Ahistoric

The Wild Hunt.

2010-04-14T22:20:00.001-04:00

Tallest Man on Earth plays new songs.

The new Tallest Man on Earth record, The Wild Hunt, reminds me of someone looking out the window onto a vista of a shit ton of forest trees. Safe in the high perch of some cabin and closed in by glass but brushed by a breeze from the cracked-open door, our viewer gazes at the woods and dreams about being there. It’s not that he doesn’t travel in the woods, or go out there and make a fire every so often; it’s just that it’s nice to have this separation- sometimes the woods are out there, and he’s inside, safe.

Our viewer picks up his guitar or sometimes sits at his rough wooden table gazing into the distance and drinking black coffee out of a chipped ceramic mug and he gets to thinking that though today the air is relatively crisp and cool, he’ll go out without a jacket and sit in the grass. Yeah it’s nature idyllic, but that’s what the Tallest Man is all about. It’s about having the balls to be rustic. Manhattan-strolling Dylan this is not. There’s more razor-edged wind and insistent guitar strumming.

The Tallest Man on Earth is Kristian Matsson. He’s from Sweden and he says he’ll be leaving in the fall. Don’t worry though, he’ll be here all summer.

What I've been up to

2010-03-08T21:01:00.005-05:00

Keeping up.
So just so it's up on here rather than in my tiny bio, I wanted to put up a post about what I've been up to. I've been writing (and actually publishing) a lot more recently, so this post will be describing that quickly and then next post I will excerpt a review or two that I've done.

I've written a total of four pieces now for Hyperallergic, an online art blogazine started by New York City art writer, critic and awesome guy Hrag Vartanian. The blog features a wide variety of posts, ranging from new media columnists to professors of impressionism to contemporary art world news; I've covered Boston and Beijing and hope to keep moving on to some artist and gallerist profiles.

I have also started writing for LEAP art magazine, a new bilingual (Chinese and English) art magazine in Beijing that covers China's contemporary art world as well as international exhibitions and artists. Editor Phil Tinari, an American writer, curator and art-worlder at large in Beijing, has developed the magazine with a combination of academic articles, critical reviews, exploratory media pieces, fashion shoots and short blip write-ups. So far, I've contributed a blurb about Chinese photographer Madi Ju's first photobook, Qingchun, and a larger review of Yunfei Ji's recent James Cohan Gallery New York show, Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts.

I'm now interning at GlobalPost, a relatively recently founded international news agency based in Boston. Our group of interns develops, edits and creates content for the site's Study Abroad vertical, a section that gathers work from student reporters. I had a hand in our popular cats in costumes story and have a few other articles in development.

Just in case you were wondering. Now back to (ir)regular programming.

Twin Sister

2010-03-08T14:29:00.004-05:00

New Bands/New Music

I just wanted to write everyone and say that Twin Sister is far and away my favorite new band of the past year. Sure, plenty of oldie-but-goodies have put out some excellent stuff, but Twin Sister is something new, something different, something that ties together electro and funk and indie pop and woodsy day dreams.

Their 2008 EP is available for free on their website, a homegrown jumble of hipster photos, song outtakes, even a collection of cell phone ringtones which are unabashedly catchy. The EP itself is four songs long and the band doesn't take a breath transitioning from one to the next, the best 15 minutes straight of music you'll hear in a while. Opener Dry Hump is quiet but builds insistently. The way Andrea Estella sings, if you're all alone, you can bring ov-er your bones, it's like a fluttering leaf attached only tangentially to a tree branch, ready to shake off and drift out into open air. The production is spare, beautiful, quiet.

Ginger (love the song names, right?) is a punch compared to the waves of the first tune. It starts out with a grainy, fuzzed out hit of drums guitar and synth and doesn't let up on a galloping rhythm all while skirting lyrics of ginger kids wrapped in Estella's mewling. It's flighty but heady music. Following is Nectarine, a picked acoustic guitar ringing over burbling tape noise that somehow manages to actually call to mind the light orange pink and yellow of a tangerine, the color of morning light bouncing off faded blossoms. Somehow.

And the closer, the effervescent, get down knock out groovy slow burn fretless bass lovefest, I Want a House. There's Estella's plaintive I want a house/built of old wood echoing out over a jangling backing, the drums kick in, the beat picks up, your feet start tapping, you could paint it any color/just so long as I could live with you, and all of a sudden you're dunked bodily into the chillest laid back indie jam since indie was invented. Estella's voice leaves over one last live with you and the instrumental takes over wholly, getting deeper and deeper into the music as one singly piano synth jab keeps time. Far and away one of the best songs I've heard since the EP came out in 2008, even though I only picked it up as the band's star has risen in the past year.

They're opening for Xiu Xiu and Tune-Yards (no alternating caps) on April 10 at the Paradise in Boston. Who want to come?

Food/Face.

2009-12-22T20:26:00.003-05:00

Art Free Associating.

They are remarkably similar.

1. "La Grenouille's pike quenelles Lyonnaise." NYT link
2. Magritte, The Rape, 1945

Glass.

2009-09-23T21:41:00.004-04:00

Glass.

Gagosian in Athens.

2009-08-26T11:04:00.005-04:00

Gagosian in Athens.

Work from "Three notes from Salalah" by Cy Twombly, inaugural exhibition, Gagosian Rome

Via Art in America (http://tinyurl.com/my5p7f) Gagosian is planning on opening up a new gallery in Athens, Greece. An exhibition entitled "Leaving Paphos Ringed with Waves" by Cy Twombly will open on September 25.

Does anyone remember this happening in Rome? A space at Via Francesco Crispi 16 opened an exhibition of Cy Twombly's works, entitled "Three Notes from Salalah," on December 15, 2007. The building, a neoclassical structure made up of the ground and mezzanine levels of a former bank, built in 1921, is an imposing mix of grand vertical columns and impressive facade with bare, white cube galleries on the interior. The atmosphere seems fitting for the emperor of contemporary art.

But where's Gogo going with this? Is he not satisfied to be king of New York and London? Does he crave some classical propaganda, long the crutch of despots? After all, endless monarchs and rulers have copied classical architecture to give themselves some street cred with the peasants. "Look at us!" the buildings say, "we reach back to the Roman empire! Check the dome! Don't we look powerful!?"

Charlemagne did it at Aachen:

So what is Larry up to, conquering the ancient world city by city with new outposts of his contemporary art empire? I can't find the source, but I remember reading around the time of the Rome gallery opening an article that proposed Gogo had opened the space simply to secure the legacy of Cy Twombly, to placate the artist and make sure Twombly knew Gogo was committed. I wouldn't be terribly surprised. Twombly is an artist eminently familiar with the classical, with antiquity, and with his own place in the scope of art history. He has taken inspiration and quotes from Greek and Roman poets and the epics of wars and warriors of the time. See Gogo's description of the Athens show for a soundbite:

"The group of four canvases that comprises the Athens exhibition is inspired by a quote from the 7th century B.C. choral lyric poet Alkman."

