绿茶拿铁 Green Tea Latte

International Herald Tribune

BASEL, Switzerland: First, Western art galleries turned east, moving into China to cash in on its booming contemporary art scene. Now, Chinese galleries are trekking west.

Seven Chinese galleries participated in the main fair of Art Basel and in its satellite events this year, showing some of the most spectacular works in Art Unlimited, the exhibition platform for large-scale projects, video installations and live performances aimed at the institutional art market.

The Boers-Li Gallery in Beijing, a first-timer at the fair, showed Qiu Anxiong's "Staring Into Amnesia" (2007), an authentic 1960s Chinese train car inside which black-and-white war footage was projected onto the windows.

"My work is not about ideology. It is about reviving the memory of China," Qiu said.

There were also works by a three-man collective, Yangjiang Group, presented by Vitamin Creative Space of Guangzhou, China, which were shown in both the Art Unlimited section and Art Statements, a section featuring emerging artists working with rising galleries.

In Art Unlimited, the group presented "Garden III (Pine Trees)," (2008), a faux Chinese garden installation with trees, a path onto a bridge and a paper pond moving to music. At Art Statements, they showed scenes from daily life, including gamblers socializing around a dinner table.

Moving in the opposite direction, two big New York art galleries are about to open satellites in China.

China's economic boom has produced a growing class of wealthy private collectors whose interest in the local art market is reinforcing demand from Western collectors.

"Powerful buying from the West has been reinforced recently by intensive interest from new buyers from Mainland China, some 30 to 50 of them, as well as from Singapore and Taiwan," said Michael Goedhuis, a New York art dealer and a veteran of the Chinese art scene since 1993.

In July, the James Cohan Gallery, from the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, will be the first U.S. gallery to open in Shanghai, where its senior New York director, Arthur Solway, who is fluent in Mandarin, has already relocated.

"We want to address the second wave of collecting that will inevitably happen in China," James Cohan said from New York. "There is a certain maturity process in all collecting markets. Right now it is very focused on the domestic market, but we see mainlanders and Taiwanese focusing more on international collecting."

The PaceWildenstein Gallery, also in New York, will follow in August with a spectacular space in Dashanzi, the Beijing art district that has developed in and around Factory 798, a former munitions plant.

"China, Beijing specifically, is just emerging internationally as an art-making center," said Peter Boris, vice president of PaceWildenstein, who will be chairman of Pace Beijing.

"There are now only a few buyers in mainland China, but there will be more. Our target clientele are Asian collectors and the new wealth created there," Boris said in an interview at Art Basel.

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OMG, Lok really became a "renown scholar on internet in China!" I am heavily suspicious if the person in photo was him though...

I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop. At the time that I am bored or understand—I use those words interchangeably—another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I’m not one. I’d rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can’t ignore.

 

Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody’s else’s aesthetics. I think you’re born an artist or not. I couldn’t have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations.

                                                                                 -Robert Rauschenberg

引自纽约时报的报道：

Two men, one a practiced French stuntman known for climbing tall buildings, the other a New Yorker who said he wanted to raise awareness of the dangers of malaria, scaled the 52-story New York Times Building in Times Square on Thursday just hours apart. Each was arrested when he stepped safely onto the roof.

The first, Alain Robert, the Frenchman, went up the north face of the year-old skyscraper in the morning, unfurling a bright green banner near the top. The words on the banner were illegible from the sidewalk, but from office windows inside the tower the message could be clearly read: “Global warming kills more people than 9/11 every week.”

The other, identified by the police as Renaldo Clarke, 32, of Brooklyn, climbed the Eighth Avenue side starting about 6 p.m.

A spokeswoman for The Times, Catherine J. Mathis, said that after the first climber was arrested, two additional building security guards were assigned to patrol the area outside, on 40th and 41st Streets.

Both climbers grabbed onto one of the building’s most distinctive features, the ladderlike horizontal rods that form an exterior curtain surrounding the floor-to-ceiling windows. And then, in turn, they were off on a hand-over-hand trip up the face of a New York skyscraper, with no ropes or harnesses, a trip that left the cellphone-camera-snapping crowds that swirled below thinking of Spider-Man, or maybe King Kong.

。。。

昨日收到如下一封信

Dear Fellow Activist:

Today is World Environment Day.

Right now, Alain Robert, known as the French Spiderman, is risking his life in New York City climbing high into the skyline to raise awareness of the desperate need for real stewardship from world leaders on global warming ahead of next month's G8 meeting.

He says "The Solution Is Simple":

1 – Stop Cutting Down Trees. Plant More Trees.
2 – Make Everything Energy Efficient.
3 – Only Make Clean Energy.

The cost of action is a simple matter of math. The cost of acting NOW is far smaller than the cost of acting TOO LATE. But the time for action is running out, fast.

World leaders know this, but are still not acting fast or bravely enough. Last year in Bali, they failed to agree to ANY emissions reduction targets, but rather to two more years of more talk.
TALK is no longer cheap; but we can't afford any more of it instead of ACTION.

But there is hope in the changing of the guard among world leaders. America's next President could help lead the way.
There's reason for hope. We urgently need a global agreement for at least a 50 percent cut in emissions.

World leaders meet again next month at the G8 conference in Japan. YOU can help make sure they get the message. Go to http://www.thesolutionissimple.org and join your voice with ours.
Together we WILL be heard.

Together, millions of us can help make history on the most urgent and important issue of our lifetime. It's that simple.

Stay informed, stay inspired, stay active!

