Best of 2008: Mathieu Borysevicz

2008.12.23

1. Baby Rats
This, the year of the Rat, was the year that I and many others in the Chinese art world became parents. While procreation encompasses a surfeit of physical, emotional and psychological experiences that contemporary art will never achieve, it will certainly inflect the practices of these new parents with a more life-affirming, humble, and purposeful approach to things. Stay tuned for enlightened changes from: artist Yang Zhenzhong and writer Lu Lei, artist Xu Zhen; artist Feng Zhengjie; Beijing-based German photographer Roland Fischer; Galleria Continua's Qiu Keman; curator Tang Xin and artist/designer Xie Wenyue; critic Carol Lu and artist Liu Ding; the artist couple Heidi Voet and Michael Lin, who just last week brought twins into the world, and the countless others who became parents in 2008. Viva Procreation!

2. The Sichuan Earthquake (May 12, 2008)
The Sichuan Earthquake was a humanitarian disaster that spectacularly mobilized millions, the art world included. Not only did several artists (including myself, Ai Weiwei, Zhao Bandi, Hu Xiangcheng, and Luo Ping) personally visit the devastation, but serious money was raised by impromptu charity auctions and other art-world contributions. From a formal point of view, the media’s role in galvanizing the masses was epic. The grand, theatrical narrative of devastation, conspiracy and bereavement played out for months across a myriad of media throughout China and around the globe. On televisions, billboards, and the Internet, real-life tragedy was transformed into fiction and vice versa. Premier Wen Jiabao cried, heroic soldiers rescued, and countless victims were and are still mourned.

3. Hipic.org
In this accelerated age of incessant media clamor and digital instantaneity, the world, and thus our consciousness, overflows with photographic images. It would be impossible to estimate the number of digital photographs produced each day or even each second on this planet. BizArt’s Hipic takes an imaginary stab at this enigma. Hipic is a computational machine that recycles digital images as a communal, time-based, artwork, both online and in public, one minute at a time for the rest of time...or as long as participants continue to contribute to the piece by uploading their own photos. At the time of writing this, Hipic was one year, three months, nine days, fifteen hours and seven minutes old; or close to 600,000 images long. Online or in public installations, Hipic’s images progress in an illogical though steady stream, one minute at a time, forming an ambience of constantly changing vistas.

4. Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics
Looking back it’s funny long ago the Olympics seem already. Was that August or 1999? Now matter how much we’d love to forget the Olympics, the Games became an integral part of contemporary Chinese culture, not only in their conscription of some of China’s most famous artists but in their omnipresent hold on our consciousness. While the pre-Olympic run-up saw the formation of a governing ideology based on magnitude, national pride, and promise, the actual games—from the architecture, to the over-anticipated, super-elaborate, Cai Guo-Qiang-embellished opening performances, to Liu Xiang’s tragic Achilles heel injury (which threw the entire nation into a psychoanalytical blame game), to the surreality of a closing ceremony accented by Led Zeppelin’s aging guitarist Jimmy Page playing Whole Lotta Love atop a transforming double-decker bus—were truly a feast.

5. "Comfortable" (Shanghai)
The critic Gao Minglu in his seminal exhibition Inside/Out, identified a movement he dubbed "apartment art" amidst the work produced in early-1990s China. No matter how well this label fits the work of artists who basically had no other venues at the time, Shanghai was host to its own version of apartment art this autumn. Amidst the hoopla of the Shanghai Biennial and the second incarnation of the ShContemporary fair, artist Jin Shan and others organized a small but very refreshing exhibition inside an old lane house in the French Concession. The exhibition seemed to begin well before reaching the venue itself, in the laundry-strewn alleyways and slightly dilapidated halls that doubled as communal kitchens. The event’s casual, DIY strategy was antithetical to the other art events in the city at the time. An installation of visitors’ shoes (Lu Yonglei) greeted newcomers to the exhibition while people dressed only in red imitation Calvin Klein undies and printed white t-shirts (Alexandre Ouairy) lounged about everywhere. An air conditioner unit installed inside out heated up the space and leaked water all over (Jin Shan), while in another room a floor of cushioned tiles (Tang Dixin) made walking impossible. This lived-in, funhouse sensibility gave the participant a feeling of being part of a teenage fantasy experiment rather than an exhibition.

