the curator mansion yishu may_june 2011

8/3/2019 The curator Mansion Yishu May_June 2011

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Vol.10 No.3 1

2 Editors Note

4 Contributors

6 Critical Writing from a Local Perspective:

First Yishu Awards for Critical Writing on

Contemporary Chinese Art Conference

22 The Curator Mansion: An Impossible Placeof Innite Possibilities

BeatriceLeanza

36 Conceptual Archaeology: Performance Art

in Southwest China

SophiaKidd

47 A Conversation Between Huang Du

and Cui Xiuwen

55 Wen Fang: The Path of Art

From Observing to Getting Involved

AliceSchmatzberger

63 O Zhangs Recent Works

PatriciaEichenbaumKaretzky72 Four Discussions with Hong Kong Artists:

Leung Chi Wo, Lam Tung Pang, Morgan Wong,

and Lee KitStephanieBailey

87 A Time of Critical Reection:

Chen Chieh-jens FactoryRevisited

MilenaHoegsberg

94 Chen Chieh-jen: EmpiresBordersIIWestern

EnterprisesInc.

PamelaKember

101 Michael Lin: The Colour Is Bright,

the Beauty Is Generous

KatieHill

107 Chinese Name Index

V O L U M E 1 0 , N U M B E R 3 , M a y / J U N E 2 0 1 1

CONT ENTS

22

87

36

Cover: Cui Xiuwen, Emptiness in Non-emptiness & Being

in Non-being No. 20(detail), 2009, C-print, 95 x 300 cm.

Courtesy of the artist.

101

55

63

WethankJNBY,CanadianFoundationofAsianArt,Mr.andMrs.

EricLi,StephanieHolmquistandMarkAllisonfortheirgenerous

contributiontothepublicationanddistributionofYishu.


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22 Vol.10 No.3

Make room. Look out the window. Look onto the street. Space out. Watch

a building be. Take the time to eat your lunch. Take up time. Get a haircut.

Take your time. Massage your soul. Sleep. Dream something up. Revel in

this mood. Get lost in the empire of atmosphere. As in the unconscious,something always happens when nothing does.

Giuliana Bruno, PublicIntimacy:ArchitectureandtheVisualArts1

In March 2002, just a few months before I moved to Beijing, the

Piccolo Teatro in Milano debuted Infnities, an award-winning

dramaturgical wonder staged through the collaborative efforts of

visionary director Luca Ronconi and John D. Barrow, a cosmologist

and mathematician from the University of Cambridge. The project

was initiated by the Sigma Tau Foundation, a philanthropic institutiondedicated to promoting innovative encounters between science and the

general public. With Barrow, the playwright, and Ronconi, the stage

wizard, Infnitiesexplored the mathematical concept of innity through

ve separate scenarios, each of which functioned as a performative tableau

focusing on one singular aspect of this immediately appealing subject

matter.2 The play was hosted in the vacant spaces of Magazzini della Scala,

a large hangar-like complex that once housed the laboratories of La Scala

Opera House and is located in the citys far northern industrial zone of

Bovisa. On arrival, audiences were let inside in groups of seventy, which

would sequentially move up through the ve different scenarios so that

ve different groups were simultaneously inhabiting the space. Infnities

took the city as the theatre, creating within it a moment through which

different forms of intellectual, physical, and social movements came to be

lived and collectively performed. Barrow continues: Story-telling seemed

to be the way to penetrate its [the concept of innity] paradoxes so that

they became familiar by the device of immersing the audience into other

realities where the counter-intuitive features of the innite loomed as largeas life.3

Amid many of the spectacular and modest contemporary art events I have

experienced over the course of the past decade, Infnitiesis still the one

that has left with me a deep and most memorable impression. The play

embodies a masterful synthesis of what I envision arts doing: viscerally

reawakening both the senses and consciousness through the expanding of

elds of knowledge and life in the present tense of culture. Infnitiesevoked

and provoked an active engagement with what Giuliana Bruno calls aradical refashioning of a politics of time4 as we nowadays experience it

Beatrice Leanza

The Curator Mansion:An Impossible Place of Innite Possibilities


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Vol.10 No.3 23

through the uneven spaces of our ordinary, built environments: a hyper-

connected world in endless solution and dissolution, where notions of

proximity and distance are constantly recongured.

