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Zhan Wang, Garden Utopia (detail), 2006-08
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Art in Shanghai
September 3-16, 2008
China's time in the world's spotlight has only begun. With a biennial and two art fairs opening next week in Shanghai and
a major exhibition of Shanghai art and design in Toronto, Artkrush looks past the Beijing Olympics' spangled, record-breaking
pomp to the vibrant art scene of China's largest city. We examine the ShContemporary art fair, which covers work from 20 countries; we single out the dreamy, transporting videos of ShC Best of Discovery artist
Hiraki Sawa; and Artkrush editor Paul Laster speaks to curator Christopher Phillips about his Shanghai Kaleidoscope show at the Royal Ontario Museum. Our media pick, Shanghai: The Architecture of China's Great Urban Center, explores the city's uncanny skyline, while, on the gallery circuit, we recommend Sarah Morris' origami-inspired abstractions at London's White Cube and an energetic group show of '80s art at New York's Paul Kasmin Gallery.
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Moscow's New It Girl
(New York Times, August 15)
Dasha Zhukova has become an overnight Russian-art sensation. Zhukova, the girlfriend of billionaire collector Roman Abramovich, hosted a dinner party in June that attracted an international clique of art-market elites, including Ronald S. Lauder, Larry Gagosian, and Jeff Koons. The soirée was held in Moscow's Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage, which Zhukova is transforming into a contemporary-art center. Recently, she's visited the US and Europe — hitting Damien Hirst's studio, Dia:Beacon, and the Beyeler Foundation, among other hot spots — in an attempt to get a real-world art education. "I'm taking different aspects of different institutions
that are inspiring influences," she said. Next month, Zhukova will co-host the Serpentine Gallery's fundraiser.
Indian Art Goes Public
(New York Times, August 25)
What started as a private obsession for Anupam Poddar is about to become a public invitation to take in the best of new Indian
art. Poddar and his mother, Lekha, have stuffed their home with the 7,000 pieces — including work by Subodh Gupta, Sudarshan Shetty, and Susanta Mandal — that will comprise the Devi Art Foundation, India's first contemporary-art museum. The inaugural show, Still Moving Image, will feature video and photography from 25 artists. A decade of economic growth has bolstered the Indian art market, and
Poddar says that collectors and artists alike have adopted an increasingly international outlook.
Cultural Revolution Still Too Sensitive
(Art Newspaper, August 20)
The Chinese government is barring its museums from lending artworks to a show at New York's Asia Society. The exhibition, Art and China's Revolution, spans more than 30 years of Chinese art following Mao Zedong's founding of the People's Republic in 1949. Asia Society director Melissa Chiu, who co-curated the show, said that after
accepting the requests for the museum pieces, the Chinese Ministry of Culture withdrew its offer. Said Chiu, "We were only
told unofficially by people in government the reason was because this was the year of the Olympics, and the Cultural Revolution
is a sensitive subject." In related stories, artist Zhang Hongtu's rendition of the Bird's Nest stadium was banned from an Olympics-related exhibition, while Graffiti Research Lab's James Powderly was jailed in Beijing for aiding the Students for a Free Tibet protest.
Swoon Takes to the River
(New York Times, August 17)
Street artist Swoon has assembled a team of fellow creatives to create Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea, a group of seven floating sculptures fashioned from salvaged materials. Part communal-living experiment, part art project,
the vessels' crew and captains will act as narrators and performers in the large-scale piece, which will feature a live score
by Dark Dark Dark. The artsy fleet will travel down the Hudson River, from Troy to Long Island City, where it will come to rest at Deitch Studios and form part of Swoon's solo exhibition.
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White Cube to unload "Hirst mountain" more »
Frank Gehry out of Brooklyn theater project more »
What does design mean now? more »
Tracey Emin self-portrait stolen in Edinburgh more »
A new look for New York's skyline more »
São Paulo establishing registry to preserve street art more »
Early Lucian Freud paintings unearthed, go on display more »
LACMA nabs Ed Kienholz's abortion sculpture more »
Cambodian artists reinterpret past with portraits of Pol Pot more »
Inside the world of architectural outcast Lebbeus Woods more »
Image of serial killer used to promote 2012 London Olympics more »
Getting personal with LA painter Alison van Pelt more »
Exploring the boundaries of reality in film and video more »
Ex-Lounge Lizard John Lurie slithers back with a series of paintings more »
Mark Gibian's cantilevered steel sculptures adorn Hudson River Park more »
Two Texas exhibits offer complementary takes on race more »
Sun refuses to set on designer Alexander Girard more »
The good, the bad, and the ugly of public art more »
Jeff Koons designs Greek collector's yacht more »
What happens to Olympic buildings after the games are over? more »
Film critic and artist Manny Farber dies at 91 more »
New York Times art critic John Russell dies at 89 more »
Note: Some online publications require registration to access the articles. If you encounter a registration screen, try a
shared username and password from BugMeNot.