As always in solidarity,

Your friends at AnitaRoddick.com and IAmAnActivist.org

Chinese media reported the story of foreign volunteers helping kids in the diaster zone recover from PTSD through games, which showed that foreigners are not all "devils." (See photos--NOT taken by me) But of course, the New York Times' cover story was titled "Parents' Grief Turns to Rage at Chinese Officials," with a photo of an official kneeling down to beg parents of earthquake victims to stop their protest.

News are always selective in the sense that one paper cannot cover everything happening around the globe. But what standards of selection should be applied? I'm puzzled. "Newsworthy" is as vague as the "healthy and positive" propoganda standard (which is not valid anymore if only one surfs sohu or sina nowadays). Is the "most emailed" story the most newsworthy in the economic sense? Who said "good news is not news?" The improvement of the mainland-Taiwan relationship and the appreciation of Japanese rescue effort were headline news, despite the fact that some of them first appeared in online forums. So who is the executive chef to determine what to cook for the audience today? Should newspapers/press bear certain "social responsibility?" If "incitement" can be a crime, what about "imbalanced negative connotation?" Of course that's teasing. But it is also a reality that no newspaper can expect the audience to uphold their "independent judgment" and diverse resources. Shouldn't a few leading newspapers such as the New York Times be held to a higher standard then? Simply because they are often quoted as the authority?

Also on the cover of NYTimes, was the story of a female "holy warrior for Al Qaeda" who was portrated in the photo with an overall black gown covering all her body except for the eyes.

Not in the news: Tibetans residing in NJ and NYC held a ceremony to pray for earthquake victims on Union Square on Sunday.

Dujiangyan Parents' Search for Child

We found Fu Guanyu and her husband Wang Wei as they clung frantically to the long arm of a Hitachi excavator as it rumbled through the city of Dujiangyan.They were crying and seemed to be trying to pull the heavy machine, as if they could make it move faster toward their home. Their six-story apartment building had collapsed in the earthquake. Their toddler son, Wang Zhilu, was buried under the debris along with his grandparents. Mrs Fu broke down as she told me she still had hope their son would be found alive.

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Source: The Art Newspaper

French curator Jérôme Sans is expected to be announced as the new artistic director of the Ullens Center of Contemporary Art (UCCA) in Beijing at a press conference in Paris on Tuesday. Speaking to The Art Newspaper last month, Guy Ullens, the Belgian foodstuffs baron who has entirely funded UCCA, said that Jérôme Sans had been selected as the new director and that an announcement would be made as soon as the appropriate Chinese authorities had approved the appointment.

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The 2008 Whitney Biennial expanded to the Park Avenue Armory to host multiple installations, performances and events. The Armory is a huge 19th-century clubhouse originally used by the Seventh Regiment as both a military facility and a social gathering place. A designated historic landmark today, the Armory is full of dim hallways, crumbling period rooms, marvelous antique furniture and portraits, and walls mounted with giant animal heads. For artists, it must be exciting and challenging to produce site-specific installations and performances here. And indeed the selected artists presented the viewer with a wide range of ideas and executions. It includes dance parties (Agathe Snow), burlesque performances, a gypsy banquet, a slumber party with cots, blankets, snacks and ambient music (DJ Olive), and a real working bar serving homemade tequila (Edwardo Sarabia).

 

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Via Alejandro

Bridge Art Fair Premiers in New York
Featuring 60 International exhibitors

Known for spectacular shows of emerging contemporary art in Chicago, London, and Miami, Bridge Art Fair proudly premiers its New York edition March 27–30, at the Waterfront, 222 12th Avenue, in the northern section of Manhattan's Chelsea gallery district. Concurrent with New York's celebrated Armory Show, Bridge New York will host more than 60 international exhibitors from such diverse locales as Austria, Canada, China, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Korea, Spain, Switzerland, the UK and the United States. "We're very excited to premier Bridge in New York, "says founder Michael Workman, "It's the undisputed center of the art world, a city enthusiastic about the independent approach to art we have a built-in passion for."

Special Focus: Asia

Bridge New York marks the expansion of Bridge as an international focus showcase, premiering with a spotlight on Asian art. Invited galleries are participating from Taipei, Singapore, Shanghai, Tokyo, and elsewhere across the Pacific Rim. Building on New York's annual Asian Contemporary Art Week, Bridge New York's Focus: Asia offers art collectors never-before-seen contemporary work from the East. 

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Pretty amazing story (IMDb gave it 8.7 stars out of 10), although the characters in the movie seemed very concious of the camera (raising question whether it was directed performance or spontaneous action). More intriguing when watching it during this election year.

Watch it at China Digital Times or Youtube.

唉。。。

“请投我一票”，记录武汉某小学2年级3班的班长民主选举，是一部颇有新意的纪录片，IMDb的数据库在10颗星的等级里给了它8.7颗星。虽然影片中的人物似乎对镜头的存在过于适应，令人有些生疑其中是否有表演成分，但它总体的故事新鲜度和情节性仍令其甚是引人入胜，除了去年得了SilverDoc纪录片电影节的最佳纪录片奖，而且还入围了今年奥斯卡奖的最佳纪录片的15个候选人的shortlist。该影片可以在网上观看。导演：陈在军。

At first, my reaction was, "Ewww, what a disgusting story!" But there is certainly more to it. I used to consider adoption a noble, selfless action and I still do mostly. But I've always been a bit wary towards international, cross-racial/cultural adoption. Not necessarily more child abuse incidents, but definitely more confusion. And it is not close-minded to scrutinize the motive for international adoption. At least one wonderful American adoptive parent confessed to me that it is "simpler and easier" to adopt "healthier" children from China (than in the US).

Vanessa Beecroft, in the controversial photo "Black Madonna With Twins" showing her breast-feeding the Sudanese twins. (By Matthu Placek)

 

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