ShContemporary 2009 - Best of discoveries





Shinji Ohmaki @ Tokyo Gallery + BTAP, Tokyo / Beijing
Born in Gifu in 1971. Lives and works in Tokyo
Ohmaki has been continuously holding solo exhibitions that transform ordinary spaces into the extraordinary by creating a division between interiors and exteriors within them. His works then become a temporary visualization of things that we are unable to perceive on an everyday basis, thus enveloping the audience in an intimate experience of the realms of his creation. His dynamic installation works have been receiving worldwide acclaim, leading to exhibition opportunities in galleries, museums, public institutions and office buildings alike. During ShContemporary09, Ohmaki’s work will be composed of traditional floral patterns laid on the floor for viewers to walk over and destroy. As they do so, they transform with the passage of time, and the space will be reborn through this process.


2009 Solo Exhibition, Tokyo Gallery + BTAP, Tokyo, Japan
Solo Exhibition, Zonca & Zonca, Milan, Italy
2008 “SOFT&QUIET “Bund 18 Creative Center, Shanghai, China
“ECHOES – INFINITY : Cherry Orchard” BALS TOKYO NAKAMEGURO, Tokyo, Japan
2007 “Liminal Air -Descend- 2007” 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art  Design Gallery, Kanazawa, Japan
“Open Studio 40 Shinji Ohmaki” Fuchu Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan
2006 “Liminal Air -Descend-2006” Gallery A4, Tokyo, Japan
2005 “ECHOES -INFINITY-“ Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
“Crystallization” Tokyo Gallery, Tokyo, Japan
“If you could see inside me” ISHIDA TAISEISHA CO., Ltd., Kyoto, Japan
 
 
Exhibition views...An ephemeral work: during the exhibition mounting, young people spent hours sprinkling powder flowers on the floor on a red carpet at the entrance of the exhibition center.The central part was protected while the rest was destroyed under the feet of the visitors.

 

Shi Qing @ ShanghART, Shanghai / Beijing
Born in Baotou in 1969. Lives and works in Beijing

Shi Qing’s research based creative process is quite unique amongst Chinese artists today. His work has constantly evolved in content and form. His explorations include the psychology of symbolism and ritual, the social contexts of personal history, urban politics, global economic histories and their effect of culture, and the relationship on Chinese recent history of globalization.

The installations of Shi Qing are always based on extensive research into the themes that he’s concerned about. Different notions on how narrative work today in regards to old myths and folk tales in China. He explores these stories and puts them together in an entirely new way.
The social character of his work has been emphasized since 2005 as he started to focus his creation on the city as an entity and historical researches. A recent installation “Electricity Controls Shanghai” traces different stories and distilling those into a new narrative.

Recent exhibitions include When Zhuge Liang Meets Panda, ShanghArt’s F-Space, Shanghai (2007), Rejected Collection, Ke Center of Contemporary Art, Shanghai (2007) NoNo(NONO), Long March Space, Beijing (2007), Electricity, BizArt Center, Shanghai (2006) The Second Guangzhou Triennial, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou (206), Prague Biennial 2, National Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic (2005), and 4th Busan Biennale, Busan Metropolitan Art Museum, Busan, Korea (2004).


Shi Qing, Factory, 2009,
wood, old furniture, neon lights, dimensions variable, ,
Halfway House, ShanghART

click here to view Shi Qing's exhibition views in ShanghArt







 

 

 



 

MadeIn (aka Xu Zhen) @ ShanghART, Shanghai / Beijing
Born in Shanghai in 1977. Lives and works in Shanghai.
Madein is the company founded by the artist Xu Zhen. It was founded in 2009. Madein will stand for the artist to create the art works and participate in the art exhibitions. Madein is an art company which has a complex set of artistic creation, production, dissemination, support and planning functions.

During ShContemporary09, MadeIn will create a non-existent tribe. This anthropological presentation in the exhibition shows the tribe in their natural habitat, complete with people, their clothing, architecture, pattern designs, jewelry, etc.

It is hard to think of another contemporary talent as prolific as Xu Zhen. His projects articulate frivolity that entails multiple subject matters. The artist takes intrinsically slight material and plays with it without condescension: His work entails theatrical humor as well as social critique, neither entirely serious nor obviously ironic. Xu Zhen’s extensive body of work includes photography, installation art and video evoking moments of complexity. His projects are informed by performance as well as conceptual art. 

