Co-curators: Wu Hung | Ou Ning
Opening Reception: 9pm, September 18, 2009
Exhibition Time: September 18 – October 29, 2009
(Closed during the National Day holiday.)
Opening Hours: 2pm–8pm, Monday–Friday
Address: Beijing Angle Modern Art, 4/F, Tower 1, Zhongguo Hongjie (China View), Jia 2 Gongti Dong Lu, Chaoyang District, Beijing

Art Archive and a Case Study of Liu Xiaodong

Ou Ning

In China, the collection and archiving of official files and documents has a long and distinguished history. Huge archive departments were built in every dynasty to document changes in history; they kept a great amount of fulfilled official writs, in order to classify and revise them for further historical compilations. The preservation of archives has consumed enormous human resources and materials and relies heavily on systems of administration. Read more

Tracing back over time, we find the oracle bone script in Shang Dynasty, the “Every-3-year Archive Evaluation and Cut” in Tang Dynasty, the Classification System of Song Dynasty, the Yellow Book (of census register and military service files) in Ming Dynasty, the Imperial Classified Catalogue in Qing Dynasty and now, the forests of central and local archives. Though it’s beyond the archivists’ reach to change the political-narrative nature of their service, they still have their professional role of “a transmitter and not a maker”, which guides them to “to hear much and put aside the points which stand in doubt”. The perseverance of these individuals provided many independent and effective documents and important resources for researchers today. However, such preservation work supported by an administrative system never benefited the realm of art. Though art galleries, spaces and museums are springing up in China today, very few devoted art collections, archiving and studying institutions are founded. This has much to do with the organization system of these art museums, galleries and collections, the instructive traditional view of art history, and excessive reliance on finished art works. To make matters worse, the commercial trend is pushing the currency value of art works to extremes. Every day, rapid changes in contemporary art generates a huge amount of original documents. With neither supportive administrative power nor capital power, it is desperately hard to collect, sort, archive and study all these files according to Fonds Principles, not to mention digitalizing all of them into databases for more people to share.

Founded in 2000 in Hong Kong, Asia Art Archive has made an important and valuable step forward in this field. Its collection of more than 20,000 projects has become the most comprehensive resource of contemporary Asian art (especially the collection of contemporary Chinese art). It has also made contributions to the preservation, study and promotion of contemporary Asian art by sharing its collection in library and online website with institutions and public all over the world. The achievement of Asia Art Archive is in communicating to the public that archiving is not only an awakening, but more importantly, a prompt action to take up the responsibility of history.

Contemporary historiography has long surpassed the old-fashioned linear narrative, heading in a multi and interdisciplinary direction. It is the same story in the research field of art history:”the most striking feature of the development in art history is that its subject of research, objective and perspectives are expanding rapidly, which led to the increasing influence of the discipline and active participation of common liberal arts and social sciences, as well as its own blurring features and acute identity crisis.” (Wu Hung, Ten Arguments on History of Fine Art, SDXJoint Publishing Company, 2008, p56) In this case, one of the most significant causes of the self disintegration of traditional art history must have been the accumulation and opening of massive, comprehensive documents and files. Once we lay aside our attachments for the independence of art history, various possibilities of artistic creation will be presented to us.

This is the exact reason that we planned the documenta, Traces: Liu Xiaodong. As one of the most successful artists in China, Liu’s works are classics in contemporary Chinese art history, and a miracle in the art market. In an exhibition of his finished works, as an audience or critic, people can only make “format analysis” and “image/pattern recognition”. No more information is available. But in this documenta, sketches, notes, snapshots, documentary films, conversations and publications are all available, presenting the traces of Liu’s inspirations. Here you will see the primary form of his works, transmitted through other media and a process and vast reality beyond his paintings. It provides more points of penetration and investigation for case studies: they can be sociological, political, or even from the perspective we never expected (that would be decided on its encounter with different knowledge structures). As curators of this exhibition, we are only hoping to work in the way documentalists do–”a transmitter and not a maker” and “to hear much and put aside the points which stand in doubt”.Chinese art). It has also made contributions to the preservation, study and promotion of contemporary Asian art by sharing its collection in library and online website with institutions and public all over the world. The achievement of Asia Art Archive is in communicating to the public that archiving is not only an awakening, but more importantly, a prompt action to take up the responsibility of history.