Twombly certainly deserves to be shown in context with antiquity, and Rome would be the perfect place to do it. The atmosphere seems poetically perfect for Twombly's re-energized visions of legend. On the other hand, the Rome gallery has already played host to a few other important shows and events, including a Lawrence Weiner exhibition and a much-publicized GREED, A New Fragrance by Francesco Vezzoli. Rome's a rising star in the contemporary art world and Italian contemporary artists are long overdue to rise again from their 70s arte povera hangover.

But Athens!? And another Twombly show!?

I dunno, it seems like it might be a fetish, a power play, inaugurating classical spaces with the contemporary master of the ancient world. Maybe Gogo is a kind of performance artist, excorcising the ancient demons, fighting the aura of myth and the contemporary ennui of these places, using Twombly as a charm as Twombly digests the ghosts and puts them into paintings.

Leaving Paphos Ringed with Waves (III), 2009

So on the jumping off point of Larry Gagosian as performance artist conquering his way through antiquity with his artist-warriors: how does art conquer space? How does the inherent aura of a space with thousands of years of history get confronted by the contemporary art within the Rome/Athens galleries? What happens? In my mind Gagosian is appropriating these spaces into the greater historical narrative of his own contemporary art power. Cy Twombly is appropriating antiquity, ancient emotion, into his own paintings. The combination seems pretty striking.

What I love about art so much is that it presents this continuous narrative, an ongoing rush of ideas and aesthetics and work and life. The meta-works by Gogo and Twombly, the reliquary galleries, containers of ancient space that hold new works referencing antiquity, are perfect. They encounter the past and digest it, they encounter the contemporary art world and conquer it. Most of all, it's just badass. Gagosian as spatial architect, gesamptkunstwerk maker.

I'm looking forward to standing in one of these spaces and seeing if I can feel anything struggling in the air around me.

Wayne Thiebaud's San Francisco.

2009-08-22T02:31:00.006-04:00

Wayne Thiebaud's San Francisco.

This is how San Francisco looks to me. Like a vertical cross section that sticks straight up into the air, a slice of a hill. The light, too. When it's sunny out, the buildings cast blue shadows on the streets around 5:30.

Walking down California Street, sometimes I felt like I was going to fall off to one side. I'd walk straight past a cross street and suddenly look to the left to see nothing but empty air stretching all the way to the ocean and the city splaying out before it in a patchwork grid of pastel buildings. There are the stucco facades of apartments painted light blue, the faux-Roman flat rowhouses with shuttered windows.

Everything thing is angled straight up and perched on the hills like a row of birds bobbing on a telephone wire. So when I'm riding in the car like a roller coaster and trying not to fly off the pavement, my eyes are still out there in the empty air, looking down, picturing the city like a Wayne Thiebaud painting: everything mushed against the flat sky, pushed up like a body against a wall, slammed by the sunlight. Everything rolls down San Francisco like the city got tilted on its side. The cars go fastest cause they've got wheels.

All paintings are by Wayne Thiebaud, variously titled: Down 18th Street, Apartment, and Highway Curve by Google Image search. Happy looking.

Daily Audio Blog 3.

2009-08-09T22:16:00.006-04:00

Daily Audio Blog 3/Sound Diary.

Daily Audio Blog 2.

2009-08-08T23:13:00.005-04:00

Daily Audio Blog 2.

Daily Audio Blog.

2009-08-07T19:01:00.006-04:00

Daily Audio Blog.

A new feature!
My posting throughout the life of this blog has been carefully considered and written essays, but that really doesn't get updated often. So! I want to start this new feature, called Daily Audio Blog. (or at least until I come up with a better name for it.) Every day, or as often as I can, I'll post a 30 second audio clip of some place I've passed through during those 24 hours. Outside, inside, kitchen, party, whatever. I'll also post a photo from the place I took the sound. So it's an audio-visual portrait, hopefully one that's vague enough to dredge up some free association without a specific narrative.

The first picture can be seen above, from the porch off of my current apartment in Somerville, MA.

Without further ado, 30 seconds of today:

Street Rothkos.

2009-08-06T13:52:00.008-04:00

Street Rothkos.
Via Hrag Vartanian: http://bit.ly/3HhbwB

These photos are accumulations of paint, either from construction or buffing (covering over) graffiti, that have taken on the delicacy and color layering of Rothko paintings. They also bring to mind a handful of other abstract expressionists and action painters, Clifford Still, Cy Twombly at times.

The colors are obviously beautiful on these, the light of the street combined with the flat colors of paint mix to something transcendent. The shapes of the paint strokes too have this kind of vernacular poetry that might not have been intentional, but comes out with a kind of energy and directness that's rare even in the work of talented artists.

Here's my own contribution, from Beijing:

I walked by that almost daily for the three weeks I was there last, and the sheer immediacy of the paint was pretty shocking. There are these six stripes on the wall, obviously covering up some lines of writing, but they're placed in such a way that they control this entire stretch of blank white wall. The drips and splatters are classic action/abstract expressionist and the red top and bottom sections remind me of Barnett Newman. Cool stuff. Compare to Vir Heroicus Sublimis, the great MoMA Newman masterpiece:

via Artnet

It also reminds me of the Japanese action painting movement Gutai. A lot of their work was based on gesture: bursting through a sheet of paper, using hands, feet, heads to move paint around on canvas.

Dana Schutz and Itchy Life.

2009-05-17T01:10:00.014-04:00

Contemporary Evidence.
Dana Schutz Missing Pictures at Zach Feuer Gallery

Dana Schutz recently had an exhibition of new paintings at Zach Feuer gallery. It was much buzzed about, notable being the freshness of the work and its instant-classic art history dialogue making. The paintings to me are phenomenal; they bring together a history of figuration in art, a destructive surrealism and a constructive belief in the representative power of real life. Even though her figures fall apart, they get built back together into archetypes and put onto theater stages to totter in our gaze.

Painting a figure is a loaded gesture. It’s a kind of visual snap to the viewer, the lines click together into the shape of a person and it immediately carries a connotation: these lines are a body. What is the body doing? What is performing? What do its actions mean to us? Painting a figure refers compulsively to now. Representing a person is representing the present tense; it carries information about how we think of ourselves within our environment. That’s what makes Dana Schutz’ paintings so interesting: despite depicting events that could take place within some altered universe out of time, they come back relentlessly to now and the evidence and detritus of our lives.

Like the politics of Dada and Surrealism’s origins in the enervation and desperation of World War I, Schutz’ paintings distill the contradictions of life around them. The same visual trauma that is evident in Max Ernst’s melting landscape The Eye of Silence (1943-44) and Yves Tanguy’s Indefinite Divisibility comes through in Schutz’ 2008 Accident. Like a splinter lodged under the skin, the present irritant pushes through to the surface of the painting and makes itself felt in scars and striations. The tar of pavement becomes a series of writhing lines topped by wrinkled material, cloth or metal or an abstract quantity, bordering an eye-obstructing black hole. What’s the irritant here? What makes the ground so twitchy and hypersensitive? Something like the itch of what’s happening and the grating need to make it into art. I think that’s part of the urgency of Dana Schutz’ paintings. The irritation, then the painting, is the physical evidence of how we live.