His recent video installation “8.848-1.86” (2005) documents an expedition to Mount Everest. Here, Xu Zhen removed 1.86 meters of the mountain’s peak and transported it home to be exhibited in a large display cabinet. The video, among other allusions, is a subtle and humorous commentary on China’s official policy of reclaiming Tibet. r
As a signifying device he often uses the concept of the ’body’, such as in the short video “Rainbow” (2000) displayed at the 49th Venice Biennale. It features four tense minutes, during which an anonymous naked back gradually changes color according to emerging and clearly defined flesh marks. Caesuras coincide with slapping sounds that strike the skin in a sudden and unexpected manner. Xu Zhen graduated from the Shanghai School of Arts and Craft in 1996. He currently resides and works in Shanghai. Xu Zhen won the top prize at the China Contemporary Art Award (2004). He was invited to the 49th Venice Biennale and has since exhibited his works widely. Recent exhibitions include China Power Station: Part I, Battersea Power Station, (London UK, 2006), On Mobility, De Appel, (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2006), China Contemporary - Art, Architecture and Visual Culture, Museum Boijmanns van Beuningen (Rotterdam, 2006), The Thirteen – Chinese Video Now, PS1 Contemporary Art Center (New York, 2006), Restless, Museum of Contemporary Art (Shanghai, 2006), Universal Studios (Beijing, 2006) and Xu Zhen, H-Space at ShanghART Gallery (Shanghai, 2006).


Selected Solo Exhibitions
2008
Impossible is Nothing, Long March Space, Beijing, China
Xu Zhen, Folkert de Jong, Martha Colburn, James Cohan Gallery, New York
Just Did It, James Cohan Gallery, New York
2007
In Just the Blink of an Eye, James Cohan Gallery with PERFORMA, New York Art '38 Basel, Art Unlimited-Xu Zhen 18 Days (at B3), Art Fair Switzerland
2006
8848 - 1.86, ShanghART H-Space, Shanghai
8848 - 1.86 Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands
An Animal, 2577 Longhua Road, Xuhui district, Shanghai

This installation recreates the usual Windows wallpaper image, with an unknown ethny walking on it...

Fiona Tan @ Wako Works of Art, Tokyo
Born in Pekan Baru in 1966 and raised in Australia. Lives and works in Amsterdam
Fiona Tan works within the contested territory of representation: how we represent ourselves and the mechanisms that determine how we interpret the representation of others. Photography and film – made by herself, by others, or a combination of both – are her mediums; research, classification and the archive, her strategies in skilfully crafting moving and intensely human works, expanded film and video installations, that explore history and time and our place within it.
Fiona Tan’s ‘Provenance’ was shown at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum in 2008. A major exhibition of the artist’s work is planned for Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau Switzerland May – September 2009 – this will travel to the Vancouver Art Gallery later in the year. Recent notable group exhibitions include Sujeto Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon in 2005; Istanbul Biennial 2003; ICP Triennial, New York; Documenta 11, Kassel; the 49th Venice Biennale and the Berlin Biennale, 2001. Fiona Tan was short listed for the first Artes Mundi Prize in 2003.
Fiona Tan has been chosen by the Mondriaan Foundation as the Dutch representative at the 53rd Venice Biennale 2009.

Zhang Hui @ Long March Space, Beijing
Born in Yinchuan in 1969. Lives and works in Beijing

Zhang Hui graduated from the Central Drama Academy in the early 90’s and was a key figure, alongside prominent artists such as Liu Wei, Zhu Yu and Qiu Zhijie, in the collaborative artistic activities of the ‘Post Sense: Sensibility’ Group active in the late 1990s. Zhang Hui was most recently featured in ‘Farewell to Postcolonialism: the Third Guangzhou Triennial, Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China, 2008; ‘Partial Zones’, Long March Space, Beijing, China (solo), 2007; ‘Buzz…,’ Multimedia performance, Taipei Museum of Art, Kao-Chung Museum of Art, Taipei, Taiwan, 2005 and Shanghai Biennale, China, 2004; . His performative explorations have taken place extensively across China, throughout Asia and the USA.

Trained in set and theatre design, Zhang Hui is particularly sensitive to the physical and abstract languages of natural and constructed spatial experiences. Looking Towards the Right : Second Renovation is a large-scale, monochromatic canvas work displayed on the gallery floor. In this work, Zhang juxtaposes two psychological impressions of his domestic experience, subsequently suggesting a collapse of time in this determination of everyday spatial experience.


