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
Hou Hanru
(Cover of the English edition.)
Hou Hanru is undoubtedly one of the most dynamic and innovative curators and critics on the contemporary art scene today. Known for such ground-breaking exhibitions as Cities on the Move (co-curated with Hans-Ulrich Obrist), Out of the Center, Parisien(ne)s and the Kwangju Biennial in Korea, his work addresses questions of globalization and identity, understanding contemporary art practice as it exists beyond geographical and regional boundaries. This dense, excellent collection of his writings and interviews is divided into four sections: “From China to the International,” ” From ‘Exile’ to the Global,” “Global Cities and Art,” and “Interviews, Dialogues, Conversations.”
Paperback: 281 pages
Publisher: Timezone 8 (August 2, 2003)
ISBN-10: 9628638823
ISBN-13: 978-9628638826
8.5 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
1.4 pounds
Hans Ulrich Obrist
(Cover of the English edition.)
If art takes place in a contemporary art museum (where we expect it), what does it mean? Art should not be about filling spaces, but about necessities and urgencies. Such are the principles conveyed by the visionary Hans Ulrich Obrist, seeking out ways to reinvent and invent museums of the 21st century. Newly edited by April Lamm, gathered together here are the seminal texts written by (what Douglas Gordon once aptly described) a dontstop curator. His exhibitions present, as Rem Koolhaas writes in his preface to these prefaces, a heroic effort to preserve the traces of intelligence of the last 50 years, to make sense of the seemingly disjointed, a hedge against the systematic forgetting that is hidden at the core of the information age and which may, in fact, be its secret agenda.
A compendium of texts written between 1990 and 2006, here are exhibition case studies Hotel Carlton Palace, Cities on the Move, Do It, Utopia Station involving some of the more thought-provoking artists, architects, and scientists of our time such as Paul Chan, Alexander Dorner, Olafur Eliasson, Cao Fei, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Douglas Gordon, Pierre Huyghe, Qingyung Ma, Philippe Parreno, Cedric Price, Luc Steels, Rirkrit Tiravanija, among others, from Zurich to Guangzhou and back again. Designed by M/M (Paris), the cover depicts an original Gerhard Richter over-painted picture of Obrist himself. A must-have for anyone interested in the unusual strategies of a curator-at-large.
Hardcover: 128 pages
Publisher: Sternberg (June 10, 2006)
ISBN-10: 1933128062
ISBN-13: 978-1933128061
9 x 6.9 x 0.8 inches
1 pounds
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