方 璐 FANG LU

My latest project “Don’t Talk About Politic” is being installed in “We Remember the Sun” exhibition, a group show in the Walter & McBean Galleries. Opening is this coming Wednesday, exhibition on view through September.

“Don’t Talk about Politic” is a two channel video installation. Proposed plan is as image followed, as well as exhibition statement written by Mary Ellyn Johnson. I have been working on this in the past several weeks. And I found out that if you use NTSC video camera to shoot video in a lighted studio in a PAL country, then your video will be possibly have flickering all through it. What a lesson! Luckily I am able to eliminate this unexpected effect because it was shot in a blue screen studio. I am very excited to see when all is installed. And it should be an interesting show!

Some Video stills:

Events: —We Remember the Sun
Exhibition of Work by Fifteen Bay Area Artists
—Live Musical Performance at Opening Reception

Location: Walter and McBean Galleries
San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI)
800 Chestnut Street, San Francisco, CA 94133

Opening reception: Wednesday, 18 June 2008, 7:00–9:00 p.m.
Cost: Free and open to the public
Exhibition Dates: 19 June–13 September 2008
Images: High-resolution digital images available
Press Contact: Bob Gamboa, (415) 749-4507, bgamboa@sfai.edu
We Remember the Sun, an Exhibition by Fifteen California Artists, Opens at SFAI on 18 June 2008

San Francisco, CA (23 May 2008)—On Wednesday, 18 June 2008, the opening reception for
We Remember the Sun, an exhibition of work by fifteen California artists, will be held from 7:00
to 9:00 p.m. at the Walter and McBean Galleries on SFAI’s 800 Chestnut Street campus.
Participating artists are Amy Balkin, L. M. Bogad, Andrea Bowers, Deer Fang, David Gurman,
Taraneh Hemami, David Maisel, Jill Miller, Shaun O’Dell, Julia Page, Praba Pilar, John Roloff,
Pamela Wilson-Ryckman, Jon Winet, and Michael Zheng. During the reception, a live musical
performance will accompany the screening of Shaun O’Dell’s video Sun October 24th–27th
2002, and on Thursday, 11 September, at 7:00 p.m., L. M. Bogad and Praba Pilar will perform
live. Additionally, in August and September, films pertaining to the subject matter of works in
the exhibition will be screened (please go to www.sfai.edu/current for details). Free and open to
the public (Tuesdays through Saturdays, from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.), the exhibition will be on
view from 19 June to 13 September 2008 at the Walter and McBean Galleries.

Looking back, forty years in retrospect, on the signal cultural moment that May of 1968 marks,
We Remember the Sun will examine the myths and legends emanating from a period of time
punctuated by activist protests around the globe—protests against, among other things,
capitalism, racism, sexism, class divisions, rampant unemployment, and the US government.
There were student uprisings in Brazil, France, Mexico, Senegal, and Spain; the cultural
revolution in China; the Naxalite movement in India; the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia; and,
eventually, such phenomena as the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany. In the US, the civil rights
and antiwar movements were in full swing, as were, importantly for We Remember the Sun, the
movements of nonviolence and passive resistance (“Flower Power”) that flourished in San
Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, in Berkeley, and throughout California. Just as quickly,
however, a still-continuing backlash began to unfold. Along with the assassinations of Martin
Luther King Jr and Robert F. Kennedy, the endless-seeming war that took place in Vietnam
represented a sad articulation of the American hegemonic status quo, which resisted social and
political ideals of change and culminated in the election of Richard Nixon.

The question the works in this exhibition together seek to pose is this: How, if at all, has the
utopian vision, the countercultural zeitgeist, that suffused both local and global realms of
progressive thought and action in the late 60s carried over and across to 2008? Is there—beyond
the various nostalgias and disappointments, the fabrications and deconstructions—a genuine
legacy of potential political optimism and action still to be devised and articulated?

Without wanting to foreclose competing logics of response, We Remember the Sun comprises a
series of interconnected but individualized comebacks to the question it poses. If Paris was and
remains the locus classicus of the unrest of May of 1968, California was and remains the
mythical space of utopian possibilities, the goal of a wild and westering impulse promising total
freedom, the land of endless seasons of growth in ideal weather. As the exhibition’s title (taken
from a work by Shaun O’Dell) implies, however, the “California” the utopian visionaries
conceived of and sought not only no longer exists, but, in a certain sense, never did. Thus, the
longing built in to O’Dell’s quest after the setting sun—a sun that metaphorically represents both
California and 60s utopianism—is, ironically, a longing strangely already prevalent in 1968.
Rather than indicating another “god that failed,” then, the remembered sun in question can be
seen, especially in the artworld context, as the ongoing unpossessed promise of the social,
cultural, and political ideals the transformations of 1968 first taught us to imagine.

