Session 1 – Geography:
Making a Map of Contemporary Chinese Art
16.00 – 17.30
Moderated by Drew Hammond
With: Waling Boers, Marianne Csáky, David Elliott, Christopher Moore, Qiu Anxiong, Andreas Schmid

DOUBLE FLY ART CENTER
CV – Website

Double Fly Art Center is a 9-member art collective which was formed in 2008 after all its members graduated from the New Media Department of the China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, having studied under Zhang Peili. Working across media as diverse as performance, video games, music videos, painting, and video art, they remain irreverent and anarchic in their critique of social norms in China, as well as of the international art market. Double Fly Art Center members now live predominantly in Hangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing and work collectively as well as individually. Recent exhibitions of their work include SEE/SAW: COLLECTIVE PRACTICE IN CHINA NOW (2012) and ON | OFF: CHINA’S YOUNG ARTISTS IN CONCEPT AND PRACTICE (2013) at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing and a solo-show at the Vanguard Gallery in Shanghai (2012). Their work has never before been shown in Berlin.

Double Fly Save the World, 2012

Faced with the self-assigned task to save the world, Double Fly produces a music-video starring themselves as our global leaders. In the frenzied commotion that is typical of the genre, such figures as Barack Obama and Bin Laden engage in frantic orgies, reminiscent of Silvio Berlusconi’s infamous Bunga Bunga parties, while they indiscriminately intermingle with superheroes and farm-animals (of which a few living specimens also fetter around), all impersonated by Double Fly’s members.

HU JIEMING
CV – Website

Hu Jieming (b. 1957, Shanghai) is one of the foremost pioneers of digital media and visual installation art in China, and a professor at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts. Hu graduated from the Fine Arts Department of the Shanghai Light Industry College in 1984. Since the 1980s he has used emerging technologies to create works which deconstruct time, historical strata and contemporary elements of Chinese culture. One of his main focuses is the simultaneity of the old and the new: a theme that he constantly questions in a variety of media ranging from photography, video works and digital interactive technology in juxtaposition with musical comments. Through his work, Hu strives to reveal the interconnected nature of the digital universe, imagining, as he describes it, “a kind of socialism of the future”. Hu Jieming is one of the founders of CAC | Chronus Art Center in Shanghai, where he will be exhibiting with renowned media artist, Jeffrey Shaw, concurrently with PANDAMONIUM. Recent exhibitions of his work include a solo-show titled Spectacle at the K11 Art Mall, in Shanghai (2014) and two group exhibitions at ShanghART in Beijing, both in 2014.

Outline Only, 2001

The images in Outline Only originally come from the famous postcard series The Sights of China, in which ‘the most attractive historical spots’ of China are featured. Scanned and processed, Hu has created a 9-minute video from this content. In it, the images are ‘played’ as they run sideways across the screen’s drawn-on musical staves. When positioned in the centre of the screen, coloured strokes on the staves trace the outline of the depicted cultural monuments and natural sights, thereby composing the music.

QIU ANXIONG
CV – Website

Qiu Anxiong (b. 1972, Chengdu) was born in the capital of Sichuan province in the southwest of China. There, he studied under the progressive artistic practice of Ye Yongqing and Zhang Xiaogang. Qiu and his friends collectively founded a bar which became a hub for the blossoming underground music and art circles in Sichuan, and his colleagues included He Duoling, Zhou Chunya, and Shen Xiaotong. In his animated films, Qiu co-mingles the classical and the contemporary, using the traditional Chinese ink-and-wash style to transpose contemporary social and environmental issues onto traditional Chinese landscapes. A friend and neighbor of Yang Fudong, Qiu has exhibited broadly internationally, having studied contemporary international art and traditional Chinese culture at the Kunsthochschule Kassel, Germany. In 2004 he began teaching at Shanghai Normal University and currently lives and works in Shanghai. Qiu received the Chinese Contemporary Art Award in 2006 and has exhibited widely, including a recent solo-show, titled Qiu Anxiong, The New Book of Mountains and Seas II at the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Ishøj, Denmark (2013) and group exhibition ‘Ink Art’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2013). He is one of the artists undertaking the PANDAMONIUM Residency, and will be producing new work for this show.