Max Ernst, The Eye of Silence, 1943-44

So what is it to live in Dana Schutz’ mirror?

People are distorted into half forms, with dangling arms and burnt away sides. A blind masseuse’s eyes gape glowing into the air, neck thrown back and teeth bared. He grasps his subject’s foot with fingers that tangle into each other and turn into lines in front of us. Everything confused and pictorial space mushed up to the front, the painting becomes a wash of beautiful colors that pulse with the hues of rashes and bruises. It’s a fleshy story. Two chess players sit at a table; a normal scene except the players burn into leftover halves, a leg crumbles and a park planter turns into a bed of splotchy germs. The funny thing is that the picture retains its normalcy. What’s wrong with this alternate universe? Throughout it all the chess turn-clock keeps ticking into the middle, untouched. A woman gapes at a newspaper, but the woman’s face suddenly turns into Goya’s Saturn Devours His Son.

Goya, Saturn Devours His Son, 1819

Nothing is settled in these paintings. It all keeps pushing against each other in a constant battle to stay, to draw attention, to live for the audience. There’s a sense that the pictures are using themselves up in a constant mytosis of form, breeding and dying in front of our eyes. Atop all this, certain touchstones stay whole. A pair of glasses. The movie title Spiderman 3 scrawled into the sand. What remains are the things we recognize. The RCA dog listening to a gramophone. The sudden recognition of pop symbols is present and anxious. Schutz’ paintings don’t want to stay abstractly beautiful. They fight to form things, not deconstruct them. The figures fight to stay in focus in the blistering of life rushing past.

It’s an itch to stay alive. It’s a constant itch not to dissolve into a pile of thoughts, a pile of misguided and misdirected instincts and emotions.

Dana Schutz’ figures are victims and witnesses. They watch as they crumble and blow away and topple, only to pile up again, a squirming stack of lines that snap back into people and eyes. Like late Guston’s despairing Klansmen and clutching hands, the pictures seem so intent on being that meaning becomes less important than existing. Life is a struggle not to fall apart. That is what makes Schutz’ paintings so local but universalized in time; they are always fighting to stay in the moment you see them. That’s what makes me itch.

All pictures not noted are by Dana Schutz, a log of Schutz' gallery shows and titles can be found here. Schutz is represented by the Zach Feuer Gallery.

Shepard Fairey and Tufts University

2009-03-14T13:21:00.010-04:00

Appropriating appropriation and its consequences.

Shepard Fairey is an artist who has been pretty in the moment recently. From an early mid-career retrospective at the Boston Institute for Contemporary Art to his omnipresent portrait of Barack Obama that became a rallying symbol for the president’s campaign to his scandal-inducing wheatpastes on Boston-area buildings, Fairey has been in the news for months.

This isn’t about Fairey’s mind-numbingly stupid arrest in front of the ICA before the opening of his show though. It’s not about the court cases he has had to endure for doing some illegitimate wheatpasting in Boston on his own time. This is just about one Fairey piece in particular, a mural put up outside of the Tufts campus center on January 25, 2009.

As an adjunct to his show at the ICA, Fairey was commissioned to put up about a dozen murals around Boston. These were large, wheatpasted pieces consisting of the artist’s iconic black, red and white designs, pre-printed, aligned and then stuck on the wall. One can’t blame the ICA and independent curator Pedro Alonzo for trying to take it to the streets a little, that’s one way to give a museum exhibition of street art some life. Despite the museum’s good intentions, however, it’s sometimes hard to avoid provoking someone in artistically-conservative Beantown.

The important thing to remember is that the owners, or managers, of the places these murals were installed in agreed to have them. In a sense, they agreed to play host to Fairey’s art of appropriation and accept the work’s parasitic relationship with its location. Shepard Fairey’s work depends on its environment, and it has a direct influence on it: namely, Fairey’s work politicizes space, and does it well.

This brings us to the case of Tufts University’s Fairey mural. First, the true and whole story of the mural’s short, sharp existence. Sherman Teichman, the head of Tufts’ Institute for Global Leadership, is a personal friend of the director of the Institute for Contemporary Art, Jill Medvedow. This led Teichman to be aware of the ICA’s scouting possible locations for Fairey’s murals. Teichman jumped at the chance, getting the installation of a mural at Tufts approved in a shotgun meeting of university officials. January 25 saw Shepard Fairey brought to campus along with curator Pedro Alonzo and the artist’s crew of assistants.

Hours later, the finished mural was up, a combination of an assertive Asian-looking woman wrapped in a head scarf, a giant black and white peace-sign hand and an assemblage of smaller posters. What the wall also held is a politicized space. Shepard Fairey opened the wall, appropriating the neutral space of Tufts University for his own message, a message that is still a markedly political statement, though it is ostensibly for peace.

Something that has been appropriated once, and so visibly in this case, tends to never quite be pure again after. This is important. It’s an innate aspect of modern and contemporary art. Think of Marilyn Monroe. Is it possible not to see Andy Warhol’s garish screenprints? An imposed meaning tends to overwhelm a neutral base. What was once a blank wall became, after Fairey’s mural, a space for self-expression. And it was used as such.

Milan Kohout is a performance artist from the Czech Republic. He currently teaches a class on performance art through Tufts University’s Experimental College. The class is a mix of discussion and practice, rehearsal and performance. During one class he suggested to his students how interesting it would be if Shepard’s violated space, the wall and the mural, were to be added to. What effect, he asked, would another layer of meaning give to this piece? Another physical layer of posters, combined with another conceptual layer of symbolism? Some of Kohout’s students took that question to heart. They added their own political posters to the politicized space of the wall, politicized space that was directly approved by the highest levels of Tufts University administration.

The new posters caused some controversy. The students’ work confronted some highly charged issues, including Roe v. Wade, the endless optimism of Obama’s followers, and gay marriage rights. Immediately the posters provoked a negative response that Fairey’s work failed to. Tufts Unversity’s anti-bias group BEAT as well as the LGBT center took issue with the posters’ up-front politics and what they deemed as excessive imagery. The posters, along with the remains of Fairey’s mural, were torn down, under the blessing of Tufts’ Dean of Student Affairs Bruce Reitman. The new posters were rejected by the same staff that approved Fairey’s original mural.

My point is that, in terms of art in relation to politics, the two waves of appropriation of this blank wall were equally political and equally valid. And yet Tufts’ administration chooses only to approve of the first. These second posters were nothing if not an expression of free speech, a piece of performed art, where the first mural by Shepard Fairey was a gesture more motivated by personal branding than real communication. Which does Tufts bestow its approval on?
There is an inherent paradox in complaining that a space that has already been appropriated for art is appropriated once again by the students of this university. Tufts’ actions towards the posters betray its fundamentally conservative view towards the visual arts, one that the university has done nothing to correct and everything to reinforce in its treatment of Fairey’s mural and the subsequent posters.

______________________________________
Notes:
All photos courtesy of myself besides the last two of the posters, courtesy of Meredith Klein and the Tufts Daily

Shepard Fairey is the figure wearing the puffy coat and gloves in the photos.