Exhibition views.
A painting installation: neon lights are mounted on a wall, but the light and shadows they created are painted, creating an optical illusion effect...

Heman Chong @ Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou / Beijing

Born in 1977 in Malaysia. Lives and works in Berlin and Singapore
Heman Chong is based in Berlin and Singapore. He received his M.A in Communication Art & Design from The Royal College of Art, London in 2002. His art practice involves an investigation into the philosophies, reasons and methods of individuals and communities imagining the future. Charged with a conceptual drive, this research is then adapted into objects, images, installations, situations or texts.

2008
“The End Depends on The Beginning. The Beginning Depends on The End.”, Third Floor-Hermès, Singapore
2007
“Brazil”, Deckard & Pei, Singapore“Common People and other Stories”, Art In General, New York, USA +
“The Sole Proprietor and other Stories”, Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou, China +
2006
“Bhutan”, Deckard & Pei, Singapore
“Untitled (Paperback Covers #01)”, CityRoom, Singapore
“Untitled (Verbraucht)”, Projektraum Deutscher Künstlerbund, Berlin, Germany
“Philip”, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, Ireland (with Leif Magne Tangen & Mai Abu ElDhab) +
“Midnight Canteen”, Rathaus Kreuzberg / HAU Theater, Berlin, Germany (with Max Schumacher)
2005
“Bermuda”, Deckard & Pei, Singapore
“Vexillogy, Cartography and other Stories”, Ellen de Bruijne Projects, Amsterdam, Holland
2004
“Snore louder if you can”, The Substation Gallery, Singapore +“KunstLottery”, Galerieraum KunstBank, Berlin, Germany
2003
“The Silver Sessions”, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany
“Lost (Found Tracks)”, Sparwasser HQ, Berlin, Germany
“The End of Travelling”, Sparwasser HQ, Berlin, Germany (with Isabelle Cornaro)

In ShContemporary: DISCOVERIES , 8 Memories of J.G. Ballard is part of a series of work that investigates the representation of fiction through the usage of visuals. Moving beyond the idea of illustration, the intent here resembles an action whereby a body of text shifts and becomes an image that is at once ambivalent yet justified to a certain set of laws. Objects that exists between worlds. Between different usage forms. With varying capacities to induce thought. Encountering these eight paintings, one has the impression of opening up the pages of a catalogue of a publisher, making minute decisions based on the immediacy of the visual appeal of the covers. The stage is set for desires to be confronted. Superficiality surfaces, and in moments, take over the consciousness as one searches for a synopsis. The idea of influence in contemporary art is perhaps one that is heatedly debated: what do we own of the images and texts that we have consumed over time? And what does this appropriation and transposition say about our strategies for living?

 

Feng Mengbo @ Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong
Born in Beijing in 1966. Lives and works in Beijing

He graduated from Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. Feng Mengbo is one of China's leading new media artists, well known for his video games and interactive technology. The artist has been invited to the prestigious Kassel Documenta in both 1997 and 2002. In 2004 Feng was one of only two artists awarded Distinction in Interactive Arts by Arts Electronica in Linz, Austria. In 2008, Feng featured an eighteen-meter wide computer-generated landscape painting at Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague.
Mengbo has worked in paint, video and more recently digital media, to produce narrative pieces, full of computer game images, mixed with symbols from communist China. His 'Streetfighter' painting series features a revolutionary soldier, in Red Guard uniform, in conflict with a series of computer assassins and monsters. His weapons range from ninja stars to crushed Coca Cola cans.

Marina Abramović / ULAY @ Sean Kelly Gallery, New York
Born in Belgrade/Yugoslavia in 1946. Lives and works in Amsterdam and New York.

Since the beginning of her career, during the early 1970s where she attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, Abramović has pioneered the use of performance as a visual art form. The body has been both her subject and medium. Exploring the physical and mental limits of her being, she has withstood pain, exhaustion and danger in the quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. As a vital member of the generation of pioneering performance artists that includes Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci and Chris Burden, Abramović created some of the most historic early performance pieces and continues to make important durational works.

