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| YANG FUDONG | |
JIM LAMBIE | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Interview: Hans Ulrich Obrist and Yang Fudong |
Jim Lambie 'Boy Hairdresser' By Roberta Smith |
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First published in full length in the Magazine Yishu , Journal of HUO: Let's talk about the background to your work. Shanghai was a well-known filmmaking centre in the '20s and '30s. What has been the importance of this history on your practice? But maybe I should start by asking you whether you studied contemporary art or film first. YF: Both of those factors have influenced me. Firstly, I studied at the China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, where I was taught a lot about contemporary art. As for cinema, I've watched, and still watch, a lot of Chinese movies, Yuan Muzhi's Street Angels (Malu Tianshi, 1937 ) and Fei Mu's Springtime in a Small Town ( Xiao chen zhi chun, 1948), a film a lot of cinema people are talking about at the moment. There is a contemporary film director, Tian Zhuang Zhuang who redid this film, keeping its original title, and it was shown at the film festival in Venice in 2002. HUO: You also told me that you have been influenced by the artist Huang Yong Ping. YF: Actually, Huang Yong Ping attended the same school as me and belonged to the generation of my professors. Although I didn't know him personally, I did discover his work in various catalogues after 1989, in a rather tense atmosphere. In his artwork, I discovered something I had never seen elsewhere and in a way, I began to see him as a teacher from a distance. HUO: The exhibition that you are partaking in along with Wang Jian Wei and Chang Yung Ho in Paris is based on the idea of multiple forms of expression, dealing with the links between art and architecture as well as between art and cinema. You started out working mainly in video, but An Estranged Paradise ( Moshen Tiantang , 1997–2002), which is maybe your best-known piece, is a black and white movie much more related to Chinese cinema of the '20s. Can you tell me about how you use or allude to old Chinese cinema in your work? YF: The relationship between my work and the films of the '20s is pretty vague. Artists today can appropriate any medium to express their way of living and seeing, and make that choice according to their need to say something specific. I see the sensitivity that marks my films as a personal thing having its roots in my past and my experience. I am unable to be more explicit about this personal relationship that I have with cinema from the '20s, I am afraid. HUO: In your work, you speak directly and indirectly about the city. YF: My family lives in Beijing and I live in Shanghai, where I got married. I always have this feeling of not living in my own city, of being a long way from my family in a city that isn't really mine. HUO: Isn't it something that goes along with the changes taking place in Chinese contemporary society? YF: I feel like a foreigner in Shanghai and it's as if I'm trying to get things happening in a context where there are political pressures that might get in the way. Like all of us, I'm a bit like that “first intellectual.” HUO: You mean the character in your photographic series ( The First Intellectual , 2000) who is hit by a brick that someone threw at him? YF: Yes. One wants to accomplish big things, but in the end it doesn't happen. Every educated Chinese person is very ambitious, and obviously there are obstacles, obstacles coming either from society or from inside oneself. The “first intellectual” has been wounded: he has blood running down his face and he wants to respond and react, but he doesn't know who he should throw his brick at. He doesn't know if the problem stems from him or society. HUO: Can we talk a bit about your dialogue with the architect Chang Yung Ho. How did it go when you first brainstormed for this exhibition? YF: We talked for a while, he explained to me what it is that he wants to do. I immediately got the impression that he is a person one could really work with. Now that I have seen the space [in ARC] and the framework that I was given to work in, I realize that I need to re-think my initial project because it doesn't fit the architectural set up. HUO: Still, it's important to find a solution that you agree upon. The architecture should be made to fit your project. YF: In my initial plan I wanted to use the space only with the projection of my video, but now I must find a balance between all three projects, mine and those of my colleagues. I wanted to make a horizontal picture like the traditional Chinese scrolls with images inside. But when I saw the shape of the room I realized that it wouldn't be possible. I do have other ideas that would work out fine in the given space. This isn't only my exhibition though, and I think it is important to take into consideration whatever the others are planning on doing. I really appreciate both Wang Jian Wei and Chang Yung Ho's work and I hope that my contribution to this exhibition will be an interesting piece to an even more interesting puzzle. HUO: Could you tell me about the work you created for the Istanbul Biennial (“Egofugal: Fugue from Ego for the Next Emergence,” 7th International Istanbul Biennial, 2001)? It was a video installation that gave the viewer the feeling he was in some kind of paradise. YF: The work is called Tonight's Moon ( Jinwande Yueliang , 2000). I wanted to talk about paradise, the ideal, a dream world. It's set in a traditional Chinese garden, which is a kind of dreamy image. I really like showing this sort of atmosphere: very calm, very beautiful, but with a strange aspect that disturbs the context. HUO: What are your Utopias, projects that you haven't been able to get off the ground, but that you would still like to carryout? YF: There are two very important projects that I'd like to do late next year. First is this film about what I call the ideal or ideals you have when you're young, which stay with you all your life; and another one about intellectuals—but it has nothing to do with The First Intellectual ! I'd also like to prepare my own solo show, which would include film, video, sculpture and painting. HUO: Sort of like a complete work of art? YF: This project will be a global project of the understanding that I have of my life as well as my comprehension of intellectuals. I seriously plan on taking my time in completing this project, it will be done quite slowly, and perhaps it is too soon to even be talking about it. HUO: In your work there's a narrative presence reminiscent of the cinema, but it's something more allusive: a narrative that's open-ended rather than completed. Could you tell me something about this narrative aspect? YF: In fact I'd like to move into cinema, but not to tell stories or go completely into a narrative mode. I'm tempted by the idea of seeing my films shown in movie houses, but at the same time I want to stay experimental and keep on working on things for the exhibition.
