the original tribes, of the nomadic sheikhs who built their civilization in the mountainous desert landscape. Nasser El Aswadi is born in Taiz, a mountain town where the people are particularly hermetic to the outside world. They are the mountain dwellers, seeing things from a high place, wary of the invaders. Their world is a secretive one.

Ghas is born in Shiraz, Iran. One cannnot imagine a place more full of motifs and calligraphy. Every bowl, every tile of every mosque, every doorway of every house is covered in the most intricate writings. It is as though Shiraz has been written into existence. The writing is interwoven with tulips, pomegranates, swords. (to be continued),..

Ouvre tes Yeux Samedi 25 avril à Samedi 1 er avril , Chez Anne Kerner, Palais Royal

Wang Qiang, Yang Yongliang, B. Ajay Sharma, Marlot et Chopard, Isabelle Chappuis, Jean-Pierre Fauchet, Oleg Kulik, etc...

Ajay Sharma, Motherland this Saturday 2nd July at 4 PM , Les Grands Voisins, Paris

une performance collective de yoga

le dimanche 2 juillet de 16h-18h

avec les Grands Voisins, 82 avenue Denfert Rochereau, métro Denfert Rochereau

B. Ajay Sharma (né en 1986, jharkand), est un artiste de Delhi, diplômé en PEinture de l'École des Beaux Arts de BENARES et de DELHI. La performance Motherland conçu avec un musicien Arfaaz Kawagala durera plusieurs heures. Une vidéo sera projetée derrière lui comme la scène d’un théâtre, un théâtre où se joue une bataille quai-apocalyptique entre les religions, les nations et les symboles. Adepte et praticien du pranayama yoga, B. Ajay Sharma fera un exercice de respiration (comme le qi gong) et de méditation indienne avec un groupe de dix ou plus volontaires portant un costume blanc et noir, symbolique de caste et de religion différentes (faisant référence au brahmanisme, au catholicisme, au bouddhisme, et cette camisole de force qu’est la religion).

L'idée entre musique et méditation et théâtre est de proposer un contrepoids aux nationalismes, à l'extrémisme, et à la ferveur religieuse en démontrant à la fois l'harmonie de l'homme dans l'univers et l'importance de l'empathie. Notre humanité commune est la panacée contre cette époque de guerre, de migrations et d'affrontements multiples.

Pia Camilla Copper, curateur

Museum acquisition: Qiu Jie acquired by Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has acquired a masterful work by Chinese artist QiuJie, thanks to the generosity of Cynthia Benjamin-Copper and her daughter Pia Camilla Copper. With the acquisition of artwork Mao in Winter (2011), the MMFA becomes the first Canadian museum to own a work by the artist.

Poste Restante art movie

Yang Jinsong #All About Trees

All About Trees, inaugural exhibition at Icicle Space and flagship store, 35 avenue George V, Yang Jinsong solo exhibition of Willows, 18/10/19-12/02/20-20

Qin Yifeng 1 + 1 = 1 Icicle Space 13 March-31 August 2020

Jordane Saget, pop up Icicle Space, Paris

Jordane Saget, Portraits d'artistes, Septembre 2020

POP UP MEET THE ARTIST “1 + 1 = 1”

Qin Yifeng est le maître inconditionnel du Linefield. Il ouvre ainsi la voie à l’abstraction contemporaine à Shanghai.

Mais il existe des ponts entre Orient et Occident. Des choses qui nous lient par la pensée et la pratique.

C’est pour cela que nous avons invité pour une pop up Jordane Saget, un poète des lignes et du street art parisien. L’artiste viendra tracer des lignes et présenter des oeuvres le samedi 5 septembre 2020 oeuvres disponibles préalablement sur internet.

» L’homme puise du Ciel son souffle, de la Terre son sang, des deux son rythme de la vie. » (Lao-Tseu)

Saget sillone depuis dix ans la capitale en dessinant à la craie au sol ou à la blanche de Meudon sur les vitres, des lignes énigmatiques, toujours en trois, comme le S de sa signature.

Ses arabesques ondulantes et interminables se retrouvent sur les trottoirs, les quais, les ponts, les façades. Ce sont des lignes qui s’effacent avec le temps, des performances éphémères dans le paysage architectural. La craie, comme le blanc de Meudon sont des outils naturels qui fondent dans le paysage comme l’encre du lettré chinois.

Les lignes nous font aussi redécouvrir l’architecture et l’imaginer autrement. L’Hotel Splendid à Biarritz, la cour du Louvre, la place du Palais Royal, le pont de Solférino, la vitrien de Christie’s ou de Chanel.

Enfant, Saget se passionne pour la géométrie et la mathématiques, et a toujours un carnet de croquis à la main. Il rêvassait de la ligne parfaite, la géométrie mystique, la clé de l’infini et du monde.

Il est ensuite attiré par la philosophie taoiste du vide et du plein et l’idée du mouvement dans la pratique de la calligraphie chinoise. Il lit Francois Cheng.

“J’ai commencé à pratiquer le taijichuan et me suis tourné vers la pensée chinoise. Je me suis alors essayé à dessiner des lignes sur papier. C’est en m’inspirant de l’idée d’ondulation, du Yin et du Yang en constant mouvement, de la notion de frontière poreuse, qu’est apparue la courbe. J’ai commencé à tracer une seule ligne mais cela correspondait au chiffre un, symbole dans de nombreuses cultures de l’absolu, ce qui me semblait de l’ordre de l’inaccessible. Le tracé de deux lignes m’apparaissait bancal. J’en ai alors dessiné trois : j’avais trouvé ma formule “magique” qui me suit jusqu’à ce jour et, je pense, me suivra jusqu’à la fin de ma vie.”

Stanislas Blohorn, artiste gardian

Books 书籍

Art Mao, available at CN Times

Chairman Mao is one of the most reproduced images of all time: countless millions of interpretations remind the world of the man’s (or the myth’s) importance to China. This visual celebration has been revisited in recent years through art; Chinese artists grappling with Mao’s legacy and his policies—and often challenging, at the same time, modern politics in China.

Art Mao is the first comprehensive attempt to collate this remarkable art and present it in a portable, easy-to-use format. Art Mao, the little red book of Chinese art since 1949, includes works by 97 artists including Ai Weiwei, Yu Youhan, Zhang Xiaogang, Zhang Huan, Li Shan, Shen Jiawei, Andy Warhol and Xiao Feng, and is published to coincide with the 120th anniversary of Mao’s birth.

Authors
Pia Copper is an independent art consultant and curator of Chinese art. She writes widely, and organises exhibitions around the world. She studied Taoism at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris.

Francesca Dal Lago, whose celebrated essay introduces Art Mao, is a scholar specialising in modern and contemporary Chinese art. She holds a PhD on the history of Chinese art from the Institute of Fine Arts and New York University, and lives between Italy and Paris.

448pp | Softcover, 120 x 170mm (4½ x 6½in.) | ISBN 978 0 957 151239 | £29 | $45 | March 2015

In The Rose Light of the Desert, available for sale

In the Rose Light of the Desert, Timbuktu Appears is a travelogue about the remote desert city of Timbuktu, photos by Cynthia Copper and words by Pia Camilla Copper with a preface by Anthony Sattin and a map by Sylvain Tesson published in 2009.

Mao, available to purchase

Mao by Claude Hudelot and Guy Gallice

•the first such book on the cult of Mao, published by Horizons Editions, the independent London publishing house with a presence in London, New York and Dubai

•a collection of Mao iconography and cult paraphernalia that is second-to-none

•a study in the world’s most impressive cult of personality, Mao from his beginnings in the Long March to the final embalming at Tiananmen Square

•with a preface and afterword by the Chinese novelist Yu Hua, prize-winning author of “Chronicle of a Blood Merchant”

•includes a comprehensive historical essay on the infamous leader, his life and influence

•a vibrant and witty collection, eclectic and surprising, from figurines and cups to paintings

•launched in London and Paris and Hong Kong

•210 x 240mm • 540pp • 49 GBP • US$59

The original model that contributed to the success of the original French edition (published in 2009 by Editions du Rouergue) will be respected, and the section devoted to contemporary art is being significantly expanded. We will discover, in addition to works already presented, those of the Gao Brothers, Robert van der Hilst, Wang Ziwei and Zhang Huan, among other new additions.

The New Encyclopedia of Islam, available at Rowan & Littlefield

First published in 1989, now in 2013 The New Encyclopedia of Islam, now in its fourth edition, has been extensively revised and expanded to include more than 1,500 entries. Covering all aspects of Islam, subjects range from rituals and sects to art and
architecture; from science and philosophy to countries and political leaders.

* from reviews of earlier editions

REVISED FOURTH EDITION | 31ST OCTOBER 2013 | CASEBOUND AND JACKETED | ISBN

“A feast of fact and insight... An enormous amount of information is contained here, all of it fascinating.” Washington Post

“A miracle.” The Economist “A magnificent achievement.”

Independent
“Indispensible.” Sunday Times *

Cyril Glasse’s text, richly informative and never less than engaging, has been described as “a miracle” for its readability (The Economist) and the Independent hailed “a magnificent achievement.” In this fresh new edition, with an extensive chronology and updated maps and diagrams, Cyril Glasse provides an unrivalled study of one of the world’s great religions.

978 0 957 151222 |

NEW FOR DECEMBER 2013

ART MAO
THE BIG LITTLE RED BOOK OF MAOIST ART SINCE 1949

Chairman Mao is probably the most reproduced image of all time: countless millions of interpretations remind the world of the man’s (or the myth’s) importance to China. This visual celebration has been revisited in recent years through art; Chinese artists grappling with Mao’s legacy and his politics – and often challenging, at the same time, modern politics in China.

Art Mao is the first comprehensive attempt to collate this remarkable art and present it in a portable, easy-to-use format. Art Mao

includes art by contemporary artists Yu Youhan, Zhang Xiaogang, Zhang Huan, Zeng Fangzhi, socialist realist masters such as Shen Jiawei, Xiao Feng, and with pieces from the collections of Uli Sigg (patron of M+ Museum in Hong Kong) and Jean-Marc Decrop.

Created by the team behind the epic Mao, this new art book is essential reading for anyone interested in China and Chinese art today, and is published to coincide with the 120th anniversary of Mao’s birth.

ART, PHOTOGRAPHY, CHINA| DECEMBER 2013 | CASEBOUND AND JACKETED | ISBN 978 0 957 151239 |

120X170mm | 450pp | £20 | €25 | $30| RIGHTS: WORLDWIDE EXCEPT UK ENGLISH | horizonseditions.com/asia

UK ORDERS:

INTERNATIONAL ORDERS:

Central Books Ltd

Horizons Editions Ltd

99 Wallis Road London E9 5LN

27 Old Gloucester Street London WC1N 3XX
Tel: +33 6 32 97 37 80 marketing@horizonseditions .com

PRESS AND MEDIA: Horizons Editions Tel: +33 6 32 97 37 80

Horizons Editions Ltd horizonseditions.com

News for August 2012

MAO

Introduced by Yu Hua, with a history by Claude Hudelot.

The “complete iconography.”

A visual history of China, through the eyes of some of the most renowned photographers and artists of our time.

“One of the most important books in the history of iconography.”
– South China Morning Post.

Acclaimed as “the complete iconography,” Claude Hudelot and Guy Gallice’s Mao is an extraordinary and epic journey through the social history of communist China.

Introduced by Yu Hua, prize-winning author of Brothers and The Blood Merchant, Mao contains more than 400 images, ranging from contemporary pop art to rare archival photographs and artefacts, creating the essential visual history of Chinese politics and culture in the 20th century.