Abramović has presented her work with performances, sound, photography, video, sculpture and Transitory Objects for Human and Non Human Use in solo exhibitions at major institutions in the U.S. and Europe. Her work has also been included in many large-scale international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale (1976 and 1997) and Documenta VI, VII and IX, Kassel, Germany (1977, 1982 and 1992). In 1998, the exhibition Artist Body - Public Body toured extensively, including stops at Kunstmuseum and Grosse Halle, Bern and La Gallera, Valencia. In 2004, Abramović also exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in New York and had a significant solo show, The Star, at the Maruame Museum of Contemporary Art and the Kumamoto Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan. Abramović has taught and lectured extensively in Europe and America. In 1994 she became Professor for Performance Art at the Hochschule fur Bildende Kunst in Braunschweig where she taught for seven years. In 2004 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the Art Institute in Chicago. She was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale for her extraordinary video installation/performance piece Balkan Baroque‚ and in 2003 received the Bessie for The House with the Ocean View‚ a 12-day performance at Sean Kelly Gallery.

In 2005, Abramović presented Balkan Erotic Epic at the Pirelli Foundation in Milan, Italy and at Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. That same year, she held a series of performances called Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. She was honored for Seven Easy Pieces by the Guggenheim at their International Gala in 2006 and by the AICA USA with the "Best Exhibition of Time Based Art" award in 2007. Abramović's work is included in numerous major public and private collections worldwide.

 

Nedko Solakov @ Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Le Moulin
Born in Cherven Briag/Bulgaria in 1957. Lives and works in Sofia

Nedko Solakov's broadly spanned, sprawling and formally almost uncontainable work is thematically one great assault on any demand for the perfect, the definitive and the unequivocal. Beginning with his education in wall painting at the Art Academy in Sophia, the Bulgarian artist, born 1957, has developed an oeuvre just as humorous as it is playful, as biting as it is melancholic, and which fundamentally calls in question any kind of representative system.

Since his exhibitions at Ujazdow Castle near Warsaw (2000), New York's PS1 (2001), the Rooseum, Malmö and the Reina Sofia, Madrid (2003) and, at the very latest, since his participation in the Venice Biennale (2007) and documenta 12 (2007), Solakov has been at the cutting edge of current European art.

In hardly any other work does the artist's fundamental skepticism towards our longing for clarity and lucidity become so explicit as in A Life (Black & White), conceived in 1998, in which a painter paints the walls of a gallery white, while a second painter covers the white paint black, whose effort is in turn painted over by the first painter in white, for the entire duration of the exhibition.

Across the entire formulation of his work, it has been Solakov's aspiration to compile an encyclopedia of the absurd, the arcane, a history of deviations, differences, embarrassments and broken utopias. The breakdown of the communist system at the end of the 1980s was a defining experience and, at the same time, the curtain-raiser for his search for a new, personal language (Encyclopaedia Utopia, 1989/90) with which the complexity and fragility of reality could be adequately expressed.
His drawings, texts, videos, photographs, performances, installations, sculptures and murals scratch at the seemingly smooth surface of collective truths, call the givens of the art system and art market into question (A (not so) White Cube, 2001, Leftovers, 2005), reflect on failure as a metaphor of human existence with the help of his own publicly admitted anxieties (Fear, 2002/3), and discover the paradox in the course of political history as the dominant structure in Discussion (Property), 2007). Solakov's ability to touch on all these different thematic fields in the form of stories that hold a precise balance between poetic-rhapsodic pleasure in the narration and constant ironic ruptures makes this work not only thoroughly unmistakable, but to the greatest degree also entertaining and humorous.











 

 

 

Joseph Kosuth @ Sean Kelly Gallery, New York
born in Toledo/Ohio in 1945. Lives and works in New York and Rome

Kosuth attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. From 1963 to 1964, he was enrolled at the Cleveland Art Institute. In 1965 Kosuth moved to New York to attend the School of Visual Arts; he would later join the faculty. He soon abandoned painting and began making conceptual works, which were first shown in 1967 at the exhibition space he co-founded, known as the Museum of Normal Art. In 1969 Kosuth held his first solo exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York and in the same year became the American editor of the journal Art and Language.

From 1971-1972 he studied anthropology and philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York. The philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, among others, influenced the development of his art from the late sixties to mid seventies. Kosuth's work has consistently explored the production and role of language and meaning within art. His nearly forty year inquiry into the relation of language to art has taken the form of installations, museum exhibitions, public commissions and publications throughout Europe, the Americas and Asia, including Documenta V, VI, VII and IX (1972, 1978, 1982, 1992) and the Biennale di Venezia in 1976, 1993 and 1999. Most recently, he exhibited Il Linguaggio dell'Equilibrio / The Language of Equilibrium at the Monastic Headquarters of the Mekhitarian Order on the island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, Venice. This was presented concurrently with the 2007 Biennale di Venezia.

