DEERFANG.ORG

前几天就有留意旧金山艺术学院里Walter McBean画廊里，侯瀚如策展的Adel Abdessemed个展所引起的争议。然后今天才了解到这个展览因为几个动物权利组织的抗议和威胁已被迫关闭了。展览上的一些录像纪录了动物被屠杀的过程，因而引来了众多抗议。展览开幕那天本来只是一个学院内的展览开幕，据说人不算特别多，可是过后学院却收到了8000多封投诉信，其中一些信还威胁学校的老师和学生，称要以暴力回报。(SF Gate上有具体新闻)

我无法在这里评论Abdessemed的作品因为我没有现场看过这位巴黎艺术家的作品。可是这种围绕所谓的政治“正确性”而进行的自我审查实在是可悲。在中国如果有展览被封，那可能是因为官方的限制。而这个Abdessemed展览被取消却是因为维护动物权利的团体和个人抗议而被取消的。这个维护动物权利的头衔就是我上面指的“正确性”。我发现在美国，特别是 旧金山这个提倡自由和多元的地方，这种“正确性”是最时髦的一个取向。时髦好比练瑜珈，吃有机食品(organic food), 不买第三国家血汗工厂生产的产品等等。因而这个展览才在旧金山引起了这么大的风波和抗议。

我并不反对这些“正确性”，可是我认为”正确性“的背后充满了对现实的无知，发达国家的优越感和惺惺作态的同情。就拿现在对西藏的争论为例子，那些高喊自由独立口号的人中，到底有多少是真正了解西藏，毕竟文化和宗教差异太大。那天我和一个从美国回国探亲的朋友吃饭，她满口理所当然的藏独让我摸不找边际，也不想回应。直到她话锋一转，她说回国最大目的只是购购物，我才暗自恍然：原来所有关乎自由的激进言辞其实和现实并没有什么关系。就像那些维护动物权利的抗议者们，或许他们已经把世界上所有的动物都同化成了他们家里那只宝贝宠物，却忘记了他们自己生活在和世界其它地方完全不同的现实中。

Hello! My blog is back finally after 2 months unavailable. Yes I am still in Guangzhou right now. And I am working with about 140 students from Sun Yat-sen University on new media art and experimental video. Every Thursday and Tuesday about this time, my brain is normally not very active anymore after six hours teaching with two classes. But today Jon gave the students a web workshop in class. So Hive-five to Jon!

The students are very interesting because they mostly didn’t have background in art before entering the university. Therefore to me they have great potential to be shaped and formed. Some of them have produced very exciting projects in the class. It’s amazing for me to see some of them change in their work. And I try to make sure to assign them home work that can change their normal way of thinking and leave enough freedom for them make decision and take action. But of course you can’t always predict what the result is especially having a large group of people.

Beginning of the year of Rat in China, the word “disaster” came up again and again in the news media. Here I will point out two major ones that are most talked about local news. They are not related but since they happened around the Chinese new year, I will just call them “disasters” in the name of Rat.

The first round of disaster was millions of migrant workers who were traveling home for spring festival stuck at train stations for days. Guangzhou, a money-making capital in southern China has increasing amount of migrant workers from all over the country. Like other major cities, most of these workers travel home by train for Chinese new year. And when this happens, it means the biggest human migration on earth. This year, the extreme cold weather made traveling an impossible task, snow and ice paralyzed many of the railway system that is powered by electricity. Guangzhou train station was one of the major disaster site. Some pictures here.

The second round of “disaster”, which of course might not be more entertaining than disasterous for most of us is happening online these a few days and, even now. Hong Kong Pop idol/singer Edison Chan’s sex photos with seven (so far) HK entertainment celebrities are exposed all over the web. I didn’t pay much attention in the beginning because that kind of news happen every minute in HK’s very saturated entertainment circle. But not until yesterday I saw some of the photos and read into the story more, I realize the intensity of the event. Till the night before, there were four hundred of these photos had been leaked on web. I haven’t see the full download of the images but only a few. And here we are talking about explicit sex images that are in amateur porn. The only differences are that they are personal pictures of these celebrity singers and actresses. Some of them like one singer from the Twins were idols for the Hong Kong youth with their pretty and innocent appearance; and some of them had retired from the entertainment career and married into the rich. With the leaking of the images, Edison Chen and the girls appeared in the photos, the career of pop idols and marriage life of the rich wives and mothers are in great dangers.

Maybe less interested in moral stands of these stars, I am most intrigue by the media aspects of this whole event, from the way the information leaked out from Edison Chen’s Mac book, to the speed the photos has been spreading and how it went beyond the HK police control and kept flooding the web with new images continuously, and how the online community circulated these images during all the online crack down. Images are what forms public perception. And in this case they are used like weapon. With the traffic of internet and the mass, the effect of the sex images are maximize to another extreme that is unseen before. Not only on web, there were stores selling CDs of these images package illegally, and even have service to download for your cell phone…

I am not going to include any pictures here, but go search them on your own. It’s part of the game, isn’t it?

Regardless, hope we all have a good year! A late happy new year to you all.

