light from light catalogue 6.11

M A A P — M e d i a A r t A s i a P a c i f i c

Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley (Australia)

Eugene Carchesio (Australia)

Joyce Hinterding & David Haines (Australia)

Lin Tianmiao (China)

Archie Moore (Australia)

Pak Sheung Chuen (Hong Kong, China)

Grant Stevens (Australia)

Josef Strau (Austria/New York)

Wang Gongxin (China)

Wang Peng (China)

Zhang Peili (China)

Catalogue Editor Kim Machan & Madeleine KingDesign Paul BaiPublisher Media Art Asia PacificPrinter MBE

©Copyright, MAAP–Media Art Asia Pacific Inc and the authors, 2012. All rights res erved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, transmitted or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or other-wise, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published December 2012 Brisbane

Notes on the Catalogueessays for this catalogue have been provided by the authors as attrib-uted. The views expressed are not necessarily those of the publisher. Essays have been edited for style, consistancy and length.

ISNB xxxxxxx xxxxxxxx

Light from Light has been supported by: the Queensland Government from art+place Queensland Public Art Fund; the

Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding body; the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade through

the Australian International Cultural Council and the Australia China Council. Light from Light has also been supported by

project partners: main organising partner - the State Library of Queensland, The Shanghai Library, National Library of China,

National Art Museum of China, Hangzhou Public Library, Griffith University Queensland College of the Arts, China Academy of Art,

Urban Art Projects, Rapid Design Concepts, South Bank Corporation, Kisun Renewable Energy Distribution and Integrated Fine

Arts Solutions. MAAP would like to thank the Australian Embassy, Beijing and the Australian Consulate-General, Shanghai.

The State Library of Queensland

Shanghai Library

National Library of China

National Art Museum of China

Hangzhou Public Library

Content

Kim Machan Essay couratorial rational and outcome 9-12

Pauline Yao Once Exhibited, Twice Removed: Artists and institutions in Contemporary China 13 –17

Brisbane 20 – 37

Shanghai 38 – 55

Beijing 56 – 77

Hangzhou 78 – 99 Artist Bibliography 100 – 110

Above: Artist Joyce Hinderding and SLQ staff install the antena that will record the sounds of solar winds interacting with the earth’s atmosphere.Below: Workers in Shanghai installing the outdoor sculpture Light from Light by artists Jenet Burchill & Jennifer McCamely.

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Essay on couratorial rational and outcome

Kim Machan

Modernism includes more than art and literature. By now it covers almost the whole of what is truly alive in our culture. It happens, however, to be very much of a historical novelty. Western civilization is not the first civilization to turn around and question its own foundations, but it is the one that has gone furthest in doing so. I identify Modern-ism with the intensification, almost the exacerbation, of this self-critical tendency that began with the philosopher Kant. Because he was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism, I conceive of Kant as, the first real Modernist.

The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a dis-cipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence. Kant used logic to establish the limits of logic, and while he withdrew much from its old jurisdiction, logic was left all the more secure in what there remained to it.

The self-criticism of Modernism grows out of, but is not the same thing as, the criticism of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment criticized from the outside, the way criticism in its accepted sense does; Modernism criticizes from the inside, through the proce-dures themselves of that which is being criticized. It seems natural that this new kind of criticism should have appeared first in philosophy, which is critical by definition, but as the 18th century wore on, it entered many other fields. A more rational justification had begun to be demanded of every formal social activity, and Kantian self-criticism, which had arisen in philosophy in answer to this demand in the first place, was called on eventually to meet and interpret it in areas that lay far from philosophy.

We know what has happened to an activity like religion, which could not avail itself of Kantian, immanent, criticism in order to justify itself. At first glance the arts might seem to have been in a situation like religion’s. Having been denied by the Enlighten-ment all tasks they could take seriously, they looked as though they were going to be as-similated to entertainment pure and simple, and entertainment itself looked as though it were going to be assimilated, like religion, to therapy. The arts could save themselves from this leveling down only by demonstrating that the kind of experience they provid-ed was valuable in its own right and not to be obtained from any other kind of activity.

Each art, it turned out, had to perform this demonstration on its own account. What had to be exhibited was not only that which was unique and irreducible in art in gen-eral, but also that which was unique and irreducible in each particular art. Each art had to determine, through its own operations and works, the effects exclusive to itself. By doing so it would, to be sure, narrow its area of competence, but at the same time it would make its possession of that area all the more certain.

It quickly emerged that the unique and proper area of competence of each art coin-cided with all that was unique in the nature of its medium. The task of self-criticism became to eliminate from the specific effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be borrowed from or by the medium of any other art. Thus would each art be rendered “pure,” and in its “purity” find the guarantee of its standards of quality as well as of its independence. “Purity” meant self-definition, and the enterprise of self-criticism in the arts became one of self-definition with a vengeance.

Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; Mod-ernism used art to call attention to art. The limitations that constitute the medium of painting -- the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment

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The Old Masters had sensed that it was necessary to preserve what is called the integrity of the picture plane: that is, to signify the enduring presence of flatness underneath and above the most vivid illusion of three-dimensional space. The apparent contradiction involved was essential to the success of their art, as it is indeed to the success of all picto-rial art. The Modernists have neither avoided nor resolved this contradiction; rather, they have reversed its terms. One is made aware of the flatness of their pictures before, in-stead of after, being made aware of what the flatness contains. Whereas one tends to see what is in an Old Master before one sees the picture itself, one sees a Modernist picture as a picture first. This is, of course, the best way of seeing any kind of picture, Old Master or Modernist, but Modernism imposes it as the only and necessary way, and Modernism’s success in doing so is a success of self-criticism.

Modernist painting in its latest phase has not abandoned the representation of recogniz-able objects in principle. What it has abandoned in principle is the representation of the kind of space that recognizable objects can inhabit. Abstractness, or the non-figurative, has in itself still not proved to be an altogether necessary moment in the self-criticism of pictorial art, even though artists as eminent as Kandinsky and Mondrian have thought so. As such, representation, or illustration, does not attain the uniqueness of pictorial art; what does do so is the associations of things represented. All recognizable entities (in-cluding pictures themselves) exist in three-dimensional space, and the barest suggestion of a recognizable entity suffices to call up associations of that kind of space. The fragmen-tary silhouette of a human figure, or of a teacup, will do so, and by doing so alienate pic-torial space from the literal two-dimensionality which is the guarantee of painting’s inde-pendence as an art. For, as has already been said, three-dimensionality is the province of sculpture. To achieve autonomy, painting has had above all to divest itself of everything it might share with sculpture, and it is in its effort to do this, and not so much -- I repeat -- to exclude the representational or literary, that painting has made itself abstract.At the same time, however, Modernist painting shows, precisely by its resistance to the sculptural, how firmly attached it remains to tradition beneath and beyond all ap-pearances to the contrary. For the resistance to the sculptural dates far back before the advent of Modernism. Western painting, in so far as it is naturalistic, owes a great debt to sculpture, which taught it in the beginning how to shade and model for the illusion of relief, and even how to dispose that illusion in a complementary illusion of deep space. Yet some of the greatest feats of Western painting are due to the effort it has made over the last four centuries to rid itself of the sculptural. Starting in Venice in the 16th century and continuing in Spain, Belgium, and Holland in the 17th, that effort was carried on at first in the name of color. When David, in the 18th century, tried to revive sculptural painting, it was, in part, to save pictorial art from the decorative flattening-out that the emphasis on color seemed to induce. Yet the strength of David’s own best pictures, which are predominantly his informal ones, lies as much in their color as in anything else. And Ingres, his faithful pupil, though he subordinated color far more consistently than did David, executed portraits that were among the flattest, least sculptural paintings done in the West by a sophisticated artist since the I4th century. Thus, by the middle of the 19th century, all ambitious tendencies in painting had converged amid their differences, in an anti-sculptural direction.

Modernism, as well as continuing this direction, has made it more conscious of itself. With Manet and the Impressionists the question stopped being defined as one of color versus drawing, and became one of purely optical experience against optical experience as revised or modified by tactile associations. It was in the name of the purely and liter-ally optical, not in the name of color, that the Impressionists set themselves to under-mining shading and modeling and everything else in painting that seemed to connote the sculptural. It was, once again, in the name of the sculptural, with its shading and modeling, that Cézanne, and the Cubists after him, reacted against Impressionism, as David had reacted against Fragonard. But once more, just as David’s and Ingres’ reaction had culminated, paradoxically, in a kind of painting even less sculptural than before, so