Awards include the Brandeis Award, 1990, Frederick Weisman Award, 1991, the Menzione d'Onore at the Venice Biennale, 1993 and the Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government in 1993. He received a Cassandra Foundation Grant in 1968. In February 2001, he received the Laurea Honoris Causa, doctorate in Philosophy and Letters from the University of Bologna. In October 2003, he received the Decoration of Honor in Gold, the Austrian Republic's highest honor for accomplishments in science and culture











 

 

Martha Rosler @ Christian Nagel, Berlin / Cologne
Born in Brooklyn in 1943. Lives and works in Brooklyn

She graduated from Brooklyn College (1965) and the University of California, San Diego (1974).
Rosler works in video, photo-text, installation, and performance, as well as writing about art and culture. Her work and writing have been widely influential. She has lectured extensively nationally and internationally and teaches art at Rutgers University and the Städelschule in Frankfurt.

She serves in an advisory capacity to the departments of education at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, the Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, and the Center for Urban Pedagogy (all New York City).

Rosler’s work is centered on everyday life and the public sphere, often with an eye to women's experience. Recurrent concerns are the media and war as well as architecture and the built environment, from housing and homelessness to systems of transport.

Her work has been seen in the Venice Biennale of 2003; the Liverpool Biennial and the Taipei Biennial (both 2004); as well as many major international survey shows, including the "documenta" exhibitions in Kassel, Germany, of 1982 and 2007, the SkulpturProjekte Münster 2007, and several Whitney Biennials. She has had numerous solo exhibitions. In 2006 her work was the subject of solo exhibitions at the University of Rennes and in 2007 at the Worcester Museum of Art. A retrospective of her work, “Positions in the Life World” (1998-2000) was shown in five European cities (Birmingham, England; Vienna; Lyon/Villeurbanne; Barcelona; and Rotterdam) and, concurrently, at the International Center of Photography and the New Museum of Contemporary Art (both in New York).

Her solo show, “London Garage Sale,” was held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in June 2005, revisting a series of exhibitions she has held since 1973 that center on the American garage sale. E-flux sponsored "The Martha Rosler Library," in which, starting in November 2005, over 7,500 volumes from her private collection were made available as a public resource;[1] the collection then traveled to the Frankfurter Kunstverein in Germany and to Antwerp's Muhka (Museum of Contemporary Art) in conjunction with NICC, an artist-run space; to UnitedNationsPlaza School in Berlin, and, in 2007 through early 2008, to the Institut National de L'Histoire de L'Art in Paris, then to Stills in Edinburgh from August to November 2008.













 

Aiko Miyanaga @ Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo
Born in Kyoto/Japan in 1974. Lives and works in Kyoto

MIYANAGA Aiko  gained her MA from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, and MA from Kyoto University of Art and Design. Her work has been featured at “Artist File 2009” The National Art Center, Tokyo (2009), Busan Biennale, Busan (2008), “Katsuhiko Hibino / Aiko Miyanaga -INDEXLESS”, Asahi Beer Oyamazaki Villa Museum, Kyoto (2004), and recent solo exhibition includes, “Dwelling in a boat” Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo (2009), “shiseido art egg 3” SHISEIDO GALLERY, Tokyo (2009), “Fireworks from the River-Miyanaga-Aiko” Sumida Riverside Hall Gallery, Tokyo (2007).

“Naphthalene work begins changing on the day it is exhibited.
Our encounter with it will never be the same.
It is ephemeral but lasts deeply in our memories a a beginning of eternity”

Aiko Miyanaga is known for work that constantly changes during the exhibition. For instance, everyday objects cast of naphthalene are one of the representative images of her work. The naphthalene object placed in an acrylic box gradually loses its figure. The change is as slow as the progress of a clock’s hour hand and is invisible to our eye. We only recognize the alteration as a subtle presence. Although the object seems lose its shape and figure, it is recrystallized within the clear case and becomes visible to our eyes as a still object. What we are actually seeing is not an “object” but a “phenomenon”. Crystallized everyday life and the world might paradoxically actualize immortality; this might be the operative word for Miyanaga’s Art, by losing its existence. “The trace of eternity” we see here is a theme underlying throughout Miyanaga’s work.