UK ORDERS:

INTERNATIONAL ORDERS:

Central Books Ltd

Horizons Editions Ltd

99 Wallis Road London E9 5LN

27 Old Gloucester Street London WC1N 3XX
Tel: +33 6 32 97 37 80 marketing@horizonseditions .com

PRESS AND MEDIA: Horizons Editions Tel: +33 6 32 97 37 80

Horizons Editions Ltd horizonseditions.com

Essays about Art and Artists 艺术和艺术家的文章

Gao Xiang the Dreamer

Gao Xiang the dreamer

by Pia Camilla Copper

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“I dream my painting and I paint my dream.”
― Vincent Van Gogh

The first time I met Gao Xiang, he was transfixed by a kaleidoscope painting of Damien Hirst, the spheres made of butterfly wings depicting Psyche or the soul at the FIAC in Paris. This meeting was perhaps meant to be symbolic. Symbolism is as important to Gao Xiang I think as the Surrealist idea of “hasard objectif” is to me. It was no coincidence that we met each other.

Of all the Chinese painters I have met and I have met more than a few, Gao Xiang is the one most obsessed by dreams. Perhaps, fellow dreamers are meant to meet like butterflies on a gust of wind, all part of an ephemeral world that seems so unreal as to disappear. As Zhuangzi might have said: Am I dreaming of the butterfly? Or is the butterfly dreaming of me?

When one gets to know Gao Xiang better, one senses there is a deep yearning in him, a desire to escape into another world, a world hinging on our own, the dream world, the parallel universe. One can sense, that for Gao Xiang, only the world of painting truly exists.

A student in Chinese’s most well known art academy, the Beijing Zhongya Meishu Xueyuan, Gao Xiang wrote his doctorate on Giorgio Morandi, the Italian painter, who not unlike his Chinese counterpart Chang Yu, instilled his still lifes with a strange, unreal feeling, a sort of Taoist paleness and sense of the illusory.

Giorgio Morandi was almost Chinese in his Zen-like practice of oil, using the oil as sparsely as ink, and infusing his works with a deep calm, a perception of the void. Dreamers all!

Perhaps one day soon, we will discover how to sidestep into a parallel universe, to jump from one plane of reality to another, to slip from one century to the next, from one geographical location to the next, from the ghostly world to the real world.

Scientists ensconced underground in the Hadron collider watching fast moving particles collide are now trying to prove Einstein’s theories that parallel universes exist and that we may even be only a finger away from the next world or universe. The Taoists like the Greeks have always believed that the earthly world is mirrored in the underground world or in the heavens. Gao Xiang’s dream series makes the world of dreams and the physical world collide.

A man lies beneath a tiger, dreaming on a white slope. A woman looks down from the stars at a man holding a water buffalo. A horse gallops through the red sky and the constellations. A little red man dances atop a huge white horse. Another stands astride a pagoda of horses, piled one on top of the other. This cannot be real. It must be a dream. But we feel it could be happening. The soul of the dream tiger and the man could be one.

It is the same for the horse. One feels that man and horse share feel a strange complicity. They too are at one. They understand one another. Man whispers into nature’s ear as nature whispers into man’s ear. There exists a harmony, a secret harmony of living beings in the universe.

Gao Xiang’s towers or pagodas of horses reaching into the heavens are extraordinary. They remind me of the huabiao at the Forbidden City , the shendaozhu or spirit columns, the traditional stone columns (not unlike totems) which represent the union between man and the heavens. This is the quintessential Jacob’s ladder.

Gao Xiang loves horses. Of course, the horse itself is a very Chinese symbol. There is even a link to the silk culture. One legend tells of a girl who misses her father, who has been conscripted into the imperial army. She promises to marry the family horse if the father returns. The father comes home and is horrified to hear that she is promised to the horse. He kills the steed. But the girl’s promise was a magical one and the girl is carried off by the horse’s hide. When the father sets out to search for her, he finds the girl in the horsehide has become a silkworm inside a cocoon and woven the most wonderful silk thread. Hence, the horse-headed goddess of sericulture, Cai Nu or Ma Tou Niang Niang.

The white dragon horse, bailongma, horse is said to have brought the mystical Buddhist scriptures of the travelling monk Xuanzang to China.

The heavenly horses, tianma, were the horses supposedly ridden and used of the Han dynasty emperor, Han Wudi. The emperor, a great warrior and leader, discovered the Ferghana stallion (from modern day Uzbekistan) known for its stamina and for its sweat, which resembled blood. When the Ferghana horse breeders refused to sell him the horses, he led an expedition in 104BC to capturethousands of steeds, the mount of choice to fight the marauding Xiongnu tribes.

The tianma were so swift, they were rumored to be winged horses, heavenly scions in league with the constellations.

The tianma captured the Chinese imagination and the first bronzes cast during the Han were copied endlessly and celebrated in verse and painting by Li Bai, Du Fu, Dong Qicheng, Han Gan and later modern masters such as Xu Beihong. Even foreign painters sensed the importance of the horse and horses became the subject of paintings by the Jesuit painter Guiseppe Castliglione as he attempted to court the Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong emperors.

Many mythological kings, such as the King of Yao and Shun, are said to have ridden chariots pulled by celestial horses to visit various divinities including the great Queen Mother of the West or Xiwangmu who ruled over mortals from her domain in the Kunlun mountains. The significance and importance of the Chinese horse is such that even the first emperor of modern China, Qin Shihuangdi’s tomb in Xian is flanked by two chariots pulled by half a dozen celestial horses.

Gao Xiang’s horses are never entirely real. They are often, green, a jade or leafy green or terracotta red, the burnt earth red of Yunnan, where the artist was born, the deep red of the bloodlike sweat of the Ferghana horses, whose strange sweat was said to be due to an insect burying into the skin. They are passionate colours, living colours, more real than real because they produce a certain emotion. They remind me of a poem, by one of my favorite poets E.E. Cummings, an American sensualist and sensitive soul. He wrote: “All in green went my love riding on a great horse of gold into the silver dawn.”

Colours for Gao Xiang are about feelings. His work is about feelings. Ink and oil for Gao Xiang are like mirror images of one another. He uses his oil brush lightly, like the ink brush, never too much pressure, always just the right and just amount of colour, a fleeting moment between the brush and the canvas. His oils are like inks.

Gao Xiang is a sensualist. He loves nature, he loves the universe. His male and female figures are tiny, overwhelmed by the immensity and the promise of the universe. They are in awe of the world.

Gao Xiang’s way of seeing is undeniably Chinese. His soft touch is inherently Taoist or Buddhist, even Confucian.

He does not intend to interfere with the universe, only to experience. He watches only to capture. He depicts only as an observer, a bystander. He is the eye.

One day, I will ask him about his dreams and whether he dreams his work before painting it. In his canvasses and works on paper, and even on his transparent sculptures, Gao Xiang seems to have a deep sense of the world, a spiritual sense of the universe. He has the kind of the understanding of the world that comes not only from the eyes and the mind but rather from a more profound place, fathomless, from the human heart.

梦者高翔

“一切我们的所见所闻仅仅是一个梦中梦。”

——埃德加·爱伦·坡

“我梦见了画，然后画下了梦。”

——文森特·梵高

第一次见到高翔是在巴黎当代艺术国际博览会上，一幅达明恩·赫斯特的万花筒绘画作品震惊了他。那是一幅用蝴蝶翅膀做成的球体形状的作品，描绘的是心灵。那次碰面或许注定具有某种象征性。我想象征主义于高翔的重要意义就像超现实主义中“客观偶然”于我一样。我们的碰面绝非出于偶然。

在我见过为数不少的中国艺术家中，高翔是最沉迷于梦境的一位。或许梦想家们注定会留意到这个瞬息变化的世界中所有看似不真实的事物，并看它们逐渐消逝，像是阵阵风中的蝶群。庄子也如是说：“不知周之梦为胡蝶与,胡蝶知梦为周与?”

当与高翔熟悉后，你就会发现他有一种强烈的渴望，向往逃到另一个以我们的世界为投射的梦境之地，平行世界。对于高翔来说，那是绘画唯一真实存在的世界。

中央美术学院，中国知名度最高的美术院校。高翔在这所学院获得了博士学位，他的博士论文选题为意大利画家乔尔乔·莫兰迪。跟他同期同类型的中国画家常玉不同，莫兰迪通过一种超现实的、奇怪的感觉，一种类似于道教的苍白和虚幻，徐徐表达他平静的生活。莫兰迪对油画颜料禅宗般的运用使他几乎成了一个中国人，颜料如同水墨一般稀疏，画作透出一股沉静和对虚空的感知。写作的人与被写的人都是梦想家！

也许有一天我们可以发现跨入平行世界的方法，从一个现实维度跳到另一个现实维度，从一个世纪滑到另一个世纪，从一个地理位置移到另一个地理位置，从灵鬼世界进入真实世界。

坐在地下强子对撞机里的科学家们观测着高速运动的粒子对冲，他们尝试证明爱因斯坦的理论：平行世界不但存在，甚至可能距我们的世界仅一指之遥。道教信徒跟希腊人一样，始终坚信人间映照着地狱或天堂。高翔的梦系列作品就实现了梦境跟现实的碰撞交汇。

在老虎身后，一个人伏在白坡上做梦。女人从繁星处往下看，一个男人正举着一头水牛。一匹马飞驰过一片红色的天空，跨过数个星宿。一个红色的小人跃于一匹巨大白马背上。还有的跨骑在一座马匹堆起的塔上。这些都不可能是真实的，肯定是梦境，但观者却觉着这些景象确实会出现。虎之梦，人之梦，在此合一。

同样，观者感觉人和马之间有种奇怪的联系，他们互相感知、理解。人冲着自然的耳朵私语，自然也在人的耳旁呢喃，这是世间生物私密的和谐。

高翔所绘的高至天堂的马塔非同寻常，总让我想起故宫里的华表、神道柱（不同于图腾），这类传统的石柱是人与天界相连的表现形式，是非常典型的天梯。

高翔钟爱马。马本身也是非常中国式的象征符号，甚至跟丝绸文化有一些关联。传说一位孤住的独生姑娘十分想念被召入伍的父亲，便向家中所饲的牡马戏言起誓，如果它能保父亲平安归来，就嫁与它。后来父亲安然回家，听到这个消息后，惊恐不已，便把马宰了。但那句誓言是个魔咒，某日，姑娘正玩着用那马皮做成的蹴鞠时，马皮突然展开，将女孩裹卷而去。待父亲找到时，女孩和马皮都化成了蚕蛹，正吐织着极好的丝线。这便是蚕神——蚕女或者叫马头娘娘。

白龙马，传说中跟玄奘一道将真经带回中土大唐的白色骏马。

天马，传说是汉武帝的坐骑。伟大的将士和君王——汉武帝发现了费尔干纳盆地（现今乌兹贝克斯坦）上的种马，以其持久的耐力和血般鲜红的汗液出名。在饲主拒绝交易后，公元前104年，汉武帝为攻打匈奴准备战马，亲率远征军俘获了数千匹天马。

天马速度极快，甚至传言其为带翼之马，神之后裔，天上星宿。

中国人的想象中总离不开天马，汉代就有第一座铜塑，诗歌及画作中也被不断提及，比如诗人李白、杜甫，画家董其昌、韩干，到现代大家如徐悲鸿，甚至外国画家也觉察到马的重要意义，意大利天主教传教士郎世宁也注重画马，以取得康熙、雍正和乾隆时期统治者的好感。

许多神话中的帝王，比如尧、舜，都曾乘天马战车造访神处，其中包括居于昆仑山掌管不死药、罚恶的西王母。马对于中国人来说如此重要，以至实现华夏大一统的秦始皇帝在西安的墓穴都是由两辆六匹天马拉的战车守在两侧。

高翔笔下的马从来都不是完全写实的。它们通常是玉石或叶片的绿，抑或是赤土的红，就像他家乡云南红土地上那一抹红，就像传言中因皮下寄生虫导致天马汗血的那种深红。强烈鲜活的色彩散发着某种情绪，看上去比现实更真实，让我想起其中一位我最喜欢诗人，美国感官论者，敏感细腻的E. E.卡明斯。他曾写道： “一片碧绿我的爱情骑着高大的金驹闯进银色的黎明。”

色彩对高翔来说是表达情绪感觉的手段。他的作品传递着不同的情绪。于高翔而言，水墨、油彩是彼此的镜像。他轻挥油画笔刷，就像手握毛笔，从不使多一分力，始终是恰好的颜色、恰好的浓淡，笔刷快速在画布上移动。在他手中，油彩幻化成水墨。

高翔可说崇尚感官主义。他热爱自然，热爱这个世界。他笔下的男女体型都非常小，淹没在这宽广无垠的世界，敬畏着这个世界。

高翔的视觉无疑是中国式的。他温和的笔触传承了道、佛甚至儒家精神。

他无意干预这个世界，只想经历这个世界。他注视只为捕捉，描绘只作为旁观者、局外人。眼睛是他的所有。

某天我会问他，画下的可是梦。无论帆布画还是纸张绘画，甚至透明装置，高翔的作品都具有一种对这个世界深刻而灵性的感知。他对这个世界的理解不单单是所看所感，更是发自人心深沉的思索。

皮亚·卡米拉·柯珀（法）

策展人、艺评家

2017年2月于巴黎

Qiu Jie's dazibao drawings

Qiu Jie (b.1961 Shanghai)

At an early age, Qiu Jie was left in the care of his grandparents in Shanghai because his parents had been sent to a re-education camp and then to jobs in the countryside. He often tells his friends that this made him precocious and already able to think as an adult when he was a small child. He began drawing at the age of ten, and by high school years, he was drawing until midnight every night.