ONE THOUSAND WORDS For the entire text go to www.artforum.com
“My new film investigates how this dreamlike environment affects relationships and discussions among the intellectuals-as well as their solitary meditations on individuality and liberty. We need to pursue something, and then we have our spiritual sustenance and belief. In the subsequent films, the intellectuals will be shown living in a building, in a metropolis-say, Shanghai; in a village in the countryside in the company of peasants and villagers; and on a deserted island where they'll start to invent a new world from scratch by defining new modalities of social life and interaction and a new distribution of labor. (Of course, the separation of material and immaterial labor and capital will be questioned.) And in the fifth and last part, eventually the intellectuals will return to the city-and so return to reality, confronting their contemporaries with their new experiences. “ Yang Fudong, “One Thousand Words,” Artforum, September 2003 “At the 50th Venice Biennale, Shanghai-based artist Yang Fudong presented The Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, 2003, the first part of his new filmic pentalogy, The Seven Intellectuals, an adaptation of the traditional Chinese stories known as "The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove." The first installment (shot in 35 mm black and white) begins the series' exploration of the ambiguous position of intellectuals in contemporary China-their longing for individual freedom in the shifting context of an emerging capitalist economy. Yang, who was born in 1971 in Beijing and graduated from the China Academy of Fine Arts, Hangzhou, has shown an interest in the conundrums of idealism in his earlier works, such as the photographic triptych The First Intellectual, 2000, where he reflects on the difficulty of finding and adopting a rebellious and critical attitude in a society undergoing changes that are as rapid as they are profound. On other occasions, his approach has been poetic and nostalgic, showing stylistic references to Chinese films of the '30s and '40s, such as Yuan Muzhi's Street Angel (1937) and Fei Mu's Spring in a Small Town (1948). Yang's Internationally praised first feature film, An Estranged Paradise (2002), tells the story of Zhuzi, a young intellectual befallen by a strange illness, a restlessness that arrives with the rainy season and disappears with its end. In Yang's own words, the film stands as "a meditation on life," in which nature seems intimately bound to psychology. It is a poignant convergence of mind and outside world that presages the first episode of The Seven Intellectuals.” HANS ULRICH OBRIST, “One Thousand Words,” Artforum, September 2003
JIM LAMBIE Anton Kern Gallery 532 West 20th Street Chelsea Through Oct. 13. Jim Lambie doesn't want to be known as the tape artist, and so he is not repeating the mind-bending yet completely ephemeral commandeering of space that made his first New York show so memorable. (It was achieved by covering an entire gallery floor with black, white and gray plastic tape.) In his second show here, insubstantiality rules in its own right; the artist's smaller, slighter, cheerfully abject efforts take center stage. Every one of them makes ingenious, often touching use of cultural detritus, especially that involving strong color, references to popular music or both. (Most works are inspired by Mr. Lambie's pre-art-school membership in a rock band called Boy Hairdresser.) In addition, a subtle shamanism alternates with an emphasis on pure perception as if the artist were simultaneously inspired by to name two Americans Alan Shields and Robert Irwin. For example, strands of colored beads hang from the ceiling, and one of Mr. Lambie's obsessive, slightly bumpy, thread wrapped sticks leans against a wall. The show's largest (yet barely visible) piece consists of dozens of little drips of bright paint blown onto an enormous white brick wall through plastic straws that are still inserted in its crevices, like a series of playful stigmata and the weapons that inflicted them. The hairdresser theme is clearer in a wall piece made of dime-store mirrors, a headband stabile and a big, rotating platform populated by the faces of 1970's pop stars, popped up from various album covers. (That's quantities of very dressed hair.) And Michael Jackson is brought to mind, in a tramp art sort of way, by a glove gaily sewn with buttons and a workout jacket festooned with strands of plastic pearls and safety pins, like a homemade band uniform. The jacket hangs above a fake air-conditioner cover with a metal grill highlighted in aluminum foil, all of which is also Mr. LamSic's doing. ROBERTA SMITH
