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.
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