Having trained in both Chinese socialist realism (the only school available at the time under Mao), realism and at a European art school (Beaux Arts de Genève, where he received a scholarship) and worked professionally as a set decorator and designer, Qiu Jie’s drawings are rich with diverse aesthetic influences.

Admittance into the Chinese art school in the late-1970s was a record achievement: a nationwide contest in which only the best technical artists were admitted. Being part of the intellectual “hei” or black classes, Qiu Jie’s chances of admission were slim; yet he succeeded, becoming part of an elite which included artists such as Yu Youhan and Shen Fan, painters later to have a wide influence in contemporary art as professors and leaders of the Shanghai pop movement.

Although Qiu Jie went to Geneva after the 1989 Tiananmen incident, he can be still be considered one of the founders of the Shanghai pop art movement, which paralleled the rise of another more well-known movement in Beijing “political pop” or “zhengzhi popu” put forward by such stars of the genre as Zhang Xiaogang, Zeng Fangzhi and Wang Guangyi among others... His stint at the Beaux Arts in Geneva was marked by hardship, hence his humility and monastic nature. He always travelled back and forth to his native country, taking on a studio there, as he felt it was his great inspiration.

"Qiu Jie" itself is an adopted pseudonym: meaning "foreigner" or "outsider". Qiu Jie took adopted name because to some extent he always felt an outsider to Chinese politics and propaganda and yet he is a true Shanghainese, using even the colloquial dialect to express himself. He is truly at home only in Shanghai and aspects of the city sneak into all of his works: the Yangtze river, the Yuyuan teahouse and the five-twist bridge, mahjong sessions in People’s Park, the linongs or alleyways, the new skyscrapers and the old Art Deco high rises. This innate struggle to preserve his roots and yet to be a part of the Western world makes him unique as an artist.

Qiu Jie has always had a wonderful sense of humour and the fact that he grew up under the red flag of Communism only enhanced this trait.

Qiu's Portrait of Mao, oft-repeated in traditional plum blossom landscapes and even appearing alongside divas such s Marylin Monroe and Brigitte Bardot has become one of his well-known surrealist jokes. It has become his signature and iconic figure. “Mao” in Chinese is a homonym for the word "cat". In Song traditional ink paintings, cats and butterflies are often portrayed side by side representing long life. But his caricature of the Great Leader is still taboo in China where a re- evaluation of the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s other political feats have not yet fully taken place. “Mao in Winter” is one of the drawings inspired by Mao’s own calligraphy and poems, except that this poem in particular refers sarcastically to the “luscious and delicious female” using Mao’s own imagery of nature.

Qiu Jie's work is a continual interplay between tradition and politics. He includes more often than

not scenes that he lived through as a child and adolescent, Qiu Jie revisits the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, China’s wave of economic reform, and the conflicts between Chinese and Western cultures in all his works. He often even includes himself in the drawing or canvasses. One such early drawing, “Fields of Cotton” shows Qiu Jie, lying back in a cotton field, in a surreal landscape of smoking chimneys and factories, all part of China’s great effort in the 1950s and 60s to modernize and succeed (despite a famine and drought that killed millions) as a Communist nation importing and exporting its goods. The drawing, with all of its sentimentality, is not an aesthetic style, although its rendering of the ugly industrial landscape could be termed beautiful.

In the 1990s, Qiu Jie was attracted to oil and did miniature portraits and landscapes but later his true passion, drawing came back to him and he imagined the giant “dazibao” or “big character” posters in pencil that he has been drawing since 1993. For reasons of economy, practicality and space, he chose sheets of Canson paper, sheets of 60 x 80cm, on which to draw and then had them pasted together in a frame recalling the “dazibao” which hung on every street in China during the Cultural Revolution, exhorting China’s people to be proud, to love Mao and to carry on the great work of socialism. These big character (named for the giant characters, often political slogans, which flanked them) drawings take months to complete and dozens of pencils and Qiu Jie has been known to go without food or water for days on end to finish them. His drawings, meticulously composed with pencil, and the occasional red traditional gouache or red pencil (red synonymous with happiness), often feature Chinese motifs such as papercuts, brands of Chinese tea or toothpaste symbols like dragons, phoenixes, turtles, gods and goddesses such as the Si Wang Mu or Taoist Queen Mother of the West, and even Chinese traditions such as acrobatics, calligraphy, gambling or Chinese go, etc. He is careful however to mix this Chineseness with the Westernization he has experienced, sexy movie stars, McDonalds, Nirvana, Radiohead... Elements of life in the West cohabit with the East in his wild and fiery Chinese imagination, making his life a journey of discovery and cultural collisions.

The big character drawings as a series, fifty or more over the years, recount his life story and constitute a sort of record of his daily existence, the music he listens to, the brands he likes, the stars he admires, the places and things he misses from his austere, Communist youth in China. They will be the main feature of an upcoming exhibition at the Shanghai Art Museum.

Qiu Jie is a sort of diarist, an artistic Blaise Pascal who strings his Pensées together to make a tapestry of unimaginable variety. The work is lonely and painstaking, and has made him into the artist he is today, a solitary and introspective philosopher of sorts.

“Woman and Leader” is a keen example of this record of daily life showing a Chinese woman reclining such as Olympia with in her midst the Expo slogans and skyscrapers of the new Shanghai and the murals of Stalin, Lenin and others, with in the foreground, peonies, embroidered slippers and teapots reminiscent of the artist’s youth. Everything is always there in Qiu Jie’s drawings, tea, music, images, as though his art were an extension of his studio and his very existence. Like many Chinese people, Qiu Jie always carries with him a thermos of Pu er tea, the pungent marinated tea of the Yangtze river and when travelling, his own sleeping mat. His drawings are reminiscent of this orderly life with its habits and its reminiscences, as though he were carrying a suitcase of poetic memories and cultural necessities.

“Dubai Dazibao” is a perfect example of this journey of drawing, the oil refineries and coal factories of the fifties are contrasted with Pizza Hut, Phillips, Maria Callas and Tuocha, the biggest brand of Chinese tea. Slogans as Qiu Jie tells us are only slogans, parts of our collective memory,

be they political or consumerist. Qiu Jie reminds us that history is the clockwork upon which our life depends, capitalist or socialist, the hum drum of the everyday is dotted with references to propaganda which makes up our world. Other artist such as Wu Shanzhuan from Guangdong and Gu Dexin from Beijing have also long talked about slogans and Orwellian concepts of “Big Brother, doublethink, Newspeak" in their works but Qiu Jie seems to touch upon these themes in a more naïve, childlike way, making his work simply poetic and not overly analytical or abstract. His world can be our world without question.

Qiu Jie’s works are represented in important private collections including the Saatchi collection in London, the Uli Sigg collection (recently donated in part to the new Hong Kong Museum of contemporary art), Benjamin Rothschild and Guillaume Levy-Lambert and Laurent Nebot collections. Institutions have long collected his works: Guangdong Museum of Art, the Beijing Museum of Fine Art, The Geneva Contemporary Art Foundation, the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai and the Amsterdam Museum of Fine Arts all have some of his works.

Xu Longsen and his giant contemporary landcapes

Xu Longsen's art is much like his persona. Retired from the world, a Chinese junshi scholar-gentleman who has retreated into his hutong courtyard in Beijing with his ink brushes and reams of rice paper, surrounded by centenarian white-skinned pines and emerald-green ponds full of water lilies. Xu has yet to emerge as a figure of the contemporary art world. What makes Xu Longsen a contemporary artist? First of all, his mere existence is an aberration in the smog-filled atmosphere of modern Beijing. In a world of fast cars and business empires, Xu lives like a guren, of dynasties long past. Night and day, he performs in his airplane-like hangar, painting with the least contemporary of mediums, the brush and ink technique, the traditional ink or shuimo landscape.

His art, like the man himself, a scholar inspired by the Tang, Song and Ming poets and the Renaissance artist, Michelangelo, is contemporary because he breaks all the rules. In the Song and the Ming, painters were restricted to small brushes, painting tables, and the size of the unequivocal scroll. Xu 's vision is greater, bigger. His thirty-five meter long parchment of pines and mountains, three meters high, has broken every rule of Chinese ink painting. A river runs through this landscape, under the gnarled, dark pines, almost coal-stained, that resemble a terrifying vision of industrialised China that rambles on and on for almost one quarter kilometre.

Xu paints on an electric ladder four floors high, with a paintbrush so large as to be barely encompassed by his two hands. His lone pine tree, itself seven by five meters, is an extraordinary gigantesque work one of a kind. Its lone splendour, larger than life, taller than all the trees in his garden, makes its own statement. The pine whispers to the onlookers, that all of the refined, meticulously designed gardens the long history of the scholar gentleman, the culture acquired over millennia, may only be recreated in painting, the only place it can now exist. It no longer exists in the outside world.

I once asked Xu where he found the inspiration for his work: in photographs, in nature, like the Impressionists? No, he said, he found it in dreams. ‘None of these landscapes really existed’, he replied, ‘They are simply fragments of an inner landscape, the landscape of the mind’.

Xu's backdrops of mountains redefine the traditional paintings whose very essence is qi, the Taoist energy that can only be harnessed through the skilled brush. Xu has captured beyond belief the subtle balance between dark jagged peaks and white clouds or mist, allowing the spirit to flow through like a caressing wind, or flowing stream. The crown of the summit, the arching rocks, caverns, trees,… all appear arrayed in a subtle robe of cloud and fog. The qiyun or spirit resonance, is circular: the spectator is taken into the painting, eyes tracing the flow of wind and spirit, until that energy seems be merge into the viewer.

It seems immaterial that this slight, lithe, wiry artist could have enough internal energy to paint such a grandiose opus. But Xu's qi is greater than the man himself. As in his paintings, the energy dissolved in the montane swirling clouds streaming down the valley, is overpowering, at times cascading downwards, and then in a sweeping circular motion, scooping upwards in mad explosions…flowers blooming on the summit.

‘Which mountains have you reconnoitered?’, I once asked. ‘Dongyue, Siyue, Beiyue, Nanyue, Zhongyue’ (the peaks of the North South East and West and the not to be forgotten Middle), he told me, using the lexicon of Taoist sages of earlier dynasties. He could as easily have told me using modern Beijing tongue, that he had visited Hengshan, Taishan, Songshan and Huashan and Hengshan. But, he preferred the older, more magical connotations of the five sacred mountains, that seem to beg to envelope all their Buddhist and Taoist divinities.