For further information:
See this Daily article on the added posters: here
See this article describing the original mural: here
See this post on the Boston Globe's Exhibitionist blog: here
-in particular, please note this quote: "Apparently, an adjunct faculty member at Tufts University advised his students to ruin the work Fairey had been asked to create" [emphasis added]

If you are interested in more information about Fairey's mural at Tufts, please stay tuned.

Medium Beijing.

2009-02-20T17:52:00.012-05:00

Medium Beijing.

I just got my medium format film that I shot in Beijing developed, here are my highlights. Sadly, the camera case got in the way in a few shots... that's why you see the dark area on the bottom edge. I'll know better next time! See Yugong Lama Temple, my dorm room, Wangfujing, the road outside of Xizhimen and a tourist junk shop.

Mark Rothko's Garage.

2009-01-06T21:34:00.008-05:00

Mark Rothko’s Garage
There’s a picture somewhere that shows an aging Mark Rothko, maybe somewhere around 50, sitting in his garage on a metallic chair, a brush in one hand and a painting in progress tilted in the other. Against the backdrop of shelves of junk and cluttered walls, he scrutinizes the painting he’s holding. The canvas is stained a deep blood red, and the outlines of a central lighter colored rectangle are just coming into focus.

The first time I saw the photo it stuck in my head for no good reason; only after a while did I realize what was bothering me about it. Mark Rothko was a painter of the ineffable, an artist that reached for a point in the infinite distance, his work attempting to find a pathway to spiritual utopia. He was proud of the fact that his paintings caused viewers to start weeping in museums.

So what was he doing painting in a garage?

Rothko, sitting in his garage, surrounded by the grey detritus of everyday life, looking suburban. And yet the painting he holds in his hand, roughly, by the canvas stretchers, is supposed to be a gateway to a plane above the human milieu, infinite calm. It doesn’t seem fair. It doesn’t seem right that this perfect object should be made by someone sitting on a rusty chair gazing critically at the thing like it was a disobedient dog. Don’t paintings like this get excreted unbidden from the walls of MoMA, pre-canonized? Mark Rothko in his garage. It was just too messy.

This is a problem about the innate humanity of art, the grit versus the glossy sheen that gets slopped on by the pedestal of modernism, the aura of a lot of money and the white box chapels that we keep our art in. Where do the dirty hands of the artist meet the finished product, prepped for viewers and critics and onlookers? Where are the blood and guts?

Art has to get made. The unexplainable, the floating-in-the-air, has to get processed down by some enormous act of will, fueled by pressure and insecurity and fallibility, into a thing that, in Rothko’s case, has the look of the infallible. No umbilical cord left, no blood and mucus-spattered squalling infant. Where do we make the jump from something made in someone’s sun-baked, dusty garage to the infinitely clean pinnacle of modernism that Rothko’s paintings make on a white wall? The artist was fond of calling his ethereal paintings “facades”; the term seems most appropriate describing this dichotomy of process and product.

Maybe gazing at the surface of a Mark Rothko painting for long enough will elevate you to the kind of spiritual state the artist had in mind. But then there’s the back side, the artist sitting in his garage. I tend to think that the garage is just as important for a viewer to see as the surface. Unfortunately, most museums don’t make it easy. The work looks resolved on the walls, set up into some unknowable cosmic order.

Every painting in MoMA’s modern galleries is a lady on the street but a freak between the sheets. Gauguin died of syphilis in Tahiti after leaving his wife and children and desk job in Europe for the myriad freedoms of more “primitive” nations. Mark Rothko died in a pool of his own blood slumped over his kitchen sink after he slit his wrists at the elbows, unable to sustain his pursuit of the ineffable. So much for infallibility. Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were alcoholics. We all know van Gogh cut his ear off and sent it to a prostitute and Picasso had mistresses till he died in his 90s. All this begs the question, how can these artists’ work possibly look pure and resolved when it’s on the walls? How does so much life end up dry? Dig a little bit and there’s always a garage that’s worth looking for. The pile of stuff in the background, the psychic detritus that art distills, is what makes the end result interesting. Go into a museum and look for the blood and the guts and the conflicts, because the infallible surface is never all there is.

*all pictures here are Rothko paintings culled from various sources on the internet, their titles aren't very descriptive, and I think looking should be enough anyway.

Going to middle school.

2008-12-05T21:38:00.004-05:00

Going to middle school.

Every school that I’ve been to in China has a solid band of color painted to about 4 feet up the wall. It’s just something I’ve started to notice; my dorm has it, the high school across from our building has it, the middle school we visited in the countryside has it. It actually breaks up the space really well, and like everything else in China, the walls and the paint look old, but spotless and well used.

We went to this school to practice our Chinese as well as letting the middle school students practice their English on us, probably the first foreigners they’ve ever had a chance to talk to.

Walking up to the middle school, it looks devoid of life. At the start, it seems to be a massive gate marking a path to nowhere, a stretch of cracking pavement surrounded on either side by yellowed grass. The road turns a corner into a tiled courtyard, corralled by whitewashed walls. The school’s four basketball hoops preside over empty space.

Chinese has a particular word, nongcun, whose meaning includes everywhere that’s not within a modern city, including everything from Beijing’s suburbs to the most spare farming village in the vastness of China. It seems a little unfair to call the space the school is in “the countryside”, but my teachers continuously used that word, nongcun, to describe where we were going. Every classroom has a laptop and a projector descending from the ceiling, the school is only an hour and a half ride out of the center of Beijing, it’s modernized. So why “countryside”?

We foreigners took our turn first presenting a few aspects of American and Japanese culture to the middle school students. The topics we covered were mostly in relation to ordinary life, the routine of American middle school and college students, what after school activities are. There are differences between what we went through and what these middle school students are going through now that are easily overlooked.

For one, Chinese school’s emphasis on foreign language, specifically our own mother tongue, is a far cry from when I started Spanish in 7th grade. Talking to one of the students, I asked how long he had been studying English. Turns out he started when he was three.

After we finished our reports, the middle school students one by one went up to the podium, loaded their powerpoints into the overhead projector through the laptop in the desk, and started speaking.

Powerpoints? Overhead projectors? Granted, it’s the Future now, and it wasn’t when I was in middle school, but half the time our college classrooms’ projectors broadcast a lovely blue and little else.

The students’ topics ranged from their Best Friends, how much they love their parents, how they don’t study hard enough, all the way to Basketball. Basketball is something of a religion among Chinese guys, and the middle school kids were no exception. Clearly some things aren’t too different from our respective hometowns. “Kobe Bryant is my hero,” said one student falteringly, “that’s why my English name is Basketball Star.”

As far as the students’ English went, it was pretty good, especially considering they’re in middle school. The kids’ faces were visibly pained as they struggled through the words, often slipping into a mix something like Chinese syllables strung into English sentences. We probably looked the same way to them. We foreigners, not wearing the middle school track suit-uniform, trying to speak to a bunch of Chinese middle school students in their own language while they tried to speak to us in ours.

