Tag Archives: Shanghai

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Reading: Janet Chen – Guilty of Indigence

Unlike Iain Banks, Janet Chen’s Guilty of Indigence — The Urban Poor in China, 1900-1953, has more in common with Gail Hershatter’s The Gender of Memory, and shall not be inhaled in a 24 hour period. It’s possible, but I suspect I’d lose any attempt.

I read about Guilty of Indigence on The China Beat, where the author was interviewed, and figured there would be a lot I’d find interesting. For a start it’s Chinese scholarship written by a women, and having spent more than a decade reading predominately this field written by men before discovering Hershatter, Susan Mann and others, it’s obvious to me my renewed interest has been entirely due to women academics.

Secondly, it covers an era that I find has in general been under-represented – certainly in more popular writing on China – being sandwiched as it is between the Qing Dynasty and Mao. Too often this is referred to as the warlord era – even Wikipedia does, (and it irritates me immensely I can’t refind the brilliant essay deconstructing the term in the context of its use in Afghanistan, as it is eminently applicable to China during this era), used to cover the entire Republican era rather than just the twelve years post-WW1 when the country was split under various military fiefdoms (cliques, hegemonies, etc). I don’t have an alternate suggestion for a name for this era, but I find not reducing it to the preconceptions inherent in the word ‘warlord’ helps to think and write about it with a little more subtlety.

As for the China part itself, Janet concentrates mostly on Beijing and Shanghai, which in general in almost everything I’ve read on China is what is meant by ‘China’; a cluster of provinces, Hebei to Zhejiang, and rarely further west than Henan. Yes, I have a fondness for the Southern Barbarians, and all things border-ish, so experienced small but not unexpected disappointment at absence of Canton in the index, though of course if any book tried to be even slightly all-encompassing when it came to Chinese scholarship, it wouldn’t be finished in this lifetime.

Anyway, it’s beautifully bound, the cover and layout are very attractive, and I think I shall take a pause now to begin reading.

Janet Chen – Guilty of Indigence Janet Chen – Guilty of Indigence
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all about jin xing

Whenever I’d be hanging out with some group of artists or dancers, sitting around the remnants of dinner and drinking in one of those sultry Guangzhou nights, Jin Xing’s name would always seem come up. There’s very much a story for me there, the people who affected me that I suppose caused me to become what I am now. The admiration with which she was always held, how highly regarded she was in the world of Chinese contemporary dance and that she was also very publicly transsexual was not lost on me. I think especially because in a very real way she allowed me to imagine the possibilities in how I could continue to live. After hearing so much about her and meeting her a couple of times, it’s nice to read some of her life from her.

“You are sick, Jin Xing. Do it later, maybe. But look, women are fascinated by you, and men are intrigued. If you become a woman, women won’t want to be friends with you and guys won’t be turned on by you any more. And as far as men, real men, go… Do you think they’re going to want you? They want a natural woman, not… not…”

“A fake one? Is that what you want to say?”

— The Guardian

金星 jinxing 金星 jinxing

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new photography in guangzhou

All month I’ve been meaning to blog this, but attack of laziness and other things to keep me occupied meant it always slipped away. So, mid-last year I mentioned, the book 3030: New Photography in China around the time it was published, and mostly forgot about it. Then PingMag from Tokyo did one of its famous interview/essays on the monograph with some of the photographers from Beijing, Shanghai and of course my favourite town, Guangzhou. While reading it, I was reminded just what entranced me last time I was in the city, when I met a bunch of quite amazing young artists, designers, all-round creative people the were part of something like a Cantonese cultural renaissance of art kids.

I was going to lament the lack of relevance of so much contemporary dance in some of the cities artists in this book come from, and compare that lack to the phenomenally strong and unique contemporary art, photography, performance, design, music, magazines and pretty much everything else coming from the new generations in these places, but … I’m not feeling particularly lucid today.

So back to Canton art kids, and the bunch I met while making apocalypse prd 岭南启示录, some who are in 3030, some who appear in the photos, many who are part of this large and really cool diffuse mass of artists who are making art that is so strikingly relevant to the cities it comes from. I occasionally carry on about Cantonese new art, and so I guess for everyone who tries and fails to imagine what it looks like, this article and all the links to the artists pretty much is it.

However, the basic premise of the “3030″ book is that after the Open Door Policy – the implementation of sort of new policies and an economic liberalization in the very early 90s – China changed so much. Here is this first generation of young people that has grown into maturity under this new program. So their experience of China is very different and clearly unlike their parents they know the country only as a booming economy and fairly international place. Naturally their work is quite different. Being in their mid, late 20s, they are maturing as artists too. But their work has started to be shown only very recently, maybe in the last few years, with a couple of exhibitions and then only in China.

— PingMag – New Photography in China

Lin Zhi Peng aka 223: Ivan and Wewe at a party in my apartment in winter Ivan and Wewe at a party in my apartment in winter

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when in doubt … cliché and generalise

Two almost opposite examinations of art or culture came from Ou Ning’s blog today, the first a textless photographic documentary, 乡土凋零, observing a village barren of people, the end of the world, even an empty outdoor opera stage, home to motorbikes and a table of distant, seated figures.

