方 璐 FANG LU

It was about nine thirty at night when I walked out of my studio. I have been hesitated to leave late for the whole day because I needed to wait for night bus to go home. The studio is in a quite industrial area. Buses there come and go like ghosts.

I saw a man standing by the street near the bus stop before I crossed from the opposite street. Even though I didn’t want to wait at the dark corner of the bus stop and preferred wait by the street, but in order not to encounter the man I started walking to the darker side. Obviously I wasn’t using my brain when I did that. When I walked pass the man, he looked back and suddenly say “it’s safer to wait here by the street”. His Mexican accent and humble attitude made me realized that he was just like me, trying to get home at night.

I smiled and stood next to him. “My grandson is Chinese and my granddaughter is also Chinese.” He said. I shocked. It felt like all the sudden I was able to relate everything with this old man. He was from Mexico and both of his sons married with Chinese women. What a strange feeling that when the world is so interrelated, and our human race is so hybrid. A little bit of you is actually contained in everything, or a little bit of everything is contained inside you.

Last generations of Chinese and Mexican immigrants exported themselves to US as labors. What’s going to happen when children of these immigrants start to have inter-racial marriage? How is this generation going to affect their parent’s immigrated country and their parent’s born countries? Sitting on the bus, all these questions excited my brain again…

I came accross this article and it caught my attention. “San Francisco is gateway city for immigrants and Silicon Valley Technology” Living in the Mission district in San Francisco, I don’t remember how many times walked down Mission Street, bought a cup of $0.95 bubble tea from a Chinese restaurant, and then walk down to a the Mexican store bought bags of fresh vegetable, fruits and egg for decent price; if it is a day of making a meal, there are also Chinese seafood and meat stores next to Mexican vegetable store. There is one seafood store even have ocean fish specimen diagram in their storefront windows…

Besides immigration business is powering the current economy in San Francisco, the article also proved my thought by pointing out that self-employed and small business (less than 10 employees) are 85 percent of all city establishments. I am really amazed and think of the anti-immigration especially the fear of “yellow peril” in America history. The world is already operating on a multiracial level that no one can reverse. It’s glad to see immigration business and small business models step up as global corporations are being dispute by the public. San Francisco is probably in the forefront of developing this new economy model.

I haven’t got a chance to blog about the Bump’n Grind in May until now, and really want to post up some photos. The contest was crazy, and I hope people there felt the same way too. First of all the whole idea was more than executing an art project, it was more like a reality task in terms of the duration of putting everything together (from January to May 2006), the collective effort it required, and the context of the event is really far out from academy circle, and in this case is in a San Francisco downtown club Ten15 Folsom.

The Bump’n Grind Dance Contest is part of the collaborative club project with Jeremiah Jenkins, Ryan Hackett, Steve Lopez, Socrates Parra and Tony Labat as instructor. This is also part of the Alternative Context class in San Francisco Art MFA program. We five individuals were to create project in the ground of a night club and present it to the public in a one-night party.

Ten15 Folsom, this one of the oldest night club in San Francisco is certainly a spatial place for five of us to create works, which unlike most of the exhibit situation that artists afraid they don’t have enough space. For me I don’t really see it as an exhibition where audience walk in to see objects being display. I don’t think I ever like dead-work exhibition where the only happening is holding a plastic cup of red wine. There is no way to treat 1015 Folsom a exhibition space, it’s too big, it’s too dark, it’s too loud, it’s too sexy, it’s too much more exciting than art itself!

Recognized this challenge that the club provides, I construct the project with “people in the club” approach, and I believe other colleagues have done the same. In the front entrance room, Ryan built DJ booth, where he and his friend DJ. Jeremiah changed all martini glasses in the club to his own made mugs. There were special graphics on these mugs which encouraged club users to find who’s their mates. Jeremiah is also the moderator of my dance contest. Second floor of the club, Socrates decorated the space as a underground homosexual bar and had drag performances. Steve had gogo boys show in the main stage and gogo dance boxes. Including the Bump’n Grind Dance Contest, all these projects reveals efforts to create actual club experience and win popularity from club audiences. “Impressive Nature” is the title of the whole event. Remember someday in Tony’s office, Ryan, Steve and I were throwing off ideas for the name, Steve came up “Spectacle”. Tony looked up dictionary online and we read one of its meaning “Something that can be seen or viewed, especially something of a remarkable or impressive nature”. Impressive nature, now I think of this title is very appropriate because all the projects invested the nature of of the club, which is impressive by itself.

After the first time visited 1015 Folsom during its open hours, I decided to make a project that spotlights the sexual aspect among normal club goers and challenges its limit. Participatory model of art making is also a thread in my other projects but this one is certainly the most risky. It had pretty high failure rate but which projects I had done in the past one year was not. In the end I don’t see anything will be a failure, it’s only one of the situations in a situational circumstance.

A contest can’t happen without contestants and what if there were too many contestants to be judged. There were lot of uneasy thoughts in my brain and tried to solve as many unexpected problems as I could. But the real moment is still the real moment. I went out many times to give out fliers in 1015 and sometimes to the people on the street while they were waiting in line to get into other clubs. I didn’t want it to be a party only for art people or art students. I was looking for the real people.

Bump’n Grind turned out to be really good height. I don’t want to describe the process here and some of the photo will show you the moment. But I have to mention thanks to the people who helped front the contest turned the crowd into a high energy sphere: three juries of the contest Joshua Kid Clayton, David Sanchez, Adam Ohana, and Keldamuzik’s opening performance dropped the bomb of Oakland hyphy move.

I think I have to stop here before it gets too long or turned into a thank you letter. There were lot more ideas I wanted to write down and there were more happened than what I wrote such as Felipe Dulzaides’s giant inflatable Bouncing Heart and many guest Dj Performers were presented such as Matmos etc. I am sure everyone participated the projects might have more or different thoughts than mine. I wish I had kept writing on the way as the project went instead of a long post like this after three months…

Three final groups in the Contest.

Judges and Guest Performers in Bump’n Grind. From left to right: Lingo, Joshua Kid Clayton, David Sanchez, Adam Ohana and Kelda Muzik.

Improvised Dialogues of Cannibal Cafe is finally here. After the making of Cannibal Cafe, I have been transfering all the talking to text. I didn’t expect it took that long and it is a long text. The reason of doing this is one the text can be used as reading material, and second they can be used as script for continue improvisations and performances. Because all participants created the scenes based on basic scripts I provided to them, and the simple scripts were fragments selected from online news by me, it seems natural to have text as one of the product of this project. And of course it is also because the content of these conversation that made live by all the participants was something I didn’t expect of, and it was not something that can be direct. Now I remember Tony Labat had once had said that I was a passive director in all my projects.

Chinese translation of the dialogues will also be available soon. I am still doing the final editng on it. I am also looking into some kind of book or magazine format for the dialogues. Free Press will be one approach, which is an artist project by Sal Randolph. It is a open-access publishing house and I help with the Chinese section.

ps. The camera man of Cannibal Cafe John Alston just moved to New York from San Francisco. Best wishes for his career! San Francisco, New York, China or Europe, there are definitely some decisions for me to make after this year too.