The question of space has been central to the transdisciplinary turn

of theoretical studies addressing the disembodied geographies of the

postmodern condition since the 1980s. It was paramount in the consequent

emergence of oppositional cultural practices that responded to changing

notions of place-bound identity and site-bound knowledge, as well as in

informing a variety of critical endeavours and artistic practices through

which ever-expanding paradigms of community and site-specicity

have been produced until today.5 The transformative nexus between

space, place, and identity and its connection to the ongoing permutations

between institutions and locations specic to the Asian context traversesmuch of the research at the basis of my own curatorial practice.

At the end of 2005, after I concluded my three-year collaboration as a

curator at the CAAW (China Art Archives and Warehouse), directed by

artist Ai Weiwei, I teamed up with architect and designer Li Naihan to

found BAO Atelier, a hybrid studio for integrated research in curatorial,

editorial, and design practices. This initiative reected a desire to create

an open-ended environment for critical activity and collaboration that

would enable a cross-fertilization among different creative disciplines and

communities that we perceived to be missing in the local context. By the

mid 2000s, Chinese art and artists had indeed moved out of the periphery

to embrace a period of progressive integration, and disproportioned

success, within the international market place while enjoying the ofcial

endorsement of its very own institutions within the local one.

The sudden, unmediated proliferation of museums, galleries, perennial

exhibitions (like biennials and triennials), and so-called creative clusters

certainly accelerated the course of professionalization needed to meet

the rapacious demands of the global cultural industry6 and allowed the

mobilization of private and public capital in the development of a local

system for the production and dissemination of art. Yet it also debased the

thereof created institutions in what curator Carlos Basualdo denes as the

ability to communicate as discrete singularities;7 that is, to retain the role

and responsibility to speak with a degree of autonomy and independence

outside of market logic and self-reexive academicism, and, therefore, with

and of their own identity.

One of the very rst projects we embarked on resonated in a moment

when the pre-Olympic construction frenzy was attracting to China

unprecedented international attentionthe sheer size and speed of the

Chinese urban miracle was undeniably presenting new intellectual and

social challenges to the envisioning of life in the cities of the twenty-rst

century. Our aim was to create a project whose spatio-temporal framework

could accommodate both critical reection and physical engagement with

the experience of this change and therefore expand the outreach of artistic

activity beyond the connes of galleries and dedicated districts. Realized


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in 2006 and 2007, Borderline/Moving Images was a radically collaborative

venture aimed at creating a habitat for cooperation among different local

spaces and educational institutions as well as an international network

of professionals and artists. Borderline was co-organized with Platform

China Contemporary Art Institute and then networked through a

constellation of public, private, commercial, and institutional venues. As

market and private-driven initiatives dominated the shaping of encounters

between art and the public, our project ideally wished to promote

alternative forms of communication and artistic expression beside those

motivated by existing interests.

Since 2002, the Beijing artistic scene has grown incrementally

into self-contained urban areas (art districts) where an

exuberant variety of both commercial and non-prot venues

are providing the artistic population and the general public

with a least common territory. A phenomenology dictatedby the citys urban setting and historical developmentone

of coexisting exibility and fragmentation, crescent seclusion

of specialized urban zones, gated quarters, and multiple

communitiesit has so far resulted in a form of conceptual

disconnection among the spaces themselves and a passive, non-

directional artistic discourse.8

Borderline/Moving Images sought to engage with the existing geopolitical

changes that were implicating the Asian region within an ever-growing

international network, furthering the horizon of the global cultural

sphere eastward. Our team worked with a exible structure and saw itself

as a participant in a continuous discursive process, one that we thought

had been prevented in the region by the imperative methods of global

cultural expediency geared to satisfy the fast consumption of new artistic

products from emerging countries, and the economics of mainstream

discourse in contemporary art.

