Unlike previous years, the newly created Shenzhen Public Art Centre will serve as the center of operations for the 2009 Biennale. Curatorial plans are progressing quickly and the team is working to ensure that the problems identified in previous Biennales will be resolved this year.

The theme of the Biennale, “City Mobilization”, was put forth by Ou Ning as a working methodology. He hopes to “mobilize” business, government, and further investigate social phenomena, in order to put together a moving and effective Biennale exhibition. This year, the Biennale will ask architects and artists to create site specific pieces which will allow the public to take part in these interactive installations and projects. Additionally, to make the Biennale as welcoming as possible, symposia will be separated from exhibitions: theoretical and written content will be disseminated through lectures and publications, while the main goal of exhibitions will be to display visually powerful projects. The activities accompanying the exhibitions will also include an architecture film festival and on-site interactive architecture activities.

This year, the Biennale’s Shenzhen exhibition site is located primarily in the underground exhibition space below the Shenzhen Civic square, with satellite venues scattered in various areas in Shenzhen. The main site for Hong Kong will be the Hong Kong West Kowloon Waterfront Promenade. Both sites provide expansive spaces the exhibitions of the Biennale. The exhibition designer’s task naturally involves visualizing the curator’s concept architecturally, as well as coordinating with the participating architects and artists in order to provide them with the most appropriate spaces.

The start of the brainstorming session focused on the Biennale exhibition sites, the administration of the Biennale, and how to make it more welcoming. Beyond that, the architects put forward some creative ideas, for example Li Hu proposed that student participants put up tents or simple dwelling on the Civic square; Qi Xin suggested the idea that the entrance to the exhibition could be subtle enough that visitors would unconsciously enter, and sometimes may become exhibits themselves. The big question was asked: whose Biennale is this? It shouldn’t be an elitist cultural event. The purpose of the Biennale is vague, what everyone wants to express is often different. However, everyone is in consensus that the Biennale belongs to its exhibitors and to the public, and that it is a cultural event for the city.

Viewing northwest from the studio of Approach Architecture at Linked Hybrid, designed by Steven Holl Architects.

Viewing northeast from the studio.

Liang Jingyu, principal architect of Approach Architecture showing us one of their projects.

Christopher W. Mahoney and Na Wei from Elevation Workshop.

The meeting started. First of all, Ou Ning gave a brief introduction of the meeting’s background. It started as an internal staff meeting sharing information from our respective areas of expertise, and has later evolved into a learning platform for people from the outside as well.

Pan He from Shao Foundation presented us the history and the current condition of Kinshasa, the capital of Democratic Republic of the Congo. Pan focused on the ambivalent mentality of the Kinshasa people, a dilemma resulting from the colonialisation and anti-colonialisation in recent years. On the other hand, the differences between Kinshasa and the West in terms of values and lifestyle were mentioned. Pan’s presentation was an exploration of Kinshasa’s spiritual world, rather than the description of its physical reality. Is it problematic — or even hypocritical — for a third-party person to do this kind of exploration?

Liang Jingyu from Approach Architecture outlined four tentative possibilities for the organisation and curation of the Shenzhen Biennale: The Three Paths, Archaeology, Timeline and Virtual / Reality. The Three Paths is a proposal to mimic Shenzhen’s urban condition in miniature, where exhibitions are grouped broadly within ‘districts’ and further subdivided into ‘blocks’. Archaeology explores Shenzhen and issues of urbanity as if we are from the future and have discovered the remains of a city — an incomplete record of ruins, fossils, and remains. Timeline is envisaged as a spatially continuous exhibition that groups works in terms of date, including a ‘time machine’ that explores the ancient past and the distant future. Finally, Virtual / Reality explores the way in which technology pervades our everyday lives and shapes our cities, where exhibits alternate between the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’, as a tapestry that blurs the distinction between them.

Lawrence gave a brief introduction of the futurist Adam Greenfield and his upcoming book The City is Here For You to Use. Set in a near-future world in which the vision described in Greenfield’s previous book Everyware is realised, the book deals with the imminent über-networked life from the perspective of urbanism. Greenfield coined the neologism ‘onto’ and ‘ontome’ as alternatives to Bruce Sterling’s ’spime’, all of which are used to refer to the context-awared and geo-locatable object of the next generation.

