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PANDAMONIUM
MEDIA ART FROM SHANGHAI
A Collaboration Between CHRONUS ART CENTER Shanghai and MOMENTUM Berlin
March 12 – June 29:
Micro-Exhibitions at MOMENTUM
Curated by Art Yan and Rachel Rits-Volloch
At MOMENTUM: Kunstquartier Bethanien, Mariannenlatz 2, Berlin Kreuzberg
PANDAMONIUM Micro-Exhibition #3
PERFORMANCE FOCUS
FOR
May 2 – June 1
Featuring:
Guo Xi, Jiang Zhuyun, Wang Xin, Wu Juehui, Xu Zhe, Zhang Lehua
Curated by Art Yan
Double Fly Art Center, MNM (Christian Graupner, with Mieko Suzuki and Ming Poon)
Curated by Rachel Rits-Volloch
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ARTISTS AND WORKS
DOUBLE FLY ART CENTER
Double Fly Save the World, 2012
Death in Barthel, 2011
Double Fly kill art hostage, 2012
Double Fly Art Center is a 9-member art collective which formed in 2008 after all its members had 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, and the art market worldwide. Their work has never before been shown in Berlin.
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. In Death in Barthel, Double Fly travels to Italy – the cradle of Western art. Armed with a tent and a wide range of outfits, they treat the tourists to ‘typical Chinese’ culture and engage in an inspired session of outdoor landscape-painting. In a terrorist act against “the modernist and Chinese spirit” and other essentialist or nonsensical art-theoretical jargon, Double Fly Kill Art Hostage shows its protagonists exuberantly destroying various artworks and never dispensing to add a generous share of sexual abuse.
GUO XI
I would like to satisfy your foot mania in such a way, even, 2010
Home of others, 2011
Eve R Evolution, 2011
At the age of fifteen, Guo Xi (b. in 1988,Yan City, China) entered China Academy of Art Collegiate High School to study traditional painting. In 2006, Guo Xi got accepted into China Academy of Art’s New Media Art Department. After he graduated in 2010, Guo Xi spent two years at Rijksakademie of the Netherlands as a resident artist. From 2009 and onward, Guo Xi began to work independently. His work is not confined to any particularmedia. Guo Xi’s creative method includes many forms, such as installation, painting, performance, sculpture, etc., all of which are possible means of creating. He considers art as an intermediary that transfer ideas and information to the viewer. The topics Guo Xi is concerned with are usually very personal, and he tries to interpret the world from different perspectives. Through his work, Guo Xi intends to untie, even damage, some of these once unshakable beliefs, in order for the viewers to feel a hint of absurdity and anxiety in their daily lives.
JIANG ZHUYUN
Soundinstallation Works, 2005-07
Jiang Zhuyun was born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang in 1984. He graduated from the New Media Art Department of China Academy of Art in 2007. He is currently continuing his graduate studies at the same department. His works can be found in a number of exhibitions held in major cities in China including “Little Movement” at (OCAT Shenzhen 2011) and “Fuzzy Parameters” at (Shanghai Taopu M50 2011). In 2008, he also showed at the “Sound is true II” exhibition held at UC Berkeley, US. In addition, he won the second TASML/DSML Artist Residence Award in 2011 with “Pendular Project” and the Second Prize of the Pierre Huber New Media Art Creation Award in 2007 with “Soundrug Chest”. Apart from artistic creation, Jiang is also a sound artist and has held a number of performances in Shanghai, Hangzhou and Beijing. In the meantime, he is actively engaged in curating exhibitions, projects and scholarly work.
WANG XIN
Communication Experiment n.1, 2010
Communication Experiment n.2 (Prototype version), 2011
We sit and we talk, 2008
Wang Xin (b 1983, Yichang) is an artist, curator, and writer based in Shanghai. She studied Multimedia Arts at the China Academie of Fine Arts, Interrelated Media at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and participated in the New York Studio Residency Program in 2011. As an assistant curator at the Nida Art Colony in Lithuania, Startsev co-curated (with Vytautas Michelkevicius) the first retrospective exhibition of artist works produced from the residency program. She works in a variety of media ranging from video games to performance. Drawing from a feeling of displacement and a precarious balancing acts between extremes of comfort and agitation, visibility and invisibility, her work frequently requires the viewer to act. Currently her work reflects on and examines the cold war and its continuing repercussions.
WU JUEHUI
Offline Eye, 2014
Wu Juehui was born in 1980, he is a media artist who focuses on cross-border-amalgamation, concerning interactive art, bio-art, media theater to show the plurality of art creation. Wu’s saying that “Art as the antimatter of science and technology.” shows his perspective upon the relation between art and science. Since 2009, Wu has been trying to intrude and reproduce the sense organs via popular technology in the “Organ Project”; While in 2014, WU starts using several media to simulate the deviations during the procedure of creating, resulting in a series of creatures of meaningless, namely the Mistake Creature.
