Issue 2: CHINA
With its extraordinary transformation over the past decade, China’s contemporary art scene has become the focus of intense international scrutiny, featured in numerous publications and surveyed by a multitude of large-scale exhibitions in cities worldwide. Corresponding to this hype, China has emerged in international discourse as both a utopia and a lawless borderland, its art market often seen as holding untapped riches – all it takes is education! – while its art practice is frequently made an emblem of the cynicism and collusion endemic to a bubble environment. Yet there is a hint in both these extreme views of the reflection of a self-regarding gaze: “China” may tell us more about the conditions for international contemporary art than it does anything about itself.
Unfolding over the course of the next month, the July 2010 issue of ART iT picks up this train of thought by addressing the theme CHINA. However, far from attempting to counter prevailing distortions with a more precise vision, we consider China as a metaphor, a site of projection for the aspirations and anxieties informing contemporary art today. As such, this issue takes a digressive and diversionary approach toward its subject matter.
In the cover interview, Deputy Editor Andrew Maerkle interviews British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien about his recently completed multichannel installation Ten Thousand Waves (2010), which was shot primarily in China, and how it relates to his previous works and post-colonial theory, while in a complementary essay, Gao Shiming, one of the curators of the 2008 Guangzhou Triennial, “Farewell to Post-Colonialism,” untangles the problematics of spectatorship inherent in the work.
In this month’s short interview, Shanghai-based conceptual artist Xu Zhen covers topics ranging from “Middle Eastern Art” to questions on the ethics of art making. Special contributions include the writer and curator Hu Fang‘s speculative essay on the relations between society and cinema in China today, “Das Kapital of the Senses,” as well as architect Naohiko Hino‘s comparative analysis of Chinese and Japanese urbanization.
Pushing further into the realm of metaphor, Calcutta-based writer and editor Aveek Sen revisits the poetry of Emily Dickinson through an essay on Roni Horn’s exhibition of mixed-media works, photographs and sculptures, “Well and Truly,” at Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria. For ON RECORD, the Austria-born artist Jun Yang explains the origins of the recently launched Taipei Contemporary Art Center. And in the latest installment of ART iT’s ongoing correspondence “Curators on the Move,” Hou Hanru replies to Hans Ulrich Obrist with a call to preserve the intimacy between artist and artwork – a relationship that is threatened by the very system that supports contemporary practice in Asia, the market.
Alongside thematic content, we also present the latest columns from our regular contributors Dan Cameron, Doryun Chong, Vasif Kortun, Noi Sawaragi, Minoru Shimizu and Kyoichi Tsuzuki, as well as updated exhibition reviews and art-related news coverage.
It’s tempting to interpret “China” as representing a minor crisis in internationalism today. As the monoliths of generations past slowly crumble, China is both a monolithic artifact of nationalist worldviews and, with its dynamic influx and outflux of capital, labor and ideas, an unignorable vision of a piecemeal future. What does it mean to be international, to engage with things that are beyond local? As the diverse opinions presented in this issue suggest, part of that entails finding new significance in the fragmentary, the out-of-context and the untranslatable.
– The Editors