Xu's bi or brushwork, is simultaneously passionate and complex. His use of the feibai technique or flying white, when the brush is applied more freely and leaves white vacuums, is very evolved, giving his mountains a gossamer, ethereal quality. He mixes his own ink in china pots and always keeps a water pot on hand, then using a hairdryer to dry his work, determining the darkness of the ink. But the most calculated factor is the judgment of distance. First he paints a rough draft of sorts, then stepping back, and ensconced in a variety of chairs, one a few meters away, the next five meters, and the last twenty meters, he examines his work. Each sitting, each contemplation of the work, takes a quarter hour, smoking cigarettes, drinking Oolong, or perhaps glasses or the best ergutou late at night. He then paces back and forth for hours on end, days at a time, between painting on the ladder, and sitting back from the work. The pauses are necessary for the composition: without them, a clear vision of such monumental parchments would be impossible. Xu tells me he is envisioning ceiling painting in Shanghai, a commission, that he will paint on his back on scaffolding, in the manner of Michelangelo. For him this will be new, another challenge for a man unafraid to take on monumental tasks.

I have known Xu as a friend for over a decade: he has taught me everything there is to know about Chinese painting, particularly the early 20th century works of Liu Haisu, San Yu, Pan Yuliang, and Guan Liang, whom he greatly admires. He loves the masterpieces of Rouault, Morandi and Balthus an unlikely but spirited combination, one that shows a deep understanding of Western art, beyond that of his eastern contemporaries. If I could presume the reason for such choice, I would guess that he enjoys the innocence and playfulness of Balthus, the spiritual depth of Rouault, and the simplicity of Morandi. As for Chinese paintings, the traditional, in which I am not a connoisseur, I would intimate that Xu's art, with its light ink colors, suggests that of Badashanren and Dong Qicheng (1555-1636), who, like Xu himself, are from Shanghai. But in truth, Xu is an eccentric, a contemporary, living the scholar gentleman of yore. His art grows in the silence of his garden, beyond the arched bridge over the lotuses, beyond the great red doors of his fortress-studio, and, one day, perhaps, we may catch a glimpse of it in our dreams, in our reveries of great, lost cultures, styles immersed in beauty and stillness, where the old principle of wuwei stills hold court.

Wang Keping, Wu Wei Er Wei for Randian

There has been a lot of focus on the Stars Group of late, as well as similar art movements Wu Ming, among others. But one member of the defunct art movement living in Paris is not making many waves. In fact, he seems to be making no waves at all, like a sort of fish hiding deep in the recesses of the water, only emerging now and then with small bubbles signifying his presence. But perhaps, his significance is this non-being, his particular brand of wu wei. Despite a recent retrospective at the UCCA, a group show at the Musée Cernuschi, a group show at Chancery Lane Gallery during Art Hong Kong, Wang Keping likes to keep to himself in a garden/warehouse studio in Villejuif, on the western outskirts of Paris.

When I go to meet him there, he has closely shaved his head, but there are still bristles like a paintbrush, and a clipped moustache. He does the haircutting himself, meticulously.

We sit down for tea in a light unadorned atelier room, with a copper stove. He prepares tea for me in two large noodle bowls, opposite us are two chairs male and female, crisscrossed with marks and breasts (even the man’s), the seat of the chair is a man’s protruding organ, the woman’s a slit like lips or a cowrie shell.

On the wall, hangs a sort of mask sculpture, with pouting African-looking lips. Lips, eyes, the vulva seem to be all around the room. In the corner is what looks like a book end, but it has breasts, voluptuous, bouncy breasts.

“Those are wings”, Keping says, smiling.

On another table, lies a polished copper necklace with a slit in the middle.

“A smile, Keping says, or turn it around, something else, a woman...”

Somehow, looking across at this man, his eyes like small fireballs, his large hands and torso, make this meeting seem like a confrontation, a silent one, between male and female. He looks like a peasant worker, his only gentility in the cleanliness of his appearance, black shirt and black trousers. I can see his old Maoist work jackets and pants behind us, hanging on another chair, stained, limp, worn out, torn. He has obviously dressed to meet me.

When I ask him which of his works are new, he insists there aren’t any. He always sculpts the same thing, women, birds, some with erotic beaks. Sometimes he sculpts couples, a man and a woman, often in an embrace. He is sculpting feelings not series, instincts not theories.

“I never think of a series, he tells me, I find how to do it with the wood, and it is organic. The most important is to look for the wood, it is difficult to buy. Mostly planks or beams are for sale. But I need big, rounder pieces. I sometimes go on excursions to the countryside to look for appropriate wood. Even when I find it, I am not sure I can use it but I bring it home anyway. I dry it. Then I mark the form and cut it with a chainsaw. Then I dry it again. Sometimes, I wait a year for it to dry and to crack (lie) properly. It is ready if it has cracked many times. I then use a chisel. And sand it. I then use a blowtorch to achieve the black, ebony colour. The colour is beautiful, yin and natural. Painted wood would not be the same. The contact with fire makes it natural. Huo ye she ye shi ge ziran. Fire is nature.”

He takes me outside to the stacks of pencilled marked trunks, the chiselled pieces drying in the sun, the garden around is wild, pink-hued peonies falling over in clumps next to raspberries bushes weighed down with berries.

I notice a work on the table outside, a man with an oblong head and two phalluses touching each other.

“There were two phalluses in the wood, I saw them. Unusual, isn’t it?” he says, catching my eye.

It reminds me of a painting I saw one at the old Shanghai painter’s house, Li Shan, a man with male and female attributes, beyond sex.

Somehow, the two phalluses make the wooden sculpture look more feminine.

“My works are not erotic, he adds, they are just real, human. Even the birds I sculpt. The beaks look masculine but this is the way people see them. If you look at Bada Shanren, all of his birds look, sexual, but it is because they seem human, they seem to have feelings. Ziran ye shi yi ge mei. Nature is a form of beauty and aesthetic.” I wonder if all art is not innately erotic.

We go back inside for some more tea. I ask him about the painting in the back room, a small, tarnished work on canvas.

“Oh, that is Liu Dahong’s,” he tells me. “He made it for me when I came to Paris in 1989. You can see me peeking out of a small window, in the buildings above. It is a depiction of Pigalle, the red light district. The man with the cap on crutches in the street, seen from the back, is Ma Desheng, also a Star… Liu asked me if he ever came to Paris how would he find me ? It was his way of joking he’d know where to look. Pigalle, Montmartre, where all the artists end up, with women. I kept it as a memory.”

Women beckon from doorways in the painting, the sky is Van Gogh blue with stars. Wang Keping seems to have had a sort of Casanova reputation except that he spends most of his time alone at the studio, his family elsewhere. He is like a lone monk, day after day, with his pieces of wood, unremitting. Most of them are women, anyway.

He takes out an old play he had written when he was in New York with Ai Weiwei, visiting in the 1980s. It is about a woman artist sitting in a museum, talking with people, part of a performance. Wang comes in with his translator, Lao Ai (Ai Weiwei in fact), and ask the woman if he can touch her, if she is an exhibit. She says yes. He replies that he is a sculptor in any case: “I am a manual labourer, moving around bodies all day.”

Yet the machismo of the short play seems to stem less from the artist than from the historical context. The Stars endured a lack of freedom which was not only political but also sexual. Another artist friend from the same period told me that the first time he drew a nude, the police came to knock down his door and the poor girl had not fully undressed. The nude as such was unthinkable.

Seeing Huang Rui’s erotic drawings of the same period, one can sense the repression, the lure of the forbidden, the hurried sessions.

The story of his life as Keping tells it sounds like Celine “Journey to the End of the Night”, a voyage of self-discovery more than anything. It is as though the Beijing Spring generation was simply grappling for freedom and in the end, turned to art, freedom’s highest form.

I was a Red Guard, we were sent to Heilongjiang, the far North, Keping recounts. We lost our hukou or residence permit. I joined a theater troup, an army troop to escape the countryside and return to the city. I was originally cast as Lei Feng, the Communist party hero in a Shenyang theatre group, but then I was refused the part as they thought I had got it through the houmen or back door (my mother was an actress with connections). I was eventually accepted into a Kunming theatre group. It was paradise. We were two to a bed, not more, no fleas, we could sleep lying doing instead of vertically. But, most of us at that time, underwent a sort of sexual depression. One couldn’t even talk to girls or dare look at them without being criticized and punished.

At first, I was happy being an actor, but then I thought, everything I do can be subject to criticism. It is like prison. I decided to leave the army troupe and work in a factory in Hebei. But I left that too and started working for Zhongyang TV first as an actor, then script writing. The director thought I was so talented, acting and scriptwriting at the same time. He couldn’t get over it.

But whenever I mentioned the Gang of Four or some other touchy subject I was censored. I was asked to put on a Waiting for Godot with the French embassy. But it had to be done according to party guiding, ‘guidelines’. I was under the yoke. I thought, I need to escape again.

When Deng Xiaoping died, Beijing was really starting to really ‘dance’. Foreigners were coming, people were into freedom, and the thing at that time was a ghetto blaster. I traded one for a painting, people did in those days. If you had one, you could dance in the park or at home, have a party. Soon, the Party put up signs: NO DANCING. The police arrested dancers. Everything was forbidden.

Some of the art movement began as fangkang yishu, revolt art. I started to sculpt as a revolt. My first sculpture was a man screaming holding a book, a little Red Book, It was theatrical, representing political figures as puppets.

I had never had any training. Just a need to create. To do my own thing.

Everyone was an autodidact back then. The universities were shut down. Writers, artists, we all gathered round the Stars group, people like Ma Desheng, Bei Dao, and Wei Jingsheng the activist. I met Forest Blackfield, the New York Times correspondent in a park, clandestinely. He wrote about me first, a new art movement around the Beijing Spring. People looking for freedom.

Now people can do things in the freedom of their homes, in China. Of course, there is a lot of self-censorship; this business of Ai Weiwei with UCCA is part and parcel of that. When I did my show at UCCA, I wasn’t allowed to invite LI Xianting. He could come but he couldn’t speak. Artists now have a great life unless you make a conscious decision to oppose the government.

My father was a writer, my mother was an actress, and everything they did was criticized. From my youth, I thought: all art should be free. That is what I said on the banner I carried during the Beijing Spring.

What about influences, I ask? If you didn’t study art, what inspired you?

I do think I was inspired in some sense afterwards; I travelled to Henan, collected the wangju, old toys of the peasants. The Han dynasty I like in its simplicity.

But Wang Keping doesn’t really remember any of the first Western artists he saw or any foreign influence. He told me he feels his art is ‘instinctual’. Some might call it art brut or primitivism, his works often remind people of African idols or Brancusi’s animals and birds. He tells me he did not want to suffer outside influences, preferring instead to keep a clear eye and mind.

I have always had the temperament of a sculptor. I was arrogant even as a child, tai zhao my parents used to say. People said I should study. But I didn’t want to join in, look at this, and look at that. Some artists now just take from here and there, they have no language of their own.

Technique can be taught but it is the jingli, spirit, the gexin, the character that can’t be. There are composers and there are interpreters.

Sometimes, I use half a day and nothing comes out of it. The most important is not to make something beautiful or resembling a thing, but to make something original. I want to be a composer.

I am also Chinese, I do not make Chinese contemporary art or Chinese art necessarily, I making art as an individual.

With this, Keping tells me he has to get back to work. He heads towards the chiselling room where a few women are kneeling forward into a circle, their hair tied in a bun like a dot at the end of a question mark. They look like spirals, infinite, spiralling mother figures, the origin of the universe. The simplest thing and yet the truest. If you never move, wu wei, you might attain some truth, some inescapable reality, some revelation.