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The Old Masters had sensed that it was necessary to preserve what is called the integrity of the picture plane: that is, to signify the enduring presence of flatness underneath and above the most vivid illusion of three-dimensional space. The apparent contradiction involved was essential to the success of their art, as it is indeed to the success of all picto-rial art. The Modernists have neither avoided nor resolved this contradiction; rather, they have reversed its terms. One is made aware of the flatness of their pictures before, in-stead of after, being made aware of what the flatness contains. Whereas one tends to see what is in an Old Master before one sees the picture itself, one sees a Modernist picture as a picture first. This is, of course, the best way of seeing any kind of picture, Old Master or Modernist, but Modernism imposes it as the only and necessary way, and Modernism’s success in doing so is a success of self-criticism.Modernist painting in its latest phase has not abandoned the representation of recogniz-able objects in principle. What it has abandoned in principle is the representation of the kind of space that recognizable objects can inhabit. Abstractness, or the non-figurative, has in itself still not proved to be an altogether necessary moment in the self-criticism of pictorial art, even though artists as eminent as Kandinsky and Mondrian have thought so. As such, representation, or illustration, does not attain the uniqueness of pictorial art; what does do so is the associations of things represented. All recognizable entities (in-cluding pictures themselves) exist in three-dimensional space, and the barest suggestion of a recognizable entity suffices to call up associations of that kind of space. The fragmen-tary silhouette of a human figure, or of a teacup, will do so, and by doing so alienate pic-torial space from the literal two-dimensionality which is the guarantee of painting’s inde-pendence as an art. For, as has already been said, three-dimensionality is the province of sculpture. To achieve autonomy, painting has had above all to divest itself of everything it might share with sculpture, and it is in its effort to do this, and not so much -- I repeat -- to exclude the representational or literary, that painting has made itself abstract.At the same time, however, Modernist painting shows, precisely by its resistance to the sculptural, how firmly attached it remains to tradition beneath and beyond all ap-pearances to the contrary. For the resistance to the sculptural dates far back before the advent of Modernism. Western painting, in so far as it is naturalistic, owes a great debt to sculpture, which taught it in the beginning how to shade and model for the illusion of relief, and even how to dispose that illusion in a complementary illusion of deep space. Yet some of the greatest feats of Western painting are due to the effort it has made over the last four centuries to rid itself of the sculptural. Starting in Venice in the 16th century and continuing in Spain, Belgium, and Holland in the 17th, that effort was carried on at first in the name of color. When David, in the 18th century, tried to revive sculptural painting, it was, in part, to save pictorial art from the decorative flattening-out that the emphasis on color seemed to induce. Yet the strength of David’s own best pictures, which are predominantly his informal ones, lies as much in their color as in anything else. And Ingres, his faithful pupil, though he subordinated color far more consistently than did David, executed portraits that were among the flattest, least sculptural paintings done in the West by a sophisticated artist since the I4th century. Thus, by the middle of the 19th century, all ambitious tendencies in painting had converged amid their differences, in an anti-sculptural direction.Modernism, as well as continuing this direction, has made it more conscious of itself. With Manet and the Impressionists the question stopped being defined as one of color versus drawing, and became one of purely optical experience against optical experience as revised or modified by tactile associations. It was in the name of the purely and liter-ally optical, not in the name of color, that the Impressionists set themselves to under-mining shading and modeling and everything else in painting that seemed to connote the sculptural. It was, once again, in the name of the sculptural, with its shading and modeling, that Cézanne, and the Cubists after him, reacted against Impressionism, as David had reacted against Fragonard. But once more, just as David’s and Ingres’ reaction had culminated, paradoxically, in a kind of painting even less sculptural than before, so the Cubist counter-revolution eventuated in a kind of painting flatter than anything in Western art since before Giotto and Cimabue -- so flat indeed that it could hardly contain recognizable images.

12Top image: Pak Sheung Chuen, Making Thousand of Suns, Vinyl, wooden shelf and books, 2010. (detail)Lower image: Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamely, Light from Light, self-powered geodesic dome, 2010. (detial)

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Once Exhibited, Twice Removed: Artists and Institutions in Contemporary China

Pauline J. Yao

There is a widely held consensus that contemporary art began in China in 1979. So precise is this view that the moment of inception is pinpointed to an exact day: September 27, 1979. This date coincides with the Stars Art Group’s first public exhibition—an infamous two-day affair that took place on the fences outside the National Art Gallery in Beijing. The landmark event, earmarked as an act of defiance and dissent, has become the meas-uring stick by which contemporary artists have looked to validate their status as critical outsiders to a State-run and autocratic art system and define their position vis-à-vis estab-lished arts institutions. The vanguard path for art that the Stars helped to put into motion, however, is far from a straightforward one. Instead it is characterized by internal conflicts and zigzags from noncompliance and resistance on the one side, to seeking acceptance, acknowledgement, and legitimization on the other. Still, their initial gesture of occupying public space, voicing their opinions, and using official channels to substantiate new art forms acts as a benchmark for nearly all following practices that explore art in public con-texts or that proclaim a critical stance against the mainstream.

An exhibition like Light from Light represents just how far things have come since 1979—a moment when artists were not accepted into the official domain, much less welcomed through the form of commissioned works in a publicly accessible non art-specific context. Witnessing this kind of exhibition has led to me to reflect on the recent history of Chinese art exhibitions and ongoing relationships between artists and the space of official (gov-ernment sanctioned) art culture. Over the years these relationships have fluctuated from acceptance to rejection to—more recently—forms of instrumentalization and co-optation. As contemporary art in China grows in popularity and visibility among a wider section of the general public, there remain key underlying questions concerning art’s ability to function autonomously and to go against prescribed systems and institutional structures in the art world. Given that in China it has always been the established institutions that control the definition of art, the art exhibition therefore becomes the paramount form by which the categories and boundaries of art are articulated to a public. The exhibitions of the Stars Group remain crucial historical markers because they symbolize a moment when the approved definition of art—who can make it, what it should look like, where it can be shown and who can see it—was challenged. My interest in tracing the history of exhibi-tions in China comes from a desire to further understand what role exhibitions can play in defining art as well as contours of an autonomous space for artistic production.

Although it is often treated as the opening salvo for the Chinese avant-garde, it is worth remembering that the first Stars Art exhibition did not occur in isolation, nor should its artists be viewed as renegade players willfully acting out of contempt for the established system. Their first exhibition did go through a process of approval, and in fact the Stars were granted subsequent exhibitions both inside and outside the esteemed National ArtGallery within a year of their initial outcry 1. It is also revealing that in 1980 the Stars group officially registered with the Beijing Artists’ Association 2, effectively joining the ranks of the establishment and dissuading others from aspiring to set up a space of autonomous in-dependence. From this perspective we might view the goals of the Stars as aligned with an anti-establishment stance more than an avant-garde one. Following John Clark, the former can be described as a type of loyal opposition that does not aim to subvert the establish-ment but to hopefully replace it through gradual positioning of its members among the established ranks. The avant-garde on the other hand, is concerned with returning art toa more direct relationship with life 3. In the unstable context of China it is easy to conflate these two positions into one, putting the whole of current contemporary artistic practice,

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the experimental tendencies of the 1990s, and the avant-garde movement of the 1980s, on an equal trajectory with the Stars. In doing so the counter-establishment position that recognizes value in being part of the mainstream and seizing position and power becomes fused with the avant-gardist desire to dissolve the relationship between art and life. Ac-knowledging that the latter has proven unsuccessful in the face of rampant commercial-ism, contemporary art in China find itself twice removed – from its own history and from the sphere of everyday contemporary life.

What interests me is not that the initial actions of the Stars Group succeeded in registering their dismay with the current State-controlled art system, but that they did so by wittingly acknowledging the power of the exhibition as political currency. The import of the Stars Group has always been less about the advancement of certain artistic styles or theories than carving out a space for art that obfuscated the rigid divide between official and non-official realms. Their way of envisioning this space occurred not through genre-breaking experimentation and promoting taboo subjects but through utilizing and leveraging the exhibition form itself. I would argue that in the context of China, where exhibitions oc-curred in unstable and irregular conditions and where a great deal of attention has histori-cally been paid to certifying artists, categorizing art and defining what is national art – the notion of the exhibition takes a special appeal as it epitomizes presentation of these ideals to a public audience and requires individuals to interact with larger social and political institutions. For the Stars the exhibition provided a conceptual framework though which they could express the modern ideals of freedom and democracy. For others, such as the Xiamen Dada artists or other collective undertakings, the exhibition became the work it-self (especially in the case of ‘happenings’ events) – manifested through time-based inter-actions occurring in public space. Organizing exhibitions in China (or for that matter any-where) is contingent upon building an intellectual base through which to negotiate with others and involves the act of defining oneself and ones motives in relation to the political and social conditions of the day.

Prior to 1979, art created outside the officially sanctioned institutions of art (or made by artists without links to the approved system) was not recognized by the State. Since the State controlled exhibition venues this also means certain works that do not meet approv-al are not presented to members of the public. This is not quite the same as saying certain art did not exist, but merely that it was not made visible. Artworks may be created in the studio or fabricated in the factory, but traditionally we are accustomed to seeing works of art in exhibitions in museums and galleries. In an old-school Socialist system where the institutions of art are controlled by the State, these museums and venues constitute the only outlet for artists, and independent productions or displays that do not go through the process of permissions and approvals are unlawful. The inseparable links between exhibi-tion production and audience reception illustrates important points about not just what kind of art is being made, but on what terms viewers see and encounter it. The institutions of art in China entrenched since the 1950s, consisted of State-run museums or exhibition halls, officially registered artist associations and art academies such as the National Art Gallery (known today as NAMOC), the Children’s Cultural Palace, The Worker’s Palace, or various temporary exhibition halls inside public parks 4. These controlled environments could be counted on to feed audiences a steady diet of ink painting, oil painting, and sculp-ture in accepted (read Socialist Realism) styles and to keep audiences within the safe con-fines of Party ideology.

