《民間地圖志》Shifting Topography

HK Art Fair itself is attracting a whole lot of attention, every "good" is trying to be part of it in many ways. Side events during HK art fair are all too overwhelming.

This one is probably the most expected, but will you expect more? Check it out.
Photos

Opening
2010/5/28 5:00pm-8:00pm

Venue
HANART SQUARE - 2/F Mai On Industrial Building, 17-21 Kung Yip Street, (off Tai Lin Pai Road, Kwai, Hing) Kwai Chung (near Kwai Hing MTR station)
新界葵涌（由大連排道）工業街17-21號美安工業大廈

二樓(近葵興港鐵站)

參展藝術家 / Participating artists
周 俊輝 Chow Chun-fai / 何倩彤 Ho Sin-tung / 何兆基 Ho Siu-kee / 林東鵬 Lam Tung-pang / 劉學成 Lau Hok-shing, Hanison / 李鴻輝 Michael Lee / 梁志和 Leung Chi-wo / 梁巨廷 Leung Kui-ting / 黃琮瑜 Wong Chung-yu / 王無邪 Wucius Wong


民間地圖志
張頌仁

香 港人對方位、地形、佈局等空間觀念得天獨厚，富於想象。此無它，這裡無論上班賦閒，香港人的談資都不離地產房價，所以每一寸空間都被人端詳過，掂量過，夢 過恨過。要了解香港，弄懂此地經濟，必須知道空間的價值如何被營造，拜物癖怎樣被開啟。所以要潛進香港文化的臟腑就不得不探討空間的各種使用方法，從公共 空間使用到私隱見不得光的私用，正式付諸實用或夢想慾望的空間。因為在這裏才能看清楚香港的核心價值。

香港思維中印鑴了各種藍圖，包括股市走勢圖，商場的物慾分佈圖，街區的童年生活記憶圖。這些圖是各人規劃世界，認識世界的藍圖。此外，在香港，風水學已被領入大廈單位內，以便升斗小民都能夠分辨凶吉，避剎求福。所以要觀察龍脈氣運，即使不登扯旗山不遊獅子山亦無傷大雅。

香 港人的樓居眼界是被間格成方塊的，因為這些懸空不沾地氣的空格子都談不上歷史掌故，只是數目編號，沒有立體的故事。空間價值必須有待於想象的故事，所以市 民只好忍受地產廣告的肉麻貴族生活大話。對空間價值的建立，文化界的創意和想象更具體更真實。藝術家驅使天馬行空的力量重新佔領和描述這個都市。他們有的 採用遊覽的策略來打開想象世界的路線和網絡，有的以假想的藍圖來樹立地標和據點。其實每人皆無法逃避的是如何設法逃避這種被資本投資邏輯所網羅的複製社區 與被刷洗的時空記憶。

參展藝術家在作品中提示了多種策略和思維方式，可供日常生活中用以打破常規並進行內觀反省。不過這些個案只可作為參 考樣品，因為要好好地介入和了解我們的都市尚有無數的方法。這些街道隱藏了層疊的秘密藍圖，遮掩了各類未被揭露的陰謀，慾望，暗角，等待空間的"用家"發 揮各自的能耐。只有廣集眾力，才能把蘊藏空間裡的能量發揮，以便從呆板的建築裡找到個性，以致累積功德，構築故事，集散句為鴻編，制圖測地，而成就多個民 間的歷史，民間的地理志和堪輿學。

2010


Shifting Topography
Chang Tsong-zung

In a city where real estate prices dominate all social discourse, and acquiring private space is the principal goal of every person reporting to work, there is a constant obsession about the potential value of every square inch, and fantasies about myriad possible uses. How this value system works, and how it gets fetishised, are central to understanding our economy. Exploring the possible uses of space, from the public to the secret and clandestine, opens an undercover entry into the cultural heart of Hong Kong. It is here where Hong Kong’s core value lies.

The mapping of the stock index, the pattern of street-grids encasing childhood memories, and the floor plans of malls tracing commodity-desire – all have become rooted in the Hong Kong imagination. They are blueprints for making sense of our world. Here the old science of geomancy has also been brought up to date for mapping positions of energy in simple offices, so as to plan positions of defense and channel paths of good will. We do not need to climb Lion Rock or ride on the Peak Tram to see how the spirit of the ‘feng-shui’ dragon is re-materializing in this city.

