M o o o o o o o o o ...

Art works at Zhaojiabang Road, 2008. Photography by Jeremy Tew


On the first of CNY,
my true love sent to me,
a red cow in tattoo.

On the second day of CNY,
my true love sent to me,
two golden oxen,

and a red cow in tattoo.

On the third day of CNY,
my true love sent to me,
three white bulls,
two golden oxen,
and a red cow in tattoo.

Happy Chinese 牛 Year 2009 !



January 26, 2009
Greetings
from Shanghai upon the Sea

Mooooooooo...

Jeremy

Shanghai upon the Sea

January 25, 2009

Karentino and Z's Greetings

Z who now works in Ho Chih Minh City sent me the Christmas card (right) long before the festive day but the card took a slow boat and arrived nearly a month later.

Karentino now works in Singapore and sent me the Chinese New Year card (left) recently and the card arrives today, three days before the first day of festive celebration.

Either way, I am very grateful to their well meaning of wanting to send the very best in view of this economic meltdown all over the world when cost is utmost daily concern for everyone. But I could not reciprocrate other than recording this event hereof.

Holy cow, the Year of Ox is approaching fast.

No bull at all. Really.

And from the bottom of my heart to you...thank you both so much for your kindness.

Moooooooooooooo...

Jeremy

Greetings from Shanghai upon the Sea

January 22, 2009

A sugar coated memory: an installation by Son Kok Gyon
7th Shanghai Biennale 2008, Shanghai Art Museum
Sept. 08 – Nov. 16, 2008


Sugar melts. Memory relapses. If not amnesic, both can be re-enacted in three-dimensional format.

Nothing is ideal to represent a section of unremitting memory full of wonderful sweetness by specifically applying sugar. By Son Kok Gyon, it is literally a sugar coated exhibition called Hello, Shanghai: Sweetness submerged in Memories. Son has chosen sugar to thoroughly lace and coat all the furnishing of Shanghai era.

Everything else in the interior is white washed due to sugar coating. The installation of a living room – period pieces of photographs, pears, bleacher, radio, toys, table lamp, display shelves, footstool, etc. - is a replica of actual setting out of her family picture. The fact is bygone is bygone. When combing in the existing market, Son has to settle for a little less in selecting the right furniture for her installation. Despite it all, it is indeed a place tainted with sweet memories.

Son lives in China of Korean ethnicity, for her father was from North Korea while her mother was from China. During her early time, it was more exceptional to carry dual or multiple identities. Her biography reads like the subject background of a Hollywood blockbuster, a non-fictitious movie.

An introductory text on the wall vividly describes the eventful chronology of her parent's era. Son has researched into of her parent's time, a period of time when her parent were married and lived in Shanghai. During the tumultuous period, possibly, Son's parents were living in two worlds apart but in two worlds closer than ever.

For Son, identity crisis is reconciled by means of succinctly narrate her memories in a matter of fact format. It is a time-frozen installation laced with reminiscent imagination. Albeit a stage set, with real life actors gone and space emptied, the souls and sounds from that time seem to dimly reverberate inside the ever more aloof, silent, and untouched and nearly dust free environment.

This setting could possibly be a cross section of memory delineating daily activities of any parent in a presumably cohesive family structure.

All but now broken into pieces as minute as the granulated sugar.


Jeremy
Shanghai upon the Sea
January 20, 2009

An Exhibition Review: Visual Dominance by Ye Minjun
7th Shanghai Biennale 2008, Shanghai Art Museum
Sept. 08 – Nov. 16, 2008

For everything is striving to be larger than the Texas state of USA, besides CCTV Building and Forbidden City in Beijing, China's contemporary art subject - a dinosaur hybridized with the bald headed artist - also could not escape the over bloated ego trip in their respective overwhelming visual dominance. Most often, this similar art scene and art subjects are only decors more than meaningful art matters.

