bookish imaginations

please excuse the bit of self-referentialism...this came from a friend recently:

"One clicks on an image of a bookshelf, offered on a website, and spies
on the things someone reads, the words and thoughts that have been in
someone's mind, the pages on someone's lap. Art in Theory 1900 to
2000. That book must have thousands of words, hundreds of pages, and
maybe not even one picture plate. Jonathan Spence's old dissertation
on China sits a few away from a compact travel guide, a few more from
My Life as Emperor. Wonder what that's all about, which ruler we're
talking about. Another cover looks to have Kanji characters among all
the Chinese stuff. More heavies. The Anti-Aesthetic, next to Art &
Otherness. Next to Semiotic Warfare. The Past, another book
explains, Is a Foreign Country. How to get there, and back, one
wonders -- until one moves further down: the answer may just be inside
Archeology of the Future. Fake, another proclaims. You want to
believe that, until you come to the simple white one with red
lettering - Uncertain States of America. One's astonished to learn
what titles people come up with. Tomorrow I should try one of these
books or at least build a bookshelf of my own."

The author of this passage, intending to innocently yet humorously comment on the photos of my bookshelf posted below (who knew someone would look that close? eeks), unwittingly managed to touch upon another aspect, a nerve currently running through two separate but interconnected spheres of my daily life. One is the connection to collecting and display, something which I have spent considerable time thinking about and researching over the last year or more, especially how collections and objects create narratives and inform us about their owners; and the other being the persistence of memory that comes with material possessions, namely books. Faced with the odd task of packing up my library of books over the last two weeks (attempting to move in opposition to the nostalgic leanings of Benjamin's essay "Unpacking My Library"), thoughts on collecting, ruminating on the past through objects and the significance of books have not been far from my mind. Moreover, I have always had a fascination for the ways in which the titles of books, especially when lined up on a bookshelf next to one another, inadvertently create curious yet fun associations and cryptic meanings.

Queen's Nails Annex, SF

 
Rebecca Goldfarb

 

Ana Theresa Fernandez

yah!

 

Jens Haaning show at SFAI

ugh

 

new love of my life

my brand new custom made elm wood bookshelf...courtesy of Wang Wei's dad. the best 2500 kuai (USD$340) ever spent!

 

 

 

Happy 2008! one world dream?

Long awaited 2008 is finally here! now the countdown to the "One World. One Dream." Beijing Olympics is underway in a whole new way. I flew back from Shanghai last night and (because my flight was delayed) went straight to a dinner at Wei's house. What a treat--salad with roasted beets, eggplant puree, beef with lemon and mint sauce and tangyuan for dessert. We ate and drank and watched bad Chinese TV while counting down the hours until we finally all raised our glasses one by one as our individual cell phones struck midnight, which curiously, ended up being several minutes apart. I guess I never realized that there is no satellite time here beamed to cell phones, we all just set the phones ourselves and so each of us were living on different time, as it were. A funny proposition when you think that all of China is living under the singular time zone of "beijing time".

Despite the frigid temperatures, it is nice to be back in Beijing. Meetings with Gao Shiming in Hangzhou were productive and Shanghai as well. I got to meet up with some other artists based at the Academy--Zhang Peili, Geng Jianyi--and those temporarily visiting for teaching--Yang Zhenzhong and Chen Shaoxiong. Saw/met/taught/talked to Gao's first year curating students about curating and museum practice for 3 hours one afternoon. I spoke mostly about my experience working at the Asian Art Museum in SF for several years, about institutional practices in the States, funding issues, the pitfalls of culturally specific museums in America and so on. At the end, one of the first questions from a student was: "你是从哪一个国家？”or "What county are you from?" My standard answer "America" was then followed up by "Are you Native American?". Jeez. I get asked a lot of things living here in China--my salary, cost of my home in Oakland, where I studied Chinese, etc--but most often about my identity. I think this was the first time someone thought I was Native American!

On the night of the 28th I took the train to Shanghai and had 2 full days there of meeting artists and seeing what shows I could (there wasn't much because it is wintertime). My hope of seeing Zhang Huan's huge factory were dashed as he is swamped working on upcoming solo show so that will have to wait until after I get back from States in late Feb. Went to a festive annual New Year's party at BizArt which, it seemed, the entire Shanghai art scene attended. Everyone was there with kids in tow playing games like limbo and tug of war, giving out gifts, not to mention karaoke singing, and later on, poker. Kind of nice to see the entire Shanghai art scene like one big family hanging out together...that sort of thing just doesn't happen in Beijing. things here are too disparate or politically divided or something.