JIM LAMBIE ANTON KERN GALLERY, NEW YORK 6 SEPTEMBER - 13 DECEMBER 2001 Reviewed by Michael Wilson If any art still aspires to the condition of music, to a reaction based on mood and movement that drifts beyond the reach of intellect, it is surely that of Scot Jim Lambie. While his work often contains explicit references to the trashy aesthetic of pop since the 70s, these are by means a prerequisite to feeling its attitude and rhythm in the objects and environments he creases. In providing a visual accompaniment to the axis which, in music, runs from Punk through Indie to Lo-Fi, Lambie enriches our understanding of each endeavour without recourse to a fixed theoretical or historical base. Simply put, he rocks. In his show last year at the same gallery, Lambie applied stripes of vinyl tape to the floor, effectively unifying a difficult, barn-like space. This time around he tries for a similar effect with Frankie Teardrop (all works 2001), a series of five strands of coloured beads that run from floor to very high ceiling. But, while ravishingly pretty these don't have the same transformative result. This has the unfortunate effect of leaving the other works looking somewhat stranded, isolated from each other by acres of intervening white space. Perhaps Lambie is after all better suited to more intimate venues; a pub rocker rather than a stadium king? The exhibition's other installation is titled Goo Goo Muck, a sprawling constellation o variously-coloured gloss paint dribbles issuing from plastic drinking straws shoved into holes in the wall, it looks like the aftermath of a 'creative' children's blow painting game or the product of a mindless but joyfully messy habit. Obviously fun to make, its artless verve connotes a free-for-all inclusiveness. Anyone can do this, it seems to imply, and everyone should. The show's centrepiece is Motor/wad, an assemblage of old album sleeves affixed to a revolving base. Any text on the covers has been roughly blacked-out, and each star's face is cut out and propped up like a flat-pack doll. High-gloss professional glamour and teenage bedroom project collide in a finely-balanced homage to your local second-hand record shop's vinyl bargain bin. With the introduction of a new and uncertain context (one literally and continuously on the move), the stylistic subtleties of Barbara Streisand's make-up and Neil Diamond's hair achieve both an unprecedented strangeness and an unexpected gravity. Their status never seemed more wonderfully fragile and peculiar. Psychedelic Soul Stick flavours proceedings with a hint of ritual. Badges, beads and a variety of less readily-identifiable flotsam and jetsam are bound to a rough staff with a tight chaos of wire and coloured thread. What emerges is a unique take on the shamanic fetish, an object possessed of not only simple meaning, but the potential for an active influence on events when wielded by One Who Knows. Psychedelic Soul Stick may seem worlds away from Joseph Beuys's duncoloured totems, and the quasi-religious artefacts that inspired them, but it radiates a comparable charisma. It's part good luck charm, part untested weapon. The intersection of art and fashion remains, even after most museums have had at least one go at convincing us otherwise, a zone beset by irritations. Lambie's P/suture, a grubby track suit top hung about with fake pearls, and Puma, a glove decked out with decorative buttons, dodge the issue only by omitting the curatorial rhetoric. That they would not look out of place in many a catwalk collection is both their strength and fatal flaw. In converging so closely with contemporary taste in design, they veer perilously close to fusing with it completely and leaving art behind. Their transformation is somehow too appropriate, too comfortable. Both works make for strong, even iconic images, but show that Lambie's critical distance from his subject-matter is inconsistent (which is to say, entirely natural). A touch as light as Lambie's is risky of course. A BMX tyre sprayed silver, hung on a loop of wire and going for three and a half thousand bucks is unarguably teetering on the fine line between clever and stupid. If you're in the mood, it's ghetto fabulous, if not, it's a lazy gesture, and an expensive one at that. Venom Wild Puck, a lilac leather belt rearing up from she floor at an improbably predatory angle, and CA, Your Own Way, an old LP covered in gaffer tape and blue glitter, occupy similar territory. But if Lambie hits any hum notes, these are more than compensated for by Imagine. An inverted, whitewashed poster that fades Robert Ryman into John Lennon, its the perfect summation of Lambie's approach; as catchy and scratchy as your favourite seven inch.
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