Teppei Kaneuji @ ShugoArts, Tokyo
Born in Osaka in 1978. Lives and works in Saitama

Teppei Kaneuji takes a variety of different approaches to reveal invisible phenomena and blur the outlines of things. Kaneuji tends to use commercial and ready-made products in his works. Although those everyday objects are already complete in themselves, he treats them as fragments from which he can compose new forms. After dismantling familiar objects – stationery, maps, musical instruments, advertisements for cosmetics, toys, figures, and plugs or even plastic bottles – he reconnects the pieces to produce things that are new and sometimes organic in outline. At the same time, he gives the pieces rhythmical and tactile qualities so that they can be put together endlessly. Even though he employs a variety of production methods, his unchanging objective is to give expression to invisible phenomena by destroying the boundaries that divide things and by connecting them so as to render them fluid in appearance. These can be seen as a series of attempts to protect and expand the concept of freedom.

The planned exhibit at Discoveries
In the installation work, Splash and flake, Kaneuji combines wood, wood products, driftwood, wood-like materials, architectural and waste materials, a mirror, a magnifying glass, binoculars, and other visual aids to construct a base. To complete the work, objects found by the artist at the site are added on top of this base.

Liu Wei @ Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing
Born in Beijing in 1972. Lives and works in Beijing

Liu Wei is known for his works of biting social satire and arresting visual imagery. The artist’s wide-ranging practice, which spans the breadth of painting, video, installation, drawing, and sculpture, questions the idea of marginalized positionality and is marked by anxious visions of excess, corruption, and aggression—all reflective of current social tensions.

His most recent work treats themes of environmental degradation, politically charged history, and the twin seductions and revulsions of contemporary urban life. There is no one defining stylistic tendency that ties his work together; rather, Liu Wei’s work is permeated with an engagement with peripheral identity in the context of wider culture.

Known as one of the strongest representatives of a group of young artists who have not yet been named, Liu Wei works by jarring the audience into consciousness and reframing the social condition. He takes the body as the site of social action, then ties this embodied materiality to visual perception, which is inextricably linked to a certain ‘mad reality.’ Liu Wei’s reality is absurd, but all too insightful.

Liu Wei was recognized by the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards as the artist of the year in 2007, and has recently appeared at Art Basel Miami Beach and Arco in Madrid.

Susan Norrie @ Giorgio Persano, Torino
Born in Sydney in 1953. Lives and works in Sydney

She was artist in residence at the Victoria College of Arts, University of Melbourne and the University of Western Sydney, Australia. She received the Seppelt Contemporary Art Award, Sydney and Moet & Chandon Fellowship, France. She resides in Sydney, Australia. Each of Susan Norrie's series poses questions about making art; each addresses the artist's interests in the conceptual concerns of painting; between work and the viewer, between contemplative space and the history and conditions of art. Often Norrie mimics sumptuously fashioned surfaces in oil, creating a piece that resembles fabric. Norrie is concerned with the everyday confrontation of material appearance.

In ShContemporary09: DISCOVERIES, Susan Norrie explores the pervasive geopolitical issues of a changing world in a multichannel video installation. Havoc focuses on manmade interventions and seismic disturbances that have wrought devastation to areas of East Java. She documents the resilience of people confronting disaster as well as the broader social changes occurring within a culture.

On different screens Norrie presents a shifting havoc of images and tempo. The video surrounds the audience with hypnotic, saturating sequences. She suggests that Indonesia is a microcosm for the broader state of the world. The surge of mud and the dissonance of local punk music are symptomatic of a culture under immense pressure, but also ever present in an extraordinary sense of hope, resistance and survival.

This work continues the artist’s investigation into the tension between beauty and terror, between surface appearances and what may lie beneath.

Anri Sala @ Marian Goodman Gallery, New York / Paris
Born in Tirana/Albania in 1974. Lives and works in Paris

Postgraduate Studies in film directing, Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains, Tourcoing/FR, 1998-2000; Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (video), Paris/FR 1996-98; National Academy of Arts (BA Painting), Tirana/AL, 1992-96.

1999   Best Documentary Film Award, International Documentary
2000   Best Documentary Film Award, Filmfest 2000, Tirana
2001   Young Artist Price, Biennale Venice

Anri Sala is part of a generation of young Albanian artists whose personalities and ways of working are deeply rooted in the political and social context of the country. This and his sense for stories as well as the various layers of reality are the distinctive features of his work. Most of Anri Sala's films are photographed in Albania. Their unspectacular settings are marked by an aesthetic of simplicity that is as evident in the kitchen of an elderly Albanian woman as in a barren mountainous landscape and the look into a sound studio.