In the Sky (2005)
Flying South (2006)
Minguo Landscape (2006-2007)

PANDAMONIUM will show three of Qiu’s earliest animation works. After working predominantly in oil painting during his studies in Kassel and having later turned to landscape painting in the tradition of the old Chinese masters, Qiu’s return to Shanghai in 2004 marked a shift in interest towards video art. In the Sky (2005) is his first animation work. In it, the dystopian drama of urbanization is visualized as an ink painting on a single canvas, to which Qiu successively added, layer upon layer of ink, growing in tandem with the gradual metamorphosis of the city’s life-forms. In Flying South (2006), humanity struggles to create its own artificial systems of self-control, proving absurdly counterproductive. Minguo Landscape (2006-07), is marked by the same quiet detachment and timelessness as the previous two works, now in a historical exploration of the Chinese Republican period, starting in 1912. Using allegorical imagery to explore the impact of environmental degradation and social change, Qiu offers an exquisitely crafted contemplation on the past, the present, and the relationship between the two.

XU ZHEN
CV – Website

Xu Zhen (b. 1977, Shanghai) is a trans-medial conceptual artist based in Shanghai. Incorporating painting, installation, video, photography performance and even extending into curatorial practice, Xu’s work satirizes, exposes and reworks dominant rhetoric of the contemporary art-world. Currently working under his company name MadeIn Inc, a self-declared ‘multi-functional art company’, he appropriates the art-as-brand discourse to criticize it from within. A jester at heart, he plays on authorial conventions and expectations, creating pseudo-fictions replete with cultural clichés, wittingly challenging the pervasive longing for clearly delineated so-called cultural authenticity. An irreverent artist with a unique ability to produce work across multiple platforms and media, Xu Zhen is the key figure of the Shanghai art scene and a foundational figure for the generations of Chinese artists born since 1970. Xu’s practice reflects the lingering concerns of an artist participating in the international art world while remaining deeply sceptical of it and its conventions, most immediately the label ‘Chinese contemporary art’. Working in his own name since the late 1990s, Xu Zhen is now producing new works under MadeIn Company’s newly launched brand ‘Xu Zhen’. Recent major exhibitions include his retrospective, Xu Zhen: A MadeIn Company Production, at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (2014) and his Commissioned Artist exhibition at the Armory Show in New York (2014).

Shouting, 1998

Moving crowds go about their regular and routinized business of commuting until suddenly startled by distressing screams behind them. They all turn their heads simultaneously to determine the cause of the cries, thereby engendering both a synchronized movement that is atypical of such street-scenes, as well as laughter from whoever is behind the camera.

ZHANG DING
CV – Website

Zhang Ding (b. 1980, Gansu) is a rising star of Chinese multimedia art. He first studied at the North West Minority University in the Oil Painting Department and went on to study under Zhang Peili in the New Media Arts Department at the China Academy of Fine Arts. Zhang works with large-scale mixed-media installations, incorporating video, performance and interactive components. He is influenced by the fantastical style of Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini and explores ethnic tensions, the plight of migrant workers, and the marginal urban cultures that lurk in the recesses of Chinese society. He has exhibited internationally at major institutions and has had international solo shows including Orbit at The Armony Show, Focus Section, in New York (2014) and Gold and Silver at Galerie Krinzinger in Vienna (2013), but has never before been shown in Berlin.

Buddha Jumps Over the Wall, 2012

The culinary dish called Buddha Jumps over the Wall – a variety of shark fin soup – is regarded as a Chinese delicacy and so much so that it is said to even entice the vegetarian monks from their temples to partake in the meat-based dish, hence its name. In allusion to this dish, Zhang’s video features a group of animal plaster-sculptures that are individually shot at and finally exploded altogether, to shatter into pieces. Accompanied by a magnificent and solemn symphony and filmed by means of a high-speed camera lens that captures every detail, we see bloodlike liquid and shards of debris flying everywhere in a shocking and cruel, though undeniably aesthetic manner.

Session 1 – Geography:
Making a Map of Contemporary Chinese Art
16.00 – 17.30
Moderated by Drew Hammond
With: Waling Boers, Marianne Csáky, David Elliott, Christopher Moore, Qiu Anxiong, Andreas Schmid

DAVID ELLIOTT

David Elliott is an English born curator and writer. From 1976 to 1996 he was Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England, Director of Moderna Museet [The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art] in Stockholm, Sweden (1996-2001), founding Director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (2001-2006), the first Director of the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art [Istanbul Modern] (2007), Artistic Director of the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2008 – 2010) and Artistic Director of the 1st Kiev International Biennale of Contemporary Art (2011-12), Artistic Director of the 4th International Biennale of Work by Young Artists in Moscow (2014-2014), Rudolf Arnheim Guest Professor in Art History at the Humboldt University, Berlin (2008) and Visiting Professor in Museum Studies at the Chinese University in Hong Kong (2008/11/13). From 1998 until 2004 he was President of CIMAM (the International Committee of ICOM for Museums of Modern Art). He is Hon President of the Board of Triangle Art Network/Gasworks in London and on the Asia Advisory Board of the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

