fluktor -|||- study - office - newsletter October 22, 2005

artdaily.com, 10/21/2005
The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art

[image] Xu Bing, Ghosts Pounding the Wall, 1992. Collection of the artist.
BUFFALO, N.Y.-The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary chinese art is coming to Buffalo in October 2005. Organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the University at Buffalo Art Galleries in collaboration with the Millennium Art Museum, Beijing, The Wall will be the largest exhibition of contemporary chinese art to travel beyond China. It also marks the first collaboration between American art museums and a major chinese art institution focusing on contemporary chinese art.

Curated by Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Buffalo and a leading authority on contemporary chinese art Gao Minglu, The Wall will address the work of more than fifty chinese artists working in a variety of mediums. More traditional methods such as painting, sculpture, and works on paper will be on view as well as work in more progressive mediums such as video, installation, performance, and film. Assistant Curator for Film and a current Ph.D. candidate at Yale University Huang Bingyi is organizing the film component of the exhibition. The Wall will be an interdisciplinary cultural event that will also include the publication of a bilingual catalogue, a film festival, educational programming, performance art, music, and dance programs.

http://www.artdaily.com/section/news/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=15275&b=chinese%20art

****************************

Walls to be focus of conference

Scholars to examine how real and metaphorical walls are reshaping modern China

By KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Contributor

More than 30 scholars from Asia and North America will gather today through Sunday in Buffalo for "The Roles and Representations of Walls in the Reshaping of Chinese Modernity," a multidisciplinary exploration of the cultural, social and political meanings of walls in modern China.

The conference coincides with the opening tomorrow of "The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art," a major exhibition of modern Chinese art that has two venues at UB—the UB Art Gallery in the Center for the Arts and the UB Anderson Gallery located near the South Campus—as well as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Buffalo is the only North American venue for this exhibition, which comes to the United States from Beijing's Millennium Museum and features many works never before seen outside of China. The exhibition will run through Jan. 29.

The conference will explore "a broad range of dividing mechanisms," notes Thomas Burkman, director of the Asian Studies Program in the College of Arts and Sciences and an organizer of the conference. Participants, who hail from such fields as history, communication, medicine, Asian studies and comparative literature, will discuss ideological, political, cultural, medical and ethnic walls in China, Burkman adds, as well as address the issue of Internet walls, or "firewalls," which he defines as "walls erected in China to prevent the distribution of information on the Internet."

Arthur Waldron, author of the influential book "The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth," will present the keynote speech at 4:30 p.m. today in the Screening Room in the Center for the Arts. A reception in the adjacent UB Art Gallery will follow.

In his keynote, Waldron, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, will reflect on the significance of the Great Wall in the 15 years since he wrote his book. While the Great Wall undoubtedly is China's most famous wall, its historical significance and original function are matters of dispute among scholars. Some claim that it was never a single, ancient structure, but rather a highly discontinuous series of structures that reached its peak in the 15th or 16th centuries. Others explore the Great Wall as a myth largely produced by Europeans, only later to become a key symbol of national identity.

Although Waldron's keynote on the Great Wall will kick off the conference, conference participants will go far beyond the Great Wall to look at all types of walls—physical and abstract. Sessions, to be held in the same three venues as the art exhibition, will discuss urban, cultural and legal walls in China, as well as their artistic, literary and cinematic depictions.

Papers to be delivered tackle issues as diverse as the Chinese government's silence on human rights issues, divisions in the domestic sphere, pathogens and "biological walls" in disease and health care, and the barrier between the self and others in poetry. Participants will examine some of the economic divisions facing China as well.

"We see it (the conference) as a step toward more global awareness on the part of the university," says Roger Des Forges, a conference organizer and UB professor of history.

Walls arose as a central symbol in modern Chinese art and culture in the 1980s, Des Forges notes. In 1984, China's Deng Xiaoping, an advocate of reform and openness, issued a call to the People's Republic to "love our China and restore our long wall(s)." In the two decades since then, as the nation has continued to transition from state socialism to a market economy, Chinese artists have used representations of various walls as a way to express themselves and their take on modern issues.

Xiaoping's proclamation represents a deep change in modern China's perception of walls, according to Des Forges.