Our project was an experimental platform unfolding over the course of

Opening event at Borderline/

Moving Images 2007, Michal

Kosakowski and Paolo

Marzocchi, Just Like the

Movies, video and live piano

performance, 30 mins., 2006,

Soho Shangdu building

complex, Beijing.


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six days and nine days, in 2006 and 2007, respectively, and that took as its

area of investigation the interconnections between visual production and

urban culture with a focus on video art and its multidisciplinary accounts.

It featured an international program of both exhibitions and public

programs such as talks, workshops, screenings, and live performances

bridging perspectives from installation, short lm, documentary,

animation, performance and music, sound art, and architecture and design.

The overall project was divided into three sections. The rst consisted

of two main exhibitions; a second section was constituted by a six-day

program articulated in what we dubbed the Mobile Lab, whose design we

commissioned to architect Neville Mars from the Beijing based Dynamic

City Foundation; and the third was a set of evening events that explored the

interdisciplinary interfaces of new media, performance, dance, and music

that is, the interactive grounds of visual art and digital culture.9

Like Infnities, Borderline usedthe city as a stage, and it quite

literally explored by means of

its projects the expression by

Saskia Sassen the global city is a

border zone, one of new urban

spatialities and temporalities

within whose interplay of their

difference, strategic openings have

emerged.10 In the 2007 edition,

the festival moved each day to a

new location, starting from the

newly opened complex of Soho

Shangdu in the growing Central

Business District area to Platform

China in Caochangdi (both were

exhibitions) and 798, to later move every two days to the Film Academy,

the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and nally the park by the drive-in

cinema near Liangmaqiao Road, one of the most active venues in the

music and sound art scene of the time.

Borderline/Moving Images

2007, entrance of Platform

China Contemporary Art

Institute, Beijing, 2007.

Borderline/Moving Images2007, view of Soho Shangdu

building complex, Beijing.


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The opening events live performances took place amid the hollow

blocks of the newly built Soho Shangdu, while in its underground

parking lot one of the two main shows was staged. SeductionA

Theory-Fiction between the Real and the Possible,which I curated,

was inspired by the homonymous book by French philosopher Jean

Baudrillard11 and featured diverse installation-based video works

by seventeen international artists displaying documentary and

experimental video, with footage appropriated from personal andpublic archival material, CCTVs, mass media, pop culture video-clips,

cinema repertory, and so on. The various installations were articulated

in a design by my studio partner Li Naihan, who grouped them

into three separate parking spaces, so cars were still allowed to drive

through. As an opening statement to the rest of the festival, the show

tackled the perpetual nature of the predominantly visual production in

contemporary culture on the backdrop of the structural transformation

of urban scale and the proliferation of information technologies in a

modernizing China. In my introduction to the show I stated:

Top: SeductionA Theory-

Fiction between the Real and

the Possible, exhibition view,

Soho Shangdu underground

parking, Beijing. Left: Claire

Fontaine, A Fire Is a Fire Is Not

a Fire, 2006, video, no sound,

2 mins., 16 secs, letters. Photo:

Xiao Weilun. Courtesy of BAO

Atelier, Beijing.

Bottom left: Seduction

A Theory-Fiction between

the Real and the Possible,

exhibition view, Soho Shangdu

underground parking, Beijing.

Gao Shiqiang, Great Bridge,

2007, video, 26 mins., 46 secs.

Photo: Xiao Weilun. Courtesy

of BAO Atelier, Beijing.

Bottom right: Seduction

A Theory-Fiction between

the Real and the Possible,

exhibition view, Soho Shangdu

underground parking, Beijing.

Photo: Xiao Weilun. Courtesy

of BAO Atelier, Beijing.