ANDREAS SCHMID

Andreas Schmid is an artist and curator who lives in Berlin. After studying painting and history in Stuttgart, he moved to Beijing to learn Chinese before studying Chinese calligraphy from 1984–1986 at the Zhejiang Academy of Art, Hangzhou. Since then he has been continuously involved in contemporary art in China. Curated events: 1993 CHINA AVANTGARDE, HKW, Berlin, with Hans van Dijk & Jochen Noth, 1997 Contemporary Photo Art from the P.R. China, NBK, Berlin, 2003 Sitting in China, exhibition of Michael Wolf, Kestner-Museum Hanover, 2013, Hidden Images – on the situation of Art in China, 16 panel discussions, lectures, workshops with Chinese & European artists & intellectuals for the UdK Berlin with Bignia Wehrli and “The 8 of Paths: Art in Beijing”, 2014, Uferhallen Berlin with Thomas Eller and Guo Xiaoyan. Andreas Schmid himself has been exhibiting and teaching widely in Europe, USA, and Asia.

CHRISTOPHER MOORE

Christopher Moore is the publisher of randian 燃点 digital art magazine. From 2008-10 Christopher was the Shanghai correspondent for Saatchi Online. In 2012 Chris co-curated “Forbidden Castle” at Muzeum Montanelli in Prague, an exhibition of Xu Zhen’s pre-MadeIn work, and in April 2014 he curated Yan Pijie “Children of God” at orangelab Berlin. He is also the editor of the first monograph on Xu Zhen, to be published by Distanz Verlag this Spring, with contributions by David Elliott, Philippe Pirotte and Li Zhenhua.

QIU ANXIONG

Qiu Anxiong was born in 1972 in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in the southwest of China. There, he studied the progressive artistic practice of Ye Yongqing and Zhang Xiaogang. A bar opened by Qiu and his friends became a hub for the blossoming underground music and art circles in Sichuan, and his colleagues included He Duoling, Zhou Chunya, and Shen Xiaotong. In 2003 he graduated from the University Kassel’s College of Art in Germany after six years of studying both contemporary international art and traditional Chinese culture. In 2004 he began teaching at Shanghai Normal University, and currently lives and works in Shanghai.

ALEXANDER OCHS

Since founding his first gallery in Berlin-Mitte in 1997, Alexander Ochs has focused on the exchange of artistic strategies and works between China and Europe. The list of artists that he has presented with exhibitions and projects is similar to a ‘Who is Who’ of young Chinese Art History: Ai Weiwei, Fang Lijun, Yang Shaobin, Miao Xiaochun, Lu Hao, Yue Minjun, Xu Bing, Yin Xiuzhen, and Tan Ping. In 2004, Alexander Ochs opened the WHITE SPACE BEIJING and through this, became a founding member of the 798 Art District in Beijing. Since 2008, he has published many texts and has been an editor of books and artist monographs in both China and Germany. After a consequential redevelopment of the gallery program between 2010 and today, the gallery now presents artists from Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Europe.

CHEN YANG

CHEN Yang / Chaos Y. Chen is the founder and director of WiE KULTUR, an art platform in Berlin for the dialogue and collaboration between Asia and Europe. Prior to this, Chen Yang was the head of the Curatorial Department at the Millennium Art Museum (2003-2004), and worked with The Asia Society, New York (1998-1999), Kunst-Werke Berlin (2002), and collaborate with the House of World Cultures, Berlin (2003). Her curatorial practices include Picture from the Surface of the Earth: Wim Wenders (2004), Driving the Sky-line: Frank O. Gehry & his contemporaries (2004), Mexican Modern (2005), etc. Since the end 1990s, she has been frequent contributor for art and cultural columns, i.e. Dushu Monthly, Economic Observer weekly. She is the co-author for two recent books published in Germany, “Wall Journey: Expedition into Divided Worlds” and “Contemporary Artists from China”. She holds a Master’s Degree in Art History and Theory from the Nanjing Academy of Arts. She is the recipient of Luce Scholarship (1998, USA) and RAVE Scholarship (2001, Germany). She served as jury member for CENTRAL Contemporary Art Award (Cologne, Germany, 2004) and REAL Photography Award (Rotterdam, 2008).

