arrival into HK

GZ visit to the old house

back of the house



building across the street that my grandfather also owned and used to sell medicines

went to Guangzhou on Dec 26 to see my dad give a talk at Sun Yatsen University and then hung a few days to meet the guangzhou branch of the family that I have never met before. We all went to see the old house where my dad lived until he was about 4 years old before he left for Macau. It is all run down and with lots of families living in there but it was still nice to see and get a feel for the area. the neighbor we talked to said that if we still have the deed we might be able to get it back because it is being held by the government. imagine that!

guangzhou

Guangzhou

foliage! greenery! such a welcome sight after barren beijing


requisite ubiqitous advertising

xmas dinner at Rania's house

yummy pork roast


rania's sweet potato pie

new market

the other day went shopping with rania and wang wei to buy stuff for Xmas dinner...we went to this awesome market that has great meat and produce. they have the fancy stuff that you can usually find in foreign groceries (we managed to get brussel sprouts, butter lettuce, mini yukon gold potatoes, frisee-sp?, etc) but here you can get them for chinese prices. it is like a open market with different stalls all stacked to the gills. check out this vegetable stand. I don't know how there is room for this shopkeeper to get in or out!

it must be so

yo dude!

Yul Kwon, the brainy asian lawyer guy won the survivor show. I don't watch the show (duh, I'm in China) but after all the hulabaloo about the racially divided teams I can help but feel a little glee that the Asian dude came through to reprazent, ya know?

are there any more original ideas?

I recently came back from seeing the 没事 show in Hangzhou. So amazing-at the entrance to that show there was a piece by young artist Zhang Liaoyuan bearing uncanny resemblance to a piece by US based artist Tavares Strachan on view at the luggage store gallery in San Francisco. hard to believe that these two analogous works are on view at the same time around the globe from one another! both pieces are based around the same concept - receiving permission to remove part of the street (actually Strachan chose a piece of sidewalk with parking meter in New Haven, CT and Zhang chose a piece of the street in middle of an intersection in Hangzhou) and putting it on view in the gallery. Although there are some areas where the projects diverge, the core idea is nearly the same and not only that but the methods of display are remarkably reminiscent of one another (minus the fancy hi-tech components of Strachan's SF show). To my knowledge Strachan and Zhang have not met and certainly there is more to be said about their of their work up to now and who knows about future trajectories - perhaps this is just random coincidence - but I still find it really intriguing. Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to see the luggage store show in person but trust me, there is a good amount of overlap (I have heard plenty about it from both Laurie and Darryl as well as my husband Constantine who was hired to help build and install the encasement).

what does this say about contemporary art? are we living in such an homogenous world that the these matching project ideas would develop independent of one another? yes, probably. But at the same time? very interesting. I guess it just goes to show that there are so few truly original ideas anymore...

installation views of Zhang Liaoyuan's work in Hangzhou:


large scale photo showing excavation spot


official paperwork documenting permissions process with city


more documentation


piece of the street displayed in plexi box in Hangzhou


"Where we are is always miles away" by Tavares Strachan:

still from video projection


large scale photo showing excavation spot


official letter of permission from city


photo of the dig itself in New Haven


piece of sidewalk displayed in steel box at Luggage Store Gallery
(Strachan photos courtesy of luggage store website)

"it's all right" exhibition

I went back to Hangzhou to see a contemporary art show called 没事 "It's all right" organized by the New Media Dept of the China Academy of Art and Bizart gallery in Shanghai. It was a huge show with 30+ artists, each making new work for the exhibition. the site was an old warehouse type building in Hangzhou slated for demolition and filled with different small rooms so basically each artist had their own space or room to work with. lots of interesting work by young artists. to see photos, check out my flickr account.

Hey!

There is a town on the way from Shanghai to Hangzhou with my name! apparently they are famous for zongzi (cooked rice wrapped in bamboo leaves)

shanghai - hangzhou train interior

leaving Shanghai south station for Hangzhou

Island 6 art space

Near the Moganshan Road complex of galleries in Shanghai lies this vast open empty lot with a sole building in the middle surrounded by tall grasses. this brick structure was probably some kind of warehouse or storage in the past. It now houses Island 6 art space, a non-profit contemporary art space and design office. Lord only knows how they managed to get the building but it is pretty cool.

Shanghai

the swank plaza 66

zongzi sellers on the way to Shanghai

shenzhen

arrival in Shenzhen

flight to Shenzhen

on the road

been traveling for over a week now between Hangzhou, Shanghai and most recently, Shenzhen. I decided to hop down to SZ for one night to see the Ink Biennial which opened yesterday at the He Xiangning Museum (and other venues). I also wanted to come because I have never been here before and wanted to check it out.

It is a welcome change of pace from the big city life...I sit in a hotel looking out over the sea and am surrounded by lush tropical foliage. And the weather is just perfect, about 70 degrees during the day and pleasant enough to sit outside at night! Yesterday was the opening, a grand event with buses carting everyone from one venue to the next followed by a very splashy dinner in a hotel ballroom. It's actually a pretty good show and extends over 2 venues - one more standard contemporary ink and one more installation based with Chinese and non-Chinese artists exhibiting together.

I am exhasted and tired of traveling but I still have a ways to go. Back to Shanghai today for a few more days, then to Hangzhou to see a show there and then finally back to Beijing. I have lots of things I want to accomplish in Shanghai but I am feeling unmotivated...maybe I am just feeling the effects of being on the road.

cai yuanpei former residence in shanghai

pan tianshou museum at CAA

train sleepers

just took train from Hangzhou to Shanghai the other day...cost is only US$4 or about 29 kuai. unbelievably cheap. except one has to endure the tight quarters and surrounding nappers...

Xmas decorations in HZ

it is actually some poor security guard's job to watch this mass of styrofoam, lights and fake reindeer. yeesh.

storefront

storefront I passed the other day called "Jeanswood: Different Jeans"


but wait!...they don't even sell jeans. it is a shoe store

diehards

the scant group of students that showed up (at first) for day 3 of my class where we read some theory texts. here we set up the machine so we can have the text projected on the wall so we can read together

body count

on my third day of teaching in Hangzhou. It is a week long workshop type class and on the first day, which was mostly introduction, I had about 90+ students. Then about 36 the next day. today there were probably 15, probably because we were reading Baudrillard and Benjamin so there was some work involved. It was a real challenge to teach that material in Chinese. not sure it was really a success but at least they have read it. we'll see how many make it to the final presentations this friday!

hangzhou

lunch after my first class

teaching in Hangzhou

I am in Hangzhou for one week to teach a course with Qiu Zhijie's students at the China Academy of Art. I thought at first that I might get like 10-15 students and do a nice little interactive seminar but alas this is not the case. The first day (today) there were almost a hundred students packed into a tiny room.

cabbage n onions

or vegetables held hostage.

I still don't really get the point of long- term outdoor storage of one's cabbage and leeks but around my apartment complex it is pretty common. seems to me like a waste because when it actually comes time to use you will have to throw half of it away. the wrapping in newspaper is a new trick I just noticed (saw my downstairs neighbor doing it the other day) but hmmmm...not sure about what the newspaper imparts--some healthy ink residue?