At home, our imagination is compartmentalized by boxed-in spaces. Almost invariably these are artificial ‘places’ without stories (histories), identifiable only as numbers; standardized ‘units’ removed from the ground. They need fiction to maintain their value: hence the embarrassing hyper-fictions of European highlife in Hong Kong real estate advertising. This helps to explain the strong urge among many Hong Kong artists to discover ‘true’ stories, to take back imaginative possession of their city. Some adopt the strategy of navigation by delineating tours and paths; some claim visual possession by fixing landmarks and making imaginary maps. There is no escape from the passion to escape from the monotony of repetitiveness and loss of memory to which we are being condemned by capitalist logic.

Artists in this exhibition have developed tactics and working methods that may be used to illuminate and transform the daily routine of urban life, but these represent only a small reserve of the countless ways to access the city. It is up to each one of us living here to discover for himself the hidden pattern of the matrix: the intrigues, the desires, the secret passages and links. By bringing a true imagination to bear, we can identify the wells of untapped energy and the possibilities for constructing a character from the materials of characterless structures, in order to build stories and topographs that will eventually become history, and a citizen’s topology of the city.

Unruly Chinese visitors hurl 'Nazi' insults outside German pavilion at Shanghai Expo - Shanghaiist

Unruly Chinese visitors hurl 'Nazi' insults outside German pavilion at Shanghai Expo - Shanghaiist

New Director at The 54th Venice International Art Exhibition

The Board of the Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Paolo Baratta, has appointed Bice Curiger as Director of the Visual Arts Sector, with specific responsibility for curating the 54th International Art Exhibition to be held in 2011. A graduate of the University of Zurich, Bice Curiger is an art historian, critic and curator of exhibitions at an international level. Since 1993, she has been curator at the Zurich Kunsthaus, one of the most important museums in the world for modern and contemporary art, and which has for years implemented a major exhibitions programme of international significance. Bice Curiger is co-founder and editor-in-chief of “Parkett”, one of the most authoritative and innovative contemporary art magazines in the world, published in Zurich and New York since 1984. Since 2004, she has been publishing director of the “Tate etc” magazine ...

New Sensory Perception for Possible Realities

Can you believe in what you haven’t seen? Or, can you not to believe in what you saw?
Is reality about something what you can see, what you know, or what you are brought up to believe?

true /本当のこと (真的)
a new sound, light, dance performance – a new media experience
新媒體‧聲音‧燈光‧舞蹈聯動演出

18-20.06.2010 (五至日 Fri-Sun) 8pm
香港文化中心劇場
Studio Theatre, Hong Kong Cultural Centre
$250, 180

Exploring the relationship between the brain, our sensory perception and the reality we face, true is an exceptional collaboration among 10 cutting-edge Japanese artists across digital media, technology, theatre and dance. They are members of the groups Dumb Type, AbsT, rhizomatiks, Softpad, DGN and VPP.

Through the interfacing technology and the use of myoelectric sensors attached to the performers’ bodies, which provide real-time triggers for sound, mechatronics, lights and video, True creates a completely synchronous, and totally new sensory experience.
http://www.true.gr.jp/
http://www.orleanlaiproject.net

What’s Special in China’s Special Zones? by JIANG Jun

Special zones might not be China’s invention, but it could be the society most in need of them. Chinese civilisation is well known for two unique features: a power that has occupied most of the territories in East Asia, where the span of both climate zones and elevation has given birth to the most diversified ecology on the planet, and a sustainable society that has been dominated for 2000 years by the Great Unity system, in which the vast territory of China is unified by a centralised authority. Consequently, as this eco-diversity resulted in a diversity of economies, there have been considerable difficulties in balancing the two paradoxical features. Pre-modern China used to solve the puzzle with a philosophy that “seeks common ground while preserving minor differences”. This meant that diversified economic models could be developed within a self-organised family structure, as part of the Great Unity system framework. Under Confucianism, an isomorphic model between family and state was established in order to minimise differences in political structure, while maximising the vitalities of local economies. If China’s eco-diversity has given birth to special zones, it is the flexibility and inclusiveness of the regime that has given them the space to exist. China needs special zones in order to stabilise itself within the tension created by Great Unity and eco-diversity.