XU ZHE
Waiting for a Bird(summer), 2013
Wakeflow, 2012
Born in 1977 and based in Shanghai, Xu has been active as a multimedia artist and curator for over a decade now since graduating from the Shanghai Art and Design Academy, a technical college, in 1996. A co-founder in 1998 of the influential artist-run space BizArt Art Center, he has also organized seminal exhibitions including 1999’s “Art for Sale,” staged at a Shanghai shopping mall. As an artist Xu revels in tipping over the sacred cows of social convention. In 2009, Xu announced that he would stop practicing as a solo artist and instead operate under the company name MadeIn, working in collaboration with a staff of over 10 other artists, technicians and coordinators. This move has expanded the diversity of genres that Xu employs, and one of the company’s first projects was to produce a series of works, ranging from paintings and sculptures to installations, purporting to have been made by contemporary Middle Eastern artists.
ZHANG LEHUA
A Speed-Up Education Program About Shout Painting, 2010
Facebook Art Demonstration, 2012
Zhang Lehua was born in 1985 in Shanghai, graduated from the Huashan Art School in 2004, and later studied in the New Media Department of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, graduating in 2008. Zhang’s practice has included video, installation, performance, photography and more recently, painting. He is also a member of Double Fly, a new media art collective established in 2008 and active in Shanghai, Hangzhou and Beijing. Through perverse imagery and irreverent humor, Zhang displays a moral ambivalence that is a product of his time, of a changing China that faces improving quality of life despite considerable societal repression. His paintings thus straddle the indefinable line between carefree immaturity and irreverent comedy; his humor has an adolescent, schlocky quality, yet his artworks are often provocative and deal with controversial, politically sensitive subjects. Social media and Internet have led to a mess of information, where everyone can know everything and voice anything, valid or not. Zhang plays with irony and cultural misunderstandings, deliberately mistranslating and employing ambiguity in his language, often with comical results. Drawing on comedy, satire and semiotics in his aesthetics, Zhang Lehua’s work is an assemblage of his disordered thoughts, emphasizing a smirking sense of moronic satire.
PANDAMONIUM Micro-Exhibition #2:
March 28 – April 27 | 13:00 – 19:00
To coincide with Ai Weiwei’s exhibition, “Evidence”, opening at Berlin’s Martin Gropius Bau on April 2nd, PANDAMONIUM dedicates our next Micro-Exhibition to this renowned bad boy of contemporary art. And alongside the bad boy, we present a bad girl – one of the 2 women artists in PANDAMONIUM, this provocative young artist is being shown in Berlin for the first time.
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Ai Weiwei is a prolific artist, writer, designer, architecht, curator, and activist for human rights. He is, above all, a public figure, wilfully manipulating the spotlight so as to make his point. Always irreverent throughout his career, Ai Weiwei has mastered playing the art world at its own game – using that same spotlight to illuminate its absurdities and incongruities., just as he strives to highlight political and social abuses in his country. In honor of this, we present Ai Weiwei as the public figure he assuredly is. Using open source material that he himself has released onto the internet, we ask is this artist himself a work of art, constructing his character and public persona much as he manipulates traditional Chinese furnishings into new and unexpected forms. Interviews and documentaries shed light on the man behind the character, and home surveillance footage Ai Weiwei made of himself reveals the profound humor which has enabled him to make the most of his predicament.
Ai Weiwei (b. 1957) in Beijing where he lives and works. He attended Beijing Film Academy and later, on moving to New York (1981–1993), continued his studies at the Parsons School of Design. Major solo exhibitions include Indianapolis Museum of Art (2013), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2012), Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan (2011), Tate Modern, London (2010) and Haus der Kunst, Munich (2009). Architectural collaborations include the 2012 Serpentine Pavilion and the 2008 Beijing Olympic Stadium, with Herzog and de Meuron. Among numerous awards and honours, he won the lifetime achievement award from the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards in 2008 and the Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent from the Human Rights Foundation, New York in 2012; he was made Honorary Academician at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2011.
WORKS
Music Videos:
Dumbass (2013)
Gangnam Style (2012)
Anish Kapoor And Friends Perform Gangnam Style For Ai Weiwei (2012)
Documentary:
Ai Weiwei Self-Surveillance 2012-04-03
BBC Documentary – Ai Weiwei Without Fear Or Favor (2010)
Ai Weiwei Karaoke Home Movie
Lao Ma Ti Hua / Disturbing the Peace (2009) Ai Weiwei dir.
