[artinfo] China Today on NY ARts

[Beatrice Leanza]

NY ARTS MAGAZINE | CHINA TODAY SECTION 

www.nyartsmagazine.com 

 

In May 2005 the New York-based contemporary art magazine NY ARTS introduced its China Today section: a peculiar think-tank offering selected views on the current state of contemporary art in mainland China. It focuses mostly on practices and happenings in and around Beijing, the capital, which continues to attract an increasing volume of international interest and curiosity.

 

This directory aims to present various types of information, offer picks and tips from the ever-changing metropolis, provide up-to-date material covering major events and criticism, and afford visibility to those "micro-actions" so indispensable to the local cultural discourse. Within its limits, it tries to describe the impetus of local new critical spatial identities, where definitions are constructed through an interplay of alternative tactics and dominant strategies, and divergence from acknowledged rules and accepted artistic global power structures can occur within a visible global totality.

 

In this cultural context, the relationship between art and the public, and thus its direct spatial relationship to staged power, is taking on new conformations and confrontations. The space of disciplinary power, traditionally accustomed to insurgences of alternative/revolutionary artistic codes in the form of "places of fundamental difference", or of tactics for taking over the space of the Other (of hegemony), has ephemerally relocated them within orthodoxy, and thus cast them into places of "differential reality". However when tactics turn into strategy, while at the same time refusing fixed borderlines or distinct grammars, do they become immanent differences able to transform, transgress, and mediate, as Lefèbvre foreshadowed? With Utopias and Heterotopias colliding in practice, a "proper" understanding of such critical spaces should also put concern on "what popular procedures (also minuscule and quotidian) manipulate the mechanism of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them?" (de Certeau, 1984).

This project hopes to network such invisible spatiality between absence and presence, offering a place to such "other spaces". 

The articles here listed can be found on NY Arts magazine website, under each archived issue. They are not grouped under a single frame, but can be browsed by title or authors' names.        

   

Guest Editor: Beatrice Leanza, Beijing bea_leanza at virgilio.it 

 



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MAY-JUNE 2005

 

Feature Article: Forms v/s Structure. The Art Question. And China | Hypomnemata Art (Localization and Catabolic Practices), by Beatrice Leanza

 

Section Articles: 

 

-         Zai Beijing Yi Tian Neng Zou Duoyuan, One Day in Beijing (A Performing Book), written by Gao Brothers, Beijing Broadcasting Institute ed.(Beijing Guangbo Xueyuan Chubanshe), May 2004. By Olek Borelli (book review).

-         An Analysis of Chinese Experimental Short Movies Categories, by Li Zhenhua, (translated by Beatrice Leanza).

-         New Confrontations. 9 LIVES - THE BIRTH OF AVANT-GARDE ART IN NEW CHINA, written by Karen Smith. By Beatrice Leanza (book preview)

-         MUTEK in the Middle Kingdom. Montreal's leading festival of experimental electronic music and media arts heads on a three-city China tour. By John Campbell

-         Cui Xiuwen Observes one day in 2004. By Pauline Doutreluingne

-         Yi De'er, Golden Fairy Tales, photo series 2004. Artist statement. (translated by Beatrice Leanza)

-         CIGE- International China Gallery Exposition - Beijing | MARKETING FREE TIME, by Beatrice Leanza

 

JULY - AUGUST 2005

Feature Article: Performing Absence. In-between too much Order and too much Chaos. By Beatrice Leanza

 

Section Articles:

 

-         Travelling in Shanghai without Moving, by Aurelie Duval

-         Dancing minstrels on the scene of the 2nd Dashanzi Arts Festival, by Claudia Albertini

-         Mechanized Meditation. Leo de Boignisson discovers fm3 and their hypnotic Buddha Machine. 

-         BEIJING GAY & LESBIAN FILM FESTIVAL, by Olek Borelli

-         Next Station Cartoon?, by Fang Fang

-         Techno-Orientalism: Shattering the Mirror of Itself, by Maya Kóvskaya

-         Inappropriate Interventions, by Carol Lu

 

SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2005 

Feature Article: HEXIS CITIES Power, Place AND Identity, By Beatrice Leanza

 

Section Articles:

 

-         Public Address Systems, by Rania Ho

-        The Name Card for "Capital". The Second Triennial of Chinese Art, By Carol Lu

-         Theory and Practice: a Global Discourse on Technological Revolution of "Technê", by Claudia Albertini

-         Beyond Screening: Chinese Video Art approaching Aesthetic, by Li Zhenhua (translated by Claudia Albertini)

-         "BEIJING CASE" - CULTURE OF HIGH SPEED URBAN DEVELOPMENT  (The cultural dimension of urban growth in Beijing), by Nina Betori

-         In China, they don't know why you call that dancing - by Pauline Doutreluingne   (interview with Wu Wenguang movie maker and director of the Living Dance Studio | Beijing, and Else Virant)

-         Urban China 2020: the perils of boom modernism, by Adrian Hornsby (interview with architect Neville Mars of the Dynamic City Foundation| Amsterdam-Beijing)

-         Chinese Architecture Xenophilia, by Olek Borelli 

-         Get It Louder! - by Aurelie Duval