Literati painting is often viewed within Chinese art history as a highly restricted genre, consisting of monochromatic works of ink on paper involving natural themes interpreted through a subjective or even abstract treatment produced by amateur scholars, officials, and members of the gentry in southern China across almost a millennium of history centered upon the Song and Yuan dynasties. As such, these visual styles probably offer little for artists working in the contemporary milieu today; too much has passed between for the schematics of ink to play a serious role in the global cultures of our time without stereotypical reference to nebulous concepts of Chinese identity that limit methods of reception far more than they are able to define any singular aesthetic. It may be possible, however, to excavate a set of constellations of meaning from the visual cultures that produced literati painting, particularly an approach to artistic production that we might term the literary mode.

This cluster of techniques and interests contains a number of memes that remain highly visible in modern and contemporary art and culture: the loaded symbolism of the various plants and locales of literati painting, for example, as with the economical grammar of expression Qiu Xiaofei has come to include in his painting, or a relationship with nature that involves multi-directional processes of influence, molding, and exchange amongst text, viewer, and environment–visible in the work of Myoung Ho Lee, who frames trees within their natural environments as if it were an artificial studio space, as well as Michael Heizer, one of the most significant of the land artists working to embed symbolic language within the landscape even as the conceptual meanings of these works emerged from the earth itself. Zheng Guogu engages in a similar act today when he illegally and stubbornly develops a patch of rural land in southern China according to the strategies of Age of Empires, demonstrating that bureaucracy has become an apt target for land art.

There is also a particular approach to politics that encodes meaning in the most unlikely of places, declaring the loyalties of the painter through the sincere defense of various abstract virtues. Kwan Sheung Chi does something along these lines when he proposes that the Hong Kong Museum of Art collect all of the police barricades in the city to its galleries, helping his activist colleagues to march unimpeded through the symbolic and very physical value of his installation. Ai Weiwei, by introducing the forms of wood appreciated by the literati as instances of natural sculpture, also engages in this political discourse in his preoccupations with counting and individuality. The literary mode also includes, of course, a very specific take on the poetic. Michael Lee sculpts architectural features out of physical books, while critic and musician Yan Jun uses stamps and other common tools to create volumes of poetry in unlikely locations. Charwei Tsai, similarly, writes out calligraphic Buddhist texts on organic objects like leaves and mushrooms, toying with notions of time and the historical pretensions of art.

The literary angle also becomes a signature of reference, particularly in the work of Yang Xinguang, who often titles his work after significant moments in classical poetry in a method highly reminiscent of literati intertextuality. More commonly, this aspect of reference takes the form of allusion to more traditional forms of art in general: Ruan Qianrui and Feng Mengbo both update ink wash painting for a digital era in stunningly simplistic but never forced compositions, while Liu Wei finds aesthetically interesting ways to mix polluted urban skylines and traditional plum branches in his abstract painting. Liang Shaoji literally continues to live out the literati life of the reclusive artist, working with natural materials like weathered wood, silk, and living silkworms to create dynamics and often transient installations that captivate the viewer despite their obvious references. Pei Li uses similar wooden objects and pools of ink–alongside newer materials like speaker cones and mp3 recordings–to create unmistakeably contemporary situations of sonic exchange. Such conversations are visible even in the work of material-oriented abstract painters like James Nares.

Most importantly, the literary mode involves conscious attacks upon point of view, dislocating the viewer and offering alternative tactics for approach to the subject at hand. Gao Weigang demonstrates one such possibility ably in his series of cartographic paintings on objects ranging from wardrobes to stones, creating windows into other possible spaces. Less intentionally, Bojan Sarcevic does the same with his vitrine sculptures of paper terrain and abstracted forms that allow matrices and networks of reference and implication to emerge within the miniature space. Henrik Hakansson, drawing nature into this equation, engages with the literati proposition that nature becomes a form of culture in his drastically updated takes on the literary garden. David Maljkovic presents two-dimensional images–geometric and architectural, far from the literati aesthetic–aside botanical objects, pushing for a reduction to form that passively multiplies meaning in parallel with the multiple subject positions of painting in the literary mode.

This vision of neo-literati art calls for an explosion of sorts, allowing the barbarians into the gates. If it is to survive in any meaningful way, the literati genre must abandon all talk of the relevance of new ink painting, porcelain, and such other obvious signifiers in favor of a more subtle and evolutionary approach to politics, history, literature, and nature. The art is already there; it is merely a question of interpretation.