Europa, Lars von Trier 的一部1991年的老电影。这个导演每部电影都在制作手法上做新尝试。这部电影，虽然在他的Dogma 95 宣言之前（一个反高成本电影制作的运动），但已有很大的实验性。片中多处采用演员在投影的场景下演出，画面采用多层重叠来叠印不同人物或背景。后来我看了DVD上的制作特辑（多亏现在翻版碟的日益专业精良化），才了解到片中涉及大量群众演员的大场面都事先在波兰拍摄，涉及主要演员的戏都在芬兰的录映蓬内拍摄。也就是说同一个画面，背景人物和主角分两次在不同地方拍摄，最后再用后期重叠在一起。主要目的应该是节省制作经费。根据DVD的介绍以当时的情况，一个波兰群众演员一天的工资仅需6美金。

主要剧情这里就不详细说了，这是Lars von Trier 欧洲三部曲的其中一部。你也可以从这部电影看到他后来《Dogville》等电影相关联的主题，以一个完美主义的英雄式人物为主人公，但最终主角还是成为了真实世界的牺牲品。

前天下午终于从台北回到广州。这是我第一次去台湾，尽管办入境许可证时波折重重，但总算在出发前一周收到了台北寄来的许可。

台北总的感觉人文和教育素质比较高，城市发展比中国内地要平缓，没有那种明天就要翻天覆地的恐慌。台北文化深受日本和韩国文化影响。

台北的的士司机很友好也有一定的知识面。在台北的最后一天晚上，我们遇上了一位女的士司机，第二天她还把我们送去了机场。机场的一路上我和她聊开，了解到一些独特的台湾现象。

那天上了车后，出租车女士热情地要载我们去买葱油饼早餐，我们自然也赞同。我下车买了葱油饼后，出租车女士告诉我卖饼的男人是从大陆来得。他很年轻来台湾做工，虽然他在大陆有一个妻子，但以当时政策他以为他再也不能回大陆，所以他就在台湾又娶了一个妻子。后来回国政策宽松后，他回去大陆探望他在那儿的妻子，而其实在他离开她不久，她才发现她有了他的孩子。二三十年后，孩子都已经长大了，而他才第一次见到他。后来，大陆的妻子决定跟他一起去台湾。所以现在他有两个妻子，一个大陆的妻子和他一起做葱油饼赚钱，另外一个台湾妻子则和他感情上比较亲近。出租车女士告诉我这样的情况在台湾很常见。

这次在台湾除了参加亚洲与公众创用国际研讨会，我们还在非常廊(VT Art Salon)举办了第二次媒体互换活动（Media Exchange 2)。除了预定的几位展示者：Christopher Adams， 王春燕，朱捍东，Jon Phillips方力中和我展示之后，林其蔚等几位台湾艺术家也播放和介绍了他们的录像行为作品。我很庆幸尽管时间仓促我们还是最后做了这次活动，特别是回想起媒体互换在广州的第一次活动，我想这样定期的交流活动对个体艺术家来说很重要。所以我们的原则是不排除任何流派或艺术形式。谢谢Christopher Adams ，蔣慧仙和非常廊的支持和场地提供。

我没有拍太多的照片，我把其中一些放到了我的flickr上。另外还有一些来自Rebecca MacKinnon的照片。她拍得比我的好多了。

非常廊的媒体互换2活动。这些是Rebecca MacKinnon拍的照片。

方力中和林其蔚（Lin Chi-Wei)

猪头皮和他的乐队搖滾主耶穌。我很欣赏猪头皮的表演，因为你无法辨认他的慷慨陈词和夸张的表演是讽刺还是真实的。不过无论怎样，他都有办法把自己和其他人表演弄得有意思。

By Rebecca MacKinnon

台湾新闻很有娱乐性。

台北故宫博物院

In Guangzhou, or most of other big cities in China, the city is surrounded by small villages. But as the city grows bigger, this layout turned into villages surrounded with city. These villages in the city are neighborhoods for lower income families and migrant workers. They are also the only place you can see “old Guangzhou” now. Eventually these villages are shrinking and replaced by city planning.

The pictures below is taken from the Lie De village near to where I live. The whole area is called Pearl River New Town, which is a new area the government planning to develop into the new city central.

Entry of Lie De Village, now it’s the entry of ruin.

(more…)

The night of first day of 2008, Jon and I were walking around the city and ran into a dance scene that we totally didn’t expect. It was almost ten o’clock at night and people were dancing in different groups with different styles of music in an open air public square. Low-fi but very loud speakers were set on wheels. I am really amazed by how engage people are from all age. It was not common to see public space being activated like this in the US. So without further investigate how the dance activity was formed, I felt a moment of liberation.

In the last two weeks I have left from San Francisco to Guangzhou to Beijing to Hong Kong, and now back to Guangzhou. Last night new years eve was calm and peace, which gave me some chance to reflect on things. And thinking about last year how we blindly joined the count down crowd outside of a shopping mall, this might be a wiser move.