The second, from New York Times Magazine on contemporary art in China. I used to lament the execrable editorial retardedness that could induce every newspaper and magazine to endlessly refer to Mao or the Cultural Revolution in every title of every article about China. In an effort to see hip and up with the times it’s now often a reference to Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon just leaves me thinking they’d be better off and advance Euro-Sino-Freundschaft more if they just shut up.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Agenda is an atrocious article full of name-dropping and disconnected sprawling from one topic to the next, almost a shopping list of every foreigner who has even glanced at Chinese contemporary art in the last two decades. As a magazine filler story, which in English language media is largely what writing about art is concerned with, this is not such a surprise.

What is hideous and smacks of the very ‘orientalist’ racism the author charges certain nameless collectors with (though Uli Sigg’s name appears immediately afterwards in a deliberately obscure conjunction of two sentences) is such remarks as “I’m not convinced that we Westerners really understand what’s going on there.” That the writer is also a former curator of the Venice Biennale, Francesco Bonami is disturbing, as he plays on one hand with some odious “inscrutable China” generalisations and on the other with sympathetic, cultural insider, and defender of Chinese contemporary art.

The last paragraph though, is full of bizarre and non-sensical tangled mess of metaphors, undefined allusions, and outright cultural colonialism, an illiterate scrawl of meaninglessness. This is lazy journalism at its worst, and certainly does no favours for the artists it profiles. It highlights a certain impoverishment in traditional journalism, despite the massive resources underpinning a paper such as NYT. Contra this, a blog like Heaven Tree, writing frequently on Chinese culture, history, art is emblematic of the phenomenal quality of individuals writing out of passion.

Saving itself from some of the roadkill is the slideshow and accompanying notes on several prominent artists including Ou Ning and Cao Fei from Guangzhou now based in Beijing, Xu Zhen from Shanghai, and Yangjiang’s Zheng Guogu. Skip the article and go right to the slideshow.

end of the world - 1 end of the world – 1

end of the world - 2 end of the world – 2

cao fei and ou ning cao fei and ou ning

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3030 new photography in china

A new book of contemporary art photographers from China:

3030: New Photography in China

This fully illustrated survey of 30 of China’s most exciting photographers under 30 reveals a decisive shift in the country’s artistic topography. From internationally acclaimed artists to web bloggers, their images reveal a restless and fluxionary world that is shaped as much by tradition as it is by growing affluence, pop culture, advertising and fashion – among other products of the country’s Open Policy of the 1980s. Moreover, with the advent of digital technology and the internet it is also a generation whose ability to make and publish their pictures is unprecedented. A collection of essays by leading scholars and curators from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou introduce the artists and their work.

The Photographers

Alex So 苏焊光, Li Si En 李思恩, Zao 早, Ji Wei Yu 季炜煜, Liang Yue 梁玥, Lin Zhi Peng 林志鹏, Song Tao 宋涛, Cai Wei Dong 蔡卫东, Cao Fei 曹斐, Jin Shan 金闪, Peng Yang Jun 彭杨军, Ziboy 温凌, Liu Ren 刘韧, Moon Chen 陈皎皎, Zong Ning 宗宁, Wang Yi Fei 王一飞, Chen Wei 陈维, Zhou Hongbin 周宏斌, Chi Peng 遟鵬, Xu Cheng 徐程, Liu Bo 刘波, Guo Hang 郭航, Xu Zi Yu 徐梓峪, Liu Ding 刘鼎, Huang Kui 黄奎, Yao Yi Chun 姚亦淳, Yiki Liu 刘一青, Yang Chang Hong 杨长虹, Zheng Zhi Yuan 郑知渊

The Essayists

Gu Zheng 顾铮 is professor of photography at Fudan University in Shanghai and is one of China’s leading scholars of contemporary photography. He has written articles for numerous journals and exhibition catalogues in China and was a chief curator and curatorial committee member of the 2005 Guangzhou Photo Biennial.

Ou Ning 欧宁 is an artist, author and champion of contemporary art in China. He has participated in and curated numerous exhibitions, including Get It Louder in 2005 as well as having written extensively in both Chinese and English on China’s evolving art scene.

Zhang Li 张黎 graduated from the Art History Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1992. Since then he has worked on numerous exhibition projects in Beijing and Shanghai, including the Beijing Tokyo Art Project at Dashanzi Art District (798) in 2002. He is currently setting up a centre for photography in Beijing.

Shi HanTao 施翰涛 is manager of the EpSITE photo gallery in Shanghai. He curated the new photography exhibition Selfhood in 2005 and was co-curator of Absent Minded at the Lianzhou Photo Biennale 2005.

— 3030 Press

3030 new photography in china 3030 new photography in china

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金星 jin xing and shanghai dance festival

Something I’ve been meaning to write about for a bit, but I am lazy and prefer sleeping, is the 舞上海 Shanghai Dance Festival, that has just finished, but I heard excellent raves about a certain Nederlans company via text messages who turned out to be the excellent and worth raving about Emio Greco | PC, who I think have made quite a few people think contemporary dance was actually worth looking at. Anyway, the festival is over, and the instigator of it, 金星 Jin Xing, famous across China because she used to be a male in the army, former Guangdong Modern Dance Company chick, and now artistic director of Jin Xing Dance Theatre in Shanghai had an article on her, the festival, family life and making dance, and why people have said about her, “大概脑子坏掉了” in China News. It took me about half an hour to read, so don’t hold your breath for a sub-normal translation to emerge here.

金星 jin xing 金星 jin xing

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