The technicolor forms conjure a delightful visual experience and imaginative infantile fantasy in a themed park. They have typical facial expressions: eyes-closed and toothy smiles, human heads and a few of them with serpentine necks now replacing the heads of all dinosaurs, almost up front at eye level, on the floor, close to ceiling height. These dinosaurs in various scales can be some playful interactive art experience in live size. It is also excessively easy to identify these three-dimensional pre-historic creatures transformed out of the Hollywood blockbuster movies.

Intended by the artist to expound on the meaning of urban experience via art experience, the selected extinct dinosaurs connote a visually overwhelming urban scale. In this crammed and elongated third floor corridor of Shanghai Art Museum, all the laughing heads seem to indicate some form of upstaged social farce. Peak hour visitors in unison tend to jam with art display in the museum or window display on any urban street. We cannot avoid but to live in this very magnificent urban world we create for ourselves.

According to the artist Ye Minjun, we visually experience close-ups in clearer manner more so than seeing objects at distance. Especially around an urban context, variable dominating forces such as lifestyle, visual images and surrounding environment impact on or dominate us. We have no choice but live in our existing context. Comparatively, we scan and seek to settle our visual focal point if we are in the desert.

The artist also claims that our everyday visual experiences are changing our way of thinking. With sight, visual experience is present, ever expanding, ubiquitous and pervasive. The artist is referring to advertisements and TV images that are dominating our everyday lives. These are sources of our visual experiences. The choice, however, is personally switch off the TV dial. One can also choose not to perceive, remember or recall, i.e. oblivion and amnesia are time tested personal experiences. It is said that out of sight, out of mind.

Is it a matter of personal choice? On the other hand, is it a matter of personal awareness or personal existence?


Jeremy
Shanghai upon the Sea
January 19, 2009

Blooming, a solo exhibition by Chen Xiaodan
May 30 – June 04, 2008
Shanghai Art Museum


Contents

Betty and Gloria would not be very pleased to see this exhibition.

Stenciled on the wall with spot lighting, the introductory review is being littered with figure of speech - exquisite, sensitive, weak, frail, dualistic physical and psychological roles within a social context – fatal association with the literal semantics of femininity, a physical woman or women in general.

Wikipedia defines that earthenware is a common ceramic material used extensively for pottery tableware and decorative objects. Fittingly, Xiaodan's decorative objects are made of earthenware in Blooming.

Meaning

Lost in rhetoric translation, its title deserves to be in participle tense of 'Blooming' or 'Blossoming' but never in 'Bloom'. The artist has defined her work by thematically referencing to poetic clip 'flower as non-flower.' To deduce, it is literally a flower as non-flower. Alternatively, it is a physical non-flower as flower. On the other hand, it is a flowering-flower as non-flower. Then, it is a non-flowering flower as flower. What? What had you say, Jeremy?

It is cliché at its best.

Form

The artist has perceived her artwork as a flower, a form of flower or in a state of flowering, but in sculptural form and installation format. Flower is the image and object, inherently viewed as blossoming flowers as well as a state of transforming spirituality. Then, the artist had persistently denied to label but specifically display bone structures and tree trunks in the exhibition. Structurally, the tree trunk is a tree trunk while the bone is a bone; to the artist, a tree trunk is perceived as a bone, and vice versa. Metaphysically confounding, the artist has taken to elevate her work with lame association to 'the meaning of life' or 'secretion of the artist's soul.' Where the subject studies elaborate of life, in exploring the meaning of life, the fragility and toughness of life, all these literal senses are lumped together and conjugated as the idea of ‘contradictory and complexity' in artwork. All these well complement the wishful thinking of the artist - the paradox of a tree being fragile ecologically while a brittle bone in dealing with the way of life. They are, however, some pure crap and rather some corny discourse.

No doubt, they are some beautifully made craftworks.

An inquiring mind

Laced into the introduction, the artwork metaphor defines the secretion of soul of the artist. I think this is more crap than crap.

Why would a woman always being presented as a woman writer when she writes? Why would a man never a man-eater when the man eats?

Is this some structural or literal paradox?


Jeremy
Shanghai upon the Sea
January 19, 2009

One point Seven Three Meter

Shown at the Contrast Gallery located on Central Jiangxi Road, this is probably an art exhibition with the most confounding title I had ever been. I never did and do understand its skewed title One Meter Seventy-Three; it is hardly related to the exhibition.