"There were a great many walls broken down in the 1950s and 1960s," he explains, most notably the walls around the cities of Shanghai and Beijing. The Chinese government let the Great Wall fall into disrepair as well. The stone and earth from these structures were put to what was thought to be better use as materials for roads or agriculture. However, in the 1980s, citizens started to take pride again in China's walls as symbols of national achievement and history, Des Forges says. No longer were they seen only as barriers to progress or communication. Today, efforts to preserve ancient walls thrive.

"What we have now are two different concepts of modernity," says Des Forges—one that sees walls as barriers to progress, the other that views them as an important symbol of China's past.

"We're exploring (during the conference) some of these interactions of the past and present," explains Des Forges.

The conference will conclude at 3 p.m. on Sunday in Clifton Hall in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery with a closing keynote from Minglu Gao, associate professor of modern and contemporary Chinese art at the University of Pittsburgh, curator of "The Walls" art exhibition and former assistant professor of art history at UB.

Burkman says observers are welcome at the conference without registration and without cost. For more information on times and locations, go to http://cas. buffalo.edu/depts/asianstudies or call the Asian Studies Program at 645-3474.

The conference is cosponsored by the UB Art Galleries, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, WLS Spencer Foundation, Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, College of Arts and Sciences, Asian Studies Program, Department of History, Department of Art History, Julian Park Chair in Comparative Literature, the Humanities Institute and the Mentholatum Company, Inc.

http://www.buffalo.edu/reporter/vol37/vol37n7/articles/WallsConf.html

*****************************

The Buffalo News, 10/18/2005
Scaling 'The Wall'
Expansive exhibition at three local galleries allows Chinese artistry to emerge as one of world's great wonders
By RICHARD HUNTINGTON, News Art Critic

[images] A still photo from the video "Farewell My Concubine," (2002), above, and a photo from "Big Explosion" (1993), below, are part of "The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art."

In 1989 in Beijing, about six months before the tragic incidents in Tiananmen Square, a curator named Gao Minglu organized a groundbreaking exhibition simply titled "China Avant-Garde." The show contained a kind of art never publicly seen in China, with enough of it trespassing into forbidden social and political territory to inspire authorities to shut the show down twice.

While Western contemporary art had shot off in multiple directions, making the whole idea of the avant-garde seem an antiquated thing, in China the avant-garde was just beginning.

Gao now brings that avant-garde to Buffalo. During his recent tenure as an assistant professor at the University at Buffalo, Gao has organized another, much more ambitious and wide-ranging exhibition of Chinese contemporary art. It's called "The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art," a colossal show that debuted this summer at the Millennium Art Museum in Beijing.

"The Wall" opens Thursday at three venues in Buffalo - the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and at UB's two galleries, University at Buffalo Art Gallery in the Center for the Arts on the North Campus and the Anderson Gallery in the city. It is the first collaboration featuring contemporary Chinese art between U.S. art museums and a major Chinese art organization.

Project director and associate curator at the Albright-Knox, Holly E. Hughes, said what Gao started with his 1989 exhibition reaches a grand culmination in "The Wall."

"Gao's show was the first one to deal with conceptual and performance artists," Hughes said. "Before that, these activities were underground things. Gao has come back to the important ideas that he set out in that exhibition and is now able to work with these artists in a completely free way."

Forty-seven artists will be represented by about 83 works, some of them filling entire rooms, and many never before seen outside China (if even seen within China). The exhibition races through the entire gamut of contemporary media, from painting and photography to installation and performance and all sorts of mixed and combined approaches. A film component, curated by Bingyi Huang and to be screened at UB, ranges over a variety of Chinese cinema from the 1990s on.

Gao has described his use of the wall as the central metaphor for the exhibition as a way to approach the impact of physical walls on China - architectural monuments like China's Great Wall and the Three Gorge Dam Project, even the Berlin Wall - and the existence of virtual walls "as cultural or social boundaries experienced by Chinese citizens."

The exhibition is set around three large themes. "The Wall as Memory" (at the Albright-Knox) includes work that deals with the Great Wall as an ambivalent national symbol. This section includes Xu Bing's extensive ink rubbings of the wall made with the help of a large crew of assistants working for 25 days. The final work is a massive scroll arranged to terminate in a pile of earth with a tomblike aspect.