When the classroom presentations were finished we all left together to take a picture outside of the school. The sun glared off the paving stones and the wind blew Beijing’s dry cold through the doorways. As our teachers took the photos, standing next to me was one kid I had been talking to for most of our time at the school. He was tall for his age and tall for China and gangly as any middle school boy. He looked out into the sun and squinted his eyes and said into the air, “so you’ll be going back to America soon, right?”

“Have you liked living in Beijing?”

China has a countryside, a nongcun where people make their living farming. It’s not here, though. Here is Beijing. I would be willing to bet within 5 years the city will encompass this middle school and the students will spend the rest of their lives working in the city, for the city. Right now they’re just still growing up.

The Bird's Nest.

2008-11-24T00:36:00.002-05:00

The Bird’s Nest.

Visiting the Olympic Garden in the Northern part of Beijing these days is a little bit like going to a mausoleum. The park, contrary to its present lack of TV coverage, still exists, scattered with the enormous remains of this year’s Games. The newly opened subway lines, in place to ferry guests back and forth between venues, are newly closed. There are no more reporters, no more athletes, no more photo finishes, no more medals to be awarded, so what’s left? For one thing, there are more fences.

But if you had to choose one building to symbolize the voracious energy of this year’s Olympics, set in a country trying desperately to prove itself to the world, you could do worse than the Bird’s Nest. I would be willing to guess that the majority of people on the planet have seen it at least once, a latticework of steel beams, graphic and iconic, with a characteristic dimpled top.

Countless wide-eyed critics have noted the building’s embrace of “openness”, the way it allows the eye to travel from the exterior to the interior and back freely, a consequence of its exuberant yet simple façade. They cite the fact that the Chinese government consented to this design as a symbol of China’s own increasing “openness”, openness to the West, openness in an economic sense, openness in a social sense. You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t take them at their word. There are times when it pays to look a little deeper into the context of such a place instead of linking the façade, literally and figuratively, to the changing ideology of the country it’s built in.

Still, the Bird’s Nest is undeniably a loose building. It’s a little shaky, a little more of a laugh than a frown. The photos that have been widely published, a far off perspective, a wide-angle lens, don’t do the building’s spirit justice. The Bird’s Nest dances around you as you walk through it. A few steps into the stadium, the geometric flatness of the façade becomes a riot of crisscrossing lines going everywhere in all 3 dimensions, a Dr. Suess landscape in a metallic future.

The color palate of the building, a fitting deep red mixed with the gray of steel, also enlivens the interior stadium. A surprisingly small playing field surrounded by seats colored the same deep red, the space doesn’t quite match the epic scale it had on the television screen. More than color though, what brings the Bird’s Nest its exuberance is the slicing interplay between light and shade just inside the façade. The shadows are sharp enough to cut yourself on, and the patches of light beam down in heptagons.

The rhythms play themselves like a symphony of synthesizers.

The Bird’s Nest is a great piece of architecture. Still, we don’t have to take this postmodern smiley face at first blush. The team that designed the stadium is a bit of a surprise: the always great, always willing to embrace the new, architectural firm of Herzog and De Meuron, working with the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, a known provocateur who once filmed himself dropping Ming Dynasty vases onto his studio floor, smashing them into pieces. In this more civilized role, he was labeled a 'design consultant'.

The two have worthy reputations as artists, and it’s a credit to the Chinese government that they were willing to support the team in building such an avant garde structure. And yet, looking a little deeper still: in the process of building, Ai Weiwei renounced any involvement with the project, reviling his involvement with the Chinese government and loudly criticizing China’s continued human rights problems.

Herzog and De Meuron haven’t commented apart from reaffirming that Ai Weiwei was an incredible help and influence on the project. Architects are said to be colorless in the face of such international politics as long as the money is there, and many have faced criticism for building in Communist China.

And then there are the fences. The Olympic park is now crisscrossed with high white fences, blocking off the natural flow of people in and around the mammoth structures. A ticket to get into the Bird’s Nest is 50 RMB, about 8 USD, which doesn’t sound like much, but for an afternoon outing it really is prohibitively expensive for a lot of Chinese. Across from the Bird’s Nest is the Water Cube, another 30RMB to even get close to; the fences start 100 feet away.

The problems, the political flashpoints and the are still there, they’re just not immediately clear. The Bird’s Nest is an incredible experience for those that can get in. It’s a shame that some of the artistry and the public accomplishment of the Olympic venues have been lost to politics and profit.

But still, the taste the stadium leaves in your mouth is like skittles.

PS: Hiroshi Sugimoto is my best friend.

Snapshots.

2008-11-11T09:07:00.002-05:00

Snapshots.

I've been a little busy to write longer pieces lately, but I wanted to put a bunch of random stuff up anyway. It's from the past few weeks, our trip to Harbin, around our school. I hope it's like a little bite of information, a little less like a message and more like free association.

An older Chinese woman sits outside in a park, on a stone bench overlooking a lake drenched by weeping willows. She's retired and lives with her son's family.

Twins walking down Chegongzhuang road, stopping to compare the shoes below their identical tights.

A tiger in the Harbin tiger reserve, "wildlife" shot through with van tracks to ferry tourists to and fro. The tigers take up most of the space of the reserve, with small areas for lions and, inexplicably, cheetahs.

A little girl in a panda hat on the way to Xizhimenwai subway station.

Passing the mic at KTV in Harbin, karaoke in one room equipped with comfy couches and monitors, good for any number of people to get drunk and/or sing songs in private.

A meat stall in the evening. November gets dark pretty early.

Manikins legs in the trash dump.

Hannelore waking up on the train to Harbin.

St. Sophia Church, one of the last remaining truly Russian buildings in Harbin. The bottom has been turned into a horrifying tourist trap, but the ceilings were left unrestored and mesmerizing.

A kid in the amusement park at the edge of one of Beijing's gardens.

Walking down Chegongzhuang road.

Barack Obama.

2008-11-05T03:56:00.001-05:00

The day that Barack Obama won the presidential election, in Beijing. We sat under the trees, watched the branches sway and stared to the sky for some sign of the heavens moving.

Boys and Girls in Beijing.

2008-11-04T02:13:00.001-05:00

Boys and Girls in Beijing.

What do you get, coming out of high school with a head full of cheesy pop songs, a thousand movies about cliché romances and, thanks to the Chinese government, more than a working knowledge of contraception?

Not all that you’d guess, it seems.

One of the best things about our program here in Beijing is that we have a much deeper understanding of what things are like here in China for the kids, if just for the simple reason that we live with a bunch of twenty-year olds. So obviously we talk to them about things we have in common: boys and girls, girls and boys, taking sides.

What does that entail? All the crushes are still there; after all, we are a bunch of college students thrown together into one building. This includes any combination you could think of, you’re as likely to hear Chinese girls gossiping about the American boys as you are to hear the American boys discussing which Chinese teacher is hottest.

My roommate’s friend, another roommate here, has a boyfriend. They are interminably cute together. He wears goofy glasses and walks arm in arm with her as they head off to school, not too far away from our dorm. Every so often they exchange kisses on the cheek or something slightly more serious of an evening. The thing is, I’m not sure how far it goes beyond that.