We Remember the Sun offers a view of contemporary art practice in California that, though
acknowledging its deep roots in the utopian (and dystopian) ideals of the 60s, contends that it is
only through the acceptance of mediated rather than absolutist ideas and practices that the
political progressivism of the 60s can remanifest itself under today’s extraordinarily different
political conditions—conditions that contrast globalization with antiglobalization (or, otherwise
conceptualized, altermondialisation); multiculturalism with zenophobia; terrorism, initiatory or
retaliatory, with negotiation and peace; and environmentalism with corporatism run amok. Put
more specifically in terms of We Remember the Sun (an exhibition of the work of Bay Area
artists), it is only through the process and labor of yielding to the demands of (artistic) mediums,
mixed or singular—it is only through production—that revolutionary ideas and practices can
effectually take shape.

Amy Balkin has produced a series of rubbings taken from the frequently nondescript exterior
architectural signage of Bay Area entities involved with military-industrial production, covert
activities utilizing remote sensing, and profiteering from the war on Iraq. L. M. Bogad and
Praba Pilar specialize in political performance theater and have collaborated to create a work
which specifically responds to the legacies of 1968 and the current political situation in the US
today for a performance to take place on 11 September 2008. Andrea Bower’s work The Weight
of Relevance is situated at the intersection of art and activism. The piece focuses on the current
status of the Aids Memorial Quilt—the largest piece of folk art in the world—and on the people
who maintain and display it, who strive to strike a balance between preserving it and using it as
an iconic activist tool. Deer Fang’s two-channel video installation Don’t Talk about Politics
investigates the impact of the Olympics on Chinese nationalism by presenting a group of girls
assembled like a cheerleading squad doing the “royal dance” (a dance popular in China in 1968)
and thereby connecting Chinese nationalism with the cultural revolution. David Gurman’s
Reflector Project explores digital field recordings as the contemporary and predominant
mechanisms used to understand distant landscapes and cultures. Taraneh Hemami’s bead
curtain is part of a larger body of work, Most Wanted, which investigates the nature of
perception, recognition, and representation; in particular, it examines Western constructions of
the “new enemy” through a series of faceless portrayals of so-called most-wanted terrorists.
David Maisel’s photographs focus on environmentally impacted sites. These large-scale
photographs show the physical impact on the land from industrial practices like mining, logging,
water reclamation, and military testing. Jill Miller camps out in the wilderness of California to
create Waiting for Bigfoot. Hooking up surveillance cameras, performing extensive field
research, and interviewing inhabitants who may have spotted Bigfoot in the area, Miller
questions our culture’s desire for belief or faith in the unknown or undiscovered and taps into
long-historicized legends and fantasies about California’s untamed wilderness. As noted above,
the title We Remember the Sun comes from the title of one of the works Shaun O’Dell is
showing, a work he made after soliciting his friends for one sentence and a date that reflected on
a memory they had of the sun. Accompanying his video work Sun October 24th–27th 2002, he
will perform music at the opening reception on 18 June that attempts to sonically harness the
setting sun’s final frequencies. Julia Page’s work explores the notion of American heritage in
search of latent meaning within established systems of information. For this exhibition, she
presents reinterpreted political language through avant-garde jazz. John Roloff’s work responds
to the geographic conditions of test sites, exploring their environmental possibilities through
drawing, sculpture, and installation. Pamela Wilson-Ryckman’s watercolor paintings are, in
virtue of their medium, seemingly light and benign, but on closer inspection represent scenes of
violence, rioting, and street disasters, projecting a society on the verge of ruin. Jon Winet’s The
Electoral College is a hybrid new-media-art/journalism project exploring the 2008 US
presidential election and democratic practice in America. Michael Zheng explores the poetic
state of utopia—the delicate, the beautiful, and the fleeting—thereby representing the idea and
memory of the 60s through expressive form(s).

We Remember the Sun, curated by SFAI’s assistant curator Mary Ellyn Johnson, is part of the
New Voices component of SFAI’s Exhibitions and Public Programs. New Voices encourages the
self-organizational initiatives of younger curators and other activists by providing them spaces
and strategies through which to present their projects. Exhibitions and Public Programs consists
of five discrete but intersecting directions for investigating current constructions of contemporary global culture: Global Figures, New Models of Production, Acting Out in the City,
Pacific Perspectives, and New Voices.