Tag Archives: prd art

大芬村: when is a copy not a forgery?

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located in buji town, dafen village is (in)famous for the assembly line production of copies of famous works of art, usually western masters. dafen artists pride themselves on making authentic copies, giving attention brush struck, style, and feeling. all for as little as US$ 10.

i have visited dafen village several times this summer and have yet to persuade myself to buy a souvenir painting. not that i need to. i already have a dafen souvenir, which a friend gave me after her hong kong shop went under. (she tried to cash in on the hong kong passion for interior make-overs by selling dafen copies in hong kong.) as it stands, my reluctance to purchase a dafen painting intrigues me. after all, living in shenzhen i regularly buy pirated dvds and cds; i also buy “improved upon” copies at luohu mall at the hong kong-shenzhen border. my l.v. billfold, for example, has giant flower smiley faces, which i haven’t seen on any authentic l.v. i wear knock-offs when i can’t find what i’m looking for in outlets. moreover, i live in a housing development that looks like housing developments all over the city; my apartment is itself a reproducible unit in a mass produced building. and even on superficial reflection, i remember buying posters of great works of art to hang on my college dorm wall.

the only other area of my life as a consumer, where i seem as resolutely committed to originality seems culinary. yet here again, the question is not so much one of whether or not a dish can be reproduced (after all the sign of a top chef is the ability to reproduce the same taste day in and out), but rather one of freshness; i enjoy fresh vegetables, unfrozen meets, and innovative tastes. i want the same on my walls. or so i tell myself as i look at the mass produced spring festival couplet i have hung on my door (年年如意新春乐；岁岁平安合家欢) with glittered chicken.

my reluctance to purchase a copy found its counterpart in the pictures i took while there; i again found myself looking sideways at what was happening. i ended up photographing an unintentional street performance. however, yu haibo of the shenzhen economic daily won at the 2006 world press press photo of the year contest for his photos of dafen village. eastsouthwestnorth provides a translation of 天方乱谭‘s analysis of yu’s photos and how representative they are of china.

those interested in purchasing a dafen oil painting can order directly from various websites (dafen village dot com and dafen dot net).　the people’s daily provides a brief history of dafen.

Cruel/Loving Bodies

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This weekend (July 8 and 9), I had the pleasure of participating in a roundtable discussion of Cruel/Loving Bodies 2 project, which is on display at the Hong Kong Arts Centre from July 8 through July 28. The Pao Gallery on the fifth floor and the Goethe Gallery on the fourteenth floor are co-presenting the exhibition. Cruel/Loving Bodies 1 was exhibited at Shanghai’s Duolun Museum of Modern Art (June 2004) and Beijing’s 798 Space (July 2004).

This was the first time I have contributed to an art discussion and, not unsurprisingly, approached it as if it were an anthropology meeting, understanding my role to be that of discussant. I came to play a familiar head game, reading textualized bodies against themselves, against each other, and if time permitted, against other texts. My jaw clenched at the responsibilities that my imaginary job description intimated; what would I say if asked, “What influences do you see in the work of Mayling TO? (杜美玲)” However, the experiences of viewing “Here We Are” with artist Lesley SANDERSON, sucking an ice pop with HE Chengyao (何成瑶), and dubbing Deep Throat as part of ZHENG Bo’s (郑波)“Watch porn, learn English” movement jolted, if only momentarily, corporeal habits. And I expectedly found myself remembering to play hide and seek.

When playing hide and seek, children want to be found. If you don’t find them within what they think is a reasonable amount of time, they will call out to you. In turn, if they can’t find you, they become frustrated, expecting a return call. After all, the point is to find and be found; the seeking is simply a means of enhancing the pleasure, not an end in itself. I think this commonplace observation points to a practical understanding of the fine line between love and cruelty. In hide and seek, love is the effort to find the person, cruelty the refusal.