The other day, as we were heading out to eat dinner, we ran into the couple. The girl was annoyed. Our shifu (doorman/handyman/house dad) wouldn’t let her boyfriend into the building. The reason? “He told me it’s too late,” the girl said, “he told me that there’s class tomorrow so we should be studying.” She laughed when I said that the shifu wasn’t her dad. So how are the Chinese kids supposed to get it on?

I suppose there’s always the clubs. Alcohol and dancing! Drinks and not very many clothes! Too bad there are the same problems here that we find everywhere. Does he like me? Is this just tonight? Why is she with that other guy?

Why are there so many Europeans? And why is everyone drunk?

I’d have to guess that it’s a little bit of a change for some of the Chinese students that didn’t really go out like that before. This past weekend was Halloween. A group of 30 CET students and roommates went out to a club and then came back at 5 the next morning. One of my friends, a Chinese girl, was worried that the way she danced made the other girls, American and Chinese, think badly of her. “A lot of Chinese girls can dance like that,” she said, “but they just don’t in public.”

This is also about double standards. A girl, dancing with all the guys, seen too often with different people? A little too open-minded? Telling some that they have a kaifang sixiang, literally an open way of thinking, is tantamount to calling them a slut. The same classification doesn’t really apply to guys. I guess it’s the same in America.

There are still the same non-intersecting lives. Girls are pretty much foreign territory to some of the Chinese guys, my roommate included. Do you want a career? Do you want a successful life? Maybe it’s best if you don’t have a girlfriend in college. Maybe it’s best to focus on what’s really important: learning. Drowning in textbooks, you can curl up in bed with your English primer and go to class in the morning.

The battle lines are laid like this: All the guys want the prettiest girls. All the guys want the girls that are unspoiled, and they all hope that it’ll be their First Time. Is it usually? I don’t know, I don’t really know if that kind of thing is quite open to discussion. As for the girls? Sometimes they’re still just dancing to have fun.

“Do you want to come dance with me?”

“Sure.”

Delays.

2008-11-04T01:05:00.000-05:00

Hey all,

Sorry for the absence, there was a midterm, then a Fall break, Halloween, then a bout with food poisoning, and...

Modern Sky Festival.

2008-10-06T07:32:00.000-04:00

Modern Sky Festival.

Last week we went to the Modern Sky Festival, a music festival in Haidian park, Haidian district, Beijing. A music festival. You’d think it would be easy to get to, wouldn’t you? When we got out of the subway, Haidian park, a huge body of green on the map, was nowhere to be seen. It wouldn’t be seen for another hour and a half. What we crossed through was more akin to a post apocalyptic suburb of an abandoned metropolis. Where there weren’t highway overpasses there were fences. Apartment buildings stood up like ladders leaned against the sky, a solid grey by late afternoon. They seemed to be growing a lot of trees there. Maybe it’s not hard to see why, with the empty shells of luxury housing complexes shrouded in transplanted forests.

When we drew closer to the venue itself, the streets were bathed in red lights and maintenance workers shambled away from the stages in tired groups. The sound of drums started to rise against the chatter of the crowds.

We paid for our tickets, went inside, and passed crowds of stalls and milling teenagers to get the main stage. The band was some kind of Euro-techno-pop-y outfit. Not bad, it definitely had everyone dancing. Twin screens stood on each side of the stage, blaring neon-tinged video of the musicians. The girl on screen yelled into the mic. We decided to head to the smaller stage, where someone we had already heard was playing. This was Zhou Yunpeng, a blind folk singer who has already been called China’s Bob Dylan.

We caught him in the middle of the one song we know. On the album it’s a sparse affair of Zhou Yunpeng’s operatic voice backed by a chorus of traditional sounding voices. The live version was a little more sprawling with a backbone played on an upright bass by a hip looking Chinese guy, head bopping. I couldn’t understand more than 10 percent of the lyrics, but looking around at the faces of the people around me, I saw enough of the story.

This kind of folk music, long taken for granted in the US, recently re-embraced by the indie crowd, is rare in Beijing. When I played Zhou Yunpeng’s song for my roommate, he couldn’t believe it was a local band. Hong Kong? he asked. American? The slow acoustic nod of Zhou Yunpeng’s music masks a more bitter urgency, more ambitious aims. One song, translated ‘Chinese children’, is an epic drift from highs to lows corralled by the singer’s huge voice.

And where is this voice coming from? A guy perched on a chair onstage, black sunglasses surrounded by masses of long, black hair. Guitar in hand, he doesn’t make much motion as he sings. That doesn’t stop his voice from rising high above the audience packed into the hanger-like space. They shout back his words.

Obviously the crowd is mostly younger people. Despite a fair amount of Europeans and Americans among the Chinese, there really isn’t a huge international presence to the Modern Sky Festival. The annual festival usually includes one or two big name Western acts, but this year every band is Chinese. Due to complications with the Olympics, many concert venues were forcibly told to cut back on their schedules. The festival is no exception. The absence of such illustrious stars as Avril Lavigne is no loss. This year’s Modern Sky showed that the Chinese indie, rock, and pop scene can stand all on its own. Quite a feat considering that only last year the Chinese government banned Carsick Cars, the country’s best indie band, from opening Sonic Youth’s Beijing concert.

The fact that Modern Sky Festival went off without a hitch is not to say that music is no longer a political entity in Beijing. The younger generation is embracing the music as well as the message that creativity is not a province of the government. The music certainly has a mind of its own. One of Zhou Yunpeng’s songs, “To buy a house”, corners the trouble with finding your own space in a city where most of the property has been bought up by families and the government. Carsick Cars’ best song is ‘Zhongnanhai’, a reference to the cigarette brand as well as a sendup of the Chinese government’s state compound of the same name.

Woodstock the Modern Sky Festival is not. It’s still a blatantly commercial affair with ads rising up on most surfaces. But still, consider the context. This is not entirely mainstream music. This is China. The two don’t often mesh, but for three days, they co-existed pretty well. Though Carsick Cars’ screams of guitar noise might’ve been a little out of place among cell-phone ads, it was who was hearing their music that mattered most. I’m willing to bet they made a few hundred converts.

For those of you looking to know if the kids are still alright, in China, they’re still going. This is the real deal. It is art, music and a protest. Zhou Yunpeng is not a voice for everyone, but for those who hear him, I think it’s a comfort beyond words. As for Carsick Cars, after an hour and a half dancing, you still won’t know what hit you. These are things that cannot be co-opted.

I hope I’ve made a few people want to hear this music. If you do:
Carsick Cars myspace is here: http://www.myspace.com/carsickcars , I highly recommend ‘Zhongnanhai’
Zhou Yunpeng’s song is uploaded here: https://www.yousendit.com/download/bVlBblFGT004Q1JjR0E9PQ
(sorry, I don’t know song name, album, track, etc, it’s from a mix. But still awesome)

Hiking.

2008-10-02T06:14:00.000-04:00

Hiking.

This past weekend we went to Fragrant Hills in Beijing's Northwest to go hiking and pick up trash, trying to help at least a part of the environment in China. The trip was organized by CET, our study abroad program. It was an early trip, so everyone was a little yawn-y after sleeping on the half-hour bus ride. When we woke up we were surrounded by mountains.

