The opening performance of the 10th Gwangju Biennale, a powerful piece by Minouk Lim, took place on a rainy afternoon. A helicopter hovered over Biennale Square, where ambulances and buses converged, carrying high school students, relatives of civilian victims of the Korean War, and members of the May Mothers’ House, who lost children in the…
When Xu Zhen established MadeIn Company in 2009, he announced the dissolution of his own artistic identity; later he asserted that Xu had become a corporate brand. In the six chapters of this videotaped conversation with Yu-Chieh Li, Xu discusses his practices in relation to MadeIn’s operations, which, from research and production through marketing and…
What country is Hong Kong? Hong Kong was an island. Hong Kong will become part of China. MAP Office has decided to present Hong Kong is, with the intention of clearly addressing the specific characteristics of this unique city/territory, which is in a state of perpetual transition. Offering a platform to reveal a hidden urbanity, breaking…
A close examination of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC)’s 1964 stop in Tokyo allows for a better understanding of how mutually significant this encounter was for the Japanese avant-garde and Cunningham and his close collaborators Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage. John now feels that the time is propitious for Merce to undertake not only…
Eight years ago I was told the story of two Chinese coolies who had escaped to the Peruvian Amazon, founded a village called El Chino, which means “The Chinese,” and begun a small tapioca business before vanishing mysteriously. I grew curious about what the Chinese were doing in South America, let alone, the rain forest.…
“American art that lost its glory” was the way Shinohara Ushio summed up Twenty Years of American Painting, an exhibition sent to Tokyo by New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1966. Just two years earlier, Shinohara had been an enthusiastic “imitator” of American artists, copying works by the likes of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and…
Was Robert Rauschenberg’s 1964 visit to Tokyo a case of cultural exchange or of cross-cultural discommunication? The question is central to this account of Gold Standard, a “combine” that Rauschenberg created during an event at Tokyo’s Sōgetsu Art Center in November of that year. Originally planned by the critic Tōno Yoshiaki as a public interview…
Selections by Uesaki Sen and Miki Kaneda; Annotations by Miki Kaneda Graphic scores visibly and sonically changed contemporary music in the late 1950s and ’60s. The new notation unleashed a torrent of fundamental questions about music, sound, and composition: What counts as music? What distinguishes musical sound from non-musical sound? What is the time of…
In the second half of an extended interview with Tone Yasunao for post, the composer, artist, and writer discusses the trajectory of his work from graphic scores in the 1960s to his recent work with digital media.
Big Tail Elephant was a four-member artists’ collective active in Guangzhou, China, from 1991 to 1998, the first such group in South China to employ multimedia art forms, photography, performance, installation, and video. While maintaining their individual artistic practices, the members—an advertisement designer, two teachers from the Guangzhou Art Academy, and a TV station worker—gathered…
“ ‘大尾象’ 这个词就象西方古代哲学家对自然的最终解释是上帝这个词。这是一种理念起作用，而不是某一个具体的人。”——林一林 This is a transcript of a meeting of the Big Tail Elephant Group that took place in 1993. Read the English translation here. 林一林整理 “大尾象工作组”成立于1990年底。1991年1月和1992年10月，曾经在广州举办了两次大型展览。1993年7月， “大尾象”举行了这次讨论会，参加讨论会的人仅限于这个工作组的成员，因而我充当半个发问人开始了这次的讨论会，讨论的方向主要是“大尾象工作组”的活动特点，它所处的文化背景及其成员的艺术观念和作品情况。 林一林：徐坦， 你的艺术风格已经很成熟了，并且你的作品在中国同行的眼里也不太陌生，作为你这样的艺术家完全可以按自己原有的思路继续走下去，什么原因令你加入“大尾象工作组”呢？ 徐坦： 作为新近加入“大尾象工作组”的新成员，我和“大尾象”的成员在艺术上的合作已经有一段不短的时间了。我觉得“大尾象”有一个很大的特点， 我相信这种特点在世界上任何一个地方都具有特殊的价值。在这个工作组里，每位艺术家的个人创造都会得到鼓励和支持，你会感到创造性思维的活跃，这里总是处于一种自由的状态，大家在一起工作预示着一种力量，是一中深远的潜在力。我们抱有对未来的信心在于我们工作的结构方式具有开放性。 梁钜辉： 除了你刚才所说的，“大尾象”对你最有吸引力的，是否还有别的什么？ 徐坦： 这个工作组有一种神秘的凝聚力，有一种共同的东西。很多人问过“大尾象”的共同点是什么，我发现大家都说不出来，但我们都意识到确实是有共同之处， 这种共同点有待别人或我们去发现。 别人谈到南方的形而上缺少和生活中的神秘因素，我想在这点上具有魅力和不可说的… …。 梁钜辉: 在“南方艺术家沙龙”的时候，我和林一林、陈劭雄开始合作，到现在已经有7年了。就象你所说的，这种神秘力量把我们结合在一起。 陈劭雄：我们的共同点是区别于其他的艺术群体的做法， 如“大尾象”没有什么核心人物， 假如工作组里少了任何一个人， “大尾象”仍然还存在，很奇怪，它具有凝聚力， 但又没有核心。 林一林： 这个核心就是“大尾象”这个词。 徐坦： 我想起德里达关于中心的一个问题，他谈到中心既不存在某个结构之内，也不存在于某个结构之外， 就好像一个乐团， 谁是中心？ 有人认为指挥是中心， 有人认为第一提琴手是中心，…
Graphic scores tend to have multiple identities. Simultaneously, they can be design objects, artworks, and documents silently encoded with music whose future performance can depend, at least to some degree, on their existence. What can graphic scores tell us about music, art, design, and performance, and about their intersections? During the late 1950s and the…