The careful choice of characters, the slowness of the mise en scène, the near-total absence of camera movement, which almost freezes the scenes into paintings, and the attention to seemingly unimportant detail all contribute to trigger a complex memory process – biographical memory fragments that also refers to the larger social dimension.
 

Eva & Franco Mattes (aka 0100101110101101.org)@Postmasters Gallery, New York
Born in Italy in 1976. Live and work in Bologna

Eva and Franco Mattes, (a.k.a. 0100101110101101.ORG) have been pioneers in the net.art movement remixing famous digital art pieces and performing Life Sharing: a real-time digital self portrait, during which they submitted to satellite surveillance for an entire year. In the last decade they have created unpredictable mass-scale performances staged outside the traditional art venues and involving an unaware audience, where truth and falsehood mix to the point of being indistinguishable. They created and released the code for a computer virus, erected fake architectural heritage signs, run media campaigns for non-existent action movies (United We Stand), and even convinced the entire populace of Vienna that Nike had purchased the city's historic Karlsplatz and was about to rename it "Nikeplatz". Their controversial performances, often bordering on illegality, have been widely discussed in the media earning them the name “Bonnie and Clyde of Contemporary Art”. Their works have been shown internationally including: Collection Lambert, Avignon; Fondazione Pitti Discovery, Florence, Lentos Museum of Modern Art, Linz; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; ICC, Tokyo; Manifesta 4, Frankfurt and Galeria Civica di Arte Contemporanea, Trento. and the Venice Biennale.

Jun Yang @ Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou / Beijing
Born in Tianjin in 1975. Lives and works in Vienna

Jun Yang explores the synthesis of different cultural contexts and searches for possible identification figures and attributes. The emphasis is on a self-investigative view determined by personal experience and media associations. Drawing on everyday procedures, the exhibition aims at the construction and reconstruction of a childhood in which the restaurant owned by the family figures as living room, kitchen, meeting place, and cultural epicenter.

Text, images, video, language, and space focus on the experience of being away from home and living the life of a stranger, as a resident at the Mackey House in Los Angeles, for example. Living abroad intensifies adopted habits, challenges them, and allows for a new, changed order of things.

2008        
Paris Syndrom, Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou (CN)
China International Gallery Exposition--33 Young Asian Artists' solo shows，Beijing

2007        
Galerie Martin Janda, Wien (AT)
Tufts University Art Gallery, Boston (US)
Museum am Ostwall (Studio), Dortmund (DE)
Paris Syndrom, Cafe at Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, Leipzig (DE)

2006        
Galerie Ilka Bree, Bordeaux (FR)
gfzk garten and Hei Di, garden and shop at Galerie für Zeitgenössiche Kunst Leipzig, Leipzig (DE)


Paris Syndrome is a psychological disorder, diagnosed on Japanese working or on vacation in Paris. It is a traumata arriving from the inability to reconcile between their dream-image and the harsh reality of Paris （Paris as a fairy-tale city, the symbol of love and romance). A kind of negative cultural shock. Dream/ Simulation/ Image/ Wish meets Reality/ the real World.

Sanggil Kim @ PKM Gallery, Seoul / Beijing
Born in Seoul in 1974. Lives and works in Seoul

Sanggil Kim holds an MFA in Photography from Chung-Ang University, Seoul. Selected exhibitions include Contemporary Korean Photographs 1948–2008, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea (2008); Translocalmotion, 7th Shanghai Biennale (2008); Flashcube, Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul (2007); Fast Forward: Photographic Message from Korea, Fotografie Forum International, Frankfurt (2005); Facing Korea: Demirrorized Zone, De Appel, Amsterdam (2003); 4th Gwangju Biennale (2002); New Ventures, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea (2000); Soup, Artsonje Center, Seoul (2000). In 2006, he was chosen as a finalist for the Hermès Korea Art Award.

Adopting a dispassionate, almost taxonomic approach to parsing the elusive, multifaceted experience of inhabiting a certain social and physical environment (an urban Asian metropolis continuously undergoing transformation) at a given moment (the early 21st century), Sanggil Kim deploys technical sophistication and formal rigor in photographic images that alternately defamiliarize the familiar and dramatize – even melodramatize, sometimes to discomfiting effect – the banal. From the precisely staged psychosocial tableaus of his earlier motion picture series, and the continuing series of architectonic studies of urban structures and spaces in Seoul and other Asian cities, to the more recent series of group portraitures that capture individuals existing in virtual, Internet-based communities defined by a single specific, sometimes eccentric, interest – the wearing of Burberry plaids, for example – his work constitutes a contemporary archeology of illusory systems, networks, and structures.