"The Wall as an Ongoing Social Space" (also at the gallery) holds work by Liu Xiaodong, one of China's foremost figurative painters, among many others. Liu's painting often has a satirical edge that attempts to convey the strains of a society undergoing massive cultural change.

The artists in "The Wall as Concept" (at the UB galleries) confront the conflict between strong Chinese traditions and modernity, East and West, male and female. Zhan Wang, in an installation at Anderson Gallery, creates a lyrical illusion of a traditional Chinese landscape (mists courtesy of dry ice) and then populates it with modern kitchen pots and pans and utensils. Also in this section is "Apartment Art," a term coined by Gao, which shows work by Chinese women artists who use domestic materials to makes textile sculptures and soft landscapes.

"The Wall as Visual Screen," the cinema segment, features a number of prominent filmmakers, and includes a nine-hour documentary of the Tie Xi rust-belt district by Wang Bing.

In conjunction with the exhibition a major international research conference, "The Roles and Representation of Walls in the Reshaping of Chinese Modernity" will take place from Thursday though Sunday in the three venues. The conference will involve a wide range of disciplines in its 25 participants, from the People's Republic of China, Taiwan and North America. For information call 645-3474 or go to cas.buffalo.edu/depts/asianstudies/conferences.

"The Wall" would be an exciting event for no other reason than it opens up an entirely fresh area of contemporary art, some of it reflecting on our own art and some of it taking a completely unfamiliar vantage point. The show was further enriched, however, by Gao and film curator Huang who sought out artists in remote areas outside the large cities.

Familiar to some will be well-known Chinese artists such a Xu Bing or Wenda Gu, (whose gallery-filling installation "100,000 Kilometers" at the Albright-Knox features bricks and scrims made from hair). But "The Wall" promises many surprises, as we get a first view of artists who not only are unknown here but haven't yet emerged in China.

For more information, www.thewallexhibition.org.

http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20051018/1055011.asp

__________________

with kind regards,

Matthias Arnold
(Art-Eastasia list)

http://www.chinaresource.org
http://www.fluktor.de

__________________________________________

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	October 22, 2005: [achtung! kunst] The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art +Conf: "The Roles and Representations of Walls in the Reshaping of Chinese Modernity"

