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Delirious Beijing
April 19 - May 17, 2008
PKM Gallery Beijing
Opening Reception: 5:00PM, April 19, 2008
Curated by Philip Tinari
艾格林 Ai Gelin
艾未未 Ai Weiwei
李姝睿 Li Shurui
刘安平 Liu Anping
刘窗 Liu Chuang
聂幕 Nie Mu
赵刚 Zhao Gang
赵赵 Zhao Zhao
Rutherford Chang
Ryan Gander
Jordan Wolfson
Sarah Morris
Beijing in early 2008 is a city mired in a deeply anachronistic futurism. Clocks placed in major sites around town tick off the days, hours, and seconds until the eights align (August 8, 2008, 8:00 p.m.), the Olympics begin, and-we are to believe-everything is changed. This state of frenzied waiting raises a set of psychological and aesthetic questions that have not been adequately answered: Is Beijing, as some claim, the last true (albeit distorted) heir to the modernist utopianism of the early twentieth century? How does the emergence to be marked by this long-awaited moment change global notions of aesthetics, politics, and even morality, if at all? In contraposition to the "radical Manhattanist" sensibility articulated in the book that first brought fame to Rem Koolhaas-himself the designer of the most notable architectural project in the Beijing of this moment-Delirious Beijing looks to locate a specific way of reacting to this distinct set of conditions.
Delirious Beijing juxtaposes works by artists from a range of generations, geographies, and positions, united by a shared sense of the urgency of this current situation. Beginning with Ryan Gander's Ghostwriter Subtext, a video that presents Koolhaas and curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist engaged in a dialogue about the nature of the interview itself, the show moves through works like Sarah Morris's 1936 [Rings] painting and Ai Weiwei's hundred-hour video Dabeiyao - Dabeiyao, toward a broad range of new works by younger artists including Li Shurui, Liu Chuang, Zhao Zhao, Rutherford Chang and Jordan Wolfson. Older pieces such as Zhao Gang's urban paintings of the early 1980s and Liu Anping's collages and paintings documenting his urban interventions of the 1990s complement more recent work by mid-career artists such as Nie Mu and Ai Gelin.
Philip Tinari is a writer and curator based in Beijing. He directs the editorial and publishing studio Office for Discourse Engineering and serves as China Advisor to Art Basel and executive editor of artforum.com.cn. He is a regular contributor to museum catalogues and publications including Artforum and Parkett, and has lectured on Chinese contemporary art at the Guggenheim and China Institute. Delirious Beijing is the first exhibition he has curated in Beijing since 2003. |
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