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[ ShContemporary 08 ] |
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Lin Tianmiao / Huang Rui / Zhang Huan
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The Beijing Olympics have drawn to a close, but the Asian art world is getting ready for its own pageant of sorts, as a spate
of art fairs and biennials kicks off in Shanghai. The second ShContemporary joins the more established Shanghai Art Fair and 2008 Shanghai Biennale to showcase a broad selection of big names and fresh faces.
ShContemporary 08 features 150 galleries from 20 countries, split evenly between artists from inside and outside Asia. Vienna's
Hilger Contemporary displays Spencer Tunick's trademark photos of mass nude happenings in cities around the world, while Zhang Huan explores the body and its place in Chinese culture with his recycled temple-ash works at Pace Beijing, a new space for New
York's Pace Wildenstein. Bodhi Art exhibits unsettling security-based photographs by rising Indian star Shilpa Gupta, and Zhou Xiaohu, represented by the Walsh Gallery of Chicago, contributes Concentration Training Camp, a sly video and photographic commentary on corporate conformity set in the artist's native Shanghai.
Chinese urbanism comes into clear focus in works such as Anothermountainman's Lanwei photo series of abandoned construction projects at 10 Chancery Lane Gallery and the photo-assemblages of Shanghai dwellings by Spain's Isidro Blasco at Contrasts Gallery. Beijing's Long March Space brings Zhan Wang's contemplative stainless-steel rock gardens, while Alexander Ochs Galleries highlights the works of Wang Mai, whose cartoonish, color-drenched canvases offer a snide twist on recent clichés in Chinese painting. James Cohan Gallery focuses on the darkly playful postcolonial works of British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, extending coverage of the artist with a concurrent solo show at its new Shanghai outpost.
For the Best of Discovery exhibition, 11 international curators selected a range of markedly experimental works. Pieces by better-known figures such as Beijing's Wang Luyan — a muscular satirist of consumption and politics — share space with sprawling, crafty installations from emerging Australian
duo Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro and the psych-tinged sculptures and paintings of New Zealander Rohan Wealleans. By way of Israel and Amsterdam, Yael Bartana employs cultural symbols to unpack political concerns, and from Japan, upstart provocateur Tadasu Takamine — most notorious for his controversial Kimura-san video, which shows the artist helping a disabled friend masturbate — is grouped with his more sedate countryman Sakae Ozawa.
Finally, the Outdoor Projects present 20 large-scale pieces beyond the booths, including iconic text-based works by Lawrence Weiner, a tension-charged accumulation of windows and doors by Liu Wei, live tattooed pigs from Wim Delvoye's Art Farm, and Same like Me, a zoo-like, glassed-in enclosure by Wang Wei that plays on the politics of observation.
As if ShContemporary weren't enough for Shanghai art-goers, the 100-plus galleries at the Shanghai Art Fair, now in its 12th
year, offer more commercial and traditional works, but expect something more adventurous at its ShanghART and 1918 ArtSpace booths. And the seventh installment of the Shanghai Biennale builds on the theme of "Trans Local Motion" with native heavyweights
the Big Dipper Group — comprised of Liu Yue, Wu Lizhong, and Xu Xubing — and international iconoclasts like America's Mike Kelley, Korea's Sanggil Kim, and Israel's Guy Ben-Ner.
Of course, with almost a dozen other biennials, triennials, and assorted art proceedings opening in Gwangju, Busan, Singapore, Guangzhou, and Taipei this month, Shanghai is only the first stop on this season's Asian art circuit.
- Samantha Culp
ShContemporary 08 runs from September 10 to 13 at the Shanghai Exhibition Center; the Shanghai Art Fair is on view from September
9 to 14 at ShanghaiMART; and the Shanghai Biennale takes over the Shanghai Art Museum from September 9 to November 16.
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The Art of Lee Miller
San Francisco
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Now through September 14
The Art of Lee Miller traces the artist's fascinating metamorphosis from model and muse to commercial photographer and photojournalist. Through Vogue fashion spreads and portraits by Edward Steichen, Pablo Picasso, and Man Ray, the exhibition sets the scene with Miller's glamorous early career, while 140 of her own works reveal her evolution behind
the camera, propelled by a colorful personal life and seminal moments in 20th-century art (surrealism) and history (World
War II). After apprenticing with Ray in Paris, Miller opened a commercial studio in pre-WWII New York, then spent five years
living and making pictures in Egypt. As one of a few female correspondents reporting from the frontlines, Miller produced several remarkable photojournalistic essays, including brutal images of Dachau and Buchenwald following the concentration camps' liberation.