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Indeed the synthesis of global connectivity is not only

challenging our sense of space, but also that of human

presence within; while displacing the time of history in a one-

dimensional media ow, it further brings into question that of

its immanent possibilities and invisible modes of existence.12

Conversely, Seduction sought to shorten the distance between the

compounded narratives embedded in the various works and the living

landscape they inhabitedthe Beijing urban theatre, a spectacle that

never stops reworking and rethinking itself in a universe of bustling

neighbourhoods. Furthermore, the exhibition design heightened the

desired experience of destabilizing the viewers and the works own

relationship with conscious perception and illusionary simulation. The

different installations were arranged in an abstract city scene built withwooden panels and drawn as an imaginary strip moving along three main

momentsthe ruin, the park, and the suburbsmerged together

in a single continuum. The experience offered to the viewer was one of

reconsidering the way the works exposed themselves to each other (as

belonging to diverse critical/cultural/information systems and subjective

spheres) while retaining the minimum distance necessary for the latent

meaning of each image to remain while becoming a point of collective

meeting and counter-representation.

What a curator realizes at the site of an exhibition through the selection

and positioning of works is a paradoxical creative equation that never

results in the sum of its parts. As forms of physical encounters with art,

unlike those mediated by discursive or archival dispositives, exhibitions

are conict-ridden environments where the perceptual dimension of the

works shares space with various, immaterial orders of interpretation. All

forms of exhibition are spatial strategies of containment that struggle

with the task of accommodating simultaneously the cognitive linearity of

a master narrative and the unpredictable patterns of intuitive association

experienced by their viewers. At its best, the exhibition represents a visual

and discursive identication with a particular moment of a living

aesthetic, a moment in culture that, as Irit Rogoff denes it, produces itself

in the convergence of different modes of creative enunciation traversing its

site, which comprises curators, artists, and audiences alike.

Debates about the position of the curator of contemporary art and

the nature of his or her practice reach back to the 1960s and continueto abound today on the theoretical and educational platforms that are

generally imbricated in a Western discourse. In his essay The Curatorial

Turn: From Practice to Discourse, Paul ONeil offers a panoramic view

of the evolving gure of the curator, the progressive establishment of

curatorial practice as a potential space for critique,13 and the rise of the

exhibition as a privileged mode for the communication and circulation

of both art and art professionals. Performed via the persona of the

austellungmacher, jet-set aneur, mediator, agent, artist, or author, curatorial

activity is today mostly understood as performing a connective function,


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operating among the spaces of art and the power relations that administer

themfrom patrons, collectors, artists, galleries, and various institutions

to the media, funding bodies, universities, and administrative ofces. The

so-called global curator wallows between the role of a hyper-connected

service provider and that of the independent intellectual, designing his or

her place on an uneven, cumulative geography of short-lived temporal

productions (like exhibitions) and public appearances to navigate the

hierarchical institutional superstructure of art at the level of discourse.14

The downside of this nomadic condition has made itself incrementally

manifest in the past decade with the emergence of Asian economic powers

like China, India, and the Middle East, which, eager to partake in the

circulatory system of art capitalism, have short-circuited the effects of

what ONeil labels the new reputational economies.15

The wealth ofnancial investments available to local administrations boosting large-

scale urban developments, and city marketing targeting global cultural

tourism, has created a specic market of which both prestigious museums

franchise and international curators circulation are an expression.

Furthermore the structure of the perennial exhibition has proven

particularly effective for the task of exposing the local while taking in the

global, often a process mediated by the presence generally of a Western

master curator and a subgroup of minion curators who are plugged

into the local context, as John Clark aptly describes them. Clark argues

that the participation of contemporary Asian art at biennials inside and

outside Asia has thrown into relief the crucial role of curator mediators16

that operate at a transnational level.

The embracing of the Asian perspective has certainly favoured the

widening of artistic horizons displayed on the stage of large-scale

international events and markets and proved benecial for the opening up

of both discursive and productive channels of communication. But it has

also removed vital energy from the local contexts, diverting the attention

of artists and curators, as well as that of institutions, from their immediate

environments and turning them towards the courting of the interests of

their overseas counterparts.

I do not believe there to be a one-model job description for the

contemporary curator, especially when the very connes of its time-and-

space realm of action and investigationthat is, the contemporary

remain as open-ended and diachronic as they are today. If thecontemporary question, as art historian Terry Smith would call it, is

posed with an interest in knowing how big-picture concepts tie to the

particularities of existence,17 then increasingly today, in the aftermath of

the modern and postmodern projects, the curators challenge, like that of

others inhabiting the archipelago of culture, remains that of continuing to

roam through the unattended, the punctual, and the subversive that

are located in the folds of everyday life, in the spaces where it is built and

assimilated as a collective pursuit.