The bear lumbers back to his den, with his chisel, ready to find something in the wood.

Cang Xin, Explorer with Shamanistic Instincts

by Pia Camilla Copper July 2017

Cang Xin is a strange bird. He hails from Baotou, Inner Mongolia and that is where he came from when he decided to join the flock of artists seeking freedom and greater creative autonomy, who took over the site of the Yuanmingyuan, the old Summer palace built by Guiseppe Castiglione, a painter and a Jesuit at the court of the Qianlong emperor. The Yuanmingyuan was only a ruin on the outskirts of Beijing when Cang Xin and the other jiantou or shaved heads (the fashion for 90s artists) got there. They founded China’s first artist squat, the East Village, dismantled soon after, but only after signifying the beginning of Chinese contemporary art.

On the Yuanmingyuan site, was a copy of a sprawling, baroque Western palace ,carved in stone, with a clock decorated with twelve animal heads, the animals of the Chinese zodiac. Those heads have now ended up at various auction houses and have been subsequently bought back by the Chinese government who consider them of great historical worth. At the crossroads of Chinese astronomical lore and Western Papal interference, Chinese art found its ominous beginnings.

If there is a destiny, if there is a meaning to our meanderings, Cang Xin ending up at the Yuanminyuan is certainly one of them. Cang Xin believes more than anyone in the spirit of place or esprit des lieux. He believes in the harmony of man within the universe, a principle so inherently Chinese it permeates Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist phliosophies. Indeed, Cang Xin considers himself a polytheist, something not unusual in the Middle Kingdom.

But I think Cang Xin is really a sort of shaman. He credits his mother with this gift: “My mother’s spiritual character was a sort of shaman, but she is not a real shaman,” he tells me. “I was influenced by the Neolithic Hongshan (red mountain) culture, which revolves around a goddess. The ruins of the Niulianghe culture are found in Liaoning province. This shaman altar is important in the archaeological history of shamanism. The Qin dynasty is the next important dynasty for Chinese culture, the period of the unification of China. The third most important period is Maoism.”

It is not usual for artists to look for their forebears in ancient history. We are all searching for our tenuous spiritual and intellectual beginnings. When I first met the Sichuan group of Zhang Xiaogang, Zhou Chunya and Feng Zhengjie, they all seemed to consider themselves a bande à part because of their origins in Sichuan, the former kingdom known as Shu, the site of Sanxingdui, where there was a cult to giant bronze masks, with faces resembling the silkworm. They believed that Shu was the original kingdom and therefore the birthplace of Chinese culture and civilization.

Cang Xin was born in Inner Mongolia, in a far more extreme landscape, a plateau of loess and wind, not far from the Hongshan temple complex of Niulianghe, where they have found traces of goddess worship, a giant clay statue of a female goddess with jade eyes, an earth goddess, a fertility goddess. He has identified with a more terrifying and imposing forebear, a woman divinity, perhaps one wooed with human sacrifices. On the Sanxingdui site, they found traces of woolly mammoths sacrificed en masse to the god with the bronze mask.

For these artists, their birthplace is a concurrent narrative to the official story of China, of a civilization born on the banks of the fertile Yellow River. Artists often search for a historical ancestor. Frida Kahlo took the Aztec goddess Coatlicue as her Madonna. Picasso took the Minotaur. Cocteau took Orpheus. Dali was infatuated with the Virgin Mary. Cang Xin has taken the goddess of Niulianghe. She is not only a sort of honorific ancestor but also a source of power and creativity.

Most artists in China are more influenced by Buddhism, such Zhang Huan who transformed the ashes of thousands of burning temple incense sticks into ash paintings. Very few like Huang Yongping and Cai Guoqiang, are shaped by shamanism.

Cai Guoqiang dreamed of the Sky Ladder in 2004, a ladder of exploding fireworks between earth and sky, a way of commuting with the unseen, numinous world. Huang Yongping refers a lot to oracles, his Roulette series paintings done from 1985 onward were done consulting an a roulette table inscribed with the eight Chinese trigrams as taken from the I Ching. The parts of the canvas to be painted were chosen randomly by the wheel, as commanded by Fata morgana.

The entire body of Cang Xin’s work is based on shamanism, integral to the Chinese tradition. And for Cang Xin, there has always an unspoken agreement with the supernatural, the transcendental as advisor and consultant. As an artist, Cang Xin considers a sort of messenger between humanity and the spirit world.

Shamans are said to mend the soul. And the soul of China needs mending. Not only is the Chinese soul adulterated by Western influences, but China itself, the great, heaving, breathing continent, the vast nature of China is suffering from mass urbanization, pollution, industrialisation of historical proportions. China itself is being physically altered and people are losing touch with the environment, and the animus mundi itself. This is where Cang Xin’s art could serve a higher purpose, a purpose of finding a new way forward in a world where nature has been lost.

In his Man and Sky Series (2002-2004), Cang Xin elaborates on the idea of fengshui, of the importance of inserting one body so perfectly into the landscape as to capture all of its essential energies. For this purpose, he plunges naked into a lily pond, inserts his body as one would a figure in a painting on a rock in an Inner Mongolian mountain landscape, lies nude on a field of ice. He continues the Man and Sky series with friends, all unclothed in fields, on frozen lakes, in cow pastures, on construction sites, in rings of fires. One senses in this great undertaking a sort of necessity of imprinting the body on the landscape, and yet at the same time, the necessity of disappearing into the landscape, finding a harmony, a fusion. “Fengshui is part of Chinese culture, we live in a yin yang house, we live in the yang house and the people who die, live in the yin house. The shady yin house has its own fengshui with its astronomical phenomena, its water and mountain landscape, for the yang house, there is also a fengshui, an orientation in the landscape one needs to respect.”

Cang Xin participated in one of the first and most seminal performances of Chinese contemporary art, To Add One Meter to Anonymous Mountain. In this performance done on Miaofengshan in 1995, a group of ten or more artists, men and women, in the nude, piled themselves on top of one another, according to weight. Their idea was perhaps to replicate in a contemporary way, the Chinese traditional landscape painting. But more than that, it was also to make a statement about the individual's importance in the landscape, how humanity could add to the landscape. “ But man is a foil to the landscape, he is only a small part of nature, a presence in the scenery. Man is only a part of that scenery” recounts Cang Xin .

In this way, To Add One Meter to Anonymous Mountain was strangely reminiscent of another sort of pilgrimage, a feng (heavens) and shan (earth) pilgrimage of the emperor to one of the holy mountains of China, usually the mount Taishan to seek the approval of the heavens for the imperial mandate. Perhapsthe artists of To Add One Meter, Zhang Huan, Rong Rong, Ma Liuming, and Cang Xin among others, were making a modern day pilgrimage and a sacrifice to the heavens. It is a strange one as the pilgrimage in the past was to the Heavenly Jade Maiden, the Bixia Yunjun, a cult I studied with Professor Kristopher Marinus Schipper at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris.

This performance in a strange way foretells all of Cang Xin's future performances.

His Communication series (1999-2004) in which he licks his environment from household objects, toothpaste, mosquito repellent, to animals, to coins, to a traditional compass, the five elements (fire, water, wood, etc.), to the ground beneath symbolic places (Tiananmen, the Harbin Japanese monument, London Bridge, Columbus Circle, Sydney Harbour) is a natural extension of his quest to become a part of nature, to understand it with his senses, and to coalesce with it. His practice is that of a shaman and reminds us of Shen Nong, the god of herbs who tasted various medicines in order to classify them in their importance for the body. Cang Xin is attempting to become one with the universe that surrounds him. When he licks the compass, he is attempting to find a more precise reading of his position in the universe, “the compass is the passage which sorcerers use to communicate with the universe, the North, the South, licking is a channel for communication.”

Some said Cang Xin was un bagarreur when he first came to the East Village. He explained to me however that he slightly autistic and sometimes stuttered, making communication very difficult with others. They often mistook this timidity for for anger.

His Communications Series was born of necessity. His silence and ensuing licking all over the world make him into a sort of Buddha figure, presenting an incredible outer calm and reserve, a sea of tranquility. He explained that certain places tasted different. They had a certain esprit des lieux. They smelled and felt different including the ground of the Forbidden City which tasted almost holy. This unique instinctual way of approaching reality earned Cang Xin immense respect. His eye or his way of looking at the world was intriguing and unusual. He had a certain sensibility, a deep one.

Symbolism is rife in Cang Xin’s life, in his studios, all the lamps are designed according to the ba gua or eight trigrams. His home is organized according to fengshui principles. Can Xin even looks like a shaman. He often shaves his head so that only the ponytail at the back appears, like a Manchu noble at the imperial court. His ponytail sticks out like a paintbrush. He is quite muscular, almost like what one could imagine the Taiping rebels must have seemed to terrified Westerners when they saw them, bare torso, threatening to behead and kill. He has even carved a scepter with his own head, many times repeated. It is a diviner’s rod, a Taoist priest’s ruyi or staff. He is like a Gustave Moreau or a Salvador Dali, understanding fully the power, which lies in his person to describe and ascertain the universe. Even his way of dressing and coiffing himself is an attribute of power.

One imagines him like a great magician, reordering the universe according to his principles. In his Introject series (2004-2005), Cang Xin he appear to take back the power, to root out the foreign influences in China. He is searching for that which is the unadulterated soul of China, the spirit of the place.

Introject is a concept taken form psycho analysis, the idea of a mental transfer from one person to another, a foreign body of thought entering into the stream of consciousness. In this performance done on the stone pont levis of the Forbidden City, the Cang Xin dressed in red, is seated next to a Western blonde also dressed in red in a circle of red roses. The color signifies a marriage. However, we understand that this marriage is not suitable, it is symbolic and holds no real value. Cang Xin is already looking into the Chinese soul and trying to understand what ails it, trying to reconcile with his original Chinese nature. “As a Chinese man, I often attend exhibitions and talk with American and European performance artists, I find our cultures very different. To dissolve these differences, we can research our intuition, our second pulse, and awaken our spirits.”

This is why his ending up at the Yuanminyuan to begin with seems almost fated. As though he intended to find a place where the heavens and the earth met on equal terms. The fengshui of an imperial mansion is well thought out. It is as though a student of Buddhism ended up under the tree where Siddharta had his first thoughts or Ephesus where the Virgin Mary was laid to rest.

People have forgotten about the intense magic of China, the sacred mountains, the holy rivers, the Taoist and Buddhist cosmogonies. The whole of modern, urban China is built on top of scared sites and spaces. Under the edifice of the PRC are the burial grounds of former emperors and their servants, sunken temples and monasteries, lost Buddhist sculptures. Who remembers Lu Dongbin, the Taoist official who ascended to the heavens in broad daylight after having mastered Taoist doctrine and practiced alchemy?

Cang Xin does not tread this ground lightly. He knows the importance of the sacred. He believes in the numinous world.

All of this brings us to the Shaman Scrolls, two six meters long scrolls charcoal drawings on traditional rice paper. They are pasted unto traditional Chinese scrolls to weight them down.

Cang Xin created these scrolls on all fours, crouching like a tiger, drawing with intense physical vigour, as demanding as a performance, and just as gruelling as Michelangelo painting on his back.

They are the culmination of a life work devoted to finding the harmony between man and the cosmos.

On one scroll, the artist appears as his own twin, one of the twins smaller, ever so slightly feminine, with a hint of a bosom. Gods are hermaphroditic and have attributes of the male and female, yin and yang.

His right self and left self (almost like two sides of the brain) take hold of a sceptre in the shape of a serpent. “The sceptre represents power, it is a majestic attribute, symbolic.” The serpent-sceptre appears to be alive, licking the artist’s head with its tongue, transmitting its energies. The staff is not unlike Moses’ rod with which he parted the waves at the Red Sea.