After 1979 as political policies relaxed and economic floodgates were opened, foreign art-ists and modern art forms started to appear in official contexts. Soon a crescendo of other spaces for art would come into play later during the 1980s. Since State-affiliated venues still dominated the scene and some works of radical or avant-garde styles were still un-able to be exhibited openly, young artists distant from the official spheres of political art periodically gathered together and exhibited modern styled works of art in their personal ‘strongholds’ – namely family apartments or personal dwellings. These and other brief exhibitions organized by regional or local painting and photographic societies catered to a smaller, decidedly more ‘insider’ audience base. It should be noted that the growth of this

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audience (née community) would eventually morph into what is known as the Chineseavant-garde. Art of this period not only surpassed the early salon (huahui) and modernism painting styles, but entered into a new phase of ‘conceptual art’. The dawn of these new art forms in China – language-based installations, interventions and performance and video that borrowed heavily from western conceptualism – coincided with an influx of freshly translated philosophical and art historical texts from Europe and North America. These texts in turn spawned a spate of art collectives who organized shows and ad-hoc events or ‘happenings’ that took place in smaller, makeshift venues. It was this open and relaxed atmosphere, with no onus upon artists to make living from their craft and no art market, which fomented an idealist tenor that infected artists and intellectuals alike. To this day, the conditions of the1980s are still romanticized as ‘pure’, allowing a generation of artists to experiment with art in ways never possible before, or for that matter, since.

Marked by a genuine interest to understand their own position in the world, Chinese art-ists in the late 1980s explored any and all ways to execute and exhibit their work. Take for example Geng Jianyi’s conceptual work Forms and Certificates from 1988. Partially con-ceived as a covert way of testing his fellow avant-garde artists, the Hangzhou-based Geng piggybacked his project on the invitation letters sent out to participants of the Huangshan Conference, a forum called in 1988 to discuss the planning of the upcoming 1989 China Avant-Garde Modern Art Exhibition at the National Art Gallery (now NAMOC) 5. The ad-ditional form Geng invented was inserted into the official invitations that were sent out by the organizing committee and included absurd questions such as “What is your favorite animal/food/music?” and “Do you like women?” Tellingly, after enduring years of Chinese bureaucratic systems nearly all duly completed the forms. When the participants gathered for the conference, Geng performed the second part of his work: handing out certificates of merit to reward those who had submitted properly completed forms. Such a project was aimed to reveal the ranks of conformity lurking within China and by extension, his so-called ‘avant-garde’ cohorts. Geng’s gesture also hints at the invisible indoctrination at hand as artists simultaneously claimed an avant-garde position while convening a highly structured and official event concerning a highly anticipated exhibition. Another work of this period, by Light from Light artist Zhang Peili provides clues about the structured proc-ess of viewing exhibitions. His Exhibition Procedures (which later evolved into Art Project No. 2) from 1987 consists of nineteen typed pages containing rules and regulations for how the project itself is to be constructed. Instructions outline both the artwork and the manner of its exhibition, mimicking forms legal language and conditional restrictions about who can enter the space of the exhibition wearing what kinds of clothes and so on. Laying out these terms in typical bureaucratic-speak, Zhang turns the systems of regula-tion into the focus of attention, displacing the visual in favor of the verbal and textual. These are just some examples of how the sphere of exhibition making and institutional-ized behaviors collided with artistic practices during the 1980s.

The decade following the disastrous events of Tiananmen Square in 1989 brought back a familiar struggle between official and unofficial spheres of art. The China Avant-Garde Modern Art Exhibition staged in February of that year did little to improve the position of the participating artists and their unorthodox approaches, and in fact brought negative attention from government officials who were wary of the escalating interest in ‘experi-mental’ art forms. Viewed as subversive elements, experimental artists and exhibitions featuring experimental art were largely forced underground or abroad during the 1990s. Self-organized exhibitions – lasting anywhere from a few hours to two weeks, staged in out of the way, rented locations with little or no publicity – became popular but many of these more closely resembled events than affairs of static display. The clandestine nature of these shows fostered an insider audience of like-minded individuals, most of whom carried personal connections to organizers or participating artists. In the climate of heightened political sensitivity and under the watchful eyes of censors these underground ‘shows’ were entirely divorced from a public context. Wu Hung has characterized this peri-od as a ‘domestic turn’ in contemporary art whereby artists turned inward and focused onissues of self and identity, but it would be just as easy to characterize this period as the moment when Chinese artists took the international stage and set their sights on grand

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concerns of nationhood and global politics. Communities of Chinese artists and intellectu-als living overseas who were not bound by the same limitations as those living inside Chi-na were taken in by international exhibitions and biennial circuit and celebrated widely by mainstream art media. The paradox of Chinese artists being embraced globally while persecuted domestically is one that plays out specifically through the channels of display and the politics of space. Metaphors of accessibility, admission and entrance are common themes found in artworks of this period – speaking to the delimitations of censorship at home and colonialist attitudes abroad. Light from Light artist Wang Peng staged a short-lived show ‘93: Wang Peng’s Installation Exhibition’, at the Contemporary Art Gallery at 123 Longfusi Street in Beijing, which spoke precisely to these concerns. The Beijing art-ist exhibited only one work, entitled Wall, which consisted of a brick wall sealing off the entrance of the gallery. The exhibition opened on November 20, 1993 and continued until noon the following day. Visitors who attended could only see the obstructed gallery en-trance, which was in fact the work itself. Finally the gallery owner asked Wang to tear Wall down and open up the sealed entrance, inadvertently giving Wang the chance to complete the work via an act of destruction.

The rapid influx of the art market, combined with exponential growth in private wealth made for a new set of circumstances in the early 2000s. Christening the Shanghai Biennial in 2000 with the appointment of its first international curator (Hou Hanru) and relaxing controls to allow for commercial galleries and private ventures sparked an influx of foreign buyers, wealthy patrons, and record-breaking auction figures. If artists of the 1980s and 1990s faced pressures from the central authorities and/or local law enforcement, in the 2000s they enjoyed relatively freedom and immunity from restrictive controls. Recogniz-ing contemporary art’s more profitable side and potential for market development meant that experimental art forms were no longer something to condemn but rather something to cultivate and potentially capitalize upon. The wholehearted embrace of the art market evident to today has brought few novel developments to exhibition making however, as solo shows in commercial spaces or overblown installations in privately funded museums continue to cater to a well-heeled crowd of collectors and buyers instead of a broad-based public. Of particular note is this period’s unhindered development of specially allocated art districts and designated art zones, areas that contain art and impose a sort of ‘container aesthetics’ that favors the display of (easily commodifiable) art objects housed in pristine gallery spaces. The rapid territorial expansion of contemporary art occurring in Beijing in particular, has all but eradicated hard-nosed experimentation from experimental art, favoring object oriented and studio bound artistic processes and a pre-packaged, branded image of ‘contemporary Chinese art’. The phenomenon of self-contained ‘art zones’ such as Beijing’s 798 Art Zone are symptomatic of both a desire to segregate art from regular life and efforts to enhance art’s marketability by self-referencing its own legacy of success. With little balancing counterpoint or alternative spaces, contemporary art in this context is bereft of its critical capacity and left to be treated merely as a form of entertainment, a photo backdrop, or a money-making scheme for investors and status-seeking officials and socialites. Contemporary art in China today suffers from a common predicament – it is cut off from traditions of the past on the one hand and from the life of the present on the other. This twice removed status has resulted in a scenario whereby contemporary art forms remain mostly unrecognized by mainstream culture, are only haltingly accepted into government-run institutions, are largely absent from average university art departments and go virtu-ally unknown by the average citizen. That said, efforts to delink contemporary art from its enclave status have already begun. An exhibition like Light from Light, staged in a gov-ernment-run space and featuring specially commissioned interactive works utilizing new technologies and materials, is but one example of how new models for making and dis-playing art in China can be realized. That such an event could reach approval at the highest levels offers an encouraging perspective on how art can exert its own energy upon a given environment or social context rather than simply becoming a byproduct of it.

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If the recent explosion of economic prosperity in China has resulted in an unfetteredgrowth of the art market and by result, the institutions of art, then the underlying ques-tion remains focused on how these institutions – especially those operating without directState oversight – can steer art and artists towards a space of production and reception unencumbered by excessive external forces. As commercial interests increasingly over lapwith artistic production, the factors threatening art are increasingly more economical than strictly political. The days of ‘outsider’ artists taking an organized stand against the establishment may become part of a distant past, but the form of the exhibition – once recognized as a valuable platform for redefining how art is understood and encountered by audiences or for forging new relationships between artists and institutions, has tran-sitioned increasingly into a static showcase for commercial objects. In this light, the value of active art collectives, alternative art spaces and deterritorialized social and relational practices is not to be underestimated. Such practices can go a long way in restoring art’s capacity for unexpected, unplanned encounters that transcend passive viewer reception as well as carve out space for independently minded artistic production that can meaning-fully reflect and participate in contemporary life. Without such emancipatory gestures, the generative qualities immanent to art cease to exist.

September 2012

1 The first exhibition organized by the Stars in Beihai Park was shut down prematurely due to complications with the local district police (they lacked the proper permit to use public space) and not with arts or culture-related bureaus. Subsequent vocalizations of dismay registered in open postings on the Democracy Wall and through organized street protests brought further attention to the Stars Group and helped to brand their image as outcast rebels.

2 The Beijing Artists’ Association is a branch of the larger Chinese Artists’ Association which is an official organization backed by the State.

3 See John Clark, Modern Asian Art, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988, pp.185-186.

4 The years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) should be viewed as an exception. During this time, not only was art was subsumed entirely by politics but schools were suspended and normal patterns of institutions and everyday life were dis-rupted.

5 The Huangshan conference, seen as a continuation Zhuhai Conference of 1986, was a pivotal event in the history of the Chinese avant-garde movement. Although designated as a conference, the event functioned more like a collective gathering attended by artists, curators and intellectuals active in the avant-garde scene. Artists were invited to contribute artworks, made speeches and formulated positions on future directions of art. The event in 1988 centered upon the planning of the Avant-Garde Modern Art Exhibition in 1989 which opened at the National Art Gallery (now NAMOC) on February 5, 1989. It remains one of the most important exhibitions of modern art in China.