Hotzing Tone told us his current project of photographing single people’s living environment. ‘Although this is an abused subject matter, I still see potential in it. Maybe I can do it differently? I won’t know until I try. I used to be obsessed with conceptual works, but recently I have been thinking whether or not this is necessary. This current project is by no means conceptual, but you can see all my long-term concerns and experiences in the photos. Even if the end result is not satisfactory, I’m going to have a fun ride nevertheless!’ Then he continued and described a few other interesting projects and ideas of his, which triggered extensive discussions (which also touched upon other topics from the meeting).

The exhibition design started from a self reflection of the existing gallery space. Unlike most galleries, BAMA is the opposite of a ‘white cube’. It’s situated on the fourth floor of a modern commercial office building in Sanlitun, consisting a reading area, a bar, and exhibition space which is surrounded by glass curtain walls. BAMA has been used for exhibitions, talk shows, interviews, photo shoots, and dinner parties — a truely multi-functional space!

After a couple of site visits to BAMA, it became apparent that rather than trying to ‘turn-off’ the inherent spatial attributes of the gallery to accommodate the exhibition, we should make use of them strategically. The diagram below is a contextual analysis of the gallery.

Subsequently, a 3D model was made to understand the basic parameters of the gallery, things like floor area, floor to ceiling height and so on.

The exhibition traverses various mediums including; photo collages, short films, found objects and props from the making of 24 City. The exhibition can be considered as an extension of the film, with conceptual subjects in the film having the opportunity to be experienced spatially within a gallery setting.

For example, one of the focuses in 24 City is the rapid urban renewal that is represented by the relocation of a state-owned military factory in central Chengdu city. Standing in the BAMA gallery you can see demolition and construction happening nearby which has probably been taken for granted.

Taking advantage of the gallery’s spatial attributes, the exhibition displays both the exhibition environment and the exhibits.

As a result, one actualisation (above) is a video installation combining unused footage of workers interviews and the construction sites outside the gallery window.

Above is an early iteration of the exhibition layout. Below is a very cruel way of displaying the photo collage on ladder, which has since been improved.

Ladders, red white blue strip plastic fabric, and the green wall finishing (a typical architectural element in the 1980s) are integrated into the exhibition to contribute to the overall theatrical quality of the space.

Well, that’s enough insider information for now. Don’t miss ‘Jia Zhangke: 24 City’ exhibition and CROSSTALK Beijing #2, we will keep you posted with more details about these two events.

Jay Brown: If for anything that this doesn’t work just get up and say something, I think this is the whole idea anyway. Thanks to Ou Ning, and the Shao Foundation for inviting me.

I’m going to try to give you an idea of what we have been doing in a small village – Lijing, in Yun Nan for the last three years. We have built a small studio, which is a space we experiment, often with art, with performing, and some other things. They are all related to each other. The title of the talk – “Xin Nong Cun Shi Yan Shi” (Experiments in the New Countryside Lab) is something that we have come up recently. Before we get to the topic of this poster, I’m going to spend some time to explain some background of what we have done so far.

First thing after deciding to go to the countryside is to find a base. We found two bases. The first one is a regular farm house. It was empty for 10 years, and about 15 kilometers away from Lijing. When we first got there, we started growing vegetables in our courtyard. We clean up the place to live in. Then we built a green house, so that we could grow our own vegetables 12 months in the year without using any chemical pesticide or fertilizer. We also grow what traditionally grow around us, this “liang shi” (grain) like corn, which is fed to pigs. After the pig gets fat, we kill the pig. After we kill the pig, we eat the pig and the vegetables. Once we have done that, we can start talking and start working. We have presentations, and spend hours of making art. This is the basic living background of Lijing studio.

