PEI ZHU, Studio Pei Zhu Architects, Beijing
Field Notes: Rural Explorations
15 years ago
June 8, 2008, 8:00pm @ B.A.S.E.
Red Sorghum (1987) was the first directorial effort of controversial Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou. The director's favorite leading lady Gong Li plays a young woman of the 1920s whose family sells her into marriage with a wealthy winemaker. At first a loveless union, the relationship blossoms into one of strong friendship and mutual respect. During World War II,Gong Lifights side by side with her husband against the invading Japanese. A sweeping yet intensely personal historical epic, Red Sorghumwon the 1988 Golden Bear award at the BerlinFilm Festival. – Synopsis taken from allmovie.com
May 23, 2008, 6:00pm @ B.A.S.E.
Andy Warhol in China will be shown from May 24 to Sep 7 at Timezone 8. The book by Christopher Makos, with an introduction by Ai Weiwei, is available at Timezone 8.
Art Feature: I Shot Andy Warhol
That’s Beijing talks to Warhol’s personal photographer Christopher Makos
by Venus Lau
The year was 1982 and China was still untouched by "postmodernism" – that smearing of the line between "lowbrow" and "highbrow" art. It was also the year that Andy Warhol, the pop-art legend who paid homage to consumerism through iconophilia such as the Gold Marilyn Monroe and the Campbell’s soup cans, visited China.
Warhol was not alone on his journey. With him came his collaborator and personal photographer Christopher Makos, who returns to Beijing this May to exhibit the photos he took during this famous visit.
We spoke to Makos about the trip he made 26 years ago to a city almost unrecognizable compared to what it is today. Recollecting his memories of a China where Hongqi (Red Flag) cars rolled up dusty streets and students’ feet strolled in white canvas sneakers rather than in Nike Airs, Makos described driving in from the airport in terms of "seeing all the bicycles" – a far cry from the congested traffic we’re used to on the Airport Expressway.
And if Warhol were still alive today, where would they visit? Makos’s reply was simple enough: "[Go back to] all the places that we visited together, then see all the new architecture and visit with all the new cool Chinese artists."
By "cool Chinese artists," Makos is referring to luminaries such as "Ai Weiwei, Feng Zhengjie, the artist that does the photos of himself with all the flies on his face [Zhang Huan]."
But if Warhol were alive today, he’d doubtless be intrigued by the consumerism and materialism which have crept into the pantheon of Chinese contemporary art: the shocking prices, the Shenzhen Dafen painting village that exports more than a million replicas worldwide, the repetition in producing visual icons on canvas (for instance, Yue Minjun’s laughing men). All these phenomena are on track with Warhol’s apothegm on commercial art: "Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art."
All this is intensified by employing mass production methods, including silkscreen prints – not only does the duplication of the same image not eradicate the aura of art, but it brought Warhol to the altar of contemporary art. Whether people love him or hate him, they simply can’t avoid him.
As a close collaborator with the silver-maned artist, Makos points out the linkage between the two different commercialisms behind China’s contemporary art and Warhol’s: "They are the same. The two have finally met face to face. Andy was mass market, just [as] the culture when he visited was mass market. But at that time, it was mass in a political sense; now it is mass in a consumer sense."
Makos’ mentor was Man Ray, a photographer/painter who straddled Dadaism and surrealism. Yet Makos’ work does not resemble Ray’s experimentation with rayographs and fathoms of superimposition, nor is his photography influenced by Warhol’s nearly impressionist snapshots. In fact, he is quite the opposite.
"I was the teacher, Andy was the student. Also, Andy always would appropriate photos from newspapers … magazines, and when we met he was much more interested in learning how to take pictures for himself."
Andy Warhol in China will be shown from May 24 to Sep 7 at Timezone 8. The book by Christopher Makos, with an introduction by Ai Weiwei, is available at Timezone 8.
The year was 1982 and China was still untouched by "postmodernism" – that smearing of the line between "lowbrow" and "highbrow" art. It was also the year that Andy Warhol, the pop-art legend who paid homage to consumerism through iconophilia such as the Gold Marilyn Monroe and the Campbell’s soup cans, visited China.
Warhol was not alone on his journey. With him came his collaborator and personal photographer Christopher Makos, who returns to Beijing this May to exhibit the photos he took during this famous visit.
