就在拐角 Just Around the Corner

Arrow Factory, Beijing
August 15 – November 11, 2009
Curated by Chen Shaoxiong and Pauline J. Yao

Participating artists: Lim Tzay-Chuen (Singapore/Beijing), Liang Yuanwei (Beijing), Xijing Men (Beijing/Tokyo/Seoul), Yan Lei (Beijing), Ken Lum (Vancouver), Wang Wei (Beijing), Patty Chang (New York), Liu Chuang (Beijing), Li Ming (Hangzhou), Rania Ho (Beijing), Hong Hao (Beijing), Koki Tanaka (Tokyo/Los Angeles), Dan Perjovschi (Bucharest), Lin Tianmiao (Beijing)

Please note: Artists and artworks in the show will be on view in three different sections, each lasting for approximately one month. Works by Lim Tzay- Chuen, Liang Yuanwei, Xijing Men and Yan Lei will be on view starting August 15. Please check the website www.arrowfactory.org.cn for the most current
information.

Just Around the Corner is a group exhibition that looks at the street and hutong environment as a site for artistic creation. Marking Arrow Factory’s first group exhibition, this exhibition invites international and local artists to make new projects that interact, engage, embed themselves or otherwise respond to social conditions that persist within Arrow Factory’s storefront location. Extending beyond the four walls of Arrow Factory’s space, these works wish to promote a seamless relationship with the local economies and micro-environments of hutong life.

In taking the hutong as site for artistic production, Just Around the Corner also aims at engaging strategies of looking and visibility, especially as they pertain to our understandings of consumption and exchange in daily life. Unaccustomed to the modes of visual consumption we readily associate with contemporary art, the local audience at Arrow Factory are regular users of the space and inhabitants whose daily practice is composed of less visually oriented types of consumption—buying vegetables, cigarettes, pancake bread, etc—that permeate everyday life. Even though modern lifestyles and new inhabitants have invaded the hutong, modern visual culture and art has yet to incorporate the hutong and its residents into its own horizon. The art world views its audience as the museum director, curator, collector, art researcher and art student, often neglecting the general public and enforcing a high-minded view of art. But what does it mean for works of art to be seen, noticed, witnessed, and felt in contexts where the modalities of art merge with everyday human experience? Are there ways to approach a particular location, like Arrow Factory Hutong, as a site for examining the systems and structures of consumption that overlap with but remain fundamentally different than those of the ‘art system’?

Arrow Factory is an independently run alternative storefront space that seeks to advance artistic collaboration, exploration and experimentation across different cultural contexts and viewing publics. For more information please see our website: www.arrowfactory.org.cn

Yan Lei's work

Works hidden in the hutong...:

Liang Yuanwei's work consisted in three rubbish bins.




Lin Zaichun's work was a nutella pot in the noodle stall next door.






Chen Shaoxiong's video in a small store...