After that, we decided we needed a public space. So we engaged the architect Lü Biao. He is a good friend who worked a lot on the countryside. He had a way of “xie shang” (negotiation) – taking students to countryside in Yun Nan, having them draw and do investigation which involved drawing what they saw, making measured drawings, and doing interviews. Ethnographies in a way that architecture students would interest in. That was an experiment based on the ideas of Rural Studio in America, which started by a guy named Samuel Mockbee. They took an architecture department, which is traditionally based on the computer, taught the students design built skills, and taught them construction skills on construction site. The students need to solve with their skills, and learn some of the requirements of the local people there.

This photograph shows the structure of a traditional Na Xi house, a timber frame structure with no nails. That structure has been modified a little bit. The team is from the village; normally you invite all your neighbours to help you build the house, to construct it. The other part of this building project was adding some non-local materials, the emblematic construction of modernism, which is glass and steel construction. The building on the left of this photograph already existed, the building on the right, was an adaptation of the building on the left, and the building in the middle was from another place.

One of the requirements we gave to the architect for the art exhibition space here was that it would be suitable for kids and for old people. The bench which faces the road is usually used by older people. Especially in the morning, because it faces east, it’s a nice and sunny place for the villagers to go to, to gossip, to tell each other jokes.

This photo shows our front door from the exhibition space. Here is a Russian tire, made in the 70’s. Some trash, some unwanted materials, also used in construction.

Once we’ve completed the building, we started activating it. There are a lot of program involving kids, for example, we went around picking up trash. These are all plastic bottles of trash, probably thrown by tourists. We started to make things with trash – you can make musical instruments, sculptures. You can make a lot of stuff.

There is a slide in the middle of the main exhibition space, when you are having exhibitions; the kids are going up and down on the slide. We made some visual tricks. Older people seem to enjoy hanging out here too.

When we invited outside artists to use this place, a lot of them responded the architecture by making a performance. Berlin artist Alfred Banze brought images from different parts of the world at different times. He asked kids from school to pick a few of images, and make stories using the images.

This is a photo of the opening for his performance, and exhibition. The kids on the front row are waiting for their turns to perform. With Alfred, they set up their performance, so that they perform at each others stories and their own stories – they reinterpret each others’ stuff. It’s all being fed live, there was a video camera there, and all being fed live back onto themselves. It gets quite dense.

We generally don’t use a lot of technology. But when we do, we try to make the technology very visible and obvious what it’s doing. If you are using a video camera, and feeding it live onto a TV, people respond very well to that. For example, an opened ‘final cut’ project was on that lab top. And the performer, Alfred Banze, was playing with that project. It’s not a set take; it’s responding.

Another thing that he did was to respond to the ethnographic urge or anthropological complication that comes from a foreigner, especially a European. He finds a lot of imagery from very difficult, problematic periods in ethnography, and uses those in his performance.

Another type of work, which made by one German and one Austrian artist, a little bit different, but can be realized only by having this base in the country side. This is an installation, from a video. Let me show you the video.

(Play video)

This is a road that was being built right outside our studio, against the desires of the local villager. A) They didn’t want the road. B) This was something done by the government and they didn’t get approved on. It would be better just let other people do it. So it was actually people from neighbouring villages that were hired to do this road, and they ended up calling their neighbours, their buddies to help them to build this road.

In the process they were using disposal work gloves. These glues would last for two days. So this road was covered by gloves, these guys were going through twenty gloves everyday. There is a saying – “Lu bu shi yi”, which means not anyone just picks up something they found on the road, anyone wouldn’t take something that’s not theirs. The idea is, there is a system of what belongs to whom and how you treat things you don’t know in the village. This road was to us at the time, and this was the break down of that system. So that is why they made this installation – Lu Bu Shi Yi.

There were artists who usually used to working in urban public space. We wanted to see what would happen if they come to the village. This is the work they made, this time in Lijing old town, Lijing tourist district.

Another way that an area has been interpreted, this is more in the private space, is through dance. We found the dancers have a lot of stimulation from being in farming environment, because of how much a body is involved, when they farm or making food. So we invited Butoh dancer, Min Tanaka, in Chinese “Tian Zhong Min”, he’s performed in Beijing last year. He did a number of performances, I don’t have a video of this, I will just show you images from one performance he did in our barn yard, with chickens and the pigs.