Who’s Afraid of Ai Weiwei (2011), Frontline Episode for PBS
Lu Yang (b. 1984),born and based in Shanghai, graduated from the China Academy of Art in 2010, having studied under Zhang Peili in the New Media Department. Using a variety of media: video, installation, animation, and digital painting, the artist unflinchingly explores existential issues about the nature of life and where it resides. Armed with a overlaying mix of strategies taken from Science, Pop Culture and Religion, among others, Lu Yang overrides the often delusional belief that humans control are privileged within this universe. Instead, she highlights the biological and material determinants of our condition reminding us of our transient and fragile existence, but with an edge of dark humor that leaves no room for sentimentality. Her shocking combinations of grotesque imagery and deadpan instruction manuals have made her the most controversial young Chinese multimedia artist of her generation. While 30 years Ai Weiwei’s junior, Lu Yang is his match in irreverence. Her work will be shown in Berlin for the first time. Lu Yang has participated in a number of international exhibitions, including Unpainted Media Art Fair – LAB3.0 2014, Munich, ASVOFF – A Shaded View On Fashion Film, 2013, Centre Pompidou, Paris and Rapid Pulse, 2012, DFB Performance gallery, Chicago.
WORKS
Reanimation! Underwater Zombie Frog Ballet! (2011)
“Revived Zombie Frogs Underwater Ballet,” is a project that originally started in 2009, and has been consummated as a video work. The work takes the form of an MTV video, showing dead frogs dancing controlled by Midi controller and Midi signal. Avoiding for more animals to experience cruelty, Lu Yang reused frogs already used in medical experiments.
Due to Lu Yang’s strong affinity for ‘control’ in general and in particular the control of people and animals, she has been creating works by using technologies of various media. Such control completely relies on the cerebral nature of human beings and the fact that they cannot escape their physiological reality; yet, they use their bodies to create external devices, which enable them to break free from their limitations, while at the same time being controlled by their physical form or illness.
Krafttremor: Parkinsons Disease Orchestra (2011)
Because Parkinson’s disease patients perform in this video piece, in order to shoot this work, Lu Yang had to go to several cities in China, since it was difficult to find patients agreeing to be filmed. This is part of a larger project, which includes 5 – 6 works, already shown at Meulensteen Gallery (NYC) and will next be shown as part of her solo exhibition at Boers Li Gallery in Beijing. The other works are available through ART LABOR Gallery in Shanghai. The video as well as the soundtrack/music were done by Lu Yang.
The Beast: Tribute to Neon Genesis Evengelion (2012)
This work is based on the eponimous Japanese Manga Neon Genesis Evangelion. With costumes by Givenchy and music by the New York based composer and performance artist Du Yun. Soundtrack excerpted from Du Yun’s Opera, Zolle 2006, performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble, featuring Darren Chase, tenor. Du Yun’s chamber music work, Lethean. 2007, performed by International Contemporary Ensemble. Excerpts from Du Yun’s orchestra work, Kraken. (2011), performed by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Conductor: Leonard Slatkin.
PANDAMONIUM Micro-Exhibition #1:
March 12 – 27 | 13:00 – 19:00
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Hu Jieming, Prof. Shanghai Institute of Visual Art, Shanghai, is one of the pioneers of digital media and video installation art in today’s China. One of his primary themes is the co-existence of the old and the new in a modern society. In his art he constantly comments upon and questions this concept with a variety of media including photography, video, digital interactive technology, and architectural elements, along with musical aspects.
Hu Jieming was born in 1957 in Shanghai. He graduated from the Fine Art Department of the Shanghai Light Industry College in 1984. Today he lives and works in Shanghai. Hu Jieming has exhibited widely. Solo exhibitions (selection): K11 Art Mall, Shanghai (2014); ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai (2007 and 2010). Group exhibitions (Selection): UNPAINTED Media Art Fair, Munich, Germany (2014); Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, India (2014); Zendai Zhujiajiao Art Space, Shanghai (2013); Waterfront of Xuhui District, Shanghai (2013); Jinji Lake Art Museum, Suzhou (2012); Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai (2011); CAFA Art Museum, Beijing (2010); Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai (2009); Centro Arte Modernae Contemporanea della Spezia, Italy (2008); Center for Contemporary Art, Long Island City, NY, USA (2006); Museum for Contemporary Art and the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago: Seattle Art Museum; the Santa Barbara Museum; V&A, London, and Haus der kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2006/2005); National Art Museum Beijing, Beijing (2005); Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai (2004).
WORK
2001, Single Channel video 9’25”, color, sound
The contents came from the famous postcard series The Sights of China. Scan those postcards into computer through a process. These materials became a 9 minutes video. In the video, the staves drawn on were screened from right to left slowly. When the postcard moved to the middle of the screen, the most part of the outline of the picture dotted by different color. The music is composed according to the dots on the staves and played by various instruments. The idea came from the reality and experiences of artist during a certain period. In the dark space, the video is played though a video projector.