18Eugene Carchesio, Thief of Light, Hand-bound book, watercolour on paper, 2010. (detail)

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black light

Eugene Carchesio, Thief of Light, Hand-bound book, watercolour on paper, 2010. (detail)

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Brisbane State Library of Queensland

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Light from Light 2010 Photovoltaic custom-built panels, acrylic, neon and aluminium frame.

Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley have been working collaboratively since the mid 1980s. In a variety of modes they have pursued primarily semiotic concerns, referencing in particular the languages of art, design, popular culture and feminism.

Their self-powered sculpture Light from Light was commissioned for the exhibition and was the result of a MAAP residency held in Brisbane and Shanghai. Having worked with solar technologies previously through an artist residency at IASKA (International Art Space Kellerberrin Australia), the artists sought to expand their interests in the potential for photovoltaics as an artistic medium. In this work the artists use text illuminated in neon and light-emitting diodes to meditate on the poetic process of solar technology – making light from light.

Supporting and powering the neon work, Burchill and McCamley’s solar-harvesting geodesic structure is a direct tribute to Richard Buckminster Fuller’s original utopian design. Fuller’s simple geometric structure has been an enduring symbol of utopian thinking since it entered the popular imaginary of the future in the 1960s. Reimagining this iconic architectural form as a renewable energy structure, Burchill and McCamley reinvigorate Fuller’s commitment to design, engineering and science as the instruments of radical, visionary change. Their use of acrylic and neon, familiar to the artists’ collaborative body of work, is perhaps also a reference to the indus-trial materials embraced by techno-utopians like Fuller, as well as to the minimalist oeuvre.

As a monument to the redemptive promise of renewable energy, Light from Light is compromised by its own limited utility; namely, the scale of the solar-harvesting structure seems vastly dis-proportionate to the volume of power it generates. However it is the very implausibility of their solution to the problems of the present that reinforces their affectionate critique of the utopian tradition.

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With simple and unpretentious materials including paper, cardboard and watercolour, Eugene Carchesio’s works are continuous meditations on themes of geometry, figurative symbolism, the material and immaterial. Producing three works for the Light from Light exhibition, Carchesio demonstrates the breadth and interconnectedness of his interests in light, shape and sound.

Thief of Light, an artist book in watercolour on archival paper, was hand-produced and hand-bound in an edition of four at the Conservation Laboratory at the State Library of Queensland, as part of a special residency for the project. The text-based work references the illuminated manu-script, though aside from the sparing use of gold foil on the cover lettering, Carchesio’s minimal and non-decorative approach seems almost ascetic by comparison. In his hand-drawn sans-serif font, the artist riffs on notions of light, drawing together secular and spiritual notions of enlighten-ment through his rhythmically timed word play. In the exhibition, the book is accompanied by a digital text-only edition complete with Chinese translations, generating new layers of meaning, as well as formal contrasts between the analogue and digital.

Space Light Transmission is a sound work that was exhibited exclusively at the State Library of Queensland’s listening booths. With tongue in cheek, the artist’s instruction to ‘Listen to this until you see the lights of your inner mind’ suggests the work might transform the public space of the library’s busy second level into a site for a transcendental mode of consciousness. Continuing this project of generating reflection and meditation in the institutional environs, Volume is an audio-visual installation created with the library’s vacant auditorium spaces in mind. In this experimen-tal foray into digital imagery, Carchesio merges his long-held interests in geometry, colour, rhythm, harmony and dissonance.

Space Light Transmission, Audio, 2010.

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Thief of Light, Hand-bound book, watercolour on paper, 2010.

Volume, Single-channel video projection with sound, 2010.

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Broadcast from the Ionosphere: Sunvalley Radio (Spherics and Fields 2010, Live Broadcast from the Ionosphere 2010)

Hand-made antennae, audio stream, hand-painted fabric and website.

In a collaborative practice spanning photography, sound art, scent, installation and new media, Haines and Hinterding test the boundaries of the earth and the ether, the known and the unknow-able. Drawing inspiration from figures on the radical fringes of science such as Wilhelm Reich, the duo appropriate scientific methodologies and aesthetics to ask artistic and philosophical ques-tions of both observable and invisible phenomena.

Broadcast from the Ionosphere: Sunvalleyradio (Spherics and Fields 2010, Live Broadcast from the Ionosphere 2010) provides an expansive experience of the sun. Sound plays an integral role in the artists’ work, and with a hand-made antenna positioned on the roof of the State Library of Queensland, along with their own field recordings captured in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, the pair present the rumbling, crackling sounds of solar winds interacting with the earth’s atmosphere. The audio is presented in two ways for the exhibition: as Spherics and Fields, a combination of live and mixed solar sounds composed for special sonic environments in library spaces, and as Live Broadcast from the Ionosphere, an online audio stream broadcast live and unfiltered from the State Library antenna (http://www.sunvalleyradio.net/). Their installation combines these two components and gestures to the sublime with the backdrop of an ink-on-silk painting of saturated reds and golds; a visual mirror of their aural ambitions to channel the “radiant energy that reflects and refracts along the magnetic field lines of the earth” (Haines & Hinterding, 2010, Artist Statement. http://www.sunvalleyradio.net/?page_id=45). Documentation of the field recording process, presented on a purpose-built website accompanying the work, sees the pair roaming bushland with a range of hand-made antenna instruments. They appear on the one hand as rational artist-scientists, akin to the modern avant-garde, and on the other as esoteric diviners of the immaterial.

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Private Reading Lamp 2010

Fabric, steel frame, light bulb and seat.

Private Reading Lamp invites audiences into a private environment in a public space. As a single-person reading room, complete with a light, this highly pesonalised crafted space stands in con-trast to the institutional public setting.Take your favourite book in with you or just sit and think.

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East/West Bookcases 2010

Wood and plastic.

The book shelves have been modified by the artist to force cultural specificity. The smaller shelf, with a slight gesture, has transformed into the Chinese character ‘white’. The taller shelf is mod-elled on the English word ‘black’. Moore neglects the book and instead uses directly modelled text within each shelf.

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Pak Sheung Chuen (HK, China)

Making Thousands of Suns 2010

Vinyl, wooden shelf and books.

Making Thousands of Suns is an installation that emerged from an invitation from MAAP for artist Pak Sheung Chuen to take part in a Brisbane residency. In the first stage of the project, Pak studied the State Library of Queensland, responding to the site, architecture, social environment and internal systems of the institution. Two features of the library in particular piqued the artist’s interest. One was the social and artistic potential of the interlibrary loans system, wherein public libraries across Queensland are able to exchange collections with the State Library. The other was the interplay of light in the library’s Red Box reading room – a window-wrapped space that nearly hovers over the Brisbane River.

In a poetic gesture quintessential to the artist’s practice, Pak sought to cast ‘thousands’ of suns into the library, using the sun as a source in a number of ways. As a starting point, Pak engaged public librarians across Queensland to contribute to his large-scale montage of book covers featuring images of the sun. The books were delivered to the State Library of Queensland via the interlibrary loans system, and later displayed as part of the work. The ellipses of his sun-montage were then rendered as the negative space of a window sticker, allowing light to permeate and create an array of sun-shapes on the floor below. In Brisbane, the work was featured on the bright west-facing window of the Red Box room, as Pak intended, while finding ideal light conditions proved more challenging in some of the building-locked high-rise libraries in China. Indeed, at the Hangzhou Public Library, the work found its place on the ceiling skylight, creating a new visual dynamic.

The project is not Pak’s first intervention into library spaces. Indeed, his permanent ‘solo exhibi-tion’ at New York’s 58th Street Branch Library, Page 22 (Half Folded Library) was created by the folding of the twenty-second page of every second book in the library’s collection. In that work, as in Making Thousands of Suns, Pak attempts to reframe the contrasting dynamics of intimacy and institutional alienation experienced in the public library environment, in favour of his fine-tuned sense of the social and the poetic.

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Turtle Twilight (II) 2006 – 2011

three-channel digital video installation, 10 mins 57 secs loop.

Grant Stevens’ video works are distinctive as interventions into the language and aesthetics of filmic, popular and online cultures. He recontextualises the familiar by directly appropriating found text and moving image (notoriously including blockbuster films), offering glimpses of profound insight amongst his studies of banality. In the three-channel video installation Turtle Twilight II Stevens mines the contemporary online phenomenon of holiday blogging. Originally a two-channel piece with English text, the work was developed for Light from Light with the addition of a third channel containing Chinese translations. In the centre channel, a kitsch image of a beach sunset suggests we are being taken to a tropical island destination, but also flags that the precise location is not so relevant – it is instead the timeworn island holiday of the popular imagination. The image is flanked by a text narrative lifted from an anonymous blogger’s beach-side holiday experiences, the highlight being turtles at sundown. The imagery, sensations and insights described are, perhaps for both Western and Chinese audiences, famil-iar to the point of cliché.

There is always an uneasiness surrounding Stevens’ repurposing of others’ intimate sentiment. On the one hand, the text used in this video piece is already in the public domain; in posting their diaristic reflections online, the author submits to share with a broader audience. On the other hand, however, the exaggerated mode of public display in the library or museum context confers to audiences an unshakeable sense of voyeurism. Further complicating the matter, this new context also confers to the author’s own sentiments a charge of inauthenticity – a dis-missal of their lived experiences as cliché, archetype or copy. Turtle Twilight II thus epitomises private experience in the age of public online identity. The author’s narrative is viewed through the frame of our collective and individual projections of the tropical holiday experience, as much as the author’s own experience was always already framed by these projections.