Our leader, a cool girl named Lauren who’s the American head of the Beijing CET office, passed out garbage bags and bamboo tongs and we all suited up. We met our guide, an intrepid looking member of the mountain’s hiking club who brandished his hiking pole while Beijing-accented Chinese spilled out of his mouth. Then we started up the mountain.

The hike was listed as medium to high difficulty. It was real hiking, rock climbing and all. It’s really incredible how you can be in the middle of one of the biggest cities on the Earth and in half an hour be in the mountains. There’s no hint of the city out there until your head pokes through the trees and you see the blankets of gray over tiny buildings. I’ve loved every trip we’ve taken out of the city and this was no exception. You can feel the air quality change, and you are utterly surrounded by wild forest.

Our guide stops every so often to tell us about a particular tree, a plant, a little piece of the place. He’s really proud of the mountain and it’s not hard to see why. For all of Beijing’s development, places like this still exist because people care deeply about them.

Beijing’s interaction with nature is an interesting one, I think. On the one hand there are the people like our guide and our fellow climbers. Among the people that passed us on their way to the top were spry seniors clambering over the rocks like children and a shaved-headed middle aged man climbing in shoes and track shorts and little else. Needless to say, they’re all in pretty good shape. There are also meandering couples listening, for some strange reason, to traditional music blasting out of their cell phones as they walk. It’s an odd mix of wanting to throw yourself into ‘nature’ and yet to stay out of it. I think the biggest motivation of all though is just to enjoy yourself. It’s nice being out here. It’s good exercise and it’s a beautiful place.

Our caravan of students, about 10 in all, stops whenever we see garbage on the ground. There’s actually not too much, outside of the omnipresent cigarette butts at resting spots. Our guide explains that he doesn’t often have Chinese people participating in these programs, most of the time the trash-collecting groups are foreign tourist volunteers.

When we get to the top of the mountain, we find a small ramshackle house surrounded by pecking hens and vegetable patches. The front room is a restaurant with an old couple beckoning from inside the doorway. Behind it looms a monstrous wood and cement lodge, not yet finished. Off to the side is a futuristic looking signal tower, all steel and yellow paint. The workers tell us it communicates with weather satellites.

And here we are standing on the ground. As we start to climb back down the mountainside, we cross through a few flat plains of grass and trees that look like plateaus surrounded by the valleys of the mountains.

We walk down roads that were built for cars and trucks, I assume, to make their way up to the top. The gutters are littered with cigarette butts and drooping plants. There are strange bugs and a praying mantis. The tanned cement stretches out and disappears into the trees.

We spend a good 3 hours getting back down, constantly going down thinner paths into denser woods. Still, piles of discarded food cartons crop up every so often. As we make our way down the thinnest trail, we dodge underbrush crowding our legs and spiderwebs around our heads. Our now full trash bags tied to our backpacks, our shoes skid on rocks that skitter down in front of us.

When we finally reach the ground, we land in the Beijing Botanical Gardens. There, a more genteel version of nature awaits those who may not want to confront it on such a personal basis.

Testing.

2008-09-28T00:12:00.000-04:00

Testing.

The other day the topic for our daily textbook reading was this Chinese test called the Gaokao, literally translated, kind of a shorthand for ‘High School test’. The test determines not only which college you attend, but also your major. The subject you study for four years. It’s the biggest moment of a Chinese student’s high school career. Easy to see why when it decides such a big part of your life.

So much for aptitude tests, right?

My roommate told me that the time leading up to this test was literally the hardest part of his life so far. After school activities? After freshman year, nothing. Sports? Maybe in your gym class. Going out with friends? Sorry, you have to study. All of your time is spent preparing, endlessly, for this one test.

My roommate looks up from his college civil engineering homework. “After school we didn't do anything else. Eating dinner took maybe 15 minutes. After eating I went back to studying.”

"It's not that the Chinese educational system has problems," he says, "It's that the Chinese educational system is a problem." The remark's a little hard to translate, but I hope the meaning comes through. The idea I get of this period in a Chinese student's life is that it's a black hole of studying. It's all that exists. Despite the problems, my roommate says, "There's no other way. You can't not take the test."

Gaokao lasts for two days: 5 hours a day with a break between morning and afternoon. This is a change from before when it was 3 days long. The Chinese government recently moved the test from July to June because they couldn’t turn on the air conditioning during the worst of the summer and it was too hot for the students to work.

In our classtime discussion, the Gaokao test was compared to the SATs for American students. “Don’t the SATs determine where you go to college?” our twenty-four year old teacher asks.

Well. Partly, I guess.

The SAT is long, sure. When I took it the test lasted 4 hours one morning. Stressful, of course. Life-defining? Not entirely. We American students have other activities. What are colleges looking at in the states?

1. What can you give us?
2. How many foreign countries have you been to?
3. What has been the defining moment of your life?
4. Tell us in paragraphs.

Looking back on it, it’s a pretty loose system, one that has benefited myself and so many of my friends. We have a choice. We have time to prove ourselves. We have our hobbies, we have our friends.

We certainly have more than just a number to throw at admission-folk in the US. Here? One of the sentences in our reading put forth rather matter-of-factly, "Chinese high school students don't have the time to develop their own interests." Your Gaokao grade is your major, it is your career.

In China, what’s left but the numbers? Think about the things you hear so often. Four babies. Billions of people. Ten percent growth. One chance. One test.

That China is killing us in math and science is an often quoted fact. How are the students getting there? The testing process isn't something you hear about when you hear about Chinese education.

You hear the numbers. You hear millions of engineers every year. Maybe some would rather study literature.

Going Out.

2008-09-21T07:12:00.000-04:00

Going Out.

So this past Friday night we went out to a bar with a bunch of Chinese kids: students, roommates, roommates boyfriends and girlfriends. When I say we, I mean my friend Hannelore, myself and another CET student. All in all the score was 3 to 5 Americans to Asians.

We Went Out to Sanlitunr. An area of Beijing rampant with foreigners, it’s where the Kids go to drink, dance, etcetera.

Fun stuff, especially seeing as how that night was the first time my roommate, Hannelore’s roommate, and Hannelore’s roomate’s boyfriend had ever been to a bar. They’re all college sophomores or older in a country where the drinking age is 16, and yet this is the first time they’ve gone out. Gone Out, like the American definition.

So we showed them how to Go Out. The bar we went to actually puts dice in cups on the table for you, so we started off teaching them the traditional seven, eleven or doubles. So far so good. Our Chinese friends prefer beer to hard liquor, partly, I think, because the only Chinese hard liquor is baijiu, which is gross. Lots of beer and more dice later, obviously the girls set off to dance.

This wasn’t the biggest place and we had a table, so it was pretty easy to spy on the dancefloor. One of our Chinese friends is breakin’ it down by herself, clearly the best dancer in the place. Hannelore’s roommate is dancing with her boyfriend. Though not quite what we would call ‘dancing together’. There was a notable lack of crotch-ass interaction. Hmm.