Review: Art Intervenes in Society: A New Artistic Relationship
Wang Chunchen
Published by Chinese Contemporary Art Awards in collaboration with Timezone8, 2010

The past year has seen an unprecedented level of self-conscious social activism within the art world in Beijing, both in the sense that recognized major artists have displayed an increasing willingness to make public their positions on key issues of social injustice and in the sense that these activist roles have come to achieve a certain presence in the content of art itself. Artist Ai Weiwei, of course, has been leading this movement with his documentary and petitioning projects related to corruption in the Sichuan earthquake, while other members of this circle of the art world like Yang Licai, Zuoxiao Zuzhou, Wu Yuren, and residents of a number of studio districts have expanded this social pressure within this work, through their work, and around their practices as artists.

It is appropriate, then, that the second recipient of the Chinese Contemporary Art Award (CCAA) for independent criticism, Wang Chunchen of the Art Museum of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, chose to write his prize-winning essay, Art Intervenes in Society: A New Artistic Relationship, on precisely this set of methodologies. Wang should be commended for his courage in facing this increasingly visible group of practices, especially as the majority of mainland Chinese critics have continued to sideline the potentially embarrassing political aspects of activist work by artists like Ai Weiwei in favor of more broadly cultural readings, while those abroad have chosen to fixate on the easily fetishized dissident qualities of his activity rather than a comprehensively social (and not necessarily oppositional) interpretation. Fortunately, however, Wang Chunchen moves well beyond this single figure, examining case studies as varied as Xu Bing’s “Forest” project, Guan Shi’s Baiyin projects, Lu Shengzhong’s educational practice, the Zendai “Intrude” series, the Long March Project, and work by artists from Xu Zhen and Yan Lei to Jin Feng and Zhang Dali. This list clearly attempts to investigate not just the obviously political but also practices of art that make use of charitable, inclusive, democratic, documentary mechanisms, even if the criteria remain unclear.

Unfortunately, these efforts are hampered by Wang Chunchen’s failure to resolve or even express interest in the confirmation of a distinct vocabulary with which to discuss such problems. The most serious error here is an apparent inability to understand the infrastructure of the art world, from which all of the projects in question emerge, as a an always-already social and socialized entity. That is to say, as the title Art Intervenes in Society makes clear, Wang takes “art” and “society” as two distinct terms with a mutual relationship but with little possibility of overlap, artificially creating a synchronic image of the art world in which artists are autonomous and asocial beings functioning in an entirely self-contained universe, majestically drawing “influence” from social phenomena and deigning to condescend into the public realm to offer assistance and alteration. With references to the total art and socialist ideals of Wagner, Wang has here constructed an independent system in which not a single one of the relevant terms is properly defined with relation to any of the others: “art,” “society,” and “reality” circulate as supposedly self-evident labels, the relationships between which can be realigned based on the voluntarism of artists and critics.

Aside from this overly simplistic synchronic model of social structure that consistently excludes both the content and infrastructure of art to a distinct territory, Wang Chunchen also ignores the diachronic discourse of art as a specific historical context. This particular failing, for all the force with which it emerges in this text, is symptomatic of the wider conversation from which Wang emerges, that is to say, the institutional narratives of Chinese contemporary art. In this analysis, the figuration of “art,” which, as noted above, is not defined in any meaningful way either as a practice or as a system, appears to be treated as a a cluster of actions deployed by the somewhat mythical subjects known as artists. This failure to recognize the already existing discourse of contemporary art, either internationally or in China, serves to categorically obfuscate what, actually, is intended by the “new artistic relationship” raised here in such a misleadingly straightforward way, a shortcoming that becomes painfully obvious with the use of terms like “situationism” and “total art” without any relation to their historical underpinnings. The examination of some 10 years (and a significant focus on only two to three) of regional art activity, particularly that under the self-proclaimed banner of “project-based art,” amounts to very little when isolated from information on the systems from which these artists emerged, historical precedent in China and internationally, and prior critical writing on the historical formations of socially aware contemporary art.