We spoke to Makos about the trip he made 26 years ago to a city almost unrecognizable compared to what it is today. Recollecting his memories of a China where Hongqi (Red Flag) cars rolled up dusty streets and students’ feet strolled in white canvas sneakers rather than in Nike Airs, Makos described driving in from the airport in terms of "seeing all the bicycles" – a far cry from the congested traffic we’re used to on the Airport Expressway.
And if Warhol were still alive today, where would they visit? Makos’s reply was simple enough: "[Go back to] all the places that we visited together, then see all the new architecture and visit with all the new cool Chinese artists."
By "cool Chinese artists," Makos is referring to luminaries such as "Ai Weiwei, Feng Zhengjie, the artist that does the photos of himself with all the flies on his face [Zhang Huan]."
But if Warhol were alive today, he’d doubtless be intrigued by the consumerism and materialism which have crept into the pantheon of Chinese contemporary art: the shocking prices, the Shenzhen Dafen painting village that exports more than a million replicas worldwide, the repetition in producing visual icons on canvas (for instance, Yue Minjun’s laughing men). All these phenomena are on track with Warhol’s apothegm on commercial art: "Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art."
All this is intensified by employing mass production methods, including silkscreen prints – not only does the duplication of the same image not eradicate the aura of art, but it brought Warhol to the altar of contemporary art. Whether people love him or hate him, they simply can’t avoid him.
As a close collaborator with the silver-maned artist, Makos points out the linkage between the two different commercialisms behind China’s contemporary art and Warhol’s: "They are the same. The two have finally met face to face. Andy was mass market, just [as] the culture when he visited was mass market. But at that time, it was mass in a political sense; now it is mass in a consumer sense."
Makos’ mentor was Man Ray, a photographer/painter who straddled Dadaism and surrealism. Yet Makos’ work does not resemble Ray’s experimentation with rayographs and fathoms of superimposition, nor is his photography influenced by Warhol’s nearly impressionist snapshots. In fact, he is quite the opposite.
"I was the teacher, Andy was the student. Also, Andy always would appropriate photos from newspapers … magazines, and when we met he was much more interested in learning how to take pictures for himself."
Andy Warhol in China will be shown from May 24 to Sep 7 at Timezone 8. The book by Christopher Makos, with an introduction by Ai Weiwei, is available at Timezone 8.
May 20, 2008, 7:00pm @ B.A.S.E.
FEI WANG, Chinese Archi-Image PhenomenaFei Wang is the co-founder of Chinese Archi-Image Phenomena [CAIP], a consortium of urban image theorists and architects speculating on architecture and image culture in contemporary China. The practice of CAIP exists in a world of extreme simulacra, as historical footnotes are shuffled and image realities are becoming perversely pervasive. Fei Wang is a practicing architect and an emerging architectural theorist working between Western visuality and its representation as it encounters the high-speed urbanization of China through the lens types of 18th-Century Chinese perspective, architectural simulacra and phenomenology.
Fei Wang is currently a Teaching Fellow at School of Architecture, North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. He received a B.Arch. from Tongji University in Shanghai, China, and a M.Arch. from Virginia Tech at Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center, and a second M.Arch. in History and Theory from McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
He has practiced architecture in Shanghai, Alexandria, Virginia and Princeton, New Jersey. His work has been recognized with numerous academic student awards and competition entries. His design and research projects have been exhibited in China, Germany, the United States and Canada, including Shanghai Art Museum, Aedes Galerie in Berlin and McGill University. His current project Thaumatorama was exhibited this year at North Carolina State University.
Fei Wang is a translator. He has translated many contemporary theoretical English texts into Mandarin Chinese, including: "The Tell-Tale Detail" by Marco Frascari, "Is This For Real" by Robert Somol and he is currently translating "Ethics and Poetics in Architecture Education" by Alberto Perez-Gomez. He writes intensively in Chinese and has published many articles and translations in Time+Architecture in Shanghai, Domus, Chinese version in Beijing and Urbanism & Architecture in Ha’erbin, where he acts as overseas editor and book reviewer respectively. As co-editor, his forthcoming book Inter-View of Selected Western Architectural Schools will be published both in Chinese and English in October 2008, featuring 33 interviews of 12 western architectural schools and prominent architectural educators.
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
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
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