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Josef Strau (Austria)

Theatre of the Lamps Talking in the Light of the Past 2010

Lamps, speakers and poster.

Strau creates sculptures using modified domestic lamps in a highly subjective manner revealing personal stories and recollections. He often distributes his writing by directly pasting his texts onto selected light shade stands. He has created a sculptural theatre with a group of awkward, elegant and complex lamp personas.

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This morning I wasted away, as I did with so many mornings, feeling the pure procrastination of daylight like wearing an old pancake on my head shade and then waiting for the big moment to come out of it hopefully with some energy. Slowly, at least slowly, the afternoon came over our neighborhood and I still followed the thoughts in the middle of the days blankness, until finally “something” would be going on with these thin strings in the vast empty space ahead of me. Not much, but it was as if I arrived in some slightly denser region of my introspective days journey. But it was just the voice of the landlord in his backyard garden below my window like last summer with endless daylight, when I, lazy as possible from the endless days, used to listen to his endless monologues.

Like listening again to one of the visitors very long ago, who sometimes spoke polish too. He came by each winter and he would say, the germans, they killed and they killed. He told more about what happened before he was transported to the huge camp, then actually about it. Like he would have said to us, that they put many people together in some square, and he was one of them, and the nazis asked the doctors and teachers to get separated from the rest and go over to the other part of the square, and one of the teachers said, I knew it, they will need us, and so they stood together and the germans killed them after that. It took them some time, they killed more and then the rest were taken away to the camp. He often looked at me particularly, and now I start to understand, what it might have meant to him, maybe he wanted that particularly I hear him and know what happened, and that I will be testimony of the story and tell it later. That way he looked at me and explained that they killed everywhere and anywhere, they came to every new town, they just killed and killed that same way.

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Book Dream 2010

Video screen saver, single-channel projection.

The artist has considered the existing public interface of the Library’s computer systems – the online database and public access computers – as a site. Taking the form of both computer screen saver and single-channel video projector, the work exists as both external and internal to the Library.

40

Wang Peng (China)

Distance 2011

single channel video, 5 minutes.

Distance deals with perception. Two pictorial planes are presented side-by-side: one portrays a moving dot of light against a black empty space; the other an array of imagery shot at close range including urban streetscapes, logos of luxury brands like Channel and Gucci, a stone statue, a tea cup, a pot plant. The images are recorded at night or in dark settings, partially revealed and edited through selective illumination. A light dot appears to mirror and trace the camera lens point-of-view, following the movement and zoom variations as the camera records the objects and spaces with a systematic yet poetic logic. The viewer’s gaze darts back and forth between the dual visuals in an attempt to compare, contrast and reconcile the imagery. The viewer strives to uncover the artist’s thought processes, to equate and understand the serial associations. This work evokes a poesis of distance – the artist creates and questions distances between reality and illusion, abstraction and realism, future and present, ideal and truth.

41

Wang Peng works across video, performance, photography, painting and installation. His work is often critically reflexive on the state of art in China, particularly the context of censorship and the growing culture of materialism. The artist’s work constantly toys with dichotomies, no matter what medium he employs. As another example, his 1993 site-spe-cific installation in Beijing titled 93: Wang Peng’s Installation Exhibition contained just one work titled Wall. The entrance of the gallery was completely sealed with bricks, making the gallery impossible to enter, leaving people to gather outside on the street for the open-ing night. Later the wall was removed, allowing viewers to enter the empty gallery. Again, Wang Peng visits two sides of the equation, prompting the sense of dichotomy to activate our experience at many levels. This was demonstrated through the details of the art project that came to include the design of the poster, both representational and abstract; the status of the wall’s presence and absence; and the gallerist’s reaction and contribution.

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Zhang Peili (China)

Standard Translation 2008 – 2010

LED scrolling text screen.

Standard Translation introduces scrolling text through a high resolution LED screen into the library. Multilingual phrases bleed across the screen in disorientating colour. The work extends the artist’s long history of fragmenting and dissolving meaning through a distant mechanical analysis of form and media.

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Shanghai Shanghai Library

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Volume, Single-channel video with sound, 2010.

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Thief of Light, Hand-bound book, watercolour on paper, digital monitor, 2010.

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Wood and plastic.

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Standing always in some very newly furnished bed room, I often had noticed from the sounds around me coming from the bed, that she would want to start the light at any second … with her invention for turning it on without having to move much, of which she was particularly proud. I used to hear sometime that she would tell, that when she had money and had moved into the new apartment, she finally bought a large floor lamp, an expensive design with porcelain glazing and that she placed the pale beauty next to her mattress, and only months later came up with her invention, by taking two of the long green velvet ribbons that she once brought home for no reason then storing them, tied them together, and attached them to the old fashioned but much too short metal chain that switched on the light of the white lamp. Before the chain had the right length only for someone standing up, but she wanted to turn it on from the bed, without having to move. As herinvention the green ribbon became a green velvet leash with a chain and she laid in bed and pulled the velvet leash without having to get up.

She used to say that the large round cylindrical lampshade was gilded inside and the fragile construction looked like a dome with a golden sky to which no stairs led, only the green ribbons and chain and she said that it was her lamp, always on her leash. Its green leash was her greatest invention. It led deeply into her lamps lethargic inner life. The leash lay next to her and she was able to turn off the light instead of fleeing the apartment or taking long walks on the streets outside.

1

Before I came here I used be staying for a long winter season at a pharmacy in Germany. Actually pharmacies are very comfy places here too. Inside our pharmacy are three big individual vitrines with the counter on it. When I stood my first day in the pharmacy I saw on each vitrine one person in a strange position. Their legs stood normally in front of the vitrine, but the rest of the body was deeply bowed down, the whole upper part of their bodies was shamelessly lying on the vitrine. Maybe they were really very tired I believed and needed rest between all the typical sweet decorative stuffed bears next to them. To the people working here it obviously seemed to be very normal behaviour. I waited for a while until I looked closer. I could of course not see their faces because most of the heads were hidden under blanket-like scarves in the usual Berlin fashion. First I thought that they would be maybe bad sighted and have lost their glasses and tried to look closely to read the descriptions on the different medicines under the glass surface and compare them with their own possible sicknesses. But then I realized they just rested and slowly talked to the pharmacists about their apartments and other things, probably just in order to prolong their stay in the beautiful and warm room with all my light to cover their typical dark mood and low energy attitude.

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Book Dream 2010


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Zhang Peili (China)



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BeijingNational Library of China National Art Museum of China

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National Art Museum of China



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National Library of China


Thief of Light, Hand-bound book, watercolour on paper, digital monitor, 2010.

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Broadcast from the Ionosphere: Sunvalley Radio (Spher-ics and Fields 2010, Live Broadcast from the Ionosphere 2010)


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Wood and plastic.

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We arrived at 4am and waited overcoffee until the guys came at 6am. The six Swedes were tired from their trip so we exchanged few words before making the bus ride to the docks.

I decided to have a nap because I hadn’t slept in over a day and it looked like it’d be a long night. I awoke to find that Bob and Irene had arrived bringing another shipmate from Scotland by the name of Kelly

It turned out that I had met one of her best mates, Anna, while I was in Amsterdam. Just one more reason to visit Glasgow.

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Kelly and I went to the beach and practiced yoga when we noticed a huge thunderstorm developing. We watched as sheets of pink lightening lit up the dark cloud formations which were moving in quickly.

It wasn’t more than 15 minutes before the clouds had taken a sudden shift and were heading straight for us. The lightening became more intense, illuminating the ominous clouds that were tumbling closer and closer.

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Book Dream 2010


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Wang Peng (China)

Distance 2011


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Zhang Peili (China)



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HangzhouHangzhou Public Library

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Wood and plastic.

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Book Dream 2010


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Wang Peng (China)

Distance 2011


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Zhang Peili (China)



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Artist Bibliography

Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley

???Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.

Selected solo exhibitions2012 Burchill/McCamley, David Pestorius Projects, Brisbane 2011 The Emily Dickinson Project continued, Shanthi Road Gallery, Bangalore, India2010 3 Works. Burchill/McCamley, Peloton, Sydney 2009 Janet Burchill: Equivalence, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne (solo exhibition, Janet Burchill) Imitation of Life, Shanti Road Gallery, Bangalore, India2008 Primary Views, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne Inland Empire – Solar Neon, IASKA, Kellerberrin2007 Combine: Janet Burchill, Jennifer McCamley & Melinda

Harper, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne Burchill/McCamley – Super 8 Films, Heide Museum of Mod-

ern Art, Melbourne2006 Our level of delusion is awesome, Yuill/Crowley Gallery,

Sydney2005 NEON, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Repent and sin no more, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne2004 All That Rises Must Converge, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne2003 Three Neons, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne One location – Berlin 1992-1997, Art Gallery of New South

Wales, Sydney2001 Tip of the Iceberg: selected works 1985-2001, University Art

Museum, University of Queensland, Brisbane; Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, Melbourne

Selected group exhibitions2012 Louise Bourgeois and Australian Artists, Heide Museum of

Modern Art, Melbourne Ten Years, Shanthi Road Gallery, Bangalore, India Less is More, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne Kindness, Udarta, (Australia India Cultural Exchange) India

Habitat Centre, New Delhi, India Colombo Art Biennale, Colombo, Sri Lanka In abstraction, the body, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney Forever Young: 30 Years of the Heide Collection, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne2011 Light from Light, National Art Museum of China, Beijing,

