Tonight I was at a friend’s birthday party when someone suddenly mentioned the preview screening of Jia Zhangke’s 24 City which we organise and sponsor. To my surprise, they all think the screening will be on February 23 (Monday). This is not true, and we take responsibility of the misunderstanding.
Here’s a straightforward description of the events that’s going to unfold soon:
1. An exhibition based on the film 24 City at Beijing Angle Modern Art. Time: February 23–March 8.
2. A free preview screening of 24 City. Time: 13:30, February 28 (Saturday). Place: Megabox cinema, The Village, Sanlitun.
3. A panel discussion (CROSSTALK Beijing #2) on the film and related topics. Time: 16:00–18:00, February 28 (Saturday).
It seems that many people got the news from our Facebook event page, on which the actual date of the screening (not the exhibition) was tucked at the end of the press release. The confusion may also come from the fact that we’ve compressed the above three events into one press release. Again, we apologise for the inconvenience.
To avoid having people going to the theatre on Monday only to find that they have the wrong date, we are going to publish the final list of audiences by tomorrow evening on our website. Everyone on the list will also be notified via email.
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Tagged with 24 city, crosstalk, Jia Zhangke.
Several days ago, hundreds of the objects from the old Chengdu factory featured in Jia Zhangke’s 24 City arrived at Shao Foundation’s Beijing office. With their history spanning over the past 30 years, these objects came in large variety: working pass, tea cup, award, diary, mix tape of Teresa Deng (Taiwanese pop singer who gained great popularity in the Greater China area since the 1980s), etc. They are the silent story-tellers conveying the ups and downs of a large state-owned enterprise and the daily life of the individuals who used to belong and work there. We’ve spent the past few days on selecting and categorising these objects, trying to figure out an intriguing way of exhibition setting and lighting. As of today, a few exhibits are put in place, and our exhibition designer Xu Yijing is busy experimenting with various ways of placing different media in the venue.
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Tagged with crosstalk, crosstalk Jia Zhangke.
Five days ago, we announced the news of a preview screening of Jia Zhangke’s latest feature film 24 City on our website. The reason that Shao Foundation and Xstream Pictures organised and sponsored this free screening is to provide context for our second CROSSTALK Beijing event, a panel discussion scheduled for Feb 28. Titled ‘Reflection of Times: From Industrialisation to Urbanisation’, this event is part of our exhibition ‘Jia Zhangke: 24 City’, which is going to run from Feb 23 to March 8. Since the film won’t be screened publicly until March 6, we assume that most potential audience of both the exhibition and the discussion wouldn’t have watched it by Feb 28. This is gonna create difficulties for them, as they will be participating in a discussion on something that they hardly know.
After negotiation, we managed to secure a 102-seat hall in Megabox cinema at The Village, Sanlitun for the preview screening. The 102-minute film is scheduled 2.5 hours before CROSSTALK Beijing, so that the audience will be able to walk at a casual pace to BAMA gallery, where the discussion will take place.
We realised that 102 seats is not many, but we’ve apparently underestimated people’s enthusiasm for Jia’s film—registration emails have been swarming in at a speed so fast that, as of today, all seats have been filled.
We are sorry that we couldn’t make the preview screening available to more people. If, however, you don’t mind joining in the discussion and seeing the exhibition before watching the film, you are still encouraged to go to CROSSTALK Beijing on Feb 28, and to see the exhibition itself.
You can find all the info about these events on our website.
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Tagged with crosstalk, jaybrown, ouning.
The first exhibition Shao Foundation will curate in 2009; ‘Jia Zhangke: 24 City’ is due to start on 23rd Feb at Beijing Angle Modern Art gallery (BAMA). Here I am going to talk about the design ideas for this exhibition with some initial design diagrams and some geeky background information as a teaser for you come see the exhibition in just over two weeks.
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.
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Tagged with 24 city, bama, design, exhibition, Jia Zhangke.
Ou Ning (abbreviated as Ou later on): OK. Now if any of you have any question for Jay Brown, you can ask him. We will give you the microphone.
Chi Jang Yin (Professor of Depaul University, abbreviated as Yin later on): I’m very moved by the works of the artists and the friendship they have with the local villages, so to say, the whole plan. Usually the majority of the audience of contemporary arts are a relatively special group of people, in other words, the organisers are likely to put borders around them. But for you, the audience is villagers, which breaks the traditional relationship between arts and the audience. My question is, given the audience might not have the knowledge of art history or art concepts, when they see these experimental works, like performance artists rolling on the ground, they must have lots of questions. How do you communicate with them and in what way you maintain this relation?
Jay Brown (abbreviated as Brown later on): We created some methods to introduce the artists to the locals. One is to collaborate with kids. We often screen films in school and organises workshops for them. They then will pass the message to other locals that these artists are outsiders but they’re also human beings. They will tell their parents they’ve had fun with us. These help build a good image for us and show we are not here to make money. After these, they are willing to collaborate with us.
Yin: Then how do you communicate with them? Many experimental works are conceptual. How do you explain to them?
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Tagged with crosstalk, jay brown, lijiang studio.
Below is notes from Jay Brown’s Presentation Lijiang Studio: Experiments in the New Countryside Lab at CROSSTALK Beijing #1, on Dec 6, 2008.
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.
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Tagged with bama, crosstalk, jay brown, lijiang studio.
The weekly knowledge sharing meeting is a tradition of the 5-month-old Shao Foundation. Held every Monday afternoon, it offers great opportunity for the Foundation members to exchange information and to enlarge our intellectual common ground. The meeting is conducted in a laid-back fashion, with no preconceived themes or topics. Everyone is encouraged to make presentation on subjects of his / her choice, including but not limited to the latest science and technology trend, academic discourse, personal eccentricities, social oddities, artsy chitchat, and global politics. Since we all have different training and background, the meeting often finds itself turning into a screaming contest. From now on, we are going to publish the nitty-gritty of every meeting on this blog as a way to aggregate and archive our collective brainpower.
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.
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Tagged with weekly knowledge sharing meeting.
Our web designer Zhang Ning and I went to Google Beijing’s OpenSocial Hackathon event this morning. The following board in the lobby of Google’s Beijing office caught my attention while I was waiting for the lady coming down to show me the way up to the sixth floor:
In most cases, things with title like ‘My China’ always promise to be uninteresting and tacky. Not in this one. The board features 84 selected Google logos designed by students from various elementary and middle schools around Beijing. As you can see from the examples below, there are quite a few decent designs, some with sensibility beyond the age of their authors.
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Tagged with doodle4google, google, logodesign.
The first CROSSTALK Beijing event ended yesterday. We received some useful feedbacks from the audience about the content and the format (i.e., the micro-blogging screen), thank you very much. The technical hitches during the talk testified—once again—to the flakiness of Wi-Fi network; we have four Wi-Fi access points at the venue, all running on 2.4GHz frequency. At some point yesterday afternoon, the connection of my laptop jumped from ‘crosstalk’ to ‘mm-2′, which is not exactly within the range that a 802.11b/g router can afford. This unexpected issue (supposedly caused by the interference between the four routers) effectively cut down the internet connection. We’ll have to figure out how to solve this problem in the future.
So, end of nerd speak, here are some photos from the event.
Ou Ning launching the event.
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Tagged with crosstalk, jay brown, lijiang studio, new countryside.