Both Cang Xins are wearing a strange headdresses, one in the shape of a pineapple and the other of a tropical bird, Above both of his heads, giant flies hang in the air like haloes. “The fly as you call it is, is a sort of hallucinogenic bird. People can’t fly. It is only through consciousness that we can share the feeling of flying. The birds or flies are a symbol,” Cang Xin told me. The fly has enormous, googly eyes, all seeing, the eye of the artist.

On the opposing scroll, Cang Xin wears an amulet representing his own bearded face. His headdress has become almost revolutionary like the Phrygian cap, the cap of liberty. His cap, looks organic, an almost animal form, that of a chameleon perhaps, or an insect. “All animals and creatures have a spirit, an equal spirit.” Similar hats were found fully preserved on the four thousand year old mummies of the Tarim basin.

The fly has settled on his head. He seems more powerful as though the preceding scroll was an entrée en contact, the opening of a channel with the heavens. He has become the conjurer, the magician.

He appears to be dancing or meditating, sitting half cross-legged on the back of a sort of qilin, a mythological creature associated with the imperial mandate. Qilins were said to appear as messengers presaging the passing of the great sages or leaders. Qilin, the mythological creatures, which are said to have inspired the unicorn, are always depicted as composites of different animals. They say the first qilin was inspired by a giraffe brought as an imperial token to the Ming court.

Cang Xin’s qilin has a horse’s head, a snake’s body, chicken’s claws, fish scales and a tortoise shell body. He sits astride it, as though on a totemic throne, harnessing the universes’ most magnetic currants, seemingly without effort.

His hands are pointed towards one of the many natural elements: wood, mineral or flower, represented like planets on the side of the scroll. The gestures resemble the mudra or Buddha’s symbolic gestures, gestures of complete self-control, perhaps of proselytism.

Cang Xin has stolen all the attributes of power of the emperor and empress, the traditional repositories of celestial power in Chinese society. The artist has taken over. In this representation of himself, everyone’s eyes, Cang Xin, the eyes of the qilin, the eyes of the fly, all seem to be wide open, almost on stalks, as though in the ecstasy of discovery. Cang Xin has found the way of the Dao, the path. He has imagined himself into a new hermeneutic of the universe, in which he holds a vital role, that of the artists and the prophet, assort of shaman explorer.

Gao Brothers: Utopia Utopia, Humanity, humanity

What if the world were a utopia?

A perfect, ideal, just, fair, fraternal society based on the precepts or dreams of Plato, Aristotle, Tao Yuanming, Lao Tze, Mencius, Chuang Tze, Plutarch, Rousseau, Thomas More, the Count of Saint-Simon, St Thomas Aquinas; William Morris, John Stuart Mill, Emmanuel Kant, Karl Marx and other utopists.

The irony is that utopia has come to mean a non-place, a non-existent state, nowhere.

But isn’t that where everyone wants to go?

In a world where war, poverty, famine and generalized uncertainty seem to be the norm rather than the exception, more and more people are surely asking themselves if even a moderate form of utopia is even attainable. How can mankind live together in a society in which the weak and the strong have equal rights? Aren’t we all, part of this conversation, entitled, Humanity?

Massimo Sestini’s photo of a boat of migrants desperately trying to reach Europe in an overcrowded fishing vessel off Lampedusa, is perhaps one of the most accurate images of our time. David’s Le Radeau de la Méduse, in all of its agony, has been surpassed.

It makes me think of the original Forever Unfinished Building by the Gao Brothers. A digitally maneuvered photograph of all the political icons, movie stars, cartoon figures, and ordinary people of the Western and Eastern words all assembled in a giant edifice, an unfinished skyscraper. This is where we have arrived. Welcome to nowhere.

I recently saw a drawing of the refugee boat photo by Saudi artist, Abde Abdessemed, just a boat of silhouettes in black pencil against a large white sheet of paper, drifting to nowhere. It went off like a grenade into one’s consciousness.

The Gao Brothers have been the grenade in my consciousness for years.

In China, Gao Qiang (born 1962) and Gao Zhen (born 1956) are often disregarded. Outspoken political pariahs, criticizing the legacy of the iconic nation builder Mao Zedong, they are not considered either by the regime or by their fellow artists who most often prefer like Chinese junshi gentlemen painter to flee overpowering reality in favor of aestheticism.

Yet these two brothers are the quintessentially misunderstood artists, Cassandras of what is to come, sentinels on the shores of the apocalypse. Not only are they saying what is essential, but they have been doing so for almost four decades, adamantly pursuing the answer to many of society most fundamental questions through their art.

From a family of six sons in Shandong, (a widowed mother raising them alone), they originally came to Beijing to seek justice for their father, murdered for political reasons by the Red Guards. It is ironic that it was as young shangfangzhe or petitioners, that they came to the capital (as this original reason for coming to Beijing is still integral to their work). They are still petitioning it seems, but not only the Chinese government, the world, a privilege only artists can accede to.

Their mother, a talented paper cutter, was the first to teach them “how to make art” and with scores of other liberty-seeking individualists in the mid 1980s, inspired by the new wave movement, cynical realism and pop art, (burgeoning with a new capitalist openness)—this is what they have been doing for years. Autodidacts (attending some art school only briefly, the Qi Baishi academy, the Jinan academy as a painter’s assistant), they have always been on the margins of the official art scene but covering a wide scope; doing installation, performance, sculpture, photography works and writing (a novel, A Day in Beijing) since the mid-1980s.

In 1989, in tandem with the explosion of the Stars Group, and a nascent avant-garde, they put together an giant art installation of ballooning penises called “Midnight Mass” (at the China Avant-Garde exhibition at the Beijing National Gallery) which would have shocked even Jeff Koons and put Anish Kapoor into a mildly induced coma. It was quickly labeled as “blasphemous” in China. Perhaps it was too soon. As with all art.

A decade later, with “Word Hug Day, the Utopia of Hugging” (2000), they brought together hundreds of couples for a performance along the Yellow River (in their native Shandong) who simultaneously embraced in a show of open sensuality which was a raised finger to the prudish regime.

The invention of the sculpture of “Miss Mao” (2006) (which has had several incarnations, fiberglass, steel and a medley of colours), quietly galvanized the art scene. Who could have dared to imagine Mao, the handsome, heroic political father figure transformed into a gnome with the nose of Pinocchio, the pigtail of a Manchu and the breasts of the pre-pubescent girls, the Great Leader so often preferred? Only the Gao Brothers dared.

Miss Mao was vilified for being too commercial, but they did not take it to heart. In an openly consumerist society, it is hard to imagine how a funny doll of a Mao could represent more than a gimmick. However, all of those who know Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang also know that death of their father was enough to warrant a lifelong hatred, quasi-atavistic of China’s most ambiguous historical front man. As they once said to me: “Mao ideas permeate the blood of the nation, and a blood poison is as difficult to eradicate as a virus.”

Mao is not a theme, it is an obsession. To desacralize Mao, is the brothers’ lifelong quest. In “The Execution of Christ” (2009), a firing squad of twelve clones of a portly and overly confident Mao have Kalashnikovs aimed at the Christ figure, saying the last word, the obliteration, the annihilation of all that which represents compassion. It is ironic that Mao, responsible for so many deaths, should never have been portrayed with a gun.

The recent set of “Double Portraits” (2009), oil diptychs, 6m across, of dictators depicted as children and then as adults, also reflect on a recurring theme of the Gao Brother’s, our inherent humanity: whether the human soul is born good (as Rousseau might have wanted), or evil (as Joseph de Maistre suggested).

OBL, Saddam Hussein, Hitler, Madam Mao; the child and the adult side by side, a pair, seem to be looking at a mirror, the mirror of their own evolution into monsters.

“The Interview” (2007) a photo of long deceased dictators and mass murderers, figures of inhumanity, Mao, Stalin, OBL, Pol Pot, etc. meeting in a digitalized composition is another version of the same story. Oh! humanity? Where has your humanity gone? It rings of Allen Ginsberg’s “America” (Oh America, when will you end your human war?”)

I would suggest that this new series, conceived from 2002 to now, starting with the iconic“Unfinished Building Series” then, “The Utopia of Construction No 5, No 6, No 15, No 19” (2014). “Between the Walls of Utopia” (2014), is an extension of the theme of the Gao Brothers’ life work, a study of humanity and about humanity, and also on utopia.

There are the reverberating echoes of past series like “Chinese Ark” (2000), “Sense of Space” (2000), “The Forever Unfinished Building” (2002), “Morning Exercise” (2004) “The Passage of Time” (2005), “Outer Space Project: Map of China” (2007). The newer photos have taken this theme to the point of abstraction, transforming unreal buildings like honeycombs, bee hives, reefs filled with human life into quasi-mystical kaleidoscopes or mandalas.

In the new photographs (much as in past ones), one glimpses individuals stacked like so many sardines, one on top of the other, in compartments, in the skeleton of future cities. The unfinished, cement structures, seem terrifyingly high and impersonal or endlessly long.

And the inhabitants, what are they doing? What are they thinking? If we take a moment to examine their humanity, we might find that each and every one of them is different and unique like the buried terracotta warriors, each an island unto him or herself, preoccupied with his own reality, even though some are only shadows, their faces shaded.

How can we all live together, in harmony and at the same time fulfilling our own destinies and dreams? How can we all live together without impinging one another’s freedom, how can we act in a way in which in universal acceptable and moral. Perhaps, it all comes down to the Confucian ethic of humanity or “ren 仁”, man’s benevolence to man, man’s regard for other men, making humanity one’s end, “living for humanity”.

Whenever I am in Beijing, I end up on the rooftop of the Gao Brothers for interminable discussions, dinners, snacks (watermelon comes to mind) and debates. More often than not, Lu Feifei, their eponymous muse, herself an actress and filmmaker, is there, making coffee or exotic juices and adding to the general mood of utopia-discussing.

We discuss everything. Nothing is ever left out.

We discuss how Chinese cities are mushrooming into inhuman, impersonal collections of tower blocks. We discuss how massive urbanization has made a disenfranchised peasantry into a limitless stock house of labour for feckless factory owners. We discuss the nail families who refuse to dislodge and the developers who hire thugs to evict them. We discuss the end of the Chinese family, once composed of three or four generations under a common roof, sometimes a courtyard house or farmyard, now isolated and independent, living in fifteen-story domino blocks. The loneliness.

We discuss the end of culture and of a certain culture, artisans, once the life-blood of China. We discuss the environmental hazards of such rapid, non-thought out industrialization. The impact of environmental problems on health, references to Foucault. The contamination of baby milk products for example. We discuss Wei Jingsheng, an old friend. We discuss world affairs.

Dissidents, jailed longer than Ai Weiwei, and more deeply scarred, appear now and then, dropping by unexpectedly. A poet with a gallery nearby reminisces about a sculptor friend, Gai Guo who committed suicide shorty after Tiananmen, out of disillusionment.

It always seems as if the entire political consciousness of China appears and disappears on their rooftop terrace, and the discussions go on deep into the night ending at the no 6 Sichuan Studio in the 798 district over spicy noodles and warm beer. Old propaganda on the wall reminds us of the political climate. This is not even about politics or censorship, this is about the future of the world. This is about humanity as a whole.

It seems to me that our discussions continue and have been ongoing in the past few years most notably at the Kemper Museum Of Contemporary, the Centre Pompidou, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Princeton University Art Museum, the Wall Art Museum Beijing, the TSUM and the Tretyakov Museum in Moscow, the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, the Victoria and Albert museum in London, the MAC in Rome, at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, at He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen, at the Guangzhou Art Museum, even at National Gallery and Chinese Pavilion in Albania, at theFukuoka Art Museum and to come back to the start and the very beginning of the Gao Brothers, at Beijing’s National Art Museum, where it all began.

And that, of course, is what art is all about, humanity and utopia and discussing and re-discussing it until someone finally takes notice. Gao Brothers, take a bow!