China; Hangzhou Public Library, Hangzhou, China The Phantasm, Foxy Production, New York A Different Temporality: Aspects of Australian Feminist art

Practice 1975-1985, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne

Simone Weil: Decreation, West Space, Melbourne Seeing to a distance: Single Channel Video Work from Aus-

tralia, Level 17 Artspace, Victoria University, Melbourne 2010 Light from Light, State Library of Queensland, Brisbane;

Shanghai Library, Shanghai, China Extreme Beauty: Approaches to the Real, Y3K, Melbourne Change, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne Duetto, Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide Affinities, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne2009 WORD, AnnaBio-Box, West Brunswick Sculpture Triennial,

Melbourne Bio-Box, West Brunswick Sculpture Triennial, Melbourne Drawing Folio, Block Projects, Melbourne

2008 Wonderlust, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth The Ecologies Project, Monash Museum of Modern Art,

Melbourne Flux Capacitor, Utopian Slumps, Melbourne NEON, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney2007 Regarding Fear and Hope, Monash University Art Museum,

Melbourne Devotee: the will to belong to the recent past, Cabinet Gallery,

London Door Slamming Festival, Neu Galerie, Berlin Raised by Wolves, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth2006 New to the Modern, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne Turrbal-Jagera, University Art Museum, University of

Queensland, Brisbane New Social Commentaries 06, Warrnambool Art Gallery,

Warrnambool 21st Century Modern, 2006 Adelaide Biennale of Australian

Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide Heart & Mind, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville,

Victoria2005 There are no coincidences, David Pestorius Projects, Bris-

bane Slave, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Victorian College of the

Arts, Melbourne Interesting times, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney A Short Ride in a Fast Machine, Gertrude Contemporary Art

Spaces, Melbourne2004 Ed Kuepper’s Music for Len Lye, David Pestorius Projects,

Brisbane and toured internationally 1+1+1, Yuill/Crowley Gallery, Sydney This is not America, Queensland College of Art Gallery, Bris-

bane; Galerie Horst Schuler, Dusseldorf2003 O Bethaniendamm, David Pestorius Projects at Art Forum,

Berlin2002 Parallel Structures, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne;

South Bank, Brisbane2001 National Sculpture Prize and Exhibition, National Gallery of

Australia, Canberra

113

Eugene Carchesio

Born 1960, Australia. Lives and works in Brisbane, Australia.

Solo Exhibitions2012 Eugene Carchesio, Everything Nothing Projects, Canberra2011 Stars ignite between the death of mountains, Sutton Gallery,

Melbourne Eugene Carchesio, KickArts Contemporary Arts, Cairns Circles. Squares. Mountains., Milani Gallery, Brisbane2010 Blood of Hercules, Milani Gallery, Brisbane On Nothing (with Masato Takasaka), Sutton Projects, Melbourne2009 Interplanetary light transmission drawings (volume two),

Sutton Gallery, Melbourne2008-9 Someone’s Universe: The Art of Eugene Carchesio, Queens-

land Art Gallery, Brisbane2008 Mysteries of the Self, Milani Gallery, Brisbane2007 the birth of saints, Bellas Milani Gallery, Brisbane 52 works ascending and descending, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne Eugene Carchesio: ascending descending, Artspace Mackay,

Mackay2006 everything takes time takes everything, Institute of Modern

Art, Brisbane2005 Peace on Earth, Bellas Milani Gallery, Brisbane2004 The Empty House, Bellas Milani Gallery, Brisbane everything takes time takes everything, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra2003 Eugene Carchesio, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne Mortal Kings, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne and Bellas Gallery,

Brisbane2002 Heliocentricities, University of Queensland Art Museum,

Brisbane New Work, The Church Gallery, Perth Cosmic Theories, Bellas Gallery, Brisbane2001 Australian Representative, 10th Triennale-India, New Dehli,

India Lift Project, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Eugene Carchesio, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne The Jon & Eugene show (collaboration with Jon Cattapan),

Bellas Gallery, Brisbane On Contemporary Silence, Artspace, Sydney and Institute of

Modern Art, Brisbane2000 dead leaves of tokyo, Bundaberg Art Gallery, Bundaberg from nothing, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne patterns and forces, Bellas Gallery, Brisbane

Selected group exhibitions2012 Basil Sellars Art Prize, Ian Potter Museum of Art, University

of Melbourne, Melbourne Sonic Spheres, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville Negotiating this world: Contemporary Australian Art, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Temperament Spectrum: The first twenty-one years 1992-

2012, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne2011 Ten Years of Contemporary Art: The James C Sourris AM Collection, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane Remarks on Colour, QUT Art Museum, Brisbane Slowness, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne Uneasy Futures, Performance Space, Sydney Freehand: Recent Australian Drawing, Heide Museum of

Modern Art, Melbourne Light from Light, National Library of China, Beijing, China;

Hanghzhou Public Library, Hangzhou, China 2010 Hybrid & Folklore, National Gallery Victoria (performance) Super Deluxe, Artspace Sydney Biennale (performance)

(to) give time to time, Mildura Palimpsest, Mildura roundabout, City Gallery Wellington, New Zealand Light from Light, State Library of Queensland, Brisbane;

Shanghai Library, Shanghai; China Academy of Art, Hangzhou (performance)

Room 40, Kickarts Cairns (performance)2010 Beleura National Works on Paper, Mornington Peninsula

Regional Gallery, Mornington painthing (as one), Australian Experimental Art Foundation,

Adelaide Freehand: Recent Australian Drawing, Heide Museum of

Modern Art, Melbourne2009 I walk the line: New Australian Drawing, MCA, Sydney +/-, Faculty Gallery, Faculty of Art & Design Monash University, Melbourne; Switchback Gallery, Monash University Gippsland Campus, Gippsland Auckland Art Fair (represented by Sutton Gallery), Auckland, New Zealand2008 21:100:100 One Hundred Sound Works by One Hundred

Artists from the 21st Century, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne

Under the Influence: Art & Music, QUT Art Museum, Brisbane Look! New Perspectives on the Contemporary Collection,

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Onaroll, Plimsoll Gallery, Hobart On Paper, Bellas Milani Gallery, Brisbane2007 Slowing Down, Glen Eira City Council Gallery, Melbourne Who Let the Dogs Out, Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery,

Lake Macquarie; Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre, Sydney

2006 Multiplicity, Victorian Tapestry Workshop, Melbourne2005 Store 5 is…, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne2004 From the Ephemeral to the Eternal, University of South

Australia Art Museum, Adelaide Heavenly Creatures, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne Temperature: Contemporary Queensland Sculpture, Museum of Brisbane, Brisbane Ed Kuepper’s MFLL, tour includes Sydney Opera House, Sydney, and Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art,

Paris, France Transformers: More Than Meets the Eye, QUT Art Museum,

Brisbane2003 Papercuts, Monash University Art Museum, Melbourne2002 Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane Australia at ARCO (represented by Sutton Gallery), Madrid,

Spain Box, Brisbane City Gallery, Brisbane L x W X D, Brisbane City Gallery, Brisbane Phenomena, Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne, Melbourne Contemporary Drawing, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Centre,

New York2001 The Australian Paper Art Awards, Victorian Arts Centre,

Melbourne Phenomena, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

116

ARCHIE MOORE

Born 1970. Lives and works in Brisbane, Australia.

Selected solo exhibitions2012 [as yet untitled], The Commercial Gallery, Sydney Clover, Boxcopy, Brisbane Mussel, Higure Gallery, Tokyo, Japan Ten Missions From God, Spiro Grace Art Rooms, Brisbane2011 Three Strikes, PLATFORM: Public art installation (curated

by the Museum of Brisbane), Royal Brisbane & Women’s Hospital Busway Station, Brisbane

2010 Bennelong Way To The Top, The Cosmic Battle For Your Heart Gallery, Sydney

Dwelling, Accidentally Annie Street Space, Brisbane2009 Archie Moore: Club, Museum of Brisbane, Brisbane2006 Depth of Field, Ryan Renshaw Gallery, Brisbane2005 New Flames – Residency Exhibition, FireWorks Gallery,

Brisbane2003 Nympholepsy – A Survey of ‘Love’ Works, Palace Gallery,

Brisbane2002 Words I Learnt From The English Class, Black Peppers Gallery, Brisbane

Selected Group Exhibitions2012 Experimenta – Speak to me, 5th International Biennale of

Media Art, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne ONE/THREE – Agatha Gothe-Snape, Andrew Liversidge, Archie Moore, Robert Pulie, The Commercial Gallery, Sydney Transmission, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney Contemporary Australian Drawing 2: Drawing as notation,

text and discovery, University of the Arts, London Lie Of The Land: New Australian Landscapes, Australian

Embassy, Washington, D.C., USA Recycled Library: Altered books, Logan Art Gallery, Logan;

State Library of New South Wales, Sydney2011 The Rest Is Silence, Death Be Kind, Melbourne 28th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander

Award Exhibition, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin

Recycled Library: Altered books, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, Wagga Wagga; Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Bathurst; Hervey Bay

Regional Gallery, Hervey Bay; The Centre for Scenic Rim Art & Culture, Beaudesert

TPИ, various locations throughout Eastern Europe Grave But Not Serious, Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane Light from Light, National Library of China, Beijing, China;

Hangzhou Public Library, Hangzhou, China2010 Light from Light, State Library of Queensland, Brisbane;