Set at the entrance way, its 1.73m height is intended for visitors to clear with heightened self-awareness with regard to the show. More accurately, its title should be One point Seven Three Meter, as the measurement of height in Metric System or in SI unit. Guess it is the average height of peoples around if speaking about typical human scale for reference.

Still, there is not a clue as to this selected measurement has to do with the exhibition.

Stenciled on the wall at the entrance lobby, the bi-lingual introductory description also could hardly match the meaning and contents of the exhibition intended by the artist but cliché. All unelaborated or deduced, its subject studies are attached with ideas linked to ink paintings and landscape painting, coals and mining, urban pollution energy depletion, industrialization and social problem, social reality and cultural polemics, esthetics and symbolism, etc.

No doubt these art works are patiently delivered with skillful techniques. These are some marvelous pieces of quality craftworks more than they are claimed to be the conventional form of ink paintings that use brush work. They are craftworks based on the form of ink paintings. Also executed on rice papers, the calligraphy is most likely achieved by long hour of cigarettes burning (now count the number of cigarettes expended; or, say, joss sticks as substitutes.) to form each of the Chinese characters while images appear like some landscape.

Isn't cigarette burning a form of air pollution? Is the typical human scale linked to the core problems of complex subject studies?

Oh, well. Never mind. It's confusing after all.

Jeremy

Shanghai upon the Sea

January 02, 2009

Oop ! Heeeelp !

Jeremy

Shanghai upon the Sea
January 03, 2009

Note the urban profile below shows the super ugly upside down trapezoid top of the tallest Shanghai World Financial Tower. The trapezoid should be a circle, an esthetically correct visual order that would only and again only perfectly complement and design responsive to the prickly symbol of the Pearl TV Tower in foreground.

Building Services of Super Tall Structure

Lately, there seems to be more activities of exterior building service of super structures around as well as this shorter one where I work. Viewing outdoor from my desk, a man is dropping from roof top to align a rope for his purpose. Catching him working by the edge of the roof, he appears so tiny comparing to the signage of the Standard Chartered, itself being diminished by the taller, currently the tallest in China, Shanghai World’s Financial Centre standing diagonally across the Century Boulevard. Speaking of taller and taller, another taller one and soon the tallest in China is now rising, also diagonally across.

Jeremy
Shanghai upon the Sea
January 10, 2009

Tianzi Square
Origin of Shanghai's Creative Industry

1930
Together with wife Rong Junli, Wang Yacheng moved into Yinyun Building of Zhicheng Square, Jiaxiyi Road. They founded a society for artists, the Li or Energy Society as well as the Xinhua Arts School of Shanghai.

Early 1998
Cheng Yifei Studio, artist Wang Jinying, Deke Er Art Centre and Zheng Wei Ceramics Studio, all successively moved into the Square.

1999
Lane #210 Taikang Road was nominated Tianzi Square by the artist Huang Yongyi. According to Records of History, Tianzi was the oldest artist during classical period. Implicating a colony for artists, Tianzi Square is a euphony of the artist Tianzi.

May 2000
With aim to develop creative industry, the Dapu Bridge Street Management Office had plans to make full use of Tianzi Square’s available resources deriving from those old factories around, and to increase employment opportunities as well as to promote business opportunities. There are now well over 70 occupants, artists from 18 participating countries and regions. Regarded as the SOHO of Shanghai as well as the Silicon Valley of Visual Arts, Tianzi Square is the origin of Shanghai’s creative industry.

Fraternity of Arts Industry, Taikang Road, Shanghai
April 19, 2004


This is a transcription of the plaque shown above. Note that Yinyun Building is literally a building of concealed cloud or a building for a hermit cloud; Zhicheng Square is the current Tianzi Square.

Former co-worker Banjun could easily qualify as a model if not for her height. We hung out for a day during the trip to Tianzi Square.

Jeremy

Shanghai upon the Sea

January 03, 2009