Beijing, the alien buildings are about to complete: Bird Nest (National Stadium), Bubble (National Swimming Center) and The Egg (National Center for the Performing Arts). Witnessing these futuristic forms of architectures in live scale, I almost lost the sense of location of where I was. But when I pull my eyes away from the structure, the workers that were working on the site immediately reminded me I was still in Beijing China.

Beijing has been cleaned up and made green since last year I visited. Rows and rows of trees have been planted in the city and along the high way. All the new planted trees are fully grown and so this was done in a way that you won’t be able to tell that they were just planted. Once I had seen on the side of a highway there were workers making meters depth holes to put in large scale grown trees.

Guangzhou is a city with little less expectation for the public and therefore things are going and building out of control. My family moved to the newer part of the city about two years ago. Within a year or so the relatively flat surrounding already filled with high rises that are completed with sales ad hanging on top of the building and high rises in progress with bamboo structure. The air has gone worse with the traffic going more aggressive. Most of the newly finished buildings with brand new surfaces I saw last time already turned into dusty antiques. Walking on the street, all kind of sounds are amplified to make themselves stand out in the highly competitive environment. Small street shops one next to each other put out their speakers in front of their stores to play their own ‘energetic’ beats and how much discount you can get.

Everyone here can equipped with cheap and outrage fashions: purple feather top, cowboys boots with shorts, girls with hip hop jackets…If you are tired with the street battle scene, you can go into a bubble tea shop, which will be an instant transfer you to a fairy tale condition.
Plastic trees, columns filled with bubble water and swing seats with nerdy boys and smoking punk girls…

I still like Guangzhou，even though so many things have gone “wrong”.

Beijing

(more…)

The recent shopping mall gunfire in Omaha have made me think about Virginia Tech incident, especially how killers orchestrated their own media exposure as the last remark of their life. Is this the characteristic of violence in the media age now? Massacre in the media age, or massacre for the media?

News about 19 year old Hawkins random gunfire in a shopping mall toward Christmas shoppers and mall staff is all over the web since December 5. According to these news, Hawkins had left a will and indicate that “I’ll be famous.” Evidently there is nothing more explosive for America domestic life than having a mass murder in the shopping mall in the Christmas shopping hype.

Looking back to Virginia Tech massacre, the killing of 32 people took place in a campus. But the killer an Korean American student recorded himself on tape after the first round of firing in the campus and mailed it to mainstream news. He had ensured his image of holding guns staring at the camera were also spread everywhere to the people who were not in the incident.

Galleries opening and SFMOMA half price entry till 9PM are some art crowd tradition in San Francisco. I rarely follow it because not much happening in the galleries shows and the half price entry price is still too expensive in my opinion. The regular price for SFMOMA is $12.50, of course there are students price, senior price, free for members and all that. But it still means the regular price for the museum is $2.50 more expensive than a regular hollywood movie. First Tuesday of every month is free and first Thursday is half price $6.50. But normally I end up missing them because it’s only once a month. To me the museum entry is unacceptably high. And as an artist I can not justify that people have to pay to see art. When I have my show in SFMOMA, I will try to at least make my part of the show free for all to come in. That’s how I will stay positive and do my part.

Last night during the half price hour we went into SFMOMA to catch up new shows of Jeff Wall, Douglas Gordon and Olafur Eliasson. Walked into the museum lobby, a suspended electric fan was swinging in circle in the center of the space about a few foot right above visitors heads. But my attention immediately caught by the ambient club music and crowd noise came from the other side of the lobby. We were first pleased and thought that finally there were more night public events happening in the museum now. But as we approached, the guard looked at our tickets and politely denied our access. It would cost another $20 to get in to the party (you can get free cocktail).

Luckily three new shows are fairly good and I don’t think anything in the theater right now is more worth of seeing than them.

Douglas Gordon is certainly one of the most interesting video artists. On view is “Pretty Much Every Film and Video Work from about 1992 until Now” and if I remember right there are 48 TV monitors showing his video and film in one dark room. They are literally a pile of TVs. But such display is no flaunt of digital effects and flickering (as we might find in Nam June Paik’s TV displays). The installation is simply playing every project on TV one next to another, from video of a large scale installation with elephants “Play Dead”, to video of him kicking a camera in a living room, to video of a fly about to die. All the sound are off on the TV with headphones available. But everyone in the room were intriguingly watching all the monitors in silence. I don’t know if any artists are as gutsy as Gordon, taking away all the magical glare from the device and having all the work compete and be compared like this.

Some quick notes on the other two shows. It seems there are a lot of efforts + much money in Olafur Eliasson part of the show, which is good to see. The environmental construction is very engaging, using fundamental elements like light, temperature, reflection and scale. I think his work is very successful when viewers don’t have to perceive detail of any structure or even the actual object. Meaning the room filled with light as if everyone is being cooked is more an integrity than the frozen race car wrapped in ice spiral in a walk-in freezer. Some how when I find the trace of “man made” I feel less connected and then start to finding things on the crafting.

Perhaps because I have seen too many Jeff Wall’s photography from books already, seeing the actual work in the exhibition did not increase that much experience for me…