Lutz Becker, THE SCREAM, 2012

Born in 1941 in Berlin, Germany lives and works in London, UK. Lutz Becker is an artist, filmmaker, curator and film-historian. He studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, where he graduated under Thorold Dickinson and became a distinguished director of political and art documentaries. A practicing painter, he is also a curator of exhibitions. He collaborated with the Hayward Gallery on The Romantic Spirit in German Art (1994), Art and Power (1995), and Tate Modern on Century City (2001). As of 2003, Becker has been working for the Mexican Picture Partnership ltd.’s reconstruction project of Sergei M. Eisenstein’s film ¡Que viva Mexico! ‒ Da zdravstvuyet Meksika!.

THE SCREAM

‘The video installation The Scream is an homage to the Ukrainian filmmaker and poet Aleksandr Dovzhenko (1894-1956). It is a reflection on Dovzhenko as a poet who told his stories in the form of the classical eclogue, in which pastoral simplicity stands in contrast with modernist self-consciousness. Even in his more overtly political films Dovzhenko’s perspective remained subjective, attached to the old art of story telling, its allegorical elements, symbols and types. The installation, originally presented on three screens, is shown here as a single-channel version especially created for this exhibition. The work is a montage of segments from Dovzhenko’s films, based on dramatic interactions and accidental synchronicities of images and scenes, the play of affinities and contrast, textures, details, and the monumentalisation of the human face’.

FULL TEXT

Yang Fudong, YEJIANG / THE NIGHTMAN COMETH, 2011

Born in 1971 in Beijing, China lives and works in Shanghai, China. Yang Fudong’s films, photographs and video installations are born out of an interest in the power of the moving image to explore subjectivity, experience and thought. He draws stylistically on different periods in the history of Chinese cinema to create open ended existential narratives that interweave quotidian ritual with dream and fantasy states. Yang trained as a painter in the China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou. In the 1990s, he started to work in the medium of film and video. He is known for his cinematography and mastery of cinematic style, using 35mm film to produce powerful and poetic works about the human condition with its malaise and fantasies of everyday life. He possesses a sensitivity to the traditions of Chinese art, cinema and the place of the intellectual (the literati). Each of his films is philosophical and open-ended, engaging questions around both history and contemporary life, mostly depicting the lives of young people from his own generation, albeit with historical resonances that sometimes span many centuries. Through vignettes staged with classical precision, yang’s works propose a poetics of place and a critique of time that is determined through the interaction of individuals rather than by political doctrine.

THE NIGHTMAN COMETH / Ye Jiang

The single screen work shown here, unfolds in the realm of historical fantasy. An ancient warrior is seen wounded and forlorn after battle, in conflict about his path in life. Three ghost-like characters appear as emblems of feelings and thoughts that surface and clash within the warrior’s heart and mind as he has to decide whether to disappear or continue fighting. Yang has preferred to describe this film as ‘neo-realistic’ rather than historical or allegorical: Neo-realism” is a history theatre where current and contemporary social conditions come to play. Who exists realistically, the warrior baron in his period costume or the ghost in a modern outfit? When the ancient battlefield scene and other historical events appear and reappear, where do they belong, in the past, the present or the night-falling future?…. There is hope nonetheless. The body is full of desire whereas the soul is more precious. His spirit is what backs him up in life. How should we live our lives now? How do we identify ourselves with neorealistic historical events and continue to search for spiritual meanings? What do we really want?” [DE]

FULL TEXT

Tracey Moffatt, DOOMED, 2007

Born in 1960 in Brisbane, Australia, lives and works in Australia and USA. Tracey Moffatt is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists as well as being an artist of international significance. She has had numerous solo exhibitions in major museums around the world. Working in photography, film and video, Moffatt first gained significant critical acclaim when her short film Night Cries was selected for official competition at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival.

DOOMED

Tracey Moffatt’s video collage, Doomed, features depictions of doom and destruction ‒ war, violence and terror ‒ as they appear in popular cinema. In collaboration with Gary Hillberg, with whom she made Other (2009), Love (2003), Artist (2000) and Lip (1999), Doomed uses cut-and paste editing techniques in a highly entertaining and black-humorous take on the bleak side of our current psychological landscape. Moffatt’s film looks at both entirely fictional and reconstructed disastrous events. Each scene carries a particular cargo of references. They occupy their own unique symbolism and filmic territory ‒ the poignant, sublime and epic, the tragic, the B-grade and downright trashy. The accumulation of scenes, however, within Moffatt’s own essaying, creates a narrative whole comprised of parts. Not only does Moffatt play within the ‘disaster’ genre, re-presenting representations, she revels in it. Moffatt points at how the viewer is involved in filmic narratives through an emotional hook, by the promise of imminent disaster, an important narrative device. Moffatt’s film itself is crafted with an introduction, body and finale ‒ in a presentation of the form of filmic entertainment, as well as of ‘art as entertainment’.