He also collaborated with a sound artist, a young sound artist mostly works in Tokyo. He was recording in different places in the barn yard. He had speakers in the pigs and in the chickens. He was feeding the sounds back to his own set-ups as well. He was getting some feedbacks from the outside as well, he’s not telling you. The audience of this is simply our neighbours, just the family whose barn yard this it. Min Tanaka did one piece at PS1, only one person was allowed for an audience, every person experience was different, and he/she remembers that for the rest of his/her life. The end of the performance was when the pig actually kissed him, and it was over.

I wanted to show different kinds of work and approaches we are taking. Here is another kind of approach that is quite a bit different; it’s coming from Joseph Beuys. Some people call it social sculpture. This is done by two Americans; they call themselves “KATALOG”. They are trying to visit the problem of what happened to the art from the 60s and 70s, why we are still part of this art; and are the political, environment problems from then still the same as now. They are using some of the language of that time, and they redo pieces by Gordon Matta-Clark, Beuys and some others, try to re-ask these questions.

There is something this word “social sculpture” we try to use, to highlight how people can be intentional about their position in society, and how they can actually to change social system to some extent. We imagine people re-socializing with each other, and the basis of that is basically your environment, and the most basic part of your environment is food and subsistence. So this project was conceived around food production, our energy cycles, and what you have to do as a group, also what that might possibly politically inform and all that. One of the other assumptions for this kind of approach is that really basic understandings of a national world, biology or chemistry or something like that s very empowering for people to make their own social model.

Here is a clean room which is where we are beginning to collect the spores for mushrooms, and develop those into editable mushrooms, and will later become part of a sculpture. Incidentally most of the materials in the clean room are recycled art. The process of these very basic messing around can be anesthetizing of your relationship with nature, and it’s something these guys doing a lot. We had pretty basic equipment. This is a shot from a microscope; we just looked at water in a ditch. We had one book, from a guy named Paul Stamets, who worked on mushrooms a lot. We are basically following his example of how to grow mushrooms. The KATALOG group took mushrooms, grew them onto other materials where they can eat. And they built this house, which is also recycled art, trash, and mud to hold the mushrooms. This process happened very slowly. Every week we have open house, workshops. We invite people, local villagers who were also considering growing mushrooms, whether just for their own consumptions or to diversifying their income. The idea is to expose the process of this research. If you attempt or participate in the process, you can come out with some skills you can use, regardless whether it’s in art world, or in other professional world. This work was designed to be done in this village, and if they want to do another work, presumably here (in BAMA), it will be a different set of skills.

We actually had mushrooms grow, and we are very proud of that. The next step of the project which begins the world heritage beer garden picnic is to use some of the characteristics of mushrooms. It could actually change things such as environmental disasters, small scale environmental pollution. Mushrooms can take a pretty long carbon based molecule. The ends that mushrooms consume and digest can actually break molecule into smaller pieces that is perfectly safe for humans to eat.

There is a tractor repair shop nearby. Oil was running into the liquor factory where we get all our liquor from. We started working with the liquor. There was another side of it. But we also did a mushroom installation that was designed to eat the oil; the mushroom will break down the oil flows into the liquor shop. Inside these baskets are clumps of mycelia, enough food to last them for a year or two. And those clumps of mushroom mycelia then hack into dry corn starch which the mushrooms will then eat; they presumably will eat the basket and everything else too. The tractor fixing shop is just around the corner of the hill, the oil runs down right into this edge of earth. It’s a perfect trap to trap the oil. The owner of this “jiu chang” (liquor factory) will just make a little garden based on the sculpture. Inside the middle of these baskets are small mushrooms. The mushrooms are packed in these baskets; they will eat all the materials in these baskets. We put these baskets in earth, and then gradually the mushrooms will grow and start eating the oil.

Another installation with the same idea is designed not to treat the oil but to beat erosion. This is a site where someone started to build a house and then gave up. The top soil is removed and disappeared.

The installation of these things each time was an event, we’ve got quite a few around our village. The idea was that the installation is a kind of ceremony; we have an exhibition or performance. The things we eat are hopefully delicious, and more importantly are grown using some new understanding of the cycles of how things can be paired with each other, and grow from each other based in our farm.