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Can we curators make ourselves observers and insiders at the same time?

And what would be the place for such an endeavour? To whom would

we be talking? It is this ambivalent positioning that I have often found

myself pondering while living and working in Chinaa privileged

as much as endangered location, where culture loses xed grounds,

constantly retold and rewritten, and refracting the hopes and visions

of others who enter into it.

In 2009 I organized an exhibition in Milan, my hometown, which asked

those questions and tried to make itself available to this unspoken, open-

ended eld of contamination. The project, which has been reviewed in

the pages of this publication, was called EmporiumA New Common

Sense of Space; it included twenty-seven artists from China, Japan, and

Korea and featured mostly installation-based works spanning a range

of practices by artists who have backgrounds in visual and sound art,

architecture, and design.18Emporium attempted to communicate the

extent to which selected practices from these three countries all connected

through a not yet discursively constructed space. It was intended to

encourage the experience of latent relationships between space, work,

and objects as they collectively recall visual and aesthetic conventions

that retreat from the grand narratives of transnational critique, to rather

migrate into the expedient contingency of the quotidian and its material

expressions, by instituting a new logic of co-existence with its differential

and perpetual character.19 Emporium is part of a series of projects I am

currently working on under the thematic umbrella of what I have dubbed

States of Distraction. This is continuous with my research and interest

EmporiumA New Common

Sense of Space, exhibition

view, 2009, Museo della

Scienza e della Tecnologia

Leonardo da Vinci, Milano.

Courtesy of BAO Atelier,

Beijing.


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in the implication of spatiality (or the production of space, in Henri

Lefebvres terms) in processes of artistic production and representation

that inform historically and conceptually specic cultural perceptions

of the contemporary. The title Emporiumis appropriated in anecdotal

fashion from a text by Walter Benjamin and references the forms of spatial

consumption that the hyper-designed urban environments of the moderncity have made us accustomed to, with a comparative association to Asian

cities. Emporium was literally designed as a dense oating cloud of plinths,

walls, and hanging screens uponwhich video projectionslooped, so as to

leave the viewers to determine the whereabouts of the works belonging.

In this tightly arranged continuum, the works were left aloof, free to walk

on the margins of the conceptual perimeter of the exhibition space, so

that their tentative, incomplete qualitycharacterized by the mundane

and functional quality of their stylistic languages and materialswould

accommodate the audience to enter an ambiguous, non-deterministic

territory. Particularly, this apparently incoherent amalgamation of works

and practices aimed at communicating how new generations of artists

operating across the east Asian region are formulating new ways to deal with

the actual space of art and social action by assuming a position of open,

dynamic marginality, a subjective sphere accommodated in an unstable,

non-representational space that is enforced by a rhetoric of the unexpressed.

The essentially individualistic and self-contained nature of these types of

works speaks to a newfound impulse towards the search for protection


Sense of Space, exhibitionview, 2009, Museo della



Left: Ni Haifeng/Arrow Factory

Beijing, Vive la Difference,

mixed media installation,

2008. Right: Taiyo Kimura, Big

MistakeHeadturner, 2007,

vacuum cleaner, timer, work

cloth kit. Courtesy of BAO

Atelier, Beijing.


Sense of Space exhibition

view, 2009, Museo della



Foreground: Kim Gisoo,

Primitive Arms, 2006, plaster

objects and prints, dimensions

variable. Background: Kim

Gisoo, Recording, 2006, singlechannel video, 4 mins., 20

secs. Courtesy of BAO Atelier,

Beijing.


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against the totalizing, overwhelming force of master discourses and

spectacular designs in present day culture. Writing in the pages ofHarvard

DesignMagazine, Michael Meredith states:

Utopia isnt nowhere, where it used to be. In its microform,

it is temporary and localized. Younger artists, architects, and

designers arent rewiring all of society through design. They are

rewiring only bits. Everyone is ne with operating in smaller

niches, networked enclaves, and ever more remote campsites.