- Laura Richard Janku
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Totally Rad: New York in the '80s
New York
Paul Kasmin Gallery
Now through September 6
The summer exhibition at Paul Kasmin Gallery presents a group of large and loud masterpieces by '80s art-world superstars.
Armed with a gritty desire to venerate popular culture and reconstruct art history, these artists employed appropriation to create their own visual language. Fred and Wilma Flintstone tower above a waterfall in Agua Pollination, a vivacious Kenny Scharf painting mounted between a black-and-white Warhol and a signature Basquiat. Charm of Tradition, Haim Steinbach's assemblage of dingy sneakers and lamp, nods to Duchamp's readymade and is nestled between colorful giant canvases by Peter Halley and Frank Stella. Another iconic piece, Perfect Vehicles by Allan McCollum, references funerary urns and antique Chinese vases with five ambiguous, monochromatic forms.
- Julia Fryett
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Sarah Morris: Lesser Panda
London
White Cube
Now through September 6
Conceptual British painter and filmmaker Sarah Morris turns her attention to Beijing for the latest installment of her ongoing project, which interprets various aspects of a city
— architectural, psychological — in large-scale abstract canvases of glossy house paint. In the enormous 2028 (Rings), the ring roads that surround Beijing inspired Morris' interlinked, multicolored circles, echoing the Olympic insignia within a geometric background. Her Origami series concentrates on the ancient Japanese paper art, dividing colors according to the fold lines for traditional designs,
as in Swan. Morris' film 1972, meanwhile, juxtaposes an interview with the head psychologist of the Olympic police in Munich — where members of the Israeli team were killed by terrorists in 1972 — with archival footage. The chilling effect provides
a striking contrast to her vibrant paintings.
- Lucy Davies
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Malick Sidibé: Chemises
Amsterdam
Foam_Fotografiemuseum
Now through October 15
One of Africa's foremost portrait photographers, Malick Sidibé began his career as a party and event photographer in Bamako, Mali. From 1962 to 1973, he photographed weddings, baptisms,
birthdays, and impromptu parties organized by local youth clubs. Afterward, he would mount and number his snapshots on colored
sheets of card stock so that partygoers could view the photos and order prints. Overlooked in his studio for years, a selection
of these scrapbook-like sample images, which joyously capture the optimism of postcolonial Mali, was recently readied for
exhibition and compiled into a book. At Foam, the photo sheets are displayed alongside Sidibé's iconic '70s studio portraits of hipsters, couples, families, and friends — all dressed to the nines and putting their best faces forward.
- Paul Laster
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Loss
Knislinge, Sweden
Wanås Foundation
Now through October 19
Memory is the theme of the heady summer group show Loss, which looks at the numerous ways that artists create or transform memorials. In his video Death in Dallas, Serbian artist Zoran Naskovski combines iconic footage of JFK's final minutes in the Dallas motorcade with a Balkan folk
requiem announcing the news of his death; the singer's sad voice and poetic language elevate the event to the mythological.
By contrast, Sophie Calle's photographic project The Detatchment pays homage to lost memorials. Calle photographed former locations of symbols from the German Democratic Republic that had
been effaced or removed, and interviewed East Berlin residents about their personal memories of them. The demise of tyrants
and their tokens is also pictured in Deimantas Narkevicius' video Once in the XX Century, which documents the destruction of a statue of Lenin in Lithuania.
- Tor Billgren
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[ Hiraki Sawa ] |
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Hiraki Sawa
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Accustomed to living between cultures, Japanese-born and UK-based video artist Hiraki Sawa embraces the movement of people and the mutable notion of home as central themes in his work. In his early videos, Sawa mapped
animated caravans, flying birds, and miniature men over scenes of his spare London apartment, creating surrealist meditations on the familiar and the foreign, travel and transience, and innocence and isolation.
In Dwelling, a project he completed in 2002 as a grad student, tiny animated planes soberly travel around his apartment, transforming
Sawa's bed and kitchen counter into runways for a chaotic and impersonal airport. The video's grainy black-and-white footage
and the monotonous roar of jet engines underscore the tense restlessness of living in exile and the melancholy of being out
of place in one's own home. Sawa exploits the use of scale in this and other works, such as Migration, from the following year, and 2004's Going Places Sitting Down, which invent playful landscapes where bathtubs hold oceans and sheepskin rugs double as snow-covered fields for a parade of nomadic men and their flock.