Additional texts
HU JIEMING CATALOGUES:
“Countercurrent: One Man’s History of Chinese Art”
by Li Zhenhua
“Hu Jieming, A World in Thickness”
by Richard Castelli
“Time Substance”
by Caroline Nicod
(The copyright of the article (or interview) is owned by Hu Jieming and Li Zhenhua, from CAC.The article (or interview) was first published in Hu Jieming, catalogue produced in 2010 by ShanghART Gallery)
Ming Wong (*1971 in Singapore) lives and works in Berlin. He studied Chinese Art at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, Singapore and Fine Art Media at the Slade School of Art, University College London. Wong’s artwork assembles language and identity and creates it’s own “World Cinema”. His performance-videos show this “everyday life cinema” as a stage of queer politics of representation and combines with the story of a melodrama by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, P. Ramlees or modern dance. Solo exhibitions (selection): carlier I gebauer, Berlin (2014); White Box Gallery, Portland & Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, Oregon, USA (2013); REDCAT, Los Angeles, US (2012); Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan (2011); Singapore Art Museum (2010); Singapore Pavilion, 53. Venice Biennial (2009). Group exhibitions (selection): Gwangju Biennial, Sydney Biennial, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (all 2010); Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Vitoria-Gasteiz (2009); ZKM|Zentrum für Kunst- und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe (2008).
WORK
Honeymoon in the Third Space
(single channel version)
1999/2012, duration 15’02”, 4:3, color, silent
Honeymoon In The Third Space was originally made in 1999 as Ming Wong’s graduation work for the Slade School of Art, London. The version shown here has been revisited and reedited in 2012 for an exhibition in Hong Kong at Para/Site Art Space. This is the first time this work, in any of its editions, has been shown in Berlin. Addressing the complexities of identity and migration while playing with cultural expectations and taboos, this early work by Ming Wong prefigures many of the directions in his ensuing practice. Ming Wong has lived and worked in Berlin since coming here in 2007 to undertake an Artist Residency at the Kunslterhaus Bethanien – now the Kunstquartier Bethanien, where MOMENTUM is located, adjacent to Ming Wong’s former studio.
Additional texts:
“The new old school”
by Doretta Lau
(South China Morning Post, March 2014)
“Ming Wong in the studio”
Interview by Travis Jeppssen
(Art in America, January 2014)
“False Front”
by Joan Kee
(Art Forum, May 2012)
“Bülent Wongsoy”
Interview by Hili Perlson
(Sleek N°31 XX/XY)
ABOUT THE CURATORS
ART YAN
Born in 1981 in Shanghai. Executive Director of Chornus Art Center (CAC) since December, 2013. After graduating from East China University of Science & Technology, with a Master Degree of Art Design in 2006, Yan entering the field of contemporary art and media arts, serviced different types of art institutions, including: Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai, Assistant of Chief Educator, 2006~2007; Shanghai eARTS Festival, In-house Curator & Producer, 2007~2010; Videotage (Hong Kong), General Manager, 2011~2012. In 2010, with Mr. Li Zhenhua, Switzerland based media artist, curator and researcher, they co-founded RYE Consulting Shanghai, a supporting platform for media arts related creative projects. Since 2008, the main curatorial projects Yan has made include: “Horizon – Interactive Media Installation Outdoor Exhibition”, Shanghai eARTS Festival, 2008; “Fantastic Illusions – Media Art Exhibition of Chinese and Belgium Artists”, MoCA Shanghai, Art Centre BUDA Kortrijk, Broelmuseum Kortrijk, Belgium, 2009~2010; “Augmented Senses – A China-France Media Art Project”, OCT Suhe Creek Gallery, Shanghai, OCT Art & Design Gallery, Shenzhen, 2011. Yan also has invited to be jury member of the international media art awards, which include “UPDATE III, New Media Art Award”, Belgium, 2009.
RACHEL RITS-VOLLOCH
Rachel Rits-Volloch is a graduate of Harvard University with a degree in Literature and holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge in Film Studies. She wrote her dissertation on visceral spectatorship in contemporary cinema, focusing on the biological basis of embodiment. Having lectured in film studies and visual culture, her focus moved to contemporary art after she undertook a residency at A.R.T Tokyo. She founded MOMENTUM in 2010 in Sydney and it rapidly evolved into a global platform for time-based art, with a gallery in Berlin, a residency in Jerusalem, and a commitment to supporting international artists working in time-based media. In addition, Rachel acts as an independent art advisor connecting artists and clients internationally. She is currently based in Berlin, having previously lived and worked in the US, UK, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Istanbul, and Sydney.
MICRO-EXHIBITION #1 IMAGE GALLERY:
MICRO-EXHIBITION #2 IMAGE GALLERY:
MICRO-EXHIBITION #2 IMAGE GALLERY:
