These are the things we are pushing right now for Cantocore exhibition, a show in both Guangzhou China and San Francisco this fall. There is a home concert preview party coming Wednesday 7/23 to fund the production of the shows. I am not a very good sales woman, but really want to make this one works!

Visit Cantocore site for information about the show, artists, and detail about the preview concert. Performing musicians for the the preview concert are Ma Jie and Chris Willits.

Adam has helped me document the installation in the Walter & McBean Galleries. This is part of the exhibition “We Remember the Sun”, on view from now till Sept 19th. Documentation video-taped by Adam Barczak.

My videos will be projected on three screens in the main space. From 8-10PM, they will be showing “The Plum in the Golden Vase”, “The Unique Dancers”, “Panda Express”, “Bump’n Grind”, “Don’t Talk About Politics’. After 10PM and the rest of the night, three screens will shuffle through video clips from my hard drives. They are clips of out takes of above videos, videos I have never shown, and old works back to 2001. This become a project itself I call it “Scratch”. Watch out! Dangerous dangerous!!

Text from Gray Area Gallery:

This Saturday night we will be inviting friends and family over for a Female Themed Pride Party. We thought it would be fun to celebrate and are excited to welcome- 3 talented queer female djs from los angeles: ANON, DAISY-O, and KIM ANH that produce Booby Trap.
They will be rocking Pride Saturday alongside San Francisco’s own DJs QZEN, ALONA, and, SIMILAK CHYLD.

BOOBY TRAP
is a weekly boob-friendly dance party in East Hollywood that attracts a crowded floor of hot, sassy, and did we mention hot? Ladies dance to upbeat electro pop and new wave from DJs ANON, DAISY-O, and KIM ANH (http://www.myspace.com/clubboobytrap). While the Hollywood crowds flock to Sunset, the savvy ladies East of Highland head to Booby Trap.

GAB would like to invite you to a special evening dedicated to celebrating women in honor of San Francisco’s pride weekend. We will be showing selected pieces from DEER FANG and an installation in our mezzanine.

DEER FANG
is a video artist working in San Francisco and Guangzhou. Her earlier projects investigate the condition of video in art making and the dynamics within the production process through participation, improvisation, real-time and socialization. Her current work uses common formats from popular culture such as the news, reality TV show, music videos, and online videos to dissect culture and political meanings in the media and in our everyday society. Fang studied in School of Visual Art with Luca Buvoli and completed her BFA in Graphic Design in 2005. She received MFA in New Genres (Video+ Performance) at the San Francisco Art Institute with Tony Labat, Paul Kos and Okwui Enwezor in 2007.

8 - 10 pm: Reception for Deer Fang (free wine)
10pm to Late (after-hours): DJs and Performances

Free before 10 pm
$10 after

Event proceeds support GAB & Bitch Magazine “feminist response to pop culture”.

我们在旧金山的朋友Christopher Willits 正在进行他的巡回演出，这个月26-28日他将和李劲松在广州，深圳和佛山表演。具体演出时间和地点在李劲松的博客上。

It’s my first time to set up two screen so close to each other and have the viewers in between. Also the height of the screen is just a bit above average human height. I found that this had created an different relationship and sensation that you will normally receive from a video projection, which is often either distantly remote or overwhelming to your senses. In the case of my installation here, the projected image had lost more or less the mystifying quality with a more proximity to the viewers and other works in the space.

A review of the show had came out in the Chronicle today: ‘We Remember the Sun’: Recalling revolution

Installation picture

Me with Hanru, Kevin Chan and Michael Zheng. Michael also has work in the show and he did a performance during the opening.

Mary Ellyn Johnson, curator of the show.

Hou Hanru, Berin Golonu, Berin’s friend and me.

Kent Long, master of installing shows.

Andre and Alex from Say Bok Gwai.

“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.

The Plum in the Golden Vase will be screening in a show in CLUSTER in Berlin curated by Pauline Doutreluingne. Screening information is as follow:

A performance of space
Wednesday June 25 at 9:30 pm
Curated by Pauline Doutreluingne

This screening shows works of artists who are questioning models of living, dealing with space, dreams, and desire. So more concretely they present a zooming into performances in
different spaces: lost landscapes, desolate city border zones, and desolate city centers, spaces left by humans or fictional spaces filled by individuals. How humans infiltrate with the space around them and how spaces perform on their own, due to infiltration and intrusion by humans, action - reaction.

Some films show no direct view of infiltration by humans and the space seem to alter itself, almost naturally, like in a trance. Then in another video for example we get to see the specific story of the
demolition of artists studios in the outskirts of Beijing or the aggressive performance of a space totally ignored by people and how this affects nature. How positive and negative energy from different individuals or groups of people are interacting with their environment, and how this subtly influences our present landscape. 7 films who share an interest in the “none-spaces” of the places we
take for granted as being unspecified by virtue of them being where we are, as opposed to the quotidian like Alexander Platz or the Great Wall of China.

The Films:
Kim Su Theiler
SPY vs. SPY: JC-Beijing, 10min15, 2006

Deer Fang
The Plum in the golden vase, 15min, 2005

Feng Jiangzhou
Beijing loess slope, 4min30, 2006

Tadeu Jungle
Sempre tem mais, 9min36, 2001

Jiang Zhi
Postpause, 9min, 2004

Oliver Lyons
Passing Through, 5min, 2007

Amy Cheung & Aaron Ximm
Pillowhead, 2min40 2004

Where: CLUSTER, Osram HoÃàfe
Oudenarder Strasse 16-20
GebaÃàude E, Aufgang 23
13347 Berlin
U6 Haltestelle Seestr.U9 Haltestelle Nauener Platz Tram M13,
50 Haltestelle Osram HoÃàfe
www.cluster-berlin.de
Free admission
In the framework of the exhibition from Christina Woditschka, Berlin
Grossziethen – Stadgrenze Südost (June 18-28 2008)

“I’m, you know, not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans, because I don’t think anyone should be unkind to anyone else. And so, I have been very concerned about how to think and what to do about that because I don’t like … that. And then I’ve been, this, you know, concerned about, oh, how should we deal with the Olympics, because they’re not being nice to the Dali Lama who is a good friend of mine. And then all this earthquake and all this stuff happened, and I thought, is that karma? When you’re not nice that the bad things happen to you?”