Since 2004, Sawa's whimsical blend of reality and animation has spawned several solo and group shows in Australia, Europe,
Japan, and the US, including the inaugural exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum's Black Box space in 2005–2006.
As Sawa grows as an artist, he, like photographer Eadweard Muybridge before him, continues to be fascinated with deconstructing motion. Ghostly figures head toward unknown destinations in both
2006's Murmuring and 2007's Hidden Tree. Hako — a six-screen video installation commissioned for his 2007 solo show at London's Chisenhale Gallery — takes Sawa's work in a sculptural direction, examining objects that move in place without actually going anywhere, such
as Ferris wheels and carousels. By balancing his sense of wonder and adventure with an inventive use of animation and scale,
Sawa has discovered a unique world right under his nose.
- Shayla Harris
A new video by Hiraki Sawa is on view in the Best of Discovery exhibition at ShContemporary 08 in Shanghai from September 10 to 13.
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[ Christopher Phillips ] |
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From top:
Wang Yiyang / Yang Zhenzhong / Shi Yong
View more images » |
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| Christopher Phillips, senior curator at New York's International Center of Photography, has been following contemporary Chinese art and culture for nearly a decade — befriending and supporting the best of the
country's creative community. Drawing on his knowledge of the Shanghai scene, Phillips recently curated the Royal Ontario
Museum exhibition Shanghai Kaleidoscope, which poetically portrays the architecture, urban design, contemporary art, and fashion of that booming metropolis. Artkrush
editor Paul Laster caught up with Phillips before his next Shanghai adventure to discuss the latter's love of the city and
his survey of its dynamic arts offerings. |
AK: What first took you to China, and how often have you returned?
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CP: I first went to China in the fall of 1999 and visited Beijing and Shanghai. At that time, I was an editor at Art in America, and I'd met some of the Chinese artists who had begun to show in the US. They all said, "China is crazy right now! You've
got to come! You won't believe the things that are happening." So I went, and they were right — there was an incredible art
scene that was just starting to blossom. It was a relatively small scene at that time, and there were only a few foreigners
making the rounds, so it was very easy to meet everyone quickly. I've traveled to China three or four times a year ever since,
returning primarily to Beijing and Shanghai, and I've watched the artists that I first met, such as Ai Weiwei, become international superstars.
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AK: How has Shanghai changed since your first visit?
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Shanghai: The Architecture of China's Great Urban Center
Jay Pridmore
Abrams
Jay Pridmore's architectural survey of Shanghai unfolds like the lotus on the Westin Bund Center's crown. Beginning at the Bund in the city's center,, the book meanders across the Huangpu River to the Pudong financial district, into the old downtown Puxi, and out to the sprawling suburbs. In the opening pages, Pridmore admires the centerpiece of the Pudong skyline, the iconic,
retro-futuristic Oriental Pearl Television Tower. Subsequent chapters highlight China's penchant for ornamentation: Adrian Smith's Jin Mao Tower and Webb Zerafa Menkes Housden's China Insurance Building are both topped with decorative flourishes, and the four circular pods of Paul Andreu's Oriental Arts Center together form an open orchid. The mix of Shanghai's new developments and older structures is another example of the everyday
encounters between tradition and innovation that has become emblematic of modern China. Even as the country leaps into the
21st century with brash modernist marvels, such as Brian Andrew's gateway arch at the Shanghai Securities Exchange and Ma Qingyun's Qingpu Community Island, vestiges of the old China remain.
- Adda Birnir
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Cover Art
Zhan Wang
Garden Utopia, 2006-08
Stainless steel and dry ice
Dimensions variable
Installation view at Long March Space
Courtesy Long March Space, Beijing
All Rights Reserved
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Editor
Paul Laster
Deputy Editor
Joel Withrow
News Editor
Greg Zinman
Reviews Editor
H.G. Masters
Contributing Editors
Adda Birnir
Jennifer Y. Chen
Erin Cowgill
Shana Nys Dambrot
Sarah Kessler
Doug Levy
Andrew Maerkle
Marlyne Sahakian
Peter Stepek
Sarah Stephenson
Contributors
Tor Billgren
Samantha Culp
Lucy Davies
Julia Fryett
Shayla Harris
Laura Richard Janku
Lauren McKee
Mailer Design
Jessica Bauer-Greene
Mark Barry
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Production
Anna Altman
Andrew Steinmetz
Publishers
Sascha Lewis
Mark Mangan
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