798 District Blog

Jeff Koons Rabbit 1986 with Jeff Koons posing at the Tate Modern (profile picture)

My work is about social leveling. It tries to communicate how art and culture are used to disempower people. People use art for self- empowerment and to destabilize other people from their own pasts. People fear that they need to acquire taste or they have to like certain things, so art functions to disconnect them from their own true experience, which is the only thing that can really verify their own existence.

Jeff Koons said in an interview made by David Bonetti/ San Francisco Chronicle

Jeff Koons’ lecture on his art career as early as from 1978 will take place at 6:30pm on March 21st in the lecture hall, the Art Museum of CAFA. Pan Gongkai, President of the Central Academy of Fine Arts will chair the lecture. What do you expect to know about Jeff Koons? Will you be inspired by his experience? Please join us tonight and you may have an opportunity to communicate with him personally. The lecture is free to attend (from the western entrance of the art museum of CAFA) and we do recommend arriving as early as possible.

Jeffrey “Jeff” Koons (born January 21, 1955) is an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces.

Jeff Koons has several pieces on top of the Met, including one of his famous Balloon Dogs

Koons’ work has sold for substantial sums of money including at least one world record auction price for a work by a living artist. The largest sum known to be paid for a work by Koons is Balloon flower (Magenta) which was sold at Christie’s London, on Monday, June 30, 2008 (Lot 00012) in the Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale, where it sold for £12,921,250 or $25,765,204. Critics are sharply divided in their views of Koons. Some view his work as pioneering and of major art-historical importance. Others dismiss his work as kitsch: crass and based on cynical self-merchandising.

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A featured installation by artist Bashir Makhoul entitled “Enter Ghost, Exist Ghost” is exhibiting at Yang Gallery in Beijing and it will last until April 15th, 2012. Makhoul has filled the gallery with a large-scale maze of walls extending over 100 metres. These walls are clad with shifting photographic images of other walls, windows, doors and passageways that capture Palestinian villages/ neighbourhoods interlaced with Israeli military training sites. Produced using lenticular micro-lens printing, this allows the images to be visible and interchangeable by movement. The slightest movement within the maze of this installation is enough to transform and relocate your surroundings completely; it pushes on the limits of the relationship between movement and narrative.

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“Scenery-Borrowing: Li Di Solo Exhibition” will be presented by Being 3 Gallery from March 24th through to April 13th. Featuring new works Li Di has created over the past year, the exhibition unfolds from the hind running leg of the diptych Fleet (Kuang Biao), as the front leg, on a grant stride, marks Li Di’s entrance into a pure state of being as an artist. The step that he takes creates an intellectual and cultural space from his travels through time and various locations.

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Enrico David, Untitled, 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 117.3 x 101.5 in (298 x 258 cm). Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York.

NEW YORK, NY.- The New Museum presents the second exhibition in its recently inaugurated ‘Studio 231’ series. “Head Gas” is the first New York exhibition by Italian-born, Berlin-based artist Enrico David. Over the past twenty years, David has produced a body of work encompassing painting, drawing, sculpture, and collage that draws upon a rich variety of sources and expresses a range of complex emotional states. Although his work is highly celebrated throughout Europe the artist was among the nominees for the 2009 Turner Prize, for example—David’s work has rarely been exhibited in the United States.

The figures populating David’s work convey the struggle of adaptation, both physical and psychological, of the self and of the image. In his art, we see haunting, incomplete, and sometimes grotesque characters fighting against and merging into backgrounds comprising a personal lexicon of forms. These patterns are derived from craft, folk art, and twentieth-century design, as well as advertising, techniques of display, fashion, and art historical moments. Previously, David choreographed his figurative works to imply dramatic narratives, at times using the exhibition space as a stage. His exhibitions function as performances of self-analysis constructed and theatricalized specifically for public display. Through David’s highly personalized iconography, the works act as mirrors, reflecting viewers’ desires, fears, and vulnerabilities. In David’s more recent work, the implications and strands of psychological tension are enacted within a more formalized, image-based corporeality

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As all forms of arts do, sculpture is facing questions of innovation and development in modern times.

The China Sculpture Institute has responded by boosting a three-year promotional program for young sculptors starting from 2010.

The institute sponsored a series of exhibitions in nine cities since September 2010. The tour arrived in Beijing last weekend and will stay until Feb. 13.

Sculpture enthusiasts are treated to almost 100 works by more than 50 young sculptors at Beijing’s Today Art Museum.