6. David Byrne, Playing the Building (New York)
David Byrne is one of those artists who traverse mediums and forms with exquisite ease. With operas, films, music production, music curating, books, blogs, furniture, photography and The Talking Heads behind him what else can he possibly do? This summer as part of Creative Time’s ongoing series of public works, Byrne transformed lower Manhattan’s Battery Maritime Building into an interactive musical instrument. Opening at the same time as Olafur Eliasson’s much-hyped, fifteen-million-dollar waterfall installations, Byrne’s piece instead used low-key, lo-fi technology to magically resuscitate a dilapidated building. The piece was composed of a reconfigured antique organ from which plastic tubes strung out in an elegant web and attached to various parts of the cavernous building. When the organ’s keys were pressed, air pumped through the tubes eliciting various clanking or blowing noises from the building’s nineteenth-century structure and delighting participants.

7. "Intrude: Art & Life 366" (Zendai MoMA, Shanghai)
Zendai MoMA's Intrude: Art & Life 366 series was a bit too ambitious to truly succeed. The project’s goal was simple: on each of the 366 days of 2008, a different artwork would intervene in Shanghai’s public realm. It was an earnest attempt to cross-breed reality with the esoteric realm of contemporary art, to infiltrate new territories and reach new audiences. Art & Life 366 was a good idea but very difficult to manage, promote, document or realize in general. Having said this, 366 saw a formidable slew of local and international artists working in areas where they had hitherto never been, for audiences that never expected them. Some highlights included Vibeke Jensen’s nighttime video projections on Shanghai’s cultural institutions, Bai Yiluo’s oversized human heart being driven around on the back of a tricycle cart, Yoko Ono’s Instructional pieces and Yang Yong’s photographs as subway posters, and Utopian Group’s museums in private homes project, to name just a few.

8. The US Presidential Election and Obama Mania
Need I say more?

9. "Farewell to Post-Colonialism: The Third Guangzhou Triennial" (Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou)
While the exhibition itself was a lovely, epic mess, it is the convoluted, multilayered, almost suicidal criticality of the exhibition’s grounding theory that gets the award here. One of the grand curatorial conceits of this year’s Guangzhou Triennial is that art practices today are endangered by a reality that is increasingly fanciful and increasingly confounded by the expansion of mass media and the proliferation of nonlinear technology. Triennial curator Gao Shiming identified this as the virtual world colonizing the real world. Like this very non-linear list that I am writing (which includes entries belonging not to the art world but to our greater communal reality) the Triennial’s audacious title, “Farewell to Post-Colonialism,” was incongruous in its setting. Not only does Mainland China have no formal colonial history, but it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that post-colonial (not to mention colonial) discourse entered China. Like many other popular post-modern theories, it arrived as a Western import. Post-colonialism not only helped to reinforce the traditionally bipolar view of East vs. West in China but also became a ready-made conceptual framework for its contemporary arts. It is a framework, some may argue, that has allowed the contemporary arts of China to thrive. And now in only the third manifestation of the triennial this ideology was getting laid to rest, because the world today is a lot more complicated than that. Thank God.

10. Yang Fudong, East of Que Village (ShanghART Gallery)
David Velasco in writing about the same exhibition for artforum.com called East of Que Village “a ravishing study of antagonism on the fringes.” MoMA curator Barbara London confessed in conversation that she thought the piece was the artist’s most political and personal to date. After seeing Yang Fudong’s latest video creation I’m still not exactly sure what either of these comments mean, but somehow they both seem accurate. East of Que Village is a six-screen video installation that posits wild dogs as protagonists in a loose, survival-of-the-fittest narrative. While this pack of dogs scrape the sustenance out of a dusty, barely populated northern town, an oddly hierarchical group dynamic emerges amongst them. Perhaps the dynamic is one that we project upon them, as survivalists ourselves.

Mathieu Borysevicz is an artist, curator, and frequent contributor to Artforum.

— 文/ Mathieu Borysevicz