Contemporary historiography has long surpassed the old-fashioned linear narrative, heading in a multi and interdisciplinary direction. It is the same story in the research field of art history:”the most striking feature of the development in art history is that its subject of research, objective and perspectives are expanding rapidly, which led to the increasing influence of the discipline and active participation of common liberal arts and social sciences, as well as its own blurring features and acute identity crisis.” (Wu Hung, Ten Arguments on History of Fine Art, SDXJoint Publishing Company, 2008, p56) In this case, one of the most significant causes of the self disintegration of traditional art history must have been the accumulation and opening of massive, comprehensive documents and files. Once we lay aside our attachments for the independence of art history, various possibilities of artistic creation will be presented to us.

Exhibition guide

Download images of the exhibition opening

Presented by Shao Foundation
Co-presented by Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art
Festival:
August 15 – 16 (UCCA)
August 22 – 23 (BAMA)
August 29 – 30 (BAMA)

CROSSTALK: 5:00pm, August 30, 2009 (BAMA)
Inquiry: (86) (10) 6561 0361, info [at] shaofoundation.org.cn

Born in 1977, Ying Liang is a young director in China who has been living in a small town called Zigong in Sichuan province, where most of his films are produced by a crew consisting of his friends and relatives. Taking advantage of the global distribution system in the ‘Long Tail’ era, Ying has managed to secure a place in the international festival circus with his ultra-low budget productions. He is, however, not to be mistaken as one of the many faceless auteurs. He’s dedicated, resourceful, flexible and prolific, with a distinctive personal style. With all three of his feature films and several shorts screened for three rounds in three weekends, Sichuan Chronicles is the most comprehensive presentation of Ying’s works to this date.

(Some of these films are in Sichuan dialect, with Chinese and English subtitles.)

Opening hours: 2pm–8pm, Monday–Friday
Feb 23–Mar 12, 2009 | Beijing Angle Modern Art

24 City is the latest feature film by the Golden Lion-winning director Jia Zhangke. Set in a fifty-year old state-owned military weapon factory in Chengdu, China, it tells the stories of the relocation and demolition of the factory’s warehouses, workshops and industrial plants through the real and fictional narration of three women and five factory workers. Collectively, these stories of the sacrificed and destroyed present the memories, beliefs, youth and passion that were buried in time.

Curated by Shao Foundation, ‘Jia Zhangke: 24 City’ focuses on topics such as social transformation, political reform, and the rapid renewal of physical environments, attempting to present the subtle changes in the relationship between the collective and the individuals. Inspired by the film’s technique of integrating documentary and fictional elements, the design of the exhibition combines unused footage of workers’ interviews with ‘framed’ views of the construction sites outside of the gallery, streamed in real time. Special walls (a type of wall known as weishengqiang popular in the Chinese household in the 1980s, usually with the lower half painted in green), furniture, film props and the collage of still photographs of the interviewed workers and the demolished factories will be incorporated into a modern office environment. By juxtaposing the spaces of the film and the reality, ‘Jia Zhangke: 24 City’ offers you a glimpse of the individual’s fate in a distant and forgotten era.

Documentation

Oct 18–Nov 16, 2008 | Beijing Angle Modern Art

Animal Time’ is a huge installation composed of recycled bricks from Beijing’s demolished Hutongs and Divine Animals sculpted in stone that together give historical time a visual and solid form continuous and unbroken. In the BAMA space, the 12 animals of the zodiac dominates an assembly of 60 bricks, inscribed, one after the other, with the years dating from 1924 to 2643. At one glimpse, our eyes see 720 years.

Huang Rui manages to visually capture, physically capture I mean, the concepts that ordain our understanding of time. With this work, at the convergence of historical and cultural perceptions of the East and the West, Huang Rui touches upon the mysteries of our understanding of eternity. But he goes even further as he develops his own codes for the History of China: he succeeds in analysing memories as the historian would and in foreseeing the future as the prophet would.