In this photograph, the beer is made at home. After we used barley in one step from making the beer, we fed that to the mushrooms. They grew really well on the spent of brewing the drink. Cooked barley actually is more nutritious for pigs or fish, and mushroom, it is extra good food.

In these simple cycles, we try to consider where is trash and where is nutrition; energy we had and taking them away. The farmers are usually pretty sensitive to this. By just trying to connect a few, you can make a lot of progress and make yourself self-sufficient. It’s also heaps of fun to play around with. There is that element of social sculpture in the process of making these things. In the ritual, we try to invite a cross section of people in Lijing. In this photo, there are artists, curators. This guy in the middle represents Lijing bureau for getting foreign investment. These guys are musicians. There is another guy from the environmental department. We try to get them to talk to each other base on this experience. We went to interview people in the government, we found that each department was not talking to each other, and have no idea what the other department was doing. At that point, we decided we have to bring all those people we talk to together. And to demonstrate what we are trying to do and talking about.

So that’s it, we hope at some point the process is fun, and you can get some simple joy from watching these things grow or from just having a beer.

Ou Ning started off this week’s meeting by showing us a gift he received last week called Nuanxin, a heart-shaped hot water bag designed and produced by Shi Chuan for the kids in the earthquake-struck area of Sichuan province.

Lawrence recommended Ian Buruma’s The Missionary and the Libertine, which ‘has a very tempting Table of Content, which contains a healthy amount of name-dropping that conjures up, for those who’s not completely uninformed about the subject, a decadent and fantastic vision of the East. (Mishima, Oshima Nagisa, Yoshimoto Banana, Satyajit Ray, etc.) The description of a Tenjo Sajiki theatre performance in Amsterdam in the early ‘70s gave me more excitement than many of the troupe’s leader Shuji Terayama’s own works (mostly film works, though) that I’ve experienced myself, and reignited my interest in this maverick figure who can probably be labelled a “proto-multimedia” artist.’

Pan He raised a few pretty serious questions in his trademarked esoteric language: How to document the mind of an artist? How shall we present or display an artist’s archive? What’s the relationship between artist and archive? ‘What should the archive of a specific artist consist of? Traditionally, it consists of sketches presented in the format of drawings and photos. Sometimes the artist’s journal can also be included. In a word, all the preliminary ideas filtered by the artist’s consciousness can be the potential candidates. However, as Henri Bergson has said, the origin of art is élan, which is consequently suppressed and effaced by the systematic consciousness. The question then is how to represent the énonce of origin in what Michel Foucault described as “the era of neo-archivism.”’

Zhang Ning made some pithy remarks on the state of China’s online banking system after having some negative experiences with Alipay, the most popular online payment platform in China. ‘With the World Wide Web expanding to ubiquity, e-commerce is also gaining popularity. The leading Chinese Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) website Taobao.com has reached an annual trading volume of 99.96 billion RMB. As more people begin to buy stuff online, the user experience of e-commerce sites is becoming more important to the consumers. The payment process is obviously one of the crucial part of this experience. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) used to dominate the browser market, but is nowadays considered to be the crappiest and most-easily-compromised browser that should retire immediately. On the other hand, there are more and more browsers that not only adhere to web standard, but also provide a safer and better online experience. Nonetheless, most online banking systems in China are still IE-only, despite the fact that the above-mentioned superior browsers are gaining momentum. Now even Taobao.com provides support for Firefox browser under Windows and Linux, and the Mac OS X support is in the pipeline. Under the circumstances, isn’t it stupid to claim “Firefox is less safe than IE” as an excuse of their laziness?’

Lastly, Yijing showed a short film from a design research project she’s involved with: Nike Kardia, and the meeting ended with a brief conversation about futurism research and designer’s role in creating the future. ‘Nike Kardia envisaged a future of the next 80 years—the largest migration of mankind—a migration into the cybernetic world. Assuming in future we will spend 90% of our time in second life, and 10% in physical life; we want our time in physical life to be exceptional. A group of six industrial designers and architect, Nike Kardia designed visions for future living. For more information please visit: Design Led Futures ‘07: Hello Cybernetics.’