4:00pm—6:00pm, Feb 28, 2009 | Beijing Angle Modern Art
As the second installment of Shao Foundation’s CROSSTALK Beijing conversation programme, a panel discussion titled ‘Reflection of Times: From Industrialisation to Urbanisation’ will be held in conjunction with the exhibition. From Xiao Wu to Still Life to 24 City, Jia has been constantly examining the changes of China’s reality with his movies, while gradually shifting focus from the small towns in the countryside to modern cities. Although dealing with heavy subjects such as urbanisation, factory reform and historical mutation, he nevertheless chose to portray the underdogs and to reproduce the process of the factory’s relocation in fragments. Together, they constitute urban people’s perspectives on and reflections of an industrial time. During the panel discussion, Jia himself, noted cultural critics and scholars specialised in the study of Jia’s films will be present to talk about the aforementioned topics.
The discussion will be conducted in Chinese with English translation.
Guests:
Jia Zhangke
An award-winning director, Jia Zhangke was born in Fenyang, Shanxi province of China. He graduated from the Literature Department of Beijing Film Academy and started his directing and screenwriting career in 1995. Jia has received many international awards over the years and is now one of the most active directors of Asia. In 2006, his feature film Still Life won the Golden Lion award on the 63rd Venice International Film Festival.
Zhai Yongming
A renowned poet, Zhai Yongming graduated from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in her hometown Chengdu. Her works have been translated into English, French, Dutch, Italian, and German and published in those countries respectively. She is the co-writer of 24 City’s screenplay.
Lin Xudong
Lin Xudong is a film historian and scholar graduated from the Printmaking Department of Central Academy of Fine Arts. He was in the jury of the 6th Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival in 1999 and Hong Kong International Film Festival in 2003. In 2004, Lin organised the China International Documentary Exhibition. He is the creative consultant for many of Jia Zhangke’s films, as well as the co-editor of the book Jia Zhangke’s Hometown Trilogy (Jia Zhangke dianying: guxiang sanbuqu).
Wang Hong
Film critic and journalist Wang Hong graduated from the Department of Chinese Language and Literature of Peking University and is currently the Deputy Editor of Oriental Morning Post (Dongfang Zaobao). He has been invited to many international film festivals as a film critic and started to produce his own documentaries independently in 2006. In 2007, he entered the competition section of Cinema Digital Seoul Film Festival with his debut Cat Mountain. As a journalist, Wang is one of the prominent advocators of Jia’s films.
Moderator:
Ou Ning
Director of Shao Foundation
Venue: Beijing Angle Modern Art (4/F, Tower 1, Zhongguo Hongjie, Jia 2 Gongti Dong Lu)
Inquiry: (86) (10) 6561 8327 info [at] shaofoundation.org.cn
Reflection of Times:
From Industrialisation to Urbanisation
4:00pm—6:00pm, Feb 28, 2009
Film director Jia Zhangke, poet / screenwriter Zhai Yongming and film critics participate in a discussion about Jia’s feature 24 City.
3:00pm—6:00pm, Dec 6, 2008
Beijing Angle Modern Art (4/F, Tower 1, Zhongguo Hongjie, Jia 2 Gongti Dong Lu)
Jay Brown, director and co-founder of Lijiang Studio. Photo: Zhou Qiao.
Shao Foundation is honoured to host ‘Lijiang Studio: Experiments in the New Countryside Laboratory’, a talk and discussion session by Jay Brown, co-founder and director of Lijiang Studio. It will be the first of our serial conversation programme CROSSTALK Beijing.
Brown has been working full-time for Lijiang Studio since Feburary, 2004. Located 20 km west of Lijiang, Yunnan, the Studio is a free-form collective of rotating artists, researchers, scientists, farmers, and others working with any medium or discipline. In 2005, Lijiang Studio started bringing artists to the farming community, expecting that the experience would change the people involved and interrogate how art is made. Based in a village, Lijiang Studio’s laboratory is the transition of rural China into the current phase of global neo-liberal capitalism. Being in the middle of Naxi, Pumi, Lisu, Yi, Bai, Han and Tibetan ethnicities on the edge of China allows the studio to see both mainstream and marginal Chinese culture at work. The studio has been aiming at subtle investigations of love, suicide, and mysticism; experimental architecture and student labor; social sculpture and biodynamic agriculture; and even utopian attempts to aestheticize eco-felicitous, bioremediating mushroom sculptures.
Brown studied Chinese language, the history of Chinese art, and contemporary art at Princeton University, where he co-founded with Steve Caputo an innovative architectural design competition called Prospects, and founded Paideia, a group that brings students and professors together for discussions over meals. He has worked for the National Palace Museum in Taipei, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco. Beginning in 2002, Brown worked for The Nature Conservancy’s China Program based in Kunming, the Yunnan provincial capital. He co-founded Lijiang Studio in 2004 with Chinese painter Mu Yuming, and is the president of the Lijiang Studio Foundation.
CROSSTALK Beijing is a new kind of conversation programme conceived and presented by Shao Foundation. We invite artists, scientists, thinkers, architects, designers, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, futurists and software developers to a lecture or conference setting, confronting them with the live feedback from the audience—local and remote—through the use of new web technology known as ‘Micro-blogging’. The event is free.
Lijiang Studio:
Experiments in the New Countryside Lab
Jay Brown, director of Lijiang Studio, talks about the artistic and agricultural experiments they carry out at the Lashihai area of Lijiang, Yunnan province, China.
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.