Shanghai Library, Shanghai, China Last Words, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney Recycled Library: Altered books, Gladstone Regional Art

Gallery and Museum, Gladstone; Grafton Regional Gallery, Grafton; Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Morn-ington; Western Plains Cultural Centre, Dubbo; Civic Hall Galleries, Port Lincoln; Port Pirie Regional Art Gallery, Port Pirie; Murray Bridge Regional Gallery, Murray Bridge

2009 Queensland Art, Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane Sculpture + Works on Paper, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane Reality Check – Watching Sylvania Waters, Hazlehurst Re-

gional Gallery & Arts Centre, Sydney Making it New: Focus on Australian Contemporary Art, Mu-

seum of Contemporary Art, Sydney Breaking Boundaries: Contemporary Indigenous Australian

Art from the Collection, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane

Recycled Library: Altered books, Artspace Mackay, Mackay; Gladstone Regional Art Gallery & Museum, Gladstone

3 Degrees, Woolloongabba Art Gallery, Brisbane Colliding Islands, Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania, Hobart2008 25th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander


les autres / the others, Tjibaou Cultural Centre, Nouméa, New Caledonia

Xstrata Coal Emerging Indigenous Art Award, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane

Pap Spears, 19 Karen Contemporary Artspace, Gold Coast One-Metre Eye Height, USQ Arts Gallery, Toowoomba Greatest Hits/Previously Unreleased Tracks, University Art

Gallery, University of Sydney Biennale of Sydney Online Venue L’Aboriginal Festival, Université d’Avignon, Avignon, France The Revenge of Genres – Contemporary Australian Art, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France2007 Funeral Songs, MOP, Sydney Greatest Hits/Previously Unreleased Tracks, Umbrella Studios, Townsville; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane The Revenge of Genres – Contemporary Australian Art, Les

Brasseurs, Liège, Belgium Where Whispers Walk, State Library of Queensland, Brisbane Topsy, Metro Arts, Brisbane2006 Turrbal-Jagera, University of Queensland, Brisbane The Other APT, RawSpace Galleries, Brisbane 23rd Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander


Two Way: artists and mentors, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane2005 Top Ten, Gadens Lawyers, Brisbane 22nd Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander


Con:text, Metro Arts, Brisbane Crossings: A Gathering of Artists, SomArts Gallery, San Fran-

cisco, USA Still Moving, Colourised Festival, QUT Art Museum, Brisbane Dark and Light, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane CALD, State Library of Queensland, Brisbane2004 Predominantly White, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane2003 Prospect Portrait Prize Exhibition, Prospect Gallery, Prospect One Square Mile, Museum Of Brisbane, Brisbane Where Is It?, Black Peppers Gallery, Brisbane People, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane Prime, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane Invitational 1+1, Studio 11, Brisbane Being Black, Black Peppers Gallery, Brisbane2002 Urban Blackness, Noosa Regional Gallery, Noosa Six Shades Of Black, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane2001 Real World Art: Art By QUT Alumni, QUT Art Museum, Brisbane

118

Grant Stevens

Born1980, Australia. Lives and works in Brisbane, Australia

Selected solo exhibitions

2012 Seriously, Relax, Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney

2010 Horizons, Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney Burst, Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth2009 Fazed, Starkwhite, Auckland, New Zealand Wobbly, Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney2008 Really Really, Contemporary Centre for Photography, Mel-

bourne No Bad Days, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane2007 Education, Education, Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney Cliché and Collusion, Museum of Art, Brigham Young University, Utah, USA Going Steady, Starkwhite, Auckland, New Zealand The Switch, Il Ponte Contemporanea, Rome2006 New Ideas for Cake, The Block, Brisbane Cut to the Cheese: Selected Works, Museum of Brisbane,

Brisbane The Switch, Lismore Regional Gallery, Lismore2005 I Like Ike, Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney Like Two Ships, Elastic residence, London, UK When There’s Love, Metro Arts, Brisbane Like Two Ships, Kings ARI, Melbourne2004 Some Want It All, Gallery Barry Keldoulis, Sydney Dazed and Praised, David Pestorius Projects, Brisbane

Selected group exhibitions2012 Speak to Me, Experimenta 5th International Biennial of

Media Art, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne Greatest Hits Volume 3, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane2011 Let the Healing Begin, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane Light from Light, State Library of Queensland, Brisbane;

National Library of China, Beijing, China; Hangzhou Public Library, Hangzhou, China

New Age: New Media, Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing; Songzhuang Art Museum, Beijing; The Art Yard, Lhasa; Yuanboyuan Jinan International Art Exhibition Centre, Jinan; Art Hangzhou Expo, Hangzhou; Sichuan Fine Art Academy Art Gallery, Chongqing, China; Parer Place, Bris-bane; 146 ArtSpace, Hobart; Federation Square, Melbourne

VideoRow, The Torrence Art Museum, Los Angeles, USA heads, Utopia Art Sydney, Sydney Illuminations and bad faith, Bondi Pavilion Gallery, Sydney The New Arcadia, Lismore Regional Gallery, Lismore Life is Risk/Art is Risk, National Artists’ Self-Portrait Prize,

University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane2010 Big Tree Foot: The 5th OCAT International Art Residency

Exhibition, J & Z Gallery, Shenzhen, China (Australian) diversity, Songzhuan Art Festival Sunshine

International Art Museum, Beijing, China City of Hobart Art Prize, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gal-

lery, Hobart Kaldor Public Arts Projects Move: The Exhibition, Queens-

land Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane Loveart, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Sydney Starkwhite at Art Los Angeles Contemporary, Pacific Design

Center, Los Angeles2009 In Order Out, Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne LANGUE FROID - COLD LANGUAGE/COLD TONGUE, Conny

Dietzschold Gallery, Sydney Volume II, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane

QUEENSLAND ART 2009, Pestorius Sweeney House, Brisbane Total Nowhere Emotion Expansion, Brisbane Festival, Brisbane 58th Blake Prize, National Art School, Sydney (touring exhibition) Light Sensitive Material: works from the Verghis Collection,

Bathurst Regional Art Gallery Word, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Sydney Some Text Missing, CAST, Hobart New Acquisitions 2009, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney The more you ignore me, the closer I get, University of

Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane Lean Towards Indifference!, Metro Arts, Brisbane Speaking in Tongues, Nature Morte, Berlin, Germany Play, Spruill Gallery, Atlanta, USA2008 Artisti, Il Ponte Contemporanea, Rome Ornament is a Crime, Gallery 1927, Los Angeles TYPECAST, Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne The Dating Show, Institute of Modern Art @ TCB, Brisbane GIFTED, DELL Gallery, Brisbane AS IF THIS LAND WERE YOURS, 29025 Eveningside Dr, Los Angeles neo goth: back in black, University of Queensland Art Mu-

seum, Brisbane2007 I Want To Believe, Boxcopy Contemporary Art Space, Bris-

bane Bad Brains, a little blah blah, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam The Leisure Class, the Australian Cinematique, Queensland

Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane Clip Art, Firstdraft Gallery, Sydney Projekt Video Art Archive, Geraldton Regional Art Gallery,

Geraldton New Deities, Devonport Regional Gallery, Devonport Flim Flam, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra Experimenta Vanishing Point, Ipswich Art Gallery, Ipswich2006 Anne Landa Award, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney 21st Century Modern: 2006 Adelaide Biennial of Australian

Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (installation with Slave collective)

Low, MOP, Sydney Flaming Youth, Orange Regional Gallery, Orange2005 Prime05: New Art From Queensland, Queensland Art Gallery,

Brisbane BEOGRAD NEKAD I SAD, Prodajna Galerija, Beograd, Serbia

Terminus Projects, various train station platforms, Sydney There are no coincidences, David Pestorius Projects,

Brisbane ARC Biennial, Brisbane City Hall, Brisbane2004 2004, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Octopus 5, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne Zeitgeist, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney MAAP in Singapore 2004: GRAVITY, Singapore Art Museum,

Singapore 2003 OK Video: The Jakarta Video Art Festival, National Gallery of

Indonesia, Jakarta, Indonesia Fresh Cut, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane

120

WANG GONGXIN

Born 1960, China. Lives and works in Beijing, China.

