Session 1 – Geography:
Making a Map of Contemporary Chinese Art
16.00 – 17.30
Moderated by Drew Hammond
With: Waling Boers, Marianne Csáky, David Elliott, Christopher Moore, Qiu Anxiong, Andreas Schmid

DOUBLE FLY ART CENTER
CV – Website

Double Fly Art Center is a 9-member art collective which was formed in 2008 after all its members graduated from the New Media Department of the China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, having studied under Zhang Peili. Working across media as diverse as performance, video games, music videos, painting, and video art, they remain irreverent and anarchic in their critique of social norms in China, as well as of the international art market. Double Fly Art Center members now live predominantly in Hangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing and work collectively as well as individually. Recent exhibitions of their work include SEE/SAW: COLLECTIVE PRACTICE IN CHINA NOW (2012) and ON | OFF: CHINA’S YOUNG ARTISTS IN CONCEPT AND PRACTICE (2013) at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing and a solo-show at the Vanguard Gallery in Shanghai (2012). Their work has never before been shown in Berlin.

Double Fly Save the World, 2012

Faced with the self-assigned task to save the world, Double Fly produces a music-video starring themselves as our global leaders. In the frenzied commotion that is typical of the genre, such figures as Barack Obama and Bin Laden engage in frantic orgies, reminiscent of Silvio Berlusconi’s infamous Bunga Bunga parties, while they indiscriminately intermingle with superheroes and farm-animals (of which a few living specimens also fetter around), all impersonated by Double Fly’s members.

HU JIEMING
CV – Website

Hu Jieming (b. 1957, Shanghai) is one of the foremost pioneers of digital media and visual installation art in China, and a professor at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts. Hu graduated from the Fine Arts Department of the Shanghai Light Industry College in 1984. Since the 1980s he has used emerging technologies to create works which deconstruct time, historical strata and contemporary elements of Chinese culture. One of his main focuses is the simultaneity of the old and the new: a theme that he constantly questions in a variety of media ranging from photography, video works and digital interactive technology in juxtaposition with musical comments. Through his work, Hu strives to reveal the interconnected nature of the digital universe, imagining, as he describes it, “a kind of socialism of the future”. Hu Jieming is one of the founders of CAC | Chronus Art Center in Shanghai, where he will be exhibiting with renowned media artist, Jeffrey Shaw, concurrently with PANDAMONIUM. Recent exhibitions of his work include a solo-show titled Spectacle at the K11 Art Mall, in Shanghai (2014) and two group exhibitions at ShanghART in Beijing, both in 2014.

Outline Only, 2001

The images in Outline Only originally come from the famous postcard series The Sights of China, in which ‘the most attractive historical spots’ of China are featured. Scanned and processed, Hu has created a 9-minute video from this content. In it, the images are ‘played’ as they run sideways across the screen’s drawn-on musical staves. When positioned in the centre of the screen, coloured strokes on the staves trace the outline of the depicted cultural monuments and natural sights, thereby composing the music.

QIU ANXIONG
CV – Website

Qiu Anxiong (b. 1972, Chengdu) was born in the capital of Sichuan province in the southwest of China. There, he studied under the progressive artistic practice of Ye Yongqing and Zhang Xiaogang. Qiu and his friends collectively founded a bar which became a hub for the blossoming underground music and art circles in Sichuan, and his colleagues included He Duoling, Zhou Chunya, and Shen Xiaotong. In his animated films, Qiu co-mingles the classical and the contemporary, using the traditional Chinese ink-and-wash style to transpose contemporary social and environmental issues onto traditional Chinese landscapes. A friend and neighbor of Yang Fudong, Qiu has exhibited broadly internationally, having studied contemporary international art and traditional Chinese culture at the Kunsthochschule Kassel, Germany. In 2004 he began teaching at Shanghai Normal University and currently lives and works in Shanghai. Qiu received the Chinese Contemporary Art Award in 2006 and has exhibited widely, including a recent solo-show, titled Qiu Anxiong, The New Book of Mountains and Seas II at the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Ishøj, Denmark (2013) and group exhibition ‘Ink Art’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2013). He is one of the artists undertaking the PANDAMONIUM Residency, and will be producing new work for this show.