The specic is the new generic.20

It is no coincidence that we are witnessing a critical resurgence of

collaborative models in artistic and curatorial practices, as well as a

revamping of critiques of socially engaged or community-orientedprojects, which Tom Holert argues is emerging as an alternative response

to the contemporary governmentality that wants the individual to be

both the singular performer of a spectacular self and the obedient and

functioning team player.21

I am not prone to envisioning all collaborative ventures in the arts or

culture as being predicated on critical resistance; I see them more as non-

antagonistic, contradictory actions that inject moments of a not-totally-

planned deviation from the status quo. To a certain extent, exhibitions can

present themselves similarly as positive pronouncements and should not

aim at becoming totalizing deeds. Regardless of their scale, the risk they

might encounter in doing so is that of reinforcing the rules of visibility

that aim at containing them rather than proposing alternative ones.

Having worked as a curator in alternative art spacesrst with CAAW

in Beijing and later an independent one in my own studioIve often

struggled with the task of nding a place for such endeavours that could

respond to the dominant trend of the big and the new by resorting to

modest strategies of intervention that engage me and the artists in a sort of

game of association. On a couple of occasions, one in Shanghai in 2009,

and then another in Beijing just recently, between November 2010 and

January 2011, Ive attempted to test out the very model of the exhibition and

the practice of exhibition making, taking them as subjects of the projects.

In the rst case, the exhibition The Shape of Things to Come included

four artists based in Beijing and took place at 140sqm Gallerylocated inan apartment of an early-twentieth-century building in Shanghais French

Concession, which retains the architectural characteristics of its past. The

exhibition was conceived in reminiscence of a Wunderkammer, or cabinets

of curiosity, to engage the task of exposing the status of artistic objects

to scientic self-inspection in a time other than the present. Cabinets of

curiosity are often regarded as ancestral prototypes of the modern museum

in that they contain an objectied reservoir of history as seen through

the eyes and experiences of their owners. Inspired by the cabinets spatial

characteristics, wherein paraphernalia and a variety of cultural artifacts

are arranged in a personied associative map of symbols and places of


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32 Vol.10 No.3

confused and overlapping timelines, the exhibition asks itself: What if we

were able to test-drive the deagration of our contemporary aesthetic

universe? What parcels of history, relics of the contemporary, would be

left as a visual repository of our present times, and in what new semiotic

order would they re-awaken so that by way of an exhilarating expansion,

stretched between experience and premonition, they would frame the

possibility of a hopeful artistic prophecy beyond its predictable end?

The show presented a series of interlocking installations and textual

interventions that was extended even to the design of the invitation by

one of the artists. The exhibition played out the idea of art as a subgenre

of science ction, as its title was taken from the eponymous novel by H. G.

Wells. Their inherent similarities, that is, the obsessive drive to jumpstart

history and break into the visual repository of a possible future, were

suggested by means of the works seamless overlapping and aesthetic

interconnectedness which were put into dialogue with the spatial quality of

the gallery itself, as if the works were found from an unknown future past.

In the second case, I collaborated with Platform China, in Beijing, to

realize a tripartite exhibition called The Third Party,22 the second in the

States of Distraction series that was hosted in their project space.The three

consecutive parts, each of which presented itself as a possible iteration of an

imaginary innite show, were installed in the same space over the course ofthree months. The Third Party in this sense signied that supplementary,

The Shape of Things to Come,

exhibition view, 140sqm

Gallery, 2009. Foreground:

Liang Shuo, I am fucking

beautiful no. 4, 2009, mixed

media installation. Courtesy

of the artist and C5 Gallery,

Beijing. Background: Elaine W.

Ho, The Cover of the Society

of the Spectacle, site-specic

installation, colour lm on

window, 2009. Courtesy of

the artist and 140sqm Gallery,

Shanghai.