For the exhibition at IFA Gallery, also the gallery of a lifelong friend, at the Belgian space of thedistinguished gentleman scholar Alexis Kouzmine-Karavaieff who I met in the linongs of Shanghai, scouring artists studios for new art!

Han Bing

(soon to be added)

Autumns and dreams, the art of Sonya Fu

Miss Fu paints on her desktop or Wacom tablet with all of the technique demanded of a traditional artist, however she dispenses with paint and canvass.

In her New Territories studio home, she listens to the Space Channel, Portishead, System of A Down, Metallica, to transport her into another world, the world of where her waking and sleeping dreams meet. The music makes her “feel as if she is floating”. She works night or day, letting her unconscious gracefully drift into her conscious world, sleeping in bouts.

For, she is above all inspired by dreams, often the dreams of her childhood world, the world of her rememberings, a purple teddy bear, a manga called Yu Yu Hakusho, the rose-coloured piggy bank her father had from childhood, “my father has a piggy bank exactly like that pig, forty years, whenever I see it, it reminds me of my childhood, it has been with him since he was a child.”

The lovely Chinese-looking blonde damsel in I Love, I Imagine and I See, with either hearts or clouds tattooed on her skin, or the strange eponymous third eye portray the artist as a child and in a trance-like state. Like some creature between the real and unreal world, this vision of girlhood and of womanhood exists ,if only in our minds.

Forever and Ever is also a depiction of the artist as a dreamer, a carefree, child holding a toy, staring at the clouds like cotton candy, with a flower jauntily replacing the star on her Maoist cap.

“When I was a child, I thought clouds should taste sweet, I imagined a flower instead of a star, it’s not political, it’s just my way of looking at the world. The way we were born, the world we were brought into; it’s like we were put in a box with limits, limits of beliefs, the things your parents told you not to do. A lot of children here in Asia don’t have free time, they must learn to play the piano, dance and draw against their will. There is no time to be the child they should be, free. This way of thinking is destroying their childhood. They need to develop their spirit and their mind, to be free thinkers.”

Many of Miss Fu’s works are about the inner child, ‘reconnecting ‘with the inner child’. There is an escapism that is also about escaping modern life, society, and the world. It is not without recalling the post 70s generation of mainland Chinese painters who portray other realities, computer-like virtual worlds such as Li Jikai, Chen Ke and even the older Liu Ye, the escapist generation

Sonya Fu belongs to a new generation of surrealists; call them the‘cyberpunk’ surrealists, young artists attempting to insert themselves into a world post HR Giger (the designer of other worldly creatures from Dune and Alien who greatly inspired her), Blade Runner, computer games and manga-inspired art.

“The figures in my work are from my subconscious; I sometimes dream about them, they speak to me in fragile voices.

I remember my dreams some people say they don’t remember their dreams.

I wake up, and all of the creatures in my dreams, which existed in thought form, seem suddenly real. I think there is a dream world, another dimension, a dimension I visit when I’m asleep. Sometimes it’s the beauties I see, girls and girl shapes combined with animals, I see them playing together against a colourful landscape.”

Tender Stillness, a girl-snake, is a creature, which often comes the artists in her dreams, ‘angrily watching in the sky’, her form is ‘continually changing’, transforming itself, a pale, white coil of hands, ears and flowers.

“The world is boring and I want to escape. I desire a secret garden where I can be safe now and then, escape and detox from people and stress. One can get so tired of socializing, work, social standards of beauty, I just want to hide away in my own secret garden .”

The need to dream and to escape is also the need to be free from society and its conventions, of being an artist.

Portraying herself as a girl ravelled up in her own hair, Fu becomes sort of strange otherworldly creature. In Veiling Vanity, her hair has become a mask, a lacy mask behind which one can make out fiery eyes and black, gothic lips. She says Veiling Vanity was meant to provoke, to unsettle.

“I wanted to confront the feeling of what it is to be a rebel, the creepiness”, she says.

In Trouble Hair, she is referring to a Chinese proverb三千烦恼丝, ‘three thousand strands of trouble’, in one’s knotted, and tangled hair.

“Hair”, she says, “is a metaphor of our everyday troubles, afflictions, worries. Monks shave their heads, they have a need to be calm and peaceful, to lose their troubles. I recently just cut off all my hair from very long short, I too became freer.”

Many psychoanalysts consider dreams to be the only continuous space of creative time. The Surrealists Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, André Breton and René Magritte all attempted to reconcile the subconscious and reality, feeling the two would produce a much richer, spiritual world, a world we could transport ourselves to, out of our ordinary lives, where time and space become null and void, where ‘the dreaming’ would become even more important than ‘the living’.

Autumn dreams

Sonya Fu (Chinese name 傅敏兒 Fu Man Yi, b. 1982) belongs to a new generation of Hong Kong artists, call them them the‘cyberpunk’ surrealists, young artists attempting to insert themselves into a world post Blade Runner, computer games, sci-fi fantasy and manga-inspired art.

Her digital artwork printed on Diassec often presents a young girl or woman either dreaming or existing in a parallel world, a virtual universe in which dreams and reality fuse.

Inspired by music, spiritual beliefs, Buddhist or new age, Sonya Fu’s magical, virtual creatures are endearing and haunting at the same time, dreamers always.

A self-taught artist, trained as a graphic designer, she has exhibited in New York, Hong Kong, Berlin, Melbourne, Pasadenaand with magazines such as JET, and CURVY 8.

Hong Wai, a feminine literati painter

The boudoir is the anteroom in which a young woman quietly sits before a mirror, adorning and perfuming herself awaiting her love. The embodiment of that moment, the moment of embellishment, the moment of love is difficult to capture. Hong Wai’s paintings are in essence; about love.

Her newest series of inks, Danielle, Anaïs, Elise, Doris, Emmanuelle, Louise, Vanessa, are like so many fox spirits or ling hu, the femme fatale in Chinese fairy tales, their unembodied apparitions in ink, evanescent and dreamlike.

To paint the intimate clothing of women is to transgress a boundary in ink painting, almost as taboo as to paint a nude.

For centuries, the traditional ink has been limited to landscape and calligraphy, the attributes of a Chinese gentleman, the Confucian literati or junshi. The reluctance of painting nudes comes perhaps as Francois Jullien, the French sinologist has suggested from the reluctance to paint subjects a such or figures; the Chinese gentleman or gentlewoman preferring to paint the world itself. The Buddhist and Taoist philosophy behind ink painting has always valued the suggestion more than the depiction, the essence more than the body, the spirit more than the incarnation.

The ink “nudes” of Hong Wai (if we can call them nudes) are still in this regard very much in the literati tradition. They do not depict, but suggest. The body is still unpainted, only inferred. The head, figure, arms, hands of the subject are not apparent.

The lingerie with its floating gauze, its lacy veils, gives the work movement. The body seems to take shape behind the layers of lace, which have been painted with a tiny brush. In contrast, the ink blotch effect or xuanran gives the effect of a landscape with clouds or pools of water; adding to the ethereal, floating atmosphere.

The running ink, yunxing youmo, like threads of the embroidered garments, adds to this movement and evokes a body, one that might even be swirling, dancing or floating. The woman, like the fox spirit, seems alive. But she is indefinable, ineffable.

Ink has been confined for generations to a masculine universe. Here, Hong Wai journeys with ink to a new frontier, that of the mysterious feminine. The mountain and river landscape has become instead a woman’s body. The ode to heaven and earth has become an ode to the sensuous, the hidden, the ineluctable yin.

The pine branches and fern landscape of Vanessa, the roses and cloud landscape of of Louise (which seems to be full of hidden, voluptuous bodies), the buds and blossoms of Anaïs leading to an avalanche of ink and water clouds, the cascades of leaves of Danielle’s opera-like kimono, all of these women seem in their own way to be landscapes. One can even glimpse a hidden dragon and cloud motif in Elise, somehow indefinable, yet very ancient, extremely Oriental.

It reminds me ever so slightly of Pan Yuliang, an earlier 20th-century woman painter of nudes who lived in Paris. Pan rarely painted her “nudes” without clothing, portraying an open kimono, or a throw over a chaise longue which she inevitably decorated with flowers, leaves or other landscape motifs. Her nudes almost always appeared in their own secret gardens, their flesh complimented by the richness of the background or their adornment.

In the Tang dynasty, courtesans such as Yu Xuanji and Xue Tao employed all charms to entice their lovers. Gold hairpins, jade ornaments, woven silk gauze garments, nothing was too precious to lure secret love. The courtesan powdered her face, darkened her eyebrows and painted them into moons, into the shape of moths or flower blossoms, and covered them in gold and feathers. They then composed poems to entice; verses to bewitch.

These love poems, were subtle hints at seduction, and eventual trysts. The poetry often referred to clothing, the “silver hooks” hinting at their amorous alliances, their silken robes alluding to their femininity and seclusion; the robes hiding her innermost sentiments and shielding her from the harshness of the world. As Yu Xuanji wrote:

Shamed before the sun, I shade myself with my netted gauze silk sleeve;

Depressed by the spring, reluctant to rise and put on makeup,

It’s easy to find a priceless treasure,

Much harder to get a man with a heart.

Perhaps Hong Wai’s works are part of a deeper love poem. For the details in her work, the lace, she uses the same brush, gongbi, as was often used for writing: a tiny, intricate wolf brush which could equally have been used for writing poems or love letters.

Paris, April 2014

Doha: a new generation of museums for a new generation, for Artlog

The new museums of the Gulf have been the talk of the arts and heritage world for some time now. The oil-rich countries of the Persian Gulf have been investing in architects, curators and artworks for the past decade; quietly building monuments to posterity filled with art and artifacts.

Critics have derided the cultural initiatives as “Las Vegases of the desert”. But others have seen in this new effervescence a new era for the Arab world. Like the revolutions, the so-called Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt, some have seen the affirmation of a new Arab spirit and identity.

Dubious at times, cautious at the achievements of an overly rampant capitalism, I was recently won over by a visit to Qatar. Qatar’s museums, the first to emerge on what could be considered the world’s most exclusive coastline, have something to say and say it with a new energy.

Not far from the airport (ideal for those stopping over in Qatar), the MIA or Museum of Islamic Art is a stone’s throw from the flower-lined corniche. The structure imagined by the brilliant Chinese architect IM Pei, widely known as the man who pierced the pavements of the Louvre and built a glass pyramid, is one of the most exciting new buildings in the world.

A honey-colored palace on a sixty-meter long man-made island is set against an azure sea, with a background of wooden sailing dhows, laden with merchandise. A pale, water lined bridge links it to the mainland.

Entering is akin to entering a Cistercian monastery in Southern France, a space of pale halls and perfect geometry. The main staircase, heart-shaped, ascends to a beehive-like cupola, that allows the sun to pour through a tiny oval window. Below, a ring-shaped chandelier with arabesque allows the light to shine even more freely through the room.

The genius of Pei is to marry elements of Arabian architecture with Asian values of simplicity and asceticism. Everywhere, the elements of the arabesque, a style of repetitive geometric patterns designed to bring one closer to God, or Allah, are used. The ceiling is composed of rows of cupolas, small circular holes enclose lights, the elevators are punctuated with star friezes. Against the forty-meter high bay window, a fountain in the shape of two layered eight-sided stars, quietly gurgles.

The collection itself, the ruling al Thani family’s, is just as unique. A tiny Koran, rumored to have been conceived as an insert into a ruler’s ring, sits below a famed page by the scribe Omar El Aqta, property of Timor, otherwise known as “the lame”, or Tamerlame (1336-1405). In another room, a series of Korans dating back to the 8th century, in a variety of scripts, hail from Mongolia, Boukhara or North Africa. A diamond and spinel necklace sparkles in another cabinet, engraved with Islamic calligraphy, rumored to have come from the personal coffers of Shah Jahan (1592-1666), the Mughal emperor so tormented by grief that he built the Taj Majal. An ornate blue and gold calligraphic scroll is Suleiman the Magnificent’s last will and testament to his granddaughter, a villa on the Marmara sea. And a carpet with a chess board motif, commissioned by Timur (himself the great grandfather of Babur) who enjoyed the game of king and queens in his garden even more than conquering Central, Western and South Asia.