In the Sky (2005)
Flying South (2006)
Minguo Landscape (2006-2007)

PANDAMONIUM will show three of Qiu’s earliest animation works. After working predominantly in oil painting during his studies in Kassel and having later turned to landscape painting in the tradition of the old Chinese masters, Qiu’s return to Shanghai in 2004 marked a shift in interest towards video art. In the Sky (2005) is his first animation work. In it, the dystopian drama of urbanization is visualized as an ink painting on a single canvas, to which Qiu successively added, layer upon layer of ink, growing in tandem with the gradual metamorphosis of the city’s life-forms. In Flying South (2006), humanity struggles to create its own artificial systems of self-control, proving absurdly counterproductive. Minguo Landscape (2006-07), is marked by the same quiet detachment and timelessness as the previous two works, now in a historical exploration of the Chinese Republican period, starting in 1912. Using allegorical imagery to explore the impact of environmental degradation and social change, Qiu offers an exquisitely crafted contemplation on the past, the present, and the relationship between the two.

XU ZHEN
CV – Website

Xu Zhen (b. 1977, Shanghai) is a trans-medial conceptual artist based in Shanghai. Incorporating painting, installation, video, photography performance and even extending into curatorial practice, Xu’s work satirizes, exposes and reworks dominant rhetoric of the contemporary art-world. Currently working under his company name MadeIn Inc, a self-declared ‘multi-functional art company’, he appropriates the art-as-brand discourse to criticize it from within. A jester at heart, he plays on authorial conventions and expectations, creating pseudo-fictions replete with cultural clichés, wittingly challenging the pervasive longing for clearly delineated so-called cultural authenticity. An irreverent artist with a unique ability to produce work across multiple platforms and media, Xu Zhen is the key figure of the Shanghai art scene and a foundational figure for the generations of Chinese artists born since 1970. Xu’s practice reflects the lingering concerns of an artist participating in the international art world while remaining deeply sceptical of it and its conventions, most immediately the label ‘Chinese contemporary art’. Working in his own name since the late 1990s, Xu Zhen is now producing new works under MadeIn Company’s newly launched brand ‘Xu Zhen’. Recent major exhibitions include his retrospective, Xu Zhen: A MadeIn Company Production, at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (2014) and his Commissioned Artist exhibition at the Armory Show in New York (2014).

Shouting, 1998

Moving crowds go about their regular and routinized business of commuting until suddenly startled by distressing screams behind them. They all turn their heads simultaneously to determine the cause of the cries, thereby engendering both a synchronized movement that is atypical of such street-scenes, as well as laughter from whoever is behind the camera.

ZHANG DING
CV – Website

Zhang Ding (b. 1980, Gansu) is a rising star of Chinese multimedia art. He first studied at the North West Minority University in the Oil Painting Department and went on to study under Zhang Peili in the New Media Arts Department at the China Academy of Fine Arts. Zhang works with large-scale mixed-media installations, incorporating video, performance and interactive components. He is influenced by the fantastical style of Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini and explores ethnic tensions, the plight of migrant workers, and the marginal urban cultures that lurk in the recesses of Chinese society. He has exhibited internationally at major institutions and has had international solo shows including Orbit at The Armony Show, Focus Section, in New York (2014) and Gold and Silver at Galerie Krinzinger in Vienna (2013), but has never before been shown in Berlin.

Buddha Jumps Over the Wall, 2012

The culinary dish called Buddha Jumps over the Wall – a variety of shark fin soup – is regarded as a Chinese delicacy and so much so that it is said to even entice the vegetarian monks from their temples to partake in the meat-based dish, hence its name. In allusion to this dish, Zhang’s video features a group of animal plaster-sculptures that are individually shot at and finally exploded altogether, to shatter into pieces. Accompanied by a magnificent and solemn symphony and filmed by means of a high-speed camera lens that captures every detail, we see bloodlike liquid and shards of debris flying everywhere in a shocking and cruel, though undeniably aesthetic manner.

Session 1 – Geography:
Making a Map of Contemporary Chinese Art
16.00 – 17.30
Moderated by Drew Hammond
With: Waling Boers, Marianne Csáky, David Elliott, Christopher Moore, Qiu Anxiong, Andreas Schmid

DAVID ELLIOTT

David Elliott is an English born curator and writer. From 1976 to 1996 he was Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England, Director of Moderna Museet [The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art] in Stockholm, Sweden (1996-2001), founding Director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (2001-2006), the first Director of the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art [Istanbul Modern] (2007), Artistic Director of the 17th Biennale of Sydney (2008 – 2010) and Artistic Director of the 1st Kiev International Biennale of Contemporary Art (2011-12), Artistic Director of the 4th International Biennale of Work by Young Artists in Moscow (2014-2014), Rudolf Arnheim Guest Professor in Art History at the Humboldt University, Berlin (2008) and Visiting Professor in Museum Studies at the Chinese University in Hong Kong (2008/11/13). From 1998 until 2004 he was President of CIMAM (the International Committee of ICOM for Museums of Modern Art). He is Hon President of the Board of Triangle Art Network/Gasworks in London and on the Asia Advisory Board of the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