It seems that with ‘Animal Time’, Huang Rui has made himself into a historian; he has had a taste at being an archaeologist. He distorts reality and tampers with the clues. His work of art cannot only be a simple replica of a coding system; it cannot either be History, it needs to go further than representation to move into the sphere that is art, which it does by portraying for us its animal side. Huang Rui succeeds in making History with art and History has allowed him to create.

— Bérénice Angremy, Curator

Huang Rui talks about Chinese History in Animal Time
Interviewed at BAMA, Oct 13, 2008.

download the video in .mov format. (64.6 MB)

Time: Oct 18–Nov 16, 2008
Venue: Beijing Angle Modern Art (4/F, Tower 1, Zhongguo Hongjie, Jia 2
Gongti Dong Lu, Chaoyang District, Beijing)
Inquiry: (86) (10) 6561 8327, info [at] shaofoundation.org.cn

Ou Ning, director of Shao Foundation.

BEIJING, January 10, 2009—After months of discussion and evaluation, the committee of Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism Architecture has selected Ou Ning as the chief curator for its third installment, due to be launched at the end of 2009 in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, the coastal city in the South China known as the forefront of China’s economic reform.

Presented by the Shenzhen Municipal Government and produced by the city’s Planning Bureau and Culture Bureau, the Biennale is currently the only urbanism architecture-themed international biennale in China. The first two installments—curated by Yung Ho Chang, head of MIT’s Department of Architecture in 2005, and Ma Qingyun, dean of the University of South California School of Architecture in 2007—have focused respectively on the theme of ‘City: Open Door!’ and ‘COER: City of Expiration and Regeneration’. The 2007 exhibition was also extended beyond Shenzhen and was presented innovatively as a ‘Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale’. More than 200 architects, designers, artists and scholars were invited during the two exhibitions, which have established the Biennale as an once-every-two-year feast for the international scene of urbanism and architecture.

Taking ‘City Mobilisation’ as the curatorial point of departure, Ou is aiming at an exhibition that’s more accessible and engaging, while retaining the cutting-edge nature of its predecessors. The primary aim is to investigate the mode of operation and the organisation of social life in the context of contemporary urbanity. Large-scale symposia, conversation programmes and workshops promise to offer active platforms for stimulative thinking and discourse generating. An international team consisting of five curators from Europe, America and Asia will be working together with Ou to ensure the geographical diversity of the exhibition line-up. All exhibitions will be taking place in unconventional venues—which include important landmarks from different period of the two cities, for which multiple site-specific projects will be commissioned and carried out. The Biennale will also involve several retrospectives of individual architects, so as to complement the group-exhibition practice familiar to the international biennale circus and to offer in-depth case studies. Finally, as an attempt to stretch the concept of architecture exhibition beyond diagrams and mock-ups, a special ‘Architecture Tour’ programme will be prepared for the audience—who will be invited to register on the Biennale’s website for various architecture-oriented tours designed by travel agencies specifically for the exhibition—so that they can go to different Chinese cities to experience selected architecture projects by local and international architects.

Ou Ning’s cultural practices encompass multiple disciplines. As a curator, Ou Ning initiated the Get It Louder exhibition which tours in the major cities of China every two years and has become an important platform for young and innovative artists and designers from around the world. He’s also the commissioned curator of the sound art section in China Power Station, an exhibition presented by the Serpentine Gallery at London’s legendary Battersea Power Station and then travelled to Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo and MUDAM, Luxembourg. As an artist, Ou is known for his involvement in urban research and his archive and documentary projects such as San Yuan Li (participant of the 50th Biennale di Venezia in 2003) and Da Zha Lan, sponsored by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes. He is a frequent contributor of various magazines, books and exhibition catalogues and has lectured around the world. In the late 1990s, he founded U-thèque, an independent film and video society. Later, he launched Alternative Archive, his personal studio as well as a platform for alternative cultural activities. He’s currently based in Beijing, China and is the Director of Shao Foundation, a non-profit organisation focused on cultural production and social engineering.

For more information, please visit szhkbiennale.org