	artdaily.com, 10/21/2005 The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art [image] Xu Bing, Ghosts Pounding the Wall, 1992. Collection of the artist. BUFFALO, N.Y.-The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary chinese art is coming to Buffalo in October 2005. Organized by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the University at Buffalo Art Galleries in collaboration with the Millennium Art Museum, Beijing, The Wall will be the largest exhibition of contemporary chinese art to travel beyond China. It also marks the first collaboration between American art museums and a major chinese art institution focusing on contemporary chinese art. Curated by Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Buffalo and a leading authority on contemporary chinese art Gao Minglu, The Wall will address the work of more than fifty chinese artists working in a variety of mediums. More traditional methods such as painting, sculpture, and works on paper will be on view as well as work in more progressive mediums such as video, installation, performance, and film. Assistant Curator for Film and a current Ph.D. candidate at Yale University Huang Bingyi is organizing the film component of the exhibition. The Wall will be an interdisciplinary cultural event that will also include the publication of a bilingual catalogue, a film festival, educational programming, performance art, music, and dance programs. http://www.artdaily.com/section/news/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=15275&b=chinese%20art ************************** Walls to be focus of conference Scholars to examine how real and metaphorical walls are reshaping modern China By KEVIN FRYLING Reporter Contributor More than 30 scholars from Asia and North America will gather today through Sunday in Buffalo for "The Roles and Representations of Walls in the Reshaping of Chinese Modernity," a multidisciplinary exploration of the cultural, social and political meanings of walls in modern China. The conference coincides with the opening tomorrow of "The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art," a major exhibition of modern Chinese art that has two venues at UB—the UB Art Gallery in the Center for the Arts and the UB Anderson Gallery located near the South Campus—as well as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Buffalo is the only North American venue for this exhibition, which comes to the United States from Beijing's Millennium Museum and features many works never before seen outside of China. The exhibition will run through Jan. 29. The conference will explore "a broad range of dividing mechanisms," notes Thomas Burkman, director of the Asian Studies Program in the College of Arts and Sciences and an organizer of the conference. Participants, who hail from such fields as history, communication, medicine, Asian studies and comparative literature, will discuss ideological, political, cultural, medical and ethnic walls in China, Burkman adds, as well as address the issue of Internet walls, or "firewalls," which he defines as "walls erected in China to prevent the distribution of information on the Internet." Arthur Waldron, author of the influential book "The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth," will present the keynote speech at 4:30 p.m. today in the Screening Room in the Center for the Arts. A reception in the adjacent UB Art Gallery will follow. In his keynote, Waldron, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, will reflect on the significance of the Great Wall in the 15 years since he wrote his book. While the Great Wall undoubtedly is China's most famous wall, its historical significance and original function are matters of dispute among scholars. Some claim that it was never a single, ancient structure, but rather a highly discontinuous series of structures that reached its peak in the 15th or 16th centuries. Others explore the Great Wall as a myth largely produced by Europeans, only later to become a key symbol of national identity. Although Waldron's keynote on the Great Wall will kick off the conference, conference participants will go far beyond the Great Wall to look at all types of walls—physical and abstract. Sessions, to be held in the same three venues as the art exhibition, will discuss urban, cultural and legal walls in China, as well as their artistic, literary and cinematic depictions. Papers to be delivered tackle issues as diverse as the Chinese government's silence on human rights issues, divisions in the domestic sphere, pathogens and "biological walls" in disease and health care, and the barrier between the self and others in poetry. Participants will examine some of the economic divisions facing China as well. "We see it (the conference) as a step toward more global awareness on the part of the university," says Roger Des Forges, a conference organizer and UB professor of history. Walls arose as a central symbol in modern Chinese art and culture in the 1980s, Des Forges notes. In 1984, China's Deng Xiaoping, an advocate of reform and openness, issued a call to the People's Republic to "love our China and restore our long wall(s)." In the two decades since then, as the nation has continued to transition from state socialism to a market economy, Chinese artists have used representations of various walls as a way to express themselves and their take on modern issues. Xiaoping's proclamation represents a deep change in modern China's perception of walls, according to Des Forges. "There were a great many walls broken down in the 1950s and 1960s," he explains, most notably the walls around the cities of Shanghai and Beijing. The Chinese government let the Great Wall fall into disrepair as well. The stone and earth from these structures were put to what was thought to be better use as materials for roads or agriculture. However, in the 1980s, citizens started to take pride again in China's walls as symbols of national achievement and history, Des Forges says. No longer were they seen only as barriers to progress or communication. Today, efforts to preserve ancient walls thrive. "What we have now are two different concepts of modernity," says Des Forges—one that sees walls as barriers to progress, the other that views them as an important symbol of China's past. "We're exploring (during the conference) some of these interactions of the past and present," explains Des Forges. The conference will conclude at 3 p.m. on Sunday in Clifton Hall in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery with a closing keynote from Minglu Gao, associate professor of modern and contemporary Chinese art at the University of Pittsburgh, curator of "The Walls" art exhibition and former assistant professor of art history at UB. Burkman says