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Featuring 40 pieces of “photo studio style” artworks Maleonn has practiced in the past three years, the exhibition can also be taken as the pilot project of the Mobile Photo Studio. In the show one will discover Maleonn’s latest series as well as the Studio Mobile itself. The visitors will also be able to have their portrait done in the old fashioned way. It is the very same Studio Mobile that Maleonn will then take across China to portrait people all around the country even in the most remote places. As Maleonn puts it, “I would like to provide a mirror to the viewers and, then, they are able to see some of their own thinking and senses.”

In his photographic work Maleonn has been working for years on the identity of people crossing time. Moved by their existence and memories that fade away and compared to digital photos and new technology induces memories, stored on computers, old photos have this extra emotion Maleonn wants to recreate. The artist is creating this new show to remind us not to forget that going to the photo studio was at the same time a real sense of ceremony and a pleasure that no longer exist…“You can also say that I provide a labyrinth, a huge one with lots of entrances and lots of exits as well” as he says.

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Zhang Enli Solo Exhibition is staged in Shanghai Art Museum from December 9th through to 22nd in 2011. And it is another crucial museum exhibition ever after the one in Minsheng Art Museum in the end of 2010. In this exhibition in the winter, important works from newly completed series Still Life and Space will be displayed.

Ordinary or tedious “things”, which are least attractive, the most widely utilized and the most unlikely to be noticed in everyday life, however, become the objects that fascinate the artist these years. They are rendered by his plain and yet accurate brushes to manifest the ultimate realness of life left in them. Moreover, “space” is another theme that captivates the artist’s eyes. From Zhang’s paintings, we often detect his discovery of aroma emitted from the passage and erosion of time under seemingly mundane circumstances. Again and again, he opts for the things that appear far too familiar to us as the themes of his creation and prompts our reconcentration on them.

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Potential changes in vision due to technological breakthroughs are probably the most revolutionary and expansive field to explore. In the history of art, the greatest progress was all connected with the breakthroughs in technology of that time. Currently, the biggest intervention of technology in everyday life is manifested in the development of the Internet along with the shaping of the world of fantasy by giftware.

When talking about the possible visual features brought by technology, people used to focus on the adoption and updating of the imagery. In other words, it was regarded as progress in pictorial language, which is subordinated to evolution of pictorial language. However, if the visual renewal cannot keep up with the idea or discourse behind the pictorial language, such renewal can do nothing but submit itself to transience, while the more permanent is till the human sentiments and their intellect behind the technology or machines. The sharpest contrast takes place when human sentiments face the indifferent technology or machines. Or in Lin Xin’s words, ” Human nature reveals itself in a more distinct way.” Slavoj Zizek put forward a profound question in his The Antinomy of Cyberspace Reason, we are pretty sure that behind the screen there is nothing except digital circuits. If so, would I myself have nothing in my mind as well? Zizek was afraid that human self-consciousness could also be a screen behind which there is nothing but neural circuits. No doubt this question put us in great panic.

Lin Xin reviews Zizek’s fear in visual terms. In her works, the relationship between human being and machines, between human bodies and intellect is no longer confrontational as it used to be in the industrial era. In our age of interaction, the human being and the machine, the body and the intellect do not relate themselves to each other as subjects or objects but place themselves in a flexible and floating schema where there is an ongoing mutual reference on physiological and psychological level.

Therefore I value the quality of cyber in Lin Xin’s works. Cyber used to refer to the cyber space and was later developed to denote the virtual autonomous domain which, as a completely autonomous future world, holds a disapproving and uncooperative attitude toward the industrial world. that is not solely confined to the virtual world. However, cyber is not totally virtual. It still keeps the material base as is shown in Lin Xin’s works. She never put her works in the hand of the virtual world. The automen in her works are placed in the scene which, though based on reality, has been changed into an indifferent world. What the cyber space exactly reveals is a traumatic scene where water is no longer a resource for life, mountains are neither for habitat nor for travel. The automen were placed in a solitary atmosphere where communication is impossible, but what they need is more than survival — they long for life. Lin Xin could create automen in the images but she has no way to endow them with autonomy.

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The Yanhuang Art Museum is hosting a solo show for poet, writer, calligrapher and ink painter Han Sanzhi from Shaanxi province.

On show are more than 90 of his abstract ink works, created on various mediums and inspired by ancient cultures from China’s northwestern regions.

Han has endeavored to create ink art that connects cultural roots to diverse modern cultures, critic Jia Fangzhou says.

9 am to 4 pm, until Dec 7. Yanhuang Art Museum, 9 Huizhong Lu, Asian Games Village,

People visit the “My Personal Universe” sculpture exhibition at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art of the 798 art zone in Beijing, capital of China, Nov. 26, 2011. The exhibition, which will last to Feb. 25, 2012, presents images of universe explosion through static exhibits and videos. (Xinhua/Luo Wei)

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