June 10, 2007, 7:00pm @ B.A.S.E.

JIANG JUN Urban China Magazine, Underline Office

Born in Hubei in 1974, got bachelor’s degree in Tongji University in Shanghai and master’s degree in Tsinghua University in Beijing, now teaching in Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. Designer and critic, has been working on urban research and experimental study, exploring the interrelationship between design phenomenon and urban dynamic. Main works involve urbanism, architecture, product, graphic and art, including Non-up-and-down House, Bar-Net Project, H2O, Shopping Utopia; his writings and critiques including: Something from Nothing, CE, Metamorphosis, Dematerialized, Almost, Tense City, Social Products, Dirtitecture, etc. He is the translator of Tony Godfrey’s Conceptual Art, and Rem Koolhaas’ Bigness and Junkspace.

Underline Office is project-oriented group founded in 2003 by designer, photographer and critic Jiang Jun. Based in Guangzhou and registered in Hong Kong, most of its members came from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. Since the beginning of 2005, Underline Office has been fully engaged into the founding and researching for Urban China, an urbanism magazine based in Shanghai, and also involved into a series of important exhibitions. Main works include: Systematic Superficiality (Exhibition analysis and Design) for Get It Louder Exhibition 2005; Hi-China (An interactive installation for the images from 100 cities of China) for Guangdong Triennale 2005; Directory Lianzhou (A Branch work for Hi-China) for Lianzhou International Photography Festival 2005; Objects to Come/Objects in Disappearing and Future Past Tense (A video installation cooperated with Crystal CG) for Shenzhen Biennale 2005; Informal China for China Contemporary Exhibition in NAi, Rotterdam, 2006; Urban Image & Text for China Contemporary Exhibition in Fotomuseum, Rotterdam, 2006.



A quote from Jiang Jun:

I think it is more and more important to study the contemporary Chinese condition; this is not the way we look at it 100 years ago. We should study the methods and works that developers and designing institutes are doing; what is really happening out of the so-called architecture circle so we can define what is the real architecture of architecture. Not just combining the West-East commonplaces on architecture and urbanism.

What we see and experience today in China is a rapidly changing context. But within that, the ideology in the Chinese mind is kept, that is the most important. I find this quiet exciting. The Chinese recently have been more and more diversified; in Chinese philosophy we call this big unity and small difference. I find it a very effective way for analyzing the current Chinese condition; you can find so much diversity but paradoxically also with having more diversity the invisibles clues of Chinese ideology are disappearing due to all these mutations.

I don't think tabula rasa is a nice thing of course, because that behavior kills all diversity. We can use the strategy from architecture, from very advanced architectural thinking that aspires to keep some kind of context. The context is not what we find in hutong area; that is just a very popular topic in the current discourse in Beijing. But for the local society and the people that diversity should have more opportunities in so-called New Urbanism. This Chinese New-Urbanism should keep this kind of diversity in a totally not organized way. I am not so much believing in spatial structure, although we are always doing it. That is also why I quit architecture to do media.

Jian Jun Editor-in-Chief Urban China, interview with People's Architecture, Amsterdam, June 13, 2006


for more: http://www.peoplesarchitecture.com/jiang_jun_BIO.pdf


Coy Howard is the principal of Coy Howard & Company. He holds a B.Arch. from the University of Texas and an M.Arch. from UCLA. His work has been published widely, and his awards include Progressive Architecture (PA) citations 1977, 1980; Architecture magazine Record House 1988; Woodworkers Institute of America Award 1986; Western Art Directors Club 1980. In 1999 his work was part of an exhibition at the Galleri Rom in Oslo. His Palevsky Residence and Ashley Residence, as well as designs for furniture, were published in Coy Howard: Enough About Me (1995).

Coy Howard served as the Chair for Environmental Arts at Otis College and as the Director of the Undergraduate Program at SCI-Arc (Southern California Institute of Architecture) where he continues to teach. He is renowned as being one of the leading teachers in the U.S. over the past thirty years, and his mentorship has produced a body of designers whose success has been established worldwide.


MAP office is an open platform conceived by Laurent Gutierrez (1966, Casablanca) and Valérie Portefaix (1969, Saint-Etienne) to reform our daily practices and to reconstruct our life-world. Based in Hong Kong since 1996, both architects epitomize a new breed of architects who are rethinking the socio-political agencies of architecture. Their projects involve critical analyses of spatial and temporal anomalies and documentation of the ways in which human beings subvert and appropriate spaces for their own uses. A sense of play exists in much of their collaborative work, through a practice that includes text, drawing, photography, video and the creation of new platforms of communication. Running counter to the local architectural circle, MAP office’s mission is to bring forward a set of fresh alternatives to a region mainly preoccupied with “just-in-time” industrial production and efficiency.

Laurent Gutierrez is an Associate Professor, leading the Master in Design Strategies and the Environment and Interior Department, in the School of Design, at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Valérie Portefaix is the principal of MAP office, and teaches in the Master in Design program, in the School of Design, at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

For more visit: http://www.map-office.com/

Welcome to Beijing. This is B.A.S.E 2007.

B.A.S.E. has reopened its doors to students of Architecture and Planning under the thin shed roof of the 12 meter high, 625 meter space in the Urban Village of Cao Chang Di. Across the street from the artist (and now “architect”) Ai Weiwei, and amongst the fresh and substantive new Arts District, B.A.S.E. is situated in the epicenter of new creative thinking in Asia. The space is currently being subtly refreshed, “wired” wirelessly, equipped, and ready for early 21st century studio work. Within the space, under the curved ceiling will be- give or take - 30 participants.

Additionally, in the Spring of 2007, ACE Gallery www.acegallery.net, (Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, New York) will launch its Beijing Gallery in cooperation with B.A.S.E. in the space next door. ACE currently exhibits artists such as Robert Wilson, Tim Hawkinson, Charles Fine, Tara Donovan, Dennis Hopper, and Keith Sonnier, and has collaborated with the Guggenheim and the Whitney in curating exhibitions.
A set of courses will be laid on the table ready for action - courses of action leading to dis-course, recourse,“of course”, and other futures yet unknown. Interjections in the course of this ongoing work will take the form of events, performances, forums, exhibitions, happenings, parleys, pow wows, visitors, and treks out and back to the B.A.S.E..