observers are welcome at the conference without registration and without cost. For more information on times and locations, go to http://cas. buffalo.edu/depts/asianstudies or call the Asian Studies Program at 645-3474. The conference is cosponsored by the UB Art Galleries, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, WLS Spencer Foundation, Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, College of Arts and Sciences, Asian Studies Program, Department of History, Department of Art History, Julian Park Chair in Comparative Literature, the Humanities Institute and the Mentholatum Company, Inc. http://www.buffalo.edu/reporter/vol37/vol37n7/articles/WallsConf.html *************************** The Buffalo News, 10/18/2005 Scaling 'The Wall' Expansive exhibition at three local galleries allows Chinese artistry to emerge as one of world's great wonders By RICHARD HUNTINGTON, News Art Critic [images] A still photo from the video "Farewell My Concubine," (2002), above, and a photo from "Big Explosion" (1993), below, are part of "The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art." In 1989 in Beijing, about six months before the tragic incidents in Tiananmen Square, a curator named Gao Minglu organized a groundbreaking exhibition simply titled "China Avant-Garde." The show contained a kind of art never publicly seen in China, with enough of it trespassing into forbidden social and political territory to inspire authorities to shut the show down twice. While Western contemporary art had shot off in multiple directions, making the whole idea of the avant-garde seem an antiquated thing, in China the avant-garde was just beginning. Gao now brings that avant-garde to Buffalo. During his recent tenure as an assistant professor at the University at Buffalo, Gao has organized another, much more ambitious and wide-ranging exhibition of Chinese contemporary art. It's called "The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art," a colossal show that debuted this summer at the Millennium Art Museum in Beijing. "The Wall" opens Thursday at three venues in Buffalo - the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and at UB's two galleries, University at Buffalo Art Gallery in the Center for the Arts on the North Campus and the Anderson Gallery in the city. It is the first collaboration featuring contemporary Chinese art between U.S. art museums and a major Chinese art organization. Project director and associate curator at the Albright-Knox, Holly E. Hughes, said what Gao started with his 1989 exhibition reaches a grand culmination in "The Wall." "Gao's show was the first one to deal with conceptual and performance artists," Hughes said. "Before that, these activities were underground things. Gao has come back to the important ideas that he set out in that exhibition and is now able to work with these artists in a completely free way." Forty-seven artists will be represented by about 83 works, some of them filling entire rooms, and many never before seen outside China (if even seen within China). The exhibition races through the entire gamut of contemporary media, from painting and photography to installation and performance and all sorts of mixed and combined approaches. A film component, curated by Bingyi Huang and to be screened at UB, ranges over a variety of Chinese cinema from the 1990s on. Gao has described his use of the wall as the central metaphor for the exhibition as a way to approach the impact of physical walls on China - architectural monuments like China's Great Wall and the Three Gorge Dam Project, even the Berlin Wall - and the existence of virtual walls "as cultural or social boundaries experienced by Chinese citizens." The exhibition is set around three large themes. "The Wall as Memory" (at the Albright-Knox) includes work that deals with the Great Wall as an ambivalent national symbol. This section includes Xu Bing's extensive ink rubbings of the wall made with the help of a large crew of assistants working for 25 days. The final work is a massive scroll arranged to terminate in a pile of earth with a tomblike aspect. "The Wall as an Ongoing Social Space" (also at the gallery) holds work by Liu Xiaodong, one of China's foremost figurative painters, among many others. Liu's painting often has a satirical edge that attempts to convey the strains of a society undergoing massive cultural change. The artists in "The Wall as Concept" (at the UB galleries) confront the conflict between strong Chinese traditions and modernity, East and West, male and female. Zhan Wang, in an installation at Anderson Gallery, creates a lyrical illusion of a traditional Chinese landscape (mists courtesy of dry ice) and then populates it with modern kitchen pots and pans and utensils. Also in this section is "Apartment Art," a term coined by Gao, which shows work by Chinese women artists who use domestic materials to makes textile sculptures and soft landscapes. "The Wall as Visual Screen," the cinema segment, features a number of prominent filmmakers, and includes a nine-hour documentary of the Tie Xi rust-belt district by Wang Bing. In conjunction with the exhibition a major international research conference, "The Roles and Representation of Walls in the Reshaping of Chinese Modernity" will take place from Thursday though Sunday in the three venues. The conference will involve a wide range of disciplines in its 25 participants, from the People's Republic of China, Taiwan and North America. For information call 645-3474 or go to cas.buffalo.edu/depts/asianstudies/conferences. "The Wall" would be an exciting event for no other reason than it opens up an entirely fresh area of contemporary art, some of it reflecting on our own art and some of it taking a completely unfamiliar vantage point. The show was further enriched, however, by Gao and film curator Huang who sought out artists in remote areas outside the large cities. Familiar to some will be well-known Chinese artists such a Xu Bing or Wenda Gu, (whose gallery-filling installation "100,000 Kilometers" at the Albright-Knox features bricks and scrims made from hair). But "The Wall" promises many surprises, as we get a first view of artists who not only are unknown here but haven't yet emerged in China. For more information, www.thewallexhibition.org. http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20051018/1055011.asp __________________ with kind regards, Matthias Arnold (Art-Eastasia list) http://www.chinaresource.org http://www.fluktor.de __________________________________________ An archive of this list as well as an subscribe/unsubscribe facility is available at: http://listserv.uni-heidelberg.de/archives/art-eastasia.html For postings earlier than 2005-02-23 please go to: http://www.fluktor.de/study/office/newsletter.htm