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Vol.10 No.3 33

iterative element that is constituted in all dialogical processes, betweena party A and a party B, between the works, the artists, concepts, and

exhibitions themselves. Each with its own title and subject matter, the

three moments of this show explored overall the shaping of relationships

between narrative and aesthetic objects to foreground an inquiry in the

realm of the ordinary specic to the Chinese context. They did so by

mobilizing overarching frames of reference and critique currently at play

through three analytical environments tackling, respectively, issues of self-

historicization, witnessing/archiving, and collaboration.

For each iteration of the project, the works were accommodated in a display

system called The Beehive, which I realized in collaboration with my partner

Li Naihan. Built in units of hexagonal cardboard boxes, this modular

structure was meant to become continuous with the exible discursive

framework of the exhibition which was intended as a eld report, one that

escapes the structural preordering of objectifying analysis to disclose all

possible conceptual and thematic associations embedded in it.

Curatorial activity might be seen as a spatio-temporal narration housing

a very specic and subjective perception that should contribute with

generosity and passion to whatever the contemporary offers itself to

besimultaneously an individual and a collective creation. In face of the

current debates surrounding the demise of the traditional institutions of

art, especially museums, as envisioned by the modern project, the role

of curatorsof individuals and not institutionsseems to be rightfully

gaining momentum. There might not be an ultimate place or nal

destination for the curator to be, no ideal or nite abode to accommodate

Left: Qiu Xiaofei, Golden Age,

2009, site-specic installation,

door, double-sided mirror,

sound. Courtesy of the artist

and 140sqm Gallery, Shanghai.

Right: Sun Xun, Ceausescus,

2009, ink on canvas. Courtesy

of the artist and 140sqm

Gallery, Shanghai.

Left: The Third PartyAn

Exhibition in Three Acts (Act1: How to Be Alone), 2010,

exhibition view of video room,

Platform China. Courtesy of

Platform China, Beijing.

Right: The Third PartyAn

Exhibition in Three Acts (Act

1: How to Be Alone), 2010,

entrance view with exhibition

title and credits, Platform

China. Li Naihan, The Beehive,

2010, hexagonal cardboard

boxes. Courtesy of the artist

and Platform China, Beijing.


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34 Vol.10 No.3

The Third PartyAn Exhibition

in Three Acts (Act 1: How to

Be Alone), 2010, exhibition

view, Platform China. Left:

Wang Wei, Samples, 2010,

site-specic installation,

ceramic tiles, black paint, 2010.

Foreground: Jin Shi, TuMu No.

1 and TuMu No. 3, 2009, old

table and stool, constructionmaterials. Background: Jin

Shi, Half Life, 2010, installation

drawings. Archway: Li Naihan,

The Beehive, hexagonal

cardboard boxes. Courtesy of

the artists and Platform China,

Beijing.

Left: The Third PartyAn

Exhibition in Three Acts (Act 2:

The Stranger), 2010, Platform

China project space, Beijing.

Chen Shaoxiong and Liu

Ding, This Is Painting, 2010,

installation detail, black, grey,and white acrylic and paint

on wood, video loop, text.

Courtesy of the artist and


Right: The Third PartyAn

Exhibition in Three Acts (Act 2:

The Stranger), 2010, Platform

China. Rania Ho, Fountain

No. 4, 2010, installation,

plastic buckets, colour lights.

Courtesy of the artist and


Opposite page middle: The

Third PartyAn Exhibitionin Three Acts (Act 2: The

Stranger), 2010, Platform

China. Yan Lei, Whomever

you dont know is art, 2010,

installation, photographic print

and text on wall. Courtesy of

the artist and Platform China,

Beijing.

Opposite page bottom: The

Third PartyAn Exhibition in

Three Acts (Act 3: The Third

PartyA Group Celebration!),

2011, exhibition view, Platform

China. Courtesy of Platform

China, Beijing.


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Vol.10 No.3 35

The Third PartyAn Exhibition

in Three Acts (Act 3: The Third

PartyA Group Celebration!),

2011, Platform China project

space, Beijing. Left: Diaodui

collective, Untitled, 2011, ink

on rice paper and cardboard

box. Right: Donkey Institute

of Contemporary Art,

documentation, T-shirt, 2011.Courtesy of the artists and


his or her wanderings if these

wanderings are to remain faithful

to the perpetual movement of a

living culture and therefore allow

all forms of cultural institutions to

become recipients of new modes of

human encounter.