ANDREAS SCHMID

Andreas Schmid is an artist and curator who lives in Berlin. After studying painting and history in Stuttgart, he moved to Beijing to learn Chinese before studying Chinese calligraphy from 1984–1986 at the Zhejiang Academy of Art, Hangzhou. Since then he has been continuously involved in contemporary art in China. Curated events: 1993 CHINA AVANTGARDE, HKW, Berlin, with Hans van Dijk & Jochen Noth, 1997 Contemporary Photo Art from the P.R. China, NBK, Berlin, 2003 Sitting in China, exhibition of Michael Wolf, Kestner-Museum Hanover, 2013, Hidden Images – on the situation of Art in China, 16 panel discussions, lectures, workshops with Chinese & European artists & intellectuals for the UdK Berlin with Bignia Wehrli and “The 8 of Paths: Art in Beijing”, 2014, Uferhallen Berlin with Thomas Eller and Guo Xiaoyan. Andreas Schmid himself has been exhibiting and teaching widely in Europe, USA, and Asia.

CHRISTOPHER MOORE

Christopher Moore is the publisher of randian 燃点 digital art magazine. From 2008-10 Christopher was the Shanghai correspondent for Saatchi Online. In 2012 Chris co-curated “Forbidden Castle” at Muzeum Montanelli in Prague, an exhibition of Xu Zhen’s pre-MadeIn work, and in April 2014 he curated Yan Pijie “Children of God” at orangelab Berlin. He is also the editor of the first monograph on Xu Zhen, to be published by Distanz Verlag this Spring, with contributions by David Elliott, Philippe Pirotte and Li Zhenhua.

QIU ANXIONG

Qiu Anxiong was born in 1972 in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in the southwest of China. There, he studied the progressive artistic practice of Ye Yongqing and Zhang Xiaogang. A bar opened by Qiu and his friends became a hub for the blossoming underground music and art circles in Sichuan, and his colleagues included He Duoling, Zhou Chunya, and Shen Xiaotong. In 2003 he graduated from the University Kassel’s College of Art in Germany after six years of studying both contemporary international art and traditional Chinese culture. In 2004 he began teaching at Shanghai Normal University, and currently lives and works in Shanghai.

ALEXANDER OCHS

Since founding his first gallery in Berlin-Mitte in 1997, Alexander Ochs has focused on the exchange of artistic strategies and works between China and Europe. The list of artists that he has presented with exhibitions and projects is similar to a ‘Who is Who’ of young Chinese Art History: Ai Weiwei, Fang Lijun, Yang Shaobin, Miao Xiaochun, Lu Hao, Yue Minjun, Xu Bing, Yin Xiuzhen, and Tan Ping. In 2004, Alexander Ochs opened the WHITE SPACE BEIJING and through this, became a founding member of the 798 Art District in Beijing. Since 2008, he has published many texts and has been an editor of books and artist monographs in both China and Germany. After a consequential redevelopment of the gallery program between 2010 and today, the gallery now presents artists from Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Europe.

CHEN YANG

CHEN Yang / Chaos Y. Chen is the founder and director of WiE KULTUR, an art platform in Berlin for the dialogue and collaboration between Asia and Europe. Prior to this, Chen Yang was the head of the Curatorial Department at the Millennium Art Museum (2003-2004), and worked with The Asia Society, New York (1998-1999), Kunst-Werke Berlin (2002), and collaborate with the House of World Cultures, Berlin (2003). Her curatorial practices include Picture from the Surface of the Earth: Wim Wenders (2004), Driving the Sky-line: Frank O. Gehry & his contemporaries (2004), Mexican Modern (2005), etc. Since the end 1990s, she has been frequent contributor for art and cultural columns, i.e. Dushu Monthly, Economic Observer weekly. She is the co-author for two recent books published in Germany, “Wall Journey: Expedition into Divided Worlds” and “Contemporary Artists from China”. She holds a Master’s Degree in Art History and Theory from the Nanjing Academy of Arts. She is the recipient of Luce Scholarship (1998, USA) and RAVE Scholarship (2001, Germany). She served as jury member for CENTRAL Contemporary Art Award (Cologne, Germany, 2004) and REAL Photography Award (Rotterdam, 2008).