Most of the time, I don’t play. Instead, my shoulders tighten, my eyes squint, and my heart makes judgments about my interlocutor based on superficial signs—skin color, hair texture, body height and mass, the smell of sweat and light perfume, the drape of a skirt, the polish of leather shoes. Together, these signs suggest how the woman if front of me has treated herself and been treated by others; I too treat her like a lady should be treated. Grimy cheeks, missing teeth, crooked fingers, swollen ankles, rheumy eyes, and sweat-stained clothing also reveal past interactions; unthinkingly, I treat the old peasant like a beggar should be treated.

In presenting bodies in unexpected ways, however, the artists of the Cruel/Loving Bodies project pre-empt habitual interactions. How does one treat, for example, the virtuous women of BAI Chongmin (白崇民) and WU Weihe (吴玮和)? The form echoes that of the Terra-cotta soldiers, but unlike the first Qin Emperor’s guard, these figures have no clear features, except for a number, which corresponds to examples taken from LIU Xiang’s 烈女传. This difference invites the reader to seek: What history brought these signs together in this particular way? Or consider, susan pui san LOK’s (骆佩珊) “Notes on Return”, which skitters across the uneven, indeed flimsy, surface of plastic strips: How can a world become so unstable?

I assume that I know how to treat a lady or a beggar because I assume that their bodies reveal the history that made them who they are. In contrast, the Cruel/Loving bodies compel the viewer to reconsider how these bodies came to be; we don’t know how to treat them because we don’t recognize the processes that formed them. That moment jolts us out of habit as we lurch toward the child’s call: come and find me. Our lady and beggar abruptly seem otherwise as well: what if I have been misrecognizing the signs all along? What if this misrecognition has been a refusal to play? And what if an ability to read the signs has merely enabled me to be cruel?

If in Hong Kong this month, please visit the Cruel/Loving Bodies 2 exhibition at the Hong Kong Arts Centre. The curious can visit the artists’ sites: Leungpo　梁宝山, Zheng Bo, Conroy and Sanderson, susan pui san LOK, and Mayling TO. I have also uploaded some images of the opening weekend.

fat bird salon, 17 September 2005

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Yesterday was mid-autumn festival. The day before, Fat Bird held its second salon, this time at Rao Xiaojun’s studio, Raw Designs. The first salon featured poetry readings by Steven Schroeder, Yi Jihui, and Yang Qian, as well as pictures by Kit Kelen and Mary Ann O’Donnell. Kelen also contributed a music composition.

The second Fat Bird salon functioned as an open workshop, with an audience of 15 people watching, listening, and commenting on the work-in-progress, which is tentatively called “Materializations”. Over the summer, Liu Hongming, Yang Jie, Ma Yuan, Yang Qian, and O’Donnell met together to discuss how one might create within and beyond disciplinary constraints. By training, Liu is a dancer, Yang Jie a violinist, Ma an architect, Yang Qian a journalist, and O’Donnell an anthropologist. Each is interested in reworking the materiality of their art. For Liu, this has meant retraining his body to move both arrhythmically and distanced from music. Yang Jie taped the sounds of moving water—urine, tap water, rain, a shower—and then digitally manipulated these sounds, adding vocals and piano. Ma has been using sculpture to redefine space. Yang Qian read from “Language Materializes,” a series of written pieces, which explore cultural grammars (rather than events) as generative of meaning. In an attempt to move away from ethnographic documentary conventions, O’Donnell presented 15 photographs of Shenzhen walls.

The work of John Cage and Merce Cunningham has inspired this ongoing collaboration, as the five work independently on specific projects and then present them together at different sites. Participants can then use the others’ works in the creations of new projects, expanding the definition of “site” to include video projects, installations, and new texts that grow out of the conversation and its realization as a particular “salon”. In addition to emphasizing the way that meaning materializes through chance operations, these projects, both separately and collaboratively, mobilize self-reflexivity in the service of creativity. Indeed, this has been one of Fat Bird’s core obsessions: what does it mean to be an artist in a city like Shenzhen, where there are few organizations dedicated to creating and presenting new art? Of course, the upside of the material constraints that artists working in Shenzhen face has been to force creative to cross-disciplinary lines, both within and beyond their circles, generating a wonderful eclecticism.