Selected solo exhibitions2012 Wang Gongxin: My Sun, Asia Society Museum, New York,

USA It’s About Relating – It’s About China, RedLine, Denver, USA2010 Relating – Wang Gongxin Solo Show, Platform China, Beijing,

China 2009 It’s Not About the Neighbors, Arrow Factory, Beijing, China.2002 Wang Gongxin, The Contemporary Art Centre of South

Australia, Adelaide2001 My Sun, Art Space, Sydney, Australia. The New Works of Wang Gongxin & Lin Tianmiao, The Loft

New Media Art Space, Beijing, China

Selected group exhibitions2011 Social Mobility in Motion, Stern Gallery, Hebrew University

of Jerusalem, Israel Out Of The Box, GuangDong Times Museum, Guangzhou,

China; Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing, China The Couple Show, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China Light from Light, National Library of China, Beijing, China;

Hangzhou Public Library, Hangzhou, China2010 ShanShui 2010: H2O, Beijing Center for the Arts, China The Constructed Dimension – 2010 Chinese Contemporary Art Invitational Exhibition, National Art

Museum of China, Beijing, China Jungle – a Close-up Focus on Chinese Contemporary Art

Trends, Platform China, Beijing, China Reshaping History: Chinart from 2000 to 2009, China National Convention Center, Beijing, China Mu:Screen, UTS Gallery, Sydney, Australia Light from Light, State Library of Queensland, Brisbane; Shanghai Library, Shanghai, China2008 Four Season Group Exhibition, China Academy of Art,

Hangzhou, China Half-Life of a Dream: Contemporary Chinese Art from the

Logan Collection, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, USA

Christian Dior & Chinese Artists, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing Drawn in the clouds, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art,

Helsinki, Finland Where Are We?, Beijing Center for the Arts, Beijing, China Empty Orchestra, Justina M. Barnicke Art Gallery, Toronto,

Canada2007 China Contemporary Art – La lunga marcia dell’Avanguardia,

Museo d´Arte Contemporanea Villa Croce, Genoa Whispering Wind, The Frist Center for the Visual Arts,

Nashville, USA We Are Your Future, 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia All about Laughter, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan Art in Motion: Chinese Contemporary Art Meets the BMW

Art Cars, Long March Space, Beijing, China2006 Fiction@Love, Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai,

China. The Moscow Photobiennale 2006, Moscow, Russia Projected Realities: Video Art from East Asia, Asia Society

and Museum, New York, USA Between Past and Future, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, USA Art in Motion, Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai,

China

2005 Rapt: Austral-Asia Zero Five, Sherman Galleries, Sydney ElectroScape, Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai,

China. Between Past and Future, Victoria and Albert Museum,

London, UK The New Works of Wang Gongxin & Lin Tianmiao, Courtyard

Gallery Ann ex, Beijing, China About Beauty, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany Soul, Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Bruges2004 All under Heaven, Museum for Contemporary Art Antwerp,

Antwerp, Belgium Le moine et Le demon, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon,

Lyon, France 2004 WWVF, Post CS, Amsterdam, Netherlands Between Past and Future, ICP and Museum of Asia Society,

New York, USA Visual Performance, Walsh Gallery, Chicago, USA Dialogues… Gu Dexin, Wang Gongxin and Zhang Peili,

Shanghai gallery of Art, Shanghai, China Officina Asia, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna, Italy2003 Cyber Asia – media art in the near future, Hiroshima City

Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial 2003, Japan. Arles Photography festival 2003, Arles, France Everyday – Contemporary art from China, Japan, Korea,

Thailand, Kunstforeningen, Copenhagen, Denmark New Zone – Chinese Art, Zacheta National Gallery of Art,

Warsaw, Poland2002 Metropolitan Iconographies – 25th Sao Paulo Biennial,

Brazil Welcome to The LOFT in Beijing – “PAUSE” 4th Gwangju

Biennial, Gwangju, South Korea Shanghai Biennial 2002, Shanghai Art Museum, China Guangzhou Triennial 2002, Guangzhou Art Museum, China Taipei Biennial 2002, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan Under Construction, Tokyo Opera City Gallery, Tokyo, Japan Synthetic Reality, East Modern Art Centre, Beijing, China. MAAP in Beijing 2002: moist, The Art Museum of China Millennium Monument, Beijing, China ChinArt, Museum Kuppersmuhle, Duisburg, Germany Beijing Afloat, Beijing-Tokyo Art Projects, Beijing, China2001 MAAP 2001: Excess, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane,

Australia Non-Linear Narrative, The China Academy of Art Gallery,

Hangzhou, China Dream, Atlantis Gallery, London, UK Living in Time, Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contem-

porary Art, Berlin, Germany Translated Acts, Haus Der Kulturen der Welt, BerLin, Ger-

many; Queens Museum of Art, New York, USA. Re:Duchamp, 49th Venice Biennale (travelling exhibition),

Venice, Italy Made in Asia?, The Duke University Museum of Art, USA The Edge, Earl Lu Gallery, Lasalle-SIA College of the Arts,

Singapore2000 Documentation of Chinese Avant-Garde Art in the 90s, Fuku-

oka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan At the New Century: 1979-1999 Chinese Contemporary Art,

Chengdu Contemporary Art Museum, Chengdu, China The Home?, Contemporary Art Project, Shanghai, China 18th WWVF(World Wide Video Festival), Amsterdam, Netherlands MAAP 2000: Presence and Place, Brisbane Powerhouse,

Brisbane Inside Out: New Chinese Art, National Gallery of Australia,

Canberra; Hong Kong Museum of Art, Hong Kong

122

Zhang Peili

Born 1957, China. Lives and wokrs in Hangzhou, China

Selected solo exhibitions2012 Zhang Peili, MAAP SPACE, Brisbane2011 CERTAIN PLEASURES/Zhang Peili Retrospective, Minsheng

Art Museum, Shanghai, China2010 38# Jianchang Hutong, Arrow Factory, Beijing2009 China in Four Seasons: Zhang Peili, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand2008 Zhang Peili, Tilton Gallery, New York, USA A Gust of Wind, BOERS-LI Gallery, Beijing Mute, OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen, China2007 Best Artist (Tilton Gallery, New York), 07 Shanghai Art

Fair International Contemporary Art Exhibition, Shanghai Exhibition Centre, China

2006 Phrase, Currents/Art & Music, Beijing, China2005 Zhang Peili: Actor’s Line and Last Words, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia2000 Artist Project Rooms (Art & Public, Switzerland) Arco2000,

Madrid, Spain

Selected Group Exhibitions2011 Light from Light, National Library of China, Beijing, China;

Hangzhou Public Library, Hangzhou, China2010 Yi Yun, Today Art Museum, Beijing. Light from Light, State Library of Queensland, Brisbane;

Shanghai Library, Shanghai, China Not Only Time: Zhang Peili and Zhu Jia, REDCAT, Los Ange-

les, USA Jungle - A Close-up on Chinese Contemporary Art Trends,

Platform China Contemporary Art Institute, Beijing, China Looking Through Film: Traces of Cinema and Self-Constructs

in Contemporary Art, OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen, China

2009 Intramoenia/Extra art, Castles of Puglia, Italy Bourgeoisified Proletariat, Songjiang Creative Studio,

Shanghai, China Yi Pai – Century Thinking, Today Art Museum, Beijing, China Timelapse, National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China Avant-Garde China: 20 Years of Chinese Contemporary Art,

The National Museum of Art, Osaka; Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya, Japan

A Gift to Marco Polo, A Collateral Event for the 53rd Biennale di Venezia, Venice International University, Island

of San Servolo, Venice, Italy Blackboard, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai, China eARTS BEYOND, 2009 Shanghai eArts Festival, Shanghai,

China2008 Insomnia, Bizart, Shanghai Where Are We?, Beijing Center for the Arts, Beijing, China Beijing-Athens/Contemporary Art from China, Technopolis

of the City of Athens, Greece Homesickness, T Space, Beijing, China Writing on the Wall/Chinese New Realism and Avant-Garde

in the Eighties and Nineties, Groninger Museum, Netherlands Avant-Garde China: 20 Years of Chinese Contemporary Art,

The National Art Center, Tokyo, Japan2007 We are your future (Video Box), 2nd Moscow Biennale,

Moscow, Russia Interact or Die!/ Dutch Electronic Art Festival, Rotterdam,

Netherlands Chinese Contemporary Art, Kunsthaus Graz, Austria China on Ward/The Estella Collection/ Chinese Contempo-

rary Art, 1966-2006, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

Humlebæk, Denmark ’85 New Wave, The Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China Forms of Concepts, 2nd Documentary Exhibition of Arts,

Wuhan, China2006 European Media Art Festival 2006, Osnabrueck, Germany China Power Station Part 1, Serpentine Gallery, London, UK Create History: Commemoration of Chinese Modern Art in

1980s, OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen, China2005 L’ART DE PRODUIRE L’ART, Le Fresnoy-Studio National,

France Le invasioni barbariche, Galleria Continua, San Gimignano,

Italy Archaeology of the future, The Second Triennial of Chinese

Art, The Nanjing Museum, China2004 Techniques of the Visible/ Shanghai Biennale 2004, Shanghai

Art Museum, Shanghai, China Light as Fuck! Shanghai Assemblage 2000-2004, National

Museum of Contemporary Art Oslo, Norway BEYOND BOUNDARIES, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai,

China Zooming into Focus/ Contemporary Chinese Photography

& Video from the Haudenschild Collection, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, China

China, Video Generation, Maison Européenne de la Photog-raphie, Paris, France

Dialogues …/ Gu Dexin, Wang Gongxin, Zhang Peili, Shang-hai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, China

2003 Z.O.U - Zone of Urgency La Biennale di Venezia (50a Espo-sizione Internazionale d’Arte),Venice, Italy

Happiness: a survival guide for art and life, Mori Art Mu-seum, Tokyo, Japan

10th Biennial of Moving Images, Centre for Contemporary Images, Geneva, Switzerland

Alors, la Chine?, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France The First Guangzhou Triennial, Guangdong Museum of Art,

Guangzhou, China Open Sky, Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shang-

hai, China2002 Pause, 4th Gwanju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea MAAP in Beijing 2002: moist, China Millennium Monument

Art Museum, Beijing, China The Third Space in The Fourth World, Eastlink Gallery,

Shanghai, China2001 Tele[visions], Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria Living in Time, Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany China Art Now, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore Compound Eyes/ Contemporary Video Art from China, Earl

Lu Gallery, LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts, Singapore2000 Open Ends, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA Mediacity Seoul 2000, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, South

Korea Shanghai Biennale 2000, Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai,

China Passe-murailles, Musee de Picardie, Amiens, France

light from light catalogue 6.11

Documents

china academy of art

urban art projects

australia china council

maapmedia art asia pacific

australia council

queensland government

australian government

contemporary china