Best of 2008: Anthony Yung

2008.12.18

1. Alexander Kluge, The Films for Cinema (Edition Filmmuseum)
For ages I (and many others, I believe) have been waiting for Kluge's iconic Artists under the Big Top: Perplexed to be released on DVD. To see and collect more than fifty major cinematic works of Kluge in this set of eight two-disc DVDs is no doubt great, as is the surprise of the set's rich supplementary materials, such as Kluge's inspiring interview with Jean-Luc Godard in 2001 and some of his experimental television productions.

2. "Farewell to Post-Colonialism: The Third Guangzhou Triennial" (Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou)
The Triennial's opening was a wonderful day. The museum decided to hold the opening forum in a secondary venue, a residential real-estate development forty minutes from the city center. In this half-finished apartment block, smells of formaldehyde, rain, and perfume mingled amidst the work on view. Viewers crammed into the single elevator connecting the several floors displaying work with the tenacity of Hong Kong subway commuters at rush hour. Triennial curator Johnson Chang was enamored of the way in which this space allowed chaos and possibilities to yearn for each other. Another simple but great innovation was the show's system of overseas research curators. This team of seven introduced many good foreign artists, who were probably quite established in their own regions if virtually unknown in China.

3. Ishii Yuya, Stranger than Hysteria, 2008
By far the best program of the 32nd Hong Kong International Film Festival was this screening of four films by Ishii Yuya. To quote the festival's official program book: "Even when we showed Ishii Yuya's work to the initiated, the usual response was: 'Where the #$%^ did this guy come from?'" The 25-year-old director has already appeared at many international film festivals and is frequently suspected of insanity after his screenings. Ishii's films remind me of the early works of Nobuhiro Yamashita: low-tech, low-budget, lo-fi; funny but upsetting; mundane but absurd; surprising but desperate. In a word, Japanese, very Japanese.

4. Wu Shanzhuan, But Still Red, Red Humour International (Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou)
This is the first solo exhibition of Wu Shanzhuan in China. Wu is one of the earliest conceptual artists of the ’85 New Wave. His works are famous for their humor: playful but difficult and philosophical. The exhibition featured nearly all of his representative work from his thirty-year career. With the show published he published not a catalogue but a 793-page novel Today No Water. This "novel" actually seems to be a compilation of Wu’s writings from all these years, including a lot of possible explanations and elaborations of the whole structure of his unique theories.

5. Carlos Garaicoa, "¿Revolución o Rizoma?" (Galleria Continua, Beijing)
I will not go into the philosophical meaning of the "rhizome," but for those who find the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari just too difficult to read, I recommend this exhibition by Carlos Garaicoa. The work that amazed me most was the sculpture An Oriental Minute in Occidental Music, where different kinds of musical instruments were hooked inside a glass box, and people could use a stethoscope to listen to the music inside. Two works from this show were later shown in the Guangzhou Triennial, where they similarly stood out.

6. "Looking for Antonio Mak" (Hong Kong Museum of Art)
The third and best exhibition in the museum's “Open-Dialogue” series, this show presented more than one hundred works by the legendary Hong Kong sculptor Antonio Mak (1951-1994) alongside new commissions by seven artists responding to his short and brilliant career. Mak's early death, along with the paucity of his work in the public sphere, had made him an enigma. The exhibition, curated by Valerie Doran, includes a notable research section that helps viewers to recollect and rediscover Mak's life and work.

7. Michelangelo Pistoletto (Galleria Continua, Beijing) (Exhibition)
It’s strange that in Beijing to see huge installation works by masters like Anish Kapoor or Pistoletto, you don't go to a big, national museum but to a commercial gallery, and always the same one no less. This exhibition featured Pistoletto's classic works The Labyrinth and The Cubic Meter of Infinity in a Mirroring Cube, both produce fine spectacles that words can't describe. Whatever one can say about the taste of the Chinese audience, I observed that they enjoyed this show much more than seeing those acrylic cartoon heads.

8. Yelang and the Nanman Band, Greatest 08
A friend and owner of a record store next to the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts recommended Yelang to me. His music is a mixture of Psycho-Fork and Chinese minority-nationality folk. He tends to use local musical instruments, with names I am unable to translate. He sings in Guangxi dialect. This poorly designed, homemade record features five tracks. The lyrics, I suspect, come just from traditional folk songs: one is about the old house in which he spent his childhood; another marks a promise to his mother that one day he will marry a beautiful and good wife and return home. To be honest, I don't think there is much chance you see this CD anywhere, but I do hope that more of his music will come out.

9. "Mute: Zhang Peili's Solo Exhibition" (OCT Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen)
In September, three exhibitions opened together in Shenzhen's "Overseas Chinese Town," including a 50-artist survey called "Hypallage," a retrospective of Wang Guangyi's non-painting works, and this solo show by Zhang Peili. Among the three, Zhang's show was the smallest in scale, featuring only one installation work, but it was easily the best. Zhang brought from Zhejiang province the machinery of an entire textile factory, but he only brought the workers via his videos. The factory still makes dirt and noises, but nothing is produced. With the exhibition was published a wonderful catalogue, printing most of Zhang's major works and interviews.

10. Julio Cortazar, Rayuela, Chinese translation by Sun Jiameng (Chongqing Publishing House)
Although Cortazar's novel was originally published in 1996 as part of the "Latin American Literature Series," this new version features improved translation, editing and printing. I grew so obsessed that I wasn't able to put it down for quite some time. A conversation with one bookshop owner revealed that this book is surprisingly popular among Chinese readers, so we have some hopes that the publishers might want to release other works by Cortazar in coming years. I, for one, am looking forward.