In a densely populated society, the Great Unity system was able to make the most of economic benefits by means of integrating resources throughout its territory by way of national power. With the “socialist transformation”, however, it was the national power itself that increased in order to concentrate core resources on the industrialisation of China, rather than the country’s agricultural economy. Industrialisation was a revolution that drastically changed these valued ideas of “localness” and “specialness”. Urbanisation could be made generic when absorbed into an industrial chain of processes. When Communist China tried to construct an independent macro-industrial system in 1950s, the whole country was unified under a planned economy, in which national zones were given priority over special zones. When Deng inherited Mao’s upstream industry in the 1980s, however, he opened up spaces for downstream industry, thus reinstating the importance of special zones. Special Economic Zones, or SEZs, were established in South China as Petri dishes for China’s experiments in market economics. The military-guarded form of the SEZs was actually a spatial indication of how the market economy was planned. The 1980s experiment was not about market economics per se, but about a “planned market economy”: a fusion of an upstream planned economy and a downstream free-trade economy, which is special not only to China, but also in global economic structures.

China’s special zones of the 1980s echoed a number of other state projects from preceding decades. The Special Trade Zone in Guangzhou was established by the Ming and Qing Governments, where “official merchants” with government-issued trading licenses could cooperate with foreign merchants in a designated area. In the 1940s, Mao also set up Yan’an, the temporary “red” capital city of the Communist Party, as a Special Political Zone in wartime China. Even in the 1960s, when China was highly centralised, Panzhihua and Liupanshui, in the hinterland of Southwest China, were designated as Special Industrial Zones because of their iron and coal mines – so important in supporting China’s independent industrialisation during the Cold War. Hong Kong and Macau were also developed as Special Administrative Zones after their turnover to China as part of the “one country, two systems” policy… All these special zones are testaments to “what is special” at different historical moments in China.

In the experiments of the 1980s, SEZs were only successful in Shenzhen, because of its proximity to Hong Kong – with its Post-war geopolitical significance. Special economic achievement has here been determined by a special geopolitical situation, or a fusion of natural endowments, because of eco-diversity and socio-political configuration due to cultural diversity. Yan’an became a Special Political Zone because of its marginal position, away from both its enemies, the Kuomintang and the Japanese. Panzhihua and Liupanshui became Special Industrial Zones because of their natural resources. In a Great Unity system, a special zone could be easily set up by simply answering the question, “what’s special?” For a special zone to be successful, however, the question should be not what, but “how to be special?” This is why China’s largest economic zone, Hainan, which was established along with Shenzhen in the 1980s, with the ambition to “create another Hong Kong”, became a failed experiment in an economic bubble created by the real estate market in the early 1990s, leaving over 20 million square metres of construction abandoned. The “Hainan Lesson”, however, did not filter throughout the whole country, as the “Shenzhen Experience” did. When “development zones” – miniature special zones directly initiated by city governments – were flourishing throughout the country, some became “miniature Shenzhens”, while others became “miniature Hainans”, revealing the double-edged effects of special zones in the Great Unity system.

The year Hainan’s laisser-faire approach broke the economic bubble was when Shanghai began its “more planned”, “5 Years, Big Change” (1993-1998) policy. It became evident that despite its ambition, Hainan is too close to Hong Kong to replace it. Hong Kong’s success was based on its position as the “gateway city” between a blockaded mainland and the international world in the 30 years after the Korean War, while Shanghai was the “gateway city” between an opened mainland and the international world in the wake of Deng’s policy of reform and opening. Hong Kong is at the mouth of the Pearl River, which connects only the Pearl River Delta, while Shanghai is at the mouth of the Yangtze River, which connects the whole of China along one of the world’s most important major arteries. As a special zone, Pudong was located almost at the centre of the old colonial city, on the other side of the Huangpu River, and easily turned itself into a new financial centre because of this geography. As a city, Shanghai was located almost at the centre of the mainland coastline, easily introducing the first-mover advantage of those special zones in South China to the north. Historically, in the 1930s, Shanghai was seen to be the biggest city in the Far East, after China’s experience of Guangzhou’s special zone and the Opium War. Now the city seems to be claiming its former glory by redeveloping its unique geographic significance.