FULL TEXT

Miao Xiaochun, RESTART, 2008-2010

Born in 1964 in Wuxi, Jiangsu, China lives and works in Beijing, China. Miao Xiaochun graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Beijing, China and the Kunsthochschule Kassel, Germany. He is presently a professor at CAFA and one of the leading digital artists in China. While studying in Europe he familiarised himself with western art history and motifs from famous classic paintings are often animated in his videos. Miao Xiaochun is considered one of the most representative and influential artists In the domain of China’s new media art. He started in 90s his creative explorations on the interface between the real and the virtual. His extensive body of work includes photography, painting and 3D computer animation which are parallel to each other. He works in contemporary photography based on the “multiple view point” perspective to pioneer connections between history and the modern world. Miao Xiaochun successfully uses 3D technology to create upon a 2D image a virtual 3D scene, to transform a still canvas into moving images, concurrently changing the traditional way of viewing paintings and giving a completely new interpretation and significance to a masterpiece of art, especially with the striking use of his idiosyncratic imagination about history and the future. His works add an important example to contemporary negotiations with art history, and open up new potential for art as he experiments with new possibilities, taking a step forward into new potential spheres.

RESTART

The apocalyptic 3D video Restart begins with an animation of Pieter Breughel’s The Triumph of Death (c. 1562). Here one famous Western masterpiece morphs into another and classical civilisation crumbles into modern chaos. As the video continues, images of the present begin to take hold, some reflecting China’s recent economic growth and technological prowess. yet no triumphalism is intended in what after all is a continuing cycle. In Xiaochun’s works the naked homogeneity of seemingly oriental CG figures based on the artist’s body, dead or alive, represent everyman ‒ his joys and horrors as well as the endless struggles between life, love and death.

FULL TEXT

ARTIST STATEMENT

JARIK JONGMAN

A former assistant of Anselm Kiefer, Jarik Jongman uses both his own photographs and anonymous pictures found in flea markets, books, magazines and the internet as a starting point for his work, which often deals with archetypical imagery. Dutch born, he studied in Arnhem and has had numerous exhibitions in London, Berlin, Switzerland, Amsterdam and at the 53rd (2009) and 54th Venice Biennale in collateral events. He lives and works in Amsterdam. Jongman will expand his series of painted portraits of icons of the contemporary art world. Originally developed for the ABOUT FACE exhibition at MOMENTUM in 2012, Jongman has applied traditional oil painting to an interactive performative practice. Painting some of the richest and most influential art-world players of our time, he subsequently invokes the audience to break all the taboos of the relationship between audience and artwork. Giving the audience the tools to leave their mark on the paintings, Jongman encourages the purest form of iconoclasm in the context of the sacred space of the museum. The result is a series of mutilated images, reminiscent of the damaged murals and toppled statues of ousted dictators across the world. This series of work has so far been enacted in Berlin, Jerusalem, and London, with portraits of icons of the art world site specific to each location. For his Artist Residency at TRAFO, Jongman will show the results of the previous performances, in addition to creating five new portraits of icons of the Polish art scene. The subjects of these portraits will be selected through an open call, involving the audiences of Szczecin in the process of art production; in the very first stages of choosing a subject, and in the last step in putting their own signatures on the finished work.

ARTIST’S CV

Emi Hariyama is a ballerina born in Osaka, Japan. She graduated from Bolshoi Ballet School in Moscow in 1996. She joined the Moscow Ballet Theater and the Aalto Ballet Theater in Essen, Germany in 1997. She has won numerous international competitions, including the Special Prize at Moscow International Ballet Competition, a bronze medal at the New York International Ballet Competition, and a silver medal at the International Ballet Competition in Paris (no gold was awarded). Since 2004, Emi Hariyama has been a member of ”Staats Oper Unter den Linden” and ”Deutsche Oper Berlin” under the direction of the maestro Vladimir Malakhov.

Peter Kirn is an audiovisual artist, journalist, and technologist. Classically trained in composition and piano, he now focuses on live electronic performance. He is the founder of CDM, a widely-read daily site that explores creative technology, and has contributed to Macworld, Popular Science, De:Bug, Keyboard, and others. He teaches and develops open creative tools, including co-creating the open source MeeBlip synthesizer. Born in Kentucky, he is now based in Berlin. He is a PhD Candidate in Music Composition at The City University of New York Graduate Center.