The museum continues breathing life into forgotten eras, the richly furnished Mameluk palaces, the ornate, bejeweled objects of the Mughal emperors, the colorful ceramics of and sharp scimitars of the Ottomans…

Several pages from the Shahnameh (Persian Book of Kings) grace the collection, of a quality not unlike the one auctioned at Sotheby’s in April for US 12 million dollars from the Maurice Rothschild collection.

On the way out, in the underground parking lot and neighboring grounds, a contemporary show entitled « Told, Untold, Retold » organized by Mathaf, livened up the atmosphere, opening a window unto contemporary art, and taking up the theme of the Bedouin tradition of storytelling. Jeffar Khaldi recited the story of a Lebanese family in photographs; Youssef Nabil told a love story in film, Abel Abidin filmed a lounge singer in Cairo.

Mathaf (The Arab Museum of Modern Art) is the other facet of Qatar’s museum boom. Temporarily housed in a school reconverted by French architect Jean-Francois Bodin, it is set in what seems like a wasteland of sand and cranes in the Education City suburb of Doha.

Soon, a kasbah-like building emerges out of the dust and a vast sculpture, sixty-four blocks of white and black granite, depicting an Arabian Noah’s arc overtakes the viewer. Owls, hippos, falcons and palm trees sit astride a long barge. The work by Adam Henein was a commission sculpted in the stone quarry of Aswan. The magnificent piece points the new power of museums in the Gulf, able to commission works on a large scale and create opportunities for the Arab art scene. The two large canvasses by Yan Peiming of the emir and his wife the Sheikha Moza in the museum’s front hall are another proof of this new art sponsorship. Like the American industrialists of the 19th century, the Gulf states are pouring the revenues of black gold into art.

Artists such as Adam Henein and Dia Al Azzawi, the Iraqi painter in exile and others have benefited from the overwhelming generosity of the Qatari state and have been given artists residencies and stipends. The Mathaf museum library stocks the film and catalogue documentation of the many artists’s stay, attesting to this new dynamic.

Arab modern and contemporary art have never before been at the heart of a museum project. The Sheikh’s collection, amassed over twenty years, watched over by the young Wassan Al Khudairi, its chief curator, constitutes a sort of avant-premiere view of the grander vision for art in the Gulf. In other museums such as the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris or the Metropolitan in New York, Arab art have been part and parcel of a wider collection, but not the main focus.

However, the museum’s mandate is not so much to showcase as to educate young people (including artists from the region) who have never been exposed to the pan-Arabic art movements, which have flourished over the past five decades in other metropolises of the Arab world such as Cairo, Beirut, Baghdad and Damascus. Arab art also has its particularities. « Arab art transcends the categories of Western art, says Maryam Helmy, the Egyptian-born assistant curator of Mathaf. There is no pure abstract movement, abstraction often includes figurative aspects and the themes are very different: landscape and spirituality are often more prominent than portraiture. »

For the visitor, the works in the Mathaf (Arabic for Museum) are a glaring contrast to the works in the MIA (Museum of Islamic Art). Form and representation contrast with the spiritual and the unspoken in Islam. In the Mathaf café, young women artists in Swarovski-covered abayas, chat over cappuccino. In the MIA, families and students from the Koranic schools come to soak up history.

The current exhibition at Mathaf, « Sajjil » (which means to « record ») makes obvious the effervescence of Arab art before and after the Second World War. In the artistic salons of Cairo, Ramallah and Baghdad, a whole generation could talk of nothing but painting, art and music. A flourishing bourgeoisie commissioned family portraits and artists thrived. Some like Farid Belkalia, disappointed by a stint at the Beaux Arts in Paris, went home to find new inspiration and start their own art movements, which were rooted in their own traditions and religious outlook.

Saaed Shakir, Ismael Fattah, Madiha Umar, Hamid Nada, are but a few of the artists to have disappeared in the annals of history only to re-emerge at Mathaf. The animal pelt scuptures of Farid Belkalia, the indigo calligraphy of Rashid Koraichi, the surrealist nudes of Ramsis Younan, the Last Supper of Fateh El Moudarrès, are part of what the Western art world has missed: a rich cultural heritage not to be underestimated.

Qatar’s two new museums are a good omen. The Orient is finding itself again and it wants to flaunt its colours and its charms. In two or three years, when other such projects in the region, Abu Dhabi’s Guggenheim Saadiyat and the Louvre, as well as theaters and operas, open their doors, the Gulf may yet emerge as one of the world’s great cultural centers.

Shanghai for Citizen K

Jinmao Grand Hyatt for Citizen K

1 + 1 = 1 Qin Yifeng

1 + 1 = 1

“One's not half of two; two are halves of one.” -e.e. cummings

秦一峰 Qin Yifeng

I first met Qin Yifeng in Shanghai in the late nineties. It is a strange story of one those meetings that one calls yuanfeng or fated.

I was sitting in a café on Ulumuqi Lu, the Shen Shen and I saw the most beautiful little baby girl. She was with her mother. She seemed to be talking with me from across the room. I walked over to meet her and she smiled at me with her eyes.

I was in Shanghai to visit artists. So I called my friend Shen Fan to see if he could recommend other artists studios to visit. He told me to go and see Qin Yifeng.

I arrived at Qin Yifeng’s house a few hours later and who did I see but the same little girl and her mother, pur hasard, his wife and child. From that moment on, Qin Yifeng and I decided it was our fate to be friends.

Later, I visited Qin Yifeng’s studio on Moganshan Road. Ding Yi, Zhang Enli and others had their studios in the same draughty warehouse on Suzhou Creek. Qin Yifeng’s studio was the most intriguing one. It was filled with Ming dynasty furniture and porcelain he had found in local markets. His canvasses, abstract calligraphic oil paintings, were stacked against the wall.

Qin Yifeng is a true wenren. He is the epitome of the painter scholar surrounding himself with beauty and lives in an aesthetic way. He believes that life is art and art is life.

In this way, his philosophy is also Icicle’s, of the “natural way”. Appearing to follow a traditional aesthetic, he is still intensely contemporary. His ideas are also Taoist, it is only in being completely immersed and disappearing into the universe, that one can truly belong to it.

More than twenty years ago, Qin Yifeng was in the midst of creating Linefield, a series of bamboo-like calligraphy-inspired lines, which blur the boundaries and become conceptual, a recording of time and space. At first, these Linefield paintings seemed to be inspired by bamboo, or trees. But at closer range, the theme became less clear. They looked like rows of characters or notes. He has transformed what could have been landscapes into more abstract ideas.

“The interesting thing about getting lost in calligraphy and abstract lines,” Yifeng told me as we drank green tea in the garden of the Fenyang music conservatory last November, almost twenty years after our first meeting ”is that there is no after or before. There is only the interplay of yin and yang, the void and the full. There is no past, no future, there is only now. This series resembles our life.”

The thought behind Linefield is philosophical, a sort of block universe theory.When all elements become equal, the future and the past no longer exist. What is past to you, may be the future to someone else. The future may be someone else’s past.

Linefield also introduces the element of chance. Chance occurs spontaneously. The past and the future are irrelevant. A Taoist aspires above all to lose himself in the world, in time and space and to attain a perfect harmony of the spirit.

When time and space are irrelevant, everything becomes more real, more authentic, more soulful. “Linefield is like our meeting years ago, pure serendipity. Chance is part of the beauty of life, things happen out of nowhere,” Qin Yifeng confided.

Linefield series is not dissimilar to Negative Reading, a new series of photographs Qin Yifeng has started in which he captures the Ming furniture he collected years ago. With his old 5 x 5 camera, he studies the scars of the old furniture, the marks of time. “What was once a tree, becomes an object, but in the Ming dynasty, they did not use nails so the object remained natural. It becomes a sort of tree transformed into art, wine stained, scarred or waterlogged.”

To do these photographs, Qin Yifeng keeps a diary of natural light. He only takes pictures when the light hits the furniture so evenly that there is no shadow, no angles or dimensions.

The photo must be flat, like a painting. The negative and not the positive of the image is then made into a print, accentuating this flatness.

Chinese painting has always been one-dimensional. Perhaps this one dimensionality is related to the first of Chinese mediums, ink. This one-dimensionality has survived in contemporary painting. This the natural way, the Chinese aesthetic, the ‘block universe’.

Qin Yifeng has just built a new studio in Songjiang, I imagine him there painting on his old honghuali table, in a perfect, quiet landscape, surrounded by trees. There, he tells me, time disappears, and life is distilled to its pure essence, just like in his paintings. No past, no future, only now.

李可华 Li Kehua (Lico) (b. 1993 in Jinan, Shandong) is a young dancer formerly LDTX company living in Beijing.

Her performance One plus One is One is like the flow of water or the intake of breath, qi, is a continuous journey, not unlike Linefield.

As she dances between the white ribbons, one is reminded of the continual transformation of the universe and the natural world. Accompanied by music by Kuniyoshi Yamada, her body unravels like string.

秦一峰 Qin Yifeng (b.in 1961) graduated from the Shanghai Academy of Arts and Crafts and the Fine Arts Department of Shanghai University. He is considered one of the pionneers of Shanghai abstraction with Yu Youhan, Chen Qiang, Ding Yi, Huang Yuanqing, and others. He lives and works in Somgjiang and Shanghai. He has had solo exhibitions at major museums such as Yuz Museum, Liu Haisu Art Museum, Shanghai Art Museum in Shanghai, New South Wales Gallery (Australia) and Vienna MAK.His galleries have included Eastlink Gallery (Shanghai), Red Gate(Beijing) , Zee Stone (Hong Kong) and White Cube (London ).

ALL ABOUT TREES Yang Jinsong exhibition Icicle Space

ALL ABOUT TREES Yang Jinsong solo exhibition

18 October – 12 December 2019

“When I draw willow trees, I find a complex way of drawing, lines repeated in the same frequency. I gradually forget the world of appearances and things. The brush follows my heart!”

Yang Jinsong Foreword from the curator:

My first encounter with ICICLE was in Shanghai. Subtle, refined, contemporary yet classical clothes with a profound ecological mandate. Man and Nature.

So when they asked me to imagine an artist who would encompass their philosophy, I had to think about it.

To invite an artist who like them was Taoist in its inspiration, believing in the harmony between Man and Nature, the importance of not disturbing the universe.

How could we come together and create an event for their new bookstore and gallery, their flagship store in Paris? I thought of images and many came to mind but I thought of some trees I had seen, painted by an artist,

a 文人, wenren, a literati, the same age as me, with a young son the same age as my daughter, living in Beijing. I had shared many cups of tea with him as he moved from studio to studio, some of the studios bulldozed by overly zealous developers. He had been painting everything around him for years.

His brush is his eye. He paints teapots, old radios, an antique figurine, the fish he ate with his friends on a quiet autumn night, the watermelon he shared with his son and his wife on a hot summer’s day. His new series was about trees, the willow shimmering in his back garden. And I thought of the idea of trees, the importance of trees, in a world more and more technological, global. We have to look back at what is essential.

I thought why not invite some art collectors, writers and artists to discuss the idea of trees: people I admire, a young collector, a photographer, a writer. ICICLE is about appreciating beauty in our daily life, living according to Nature. To look at a painting of trees, to feel immersed in nature, to understand what it is to be human in the world, this is what we need to achieve. This is the philosophy we need to aspire to.

Pia Camilla Copper

ICICLE CULTURAL SPACE | 35 AVENUE GEORGE V - PARIS VIIIe | +33 1 43 59 15 17 | WWW.ICICLE.COM

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