Notes

1 Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and The Visual Arts(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press,2007), 213.

2

John D. Barrow, Where Things Happen That Dont: Staging the Innite, paper onInnities, last accessed at http://thalesandfriends.org/en/papers/pdf/barrow_paper.pdf?phpMyAdmin=rcOunTMVHvdSvjLzdNr45lZ-X09, 1.

3 Ibid.

4 Bruno, Public Intimacy, 212.

5 The politics of place and, together with it, the abundance of spatial metaphors used toaccommodate its transdisciplinary extensions, have come to dominate theoretical discourse asa mode to approach the intricate nature of new economic and social relations in the wake ofpostmodernism and its global expanse. The exibility and complexity of the new congurationsof politics, power, and ideology have therefore informed a whole new range of conceptions ofspace and place as no longer absolute, passive, and undialectical, but porous, dishomogeneous,and approximate. See, among others, Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, eds., Thinking Space(London:Routledge, 2000), and Michael Keith and Steve Pile, eds., Place and the Politics of Identity(London:Routledge, 1993).

6 The development of the so-called cultural or creative industry in twenty-rst-century China and itsimplication in the larger spatiopolitical program of the state would deserve a longer digression thanis possible here. It shall sufce to say that the concomitant projects of internationalization in theelds of architecture and design, to name only two, are remarkably disregarded by contemporaryart criticism, which fails to recognize the political and economic power of art, architecture, anddesign with growing common consumer audiences and their interconnectedness at the level of bothpractice and discourse.

7 Carlos Basualdo, The Unstable Institution, in Elena Filipovic, Marieke Van Hal, and Soveig Ovstebo,eds., The Biennale Reader: An Anthology of Perennial Exhibitions of Contemporary Art(Bergen: HatjeCantz, 2010), 131.

8 Borderline/Moving Images, Borderline Intro, http://www.borderlinefestival.org/new/Borderline%20Intro.htm.

9 For a full list of projects, contributing curators, and artists, see www.borderlinefestival.org.

10 Saskia Sassen, Cities as frontier zones: Making informal politics, 2007, http://www.16beavergroup.

org/mtarchive/archives/002282.php.11 Jean Baudrillard, Seduction(New York: Saint Martins Press, 1991).

12 My introduction to the show was published in the free festival journal and is accessible at http://www.borderlinefestival.org/new/SEDUCTION.htm.

13 Paul ONeil, The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse, in The Biennale Reader, 245.

14 Bejnamin Buchloh, quoted in ibid., 248.

15 In his lecture entitled Of Other Spaces, Foucault states that between utopias, unreal spaces, andheterotopiasreal sites such as cemeteries, prisons, museums, theaters, libraries, brothels, ships(changeable in their forms, but more or less cohesive in their respective functions)lies the mirror,a space of absence and presence, both utopic and heterotopic. Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces,trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, spring 1986, 116125.

16 John Clark, Biennales as Structures for the Writing of Art History: The Asian Perspective in TheBiennale Reader, 175.

17 Terry Smith, Introduction: The Contemporaneity Question, in Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor, andNancy Condee, eds., Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity(Duke University Press, 2008), 1.

18 Clara Galeazzi, Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, 9 no. 2 (March/April 2010), 96103.

19 Beatrice Leanza, Emporium: A New Common Sense of Space in Emporium: A New Common Senseof Space, 2009, 29.

20 Michael Meredith, Whatever Happened to Whatever Happened to Total Design? originallypublished in Harvard Design Magazineno. 29, republished in a supplement to Abitareno. 508(December 2010), 26.

21 Tom Holert Joint Ventures in Artforum, February 2011, accessible online at http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201102&id=27403&pagenum=2.

22 Complete texts and images of all three parts of the exhibition are available at the Platform ChinaContemporary Art Institute Web site, www.platformchina.org.

the curator mansion yishu may_june 2011

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