Takahiro Iwasaki @ ARATANIURANO, Tokyo
Born in Hiroshima in 1975. Lives and works in Hiroshima

In his miniature and often meticulous sculpture / installation, he transforms everyday banal materials such as towels, rubber bands, wooden chopsticks and bookmarks into fantastic and delicate landscapes. Through his childhood in Hiroshima he had been brought up with the reflection of this city’s inscribed memory, which is the fact that one whole city vanished in a few seconds. While his smallest landscapes derive from his concern for detail and the fragility of cities, they could be also interpreted as regenerations from nothing.

In ShContemporary 2009: Discovering Contemporary, Iwasaki is exhibiting an installation with pocketbooks with its bookmarkers transformed into small cranes. While an aesthetic of his artistic practice comes from its fragility and ephemeral aspect, it will create an intriguing juxtaposition with the emerging landscape of Shanghai where we can observe an ever increasing number of construction cranes.

Recent Exhibitions
2005 Differential/Integral Calculus, Sleeper Gallery, Edinburgh
2005 Dudelsack, Deutzer Brucke, Cologne, Germany
2004 Konran Show, Okada Studio, Nagoya, Japan
2004 Recent Work, Evolution, Edinburgh
2004 Occasion, Big Park, Edinburgh
2004 RSA Exhibition, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh
2004 Beyond the City, Sleeper Gallery, Edinburgh
2003 Process to Model, Formative Space Laboratory, Hiroshima
2003 Recent Work, Inverleith House, Edinburgh
2002 Art Image of Hiroshima, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art
2002 Recent Work for 4, Daiwa Radiator Factory, Hiroshima
2001 Reflection Model, Gallery Natsuka b.p, Tokyo















 

Li Yongbin @ ART ISSUE PROJECTS, Beijing
Born in Beijing in 1963. Lives and works in Beijing

Li Yongbin has always been fascinated by the representation of temporality and the ways and possibilities in which we perceive events unfolding. In the last decades he has made numerous unedited real-time recordings of non-dramatic events, or rather, nonevents. For example, in Face 4, he recorded the reflection of his own face on a windowpane against a cityscape at the moment of sunset and as the night falls, the reflection of his face gradually appeared while the cityscape slowly faded into darkness. Those works are usually very long in duration and arduous for their beholders

Solo Exhibitions :
2004  Li Yongbin Faces, Le Granit, Belfort, France
Li Yongbin Faces, JGM gallery, Paris, France
2000  Li Yongbin Videos, Palais des Beaux-arts, Brussels, Belgium
Group Exhibitions:
2008  Border of Virtuality - Chinese and Korean Media Art Now, HAN JI YUN Contemporary
Space, Beijing, China
2007  Multiplex: Directions in Art, 1970 to Now, The Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Real Thing: Contemporary Art from China, Tate Liverpool, UK
2005  Faces without Cover. Contemporary Selportrite Practices, Montbéliard of France
2004  A first look, Reinstallation of the Collection, Film and Media Gallery, The Museum of
Modern Art, New York, USA

Yuichi Higashionna @ Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo
Born in Tokyo in 1951. Lives and works in Tokyo

Higashionna describes his work: “My work frequently incorporates common, everyday things. Many of these things are what we call fanshii in Japanese, a word that originates from Japan’s great admiration for Western culture.

Fanshii things are said to be odd (in that they are neither Western nor Japanese), kitsch, girlish and tacky. Living in Japan, I am very familiar with such fanshii things, but I have never liked them. In my opinion there is even something ‘uncanny’ about them, in a Freudian sense (*2). It is difficult for me to describe their ‘uncanniness’ but it has certainly been a motivating factor in the work I create.

When I learnt of Freud’s explanation of ‘the uncanny’, I was released from the restraint that the fanshii held over me. However, what interests me now is to bring this ‘uncanniness’ into my work in a more positive way, incorporating it in the context of humour or eroticism, rather than representing it straightforwardly.

(*1)
Characters like ‘Hello Kitty’ are typical examples of fanshii. But, I was more interested in fanshii interior decoration, like things with flower patterns, or the lace curtains that adorn the European style bay windows of ready built housing.
(*2)
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (1919)

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