So what’s left? I’ve often heard it said that Chinese college students’ romantic relationships are like America’s high school awkward pairings. I’ve also heard that this is because they really are kept from dating in high school. Maybe it’s high school in college, but they still mean it. The two that are dancing together are still cute and obviously enjoy eachother’s company. It’s just that they’re not as, um, intimately involved as the American equivalent.

They can still drink just fine. The roommate and her boyfriend and my roommate keep up, beer and shots later, back to dancing. The dancefloor has a stripper pole. The couple takes turns wrapping their arms around the other and conversely fighting away the other’s advances.

There’s that, and then there’s the other thing. Another Chinese girl came with us. She spent a lot of time flirting with one of our fellow American students, dancing in such a way that she could keep up in any college frat basement. Every so often she would start dancing in front of a mirror, by and for herself.

“I’d get into trouble dancing like this in America, right?” Eyes immovably fixed on some far away point, she runs a hand through her hair and smiles.

Pace Beijing.

2008-09-14T20:47:00.000-04:00

(This post marks my first report on Chinese contemporary art. I hope it will be continued by many more)

Pace Beijing is beautiful.

Last Wednesday I went to the 798 gallery district in Beijing, so named because it lays on 798 street in the northeast of the city. 798 is an interesting place because it’s only really appeared in the mainstream awareness in the past few years, but it’s grown to such an astonishing degree that it has become one of the top 3 tourist attractions of China. It goes without saying that right now, Chinese contemporary art is pretty huge.

And the recently opened (August 8, 2008) Pace Gallery in 798 is on top of it. You may or may not know the Pace Gallery in New York city. It’s an important showcase for established contemporary artists already famous and the gallery comes pre-loaded with a taste for Chinese contemporary art, having taken on Chinese performance artist Zhang Huan. Pace’s Beijing gallery is a step towards the international art market and a show of faith in the Chinese contemporary art scene (Doubt: see Sotheby’s future canning of its Chinese contemporary art expert).

If the first show is any indication, Pace Beijing is going to be a great place in the coming years. It has the size, the capital and the potential to lead the Chinese art scene in becoming less ramshackle and more professional. On top of all of that, it has space. It has some of the best space for art that I have ever seen in my life. In short, it is fucking beautiful.

The show that’s on right now is called Encounters. It’s billed as a call and response conversation between the leading lights of American contemporary art and the stars of the Beijing scene. Most of the art deals closely with the idea of portraiture, a face, a person. All the usual suspects are there, Alex Katz, Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman. The surprise comes when you see the names on the other side of the list, including the likes of Ma Liuming and Yang Shaobin, who have never before found this high-profile critical comparison. There are no explanatory labels or wall-text save for the artists names, presented in English and a Chinese transliteration. The show doesn’t need it. It’s a game-changer anyway.

Encounters is made up entirely of two dimensional works. It sets up a kind of leveled playing field where the action occurs in the arena of the canvas.* At times it seems like you can actually feel the works talking to eachother. Two particularly apt curatorial comparisons:

A Cindy Sherman Baroque portrait recreation next to a photo of Ma Liuming, early close collaborator with Zhang Huan. Both female artists are intensely focused on performance and both have an eminent, personal and physical presence to their work.

A Qi Zhilong painting of a smiling female Cultural Revolution era-worker, pure pop appropriation, next to a dashing Katz portrait of Ada.* Both are up close face, face, face. It serves to show off Katz’ brilliant surfaces and underscore Zhilong’s lack thereof.

The show is punchy, it has a rhythm to it, and to top it all off it’s filled with exemplary pieces of work from each artist. Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami are even there. Murakami presents a big stunning red skull right by the floor to ceiling windows in the front of the gallery. Yue Minjun’s manically grinning face haunts its own corner. Ma Liuming, an artist few may know before this, is a barrage of life force out of her portrait. Wang Guangyi, whom I had discounted before, shows a huge painting that leaps off the wall: COUNTRY –AND DNA. You really have to stand in front of these things. Baselitz is here but he doesn’t do much. But then he comes off better than Marlene Dumas’ white/black kids. Fang Lijun shows an enormous orange head surrounded by birds, cool for its presence but perhaps less than substantial. Jeff Koons’ painting, ordinarily a pet peeve, even looks good. The empty-headed, manic-bliss-shot barrage of pop seems to have something in common with the still teething Chinese painters. Far off in the distance Zhang Xiaogang’s closed-eyed silent dreaming head floats, untouchable as a memory.

Encounters is lucid. Encounters sets out to make a conversation and makes it without hedging. Encounters brings together some of the best examples of established American contemporary art that Beijing has seen in a while. The show puts Chinese artists, oftimes regarded as flashes-in-the-pan and accorded with less than respect, up against the favorites. And they survive. They cling tenaciously to their space. The fact that Pace’s first show tosses together such a heap of international artists and not only survives but thrives is, I think, a sign of things to come both for the gallery and the Beijing art scene.

More photos below the notes.

*1) Note: The Cindy Sherman is obviously a photograph and so were a few others. However, The term canvas is oh so much better than ‘false-space-created-by-a-c-print’

*2) Pretty sure it was Ada. Aren’t most of them? No title labels does create some problems.

Ping pong politics.

2008-09-12T05:01:00.000-04:00

Ping pong politics.

Beijing so far is not about the architecture, the politics, the Olympic games being over, or the communism or the Great Firewall. Our experience of the city is about the people that cook for us, the people that teach us, the people we buy from and the people we live with. This is about an exchange.

We CET language students live on a converted Danwei, literally meaning Work Unit. It’s a communist-era set of buildings designed to provide everything a set number of people, men, women and children, could need. It has a cafeteria, housing, classrooms and recreation areas, all preserved from the Cultural Revolution. We mostly use the open plaza in the center of the buildings to play sports.

One day, after the lunch we always eat together in the campus’ cafeteria, we hung around outside playing soccer in the too-rare, too dusty sun. Not long after, a few of the cooks from the cafeteria came up and asked us if we wanted to play basketball. Of course, we replied in broken Chinese.

It was a normal game. One guy had a basketball uniform on, the others straight off their shifts. The same kind of thing was probably happening in a thousand different places at that instant. But despite how average it felt, living here as an average person requires a certain amount of compromise.

As students, we’re still learning to compromise what we know with what we’re discovering. We learned where some of the bars are, we learned where you can get a rather large bottle of beer for $.50 USD, we learned what normal food is. We have also learned that our Chinese roommates are used to sleeping 8 to a dorm room, that abortion is taboo as is promiscuity, and to never assume you know what’s inside a dumpling. You give up some space, you give up English, you give up some capacity to express yourself. It takes an effort to be normal after that.

It’s a back and forth, like ping pong.

Our Chinese roommates and our teachers are the other side of the exchange. What we give to them I’m not really sure yet, but what we get is real access to what it’s like to grow and live in the biggest city in China and one of the biggest on Earth. We share some habits, we don’t share others, but what comes out of living together is that at least we understand something at a basic level about each other and about two countries that are literally a world apart. More than language, it’s about collective giving and taking, being part of the push and pull that feels much farther away in America than it does in Beijing.