The “superiority of socialism” was also restored to Shanghai when the central government opted to focus not only policy but also financial support on a new planned economy. While Shenzhen relied on foreign direct investment (FDI), mostly from Hong Kong, Shanghai’s success was based on hundreds of billions of investments from the central financial authorities. The experiences of the Shenzhen SEZ were implemented in Shanghai as a national strategy, making the city the “dragon’s head” of the Yangtze River Delta, or YRD, and the Yangtze River Valley [the body behind the dragon’s head]. Shanghai was also intended to become a metropolitan landmark for China, with identifiable skylines to showcase the accomplishment of China’s modernisation under the leadership of the Communist Party. Geographically, the YRD has more advantages than the Pearl River Delta, or PRD, as being the largest metropolitan area, absorbing a more rural population into the city because of its connection to the deep hinterland and water resources, which is not the case in the Bohai Sea Rim in North China. From this perspective, we can see how the World Expo 2010 could be another opportunity for Shanghai to earn greater support from central government by making itself the centre of the biggest metropolitan area in the drastic urbanisation of China as a whole.

Special zones might not be China’s invention, but they can possess distinctly Chinese characteristics. When the potential differences on both sides of the Shenzhen-Hong Kong border were incorporated into the Shenzhen SEZ, it not only inspired diversified urban spaces along the border, but also created a number of institutions and enterprises with inherent borderline characteristics. The resulting initiatives in government reform and the restructuring of state-owned enterprises provided valuable templates for the development of the hinterland. The modernisation of China is a process in which pre-modern institutions are supposed to be reformed by gradual progression. It is also a process parallel to the “special reform” of urbanisation, in which China will transform from agricultural China to urban China. Special zones provide both the impetus and space for an experiment in temporary institutions. The real ambition behind the SEZs is not a short-term economic leap forward, but a superstructure that is meant to underlie sustainable economic achievements. The focus of China’s special zones has shifted from economic to administrative and then political: the gradual evolution, rather than revolution, from a pre-modern regime.

In the last 30 years, we have witnessed a process of upgrading China’s special zones, from South China to North China; from the coastline to the hinterland; from the independent development of SEZs to national financial support in Shanghai and Tianjin; from the singular economic experiment to multi-directional exercises for strategic purposes – thereby transforming the government’s function in the Pudong New Area in Shanghai, balancing urban and rural development in Chengdu and Chongqing, implementing sustainable development in Wuhan and Changsha. With the increasingly diversified geo-political positioning of special zones, the visible hand of the national plan becomes proportionately powerful, while wearing the glove of a socialist market economy. The reforms in administrative and institutional areas, including land, finance and taxation systems, social security, urban and rural integration, environment and resource protection, together constitute China’s systematic transition from pre-modernisation to modernisation, while special zones revive the network of diversities on the map of a Great Unity civilisation.

Jiang Jun, designer, editor and critic, specialises in urban research and experimental studies, exploring the interrelationships between design phenomena and urban dynamics. He founded Underline Office in late 2003 and has been editor-in-chief of Urban China Magazine since late 2004, while also working on his book, Hi-China. His work has been presented at Get It Louder(2005/2007), the Guangdong Triennial (2005), the Shenzhen Biennial (2005/2007), China Contemporary in Rotterdam (2006) and Documenta (2007). He curated the international exhibition,Street Belongs to … All of Us! in China in 2008. He has been invited to lecture at domestic and international universities, including Sun Yat-Sen University, Beijing University, CUHK, Harvard University, UCL, Tokyo University, Seoul University, Princeton University, Columbia University, etc.. In 2009, his Urban China was exhibited at museums in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, the first Chinese magazine to be exhibited in solo overseas travelling exhibitions. Born in Hubei in 1974, he received his Bachelor’s degree from Tongji University in Shanghai and his Master’s from Tsinghua University in Beijing. He is currently an associate professor at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.