Another concern lies again with this problematically defined notion of “art.” At various points throughout the text, this single term stands in for three wildly differing levels of meaning: in some places it refers to the content of art (for example, art about social protest), while on others it signifies modes of art (art produced in a protest setting or as an act of protest), and in yet other places it comes to stand for the circumstances of the production of art (art created “in society,” or with consciousness of protest). This semiotic slippage comes dangerously close to collapsing everything remotely related to the act of participation, accumulating within its bounds everything from relational aesthetics to the Cultural Revolution. Although it may be unnecessary or even unreasonable to call for rigorous arguments of terminology within the space of such a brief essay, opacity of this magnitude begins to obstruct any potential for mutually intelligible discussion, especially when the fraught terms of art and politics are involved.

These three failures of definition and circumscription, moreover, contribute to a third problem: the refusal to apply an existing criteria of conceptual and aesthetic judgement, and, more damningly, the failure to put forward the standards of a potential new paradigm that could accompany the shifts in artistic consciousness Wang Chunchen notes. Fittingly, this might be termed the Sigg paradox: patron of the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards and private collector Uli Sigg has amassed what many consider to be one of the most comprehensive collections of contemporary Chinese art, though he himself is the first to admit (albeit in hindsight) that it is an “archival” collection, attempting to span the breadth of new art as it has emerged over the past 20 years, rather than a “quality” collection constructed on the foundation of particular sensibility, taste, or concept. Combined with a system in which criticism rarely speaks negatively or even directly about bloated artists and movements–a deficiency that the CCAA grant for independent criticism was intended to correct–, audiences for this art are presented with a broad field of often mediocre work (at least according to the laws of probability) in which interested players speak their minds only implicitly. Here, too, Wang never lays out criteria for the projects included in his survey, but neither does he claim that all of this work is interesting as art in and of itself. Real criticism should have the courage not just to broach new topics of conversation, but also to evaluate the practices at stake.

Wang Chunchen has indubitably taken the first step in reconsidering the political and social value of recent Chinese art beyond the fetishistic tokenism of proto-revolutionary aesthetics, but his account nevertheless leaves much to be desired. It would seem that the most important lesson here is that, in building up a culture of criticism and evaluation in China, writers and historians must begin from a far more basic position, challenging the received definitions (or, more often, lack thereof) of art, politics, society, and other key concept; the kind of work we are offered at present, constructing relationships between objects never fully grasped within the text, does little to further this conversation. Criticism must step back, embrace a fuller understanding of historical and geographic context, and approach with fresh eyes the safe and institutionalized narratives that have come to characterize contemporary art as it is presented to its audiences Without such internal rigor, wild speculation about a presumed public understanding of art remains a fantasy serving only a few, largely silent actors in the field.

Isaac Mao has been called the ultimate Chinese digital guru, maintaining interests in commerce, electronic communication, and, increasingly, network politics. He is broadly labelled a venture capitalist, blogger, software architect, entrepreneur, and researcher in learning and social technology, dividing his time between research, social work, business, and technology. He is currently vice president of the United Capital Investment Group, director of the Social Brain Foundation, and advisor to Global Voices Online. He is now a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, developing his Sharism theory discussed below, a philosophy for the new shape of the web and a possible key to a future open society for our future. As one of the earliest bloggers in the Chinese community, Mao was a co-founder of CNBlog.org, the earliest grassroots publishing evangelism site in China, and a co-organizer of the annual Chinese Blogger Conference. The CNBlog team later became the Social Brain Foundation, which promotes social media and free culture in China, particularly including free access, free speech, and free thinking. The Foundation currently supports Idea Factory, Memedia, Digital Nomads, Open Education, and Creative Commons China, among other initiatives. Mao is also a global bridge in blogosphere. He is regular speaker at Wikimania, the Chinese Internet Conference, and other global internet cultural events. As a trained software engineer, he has a long history in leading the development of both business and consumer software. He has applied HCI methodologies to the software design process and vastly improved the usability of software in mainland China. After turning to social computing research, Isaac organized the first Social Software Forum in China. He is also a pedagogical consultant to several local institutions and acts as an advisor for some local tech firms on business strategy. Mao once wrote an infamous open letter to Google, challenging the search engine giant to support anti-censorship efforts and change its China strategy well before the episode exploded in a show of media fireworks in early 2010.

Sharism, broadly speaking, is an ideology that attempts to reconcile the sometimes idealistic cultures of open source and new media theory with the tech business community, creating viable options for both content sharing and progressive models of profitability. Expanding on a conception of “cloud intelligence” that he has presented previously in several exhibitions and essays, Isaac Mao here clarifies how and why everyone from artists and dissidents to investors and marketers should open up their lives and work in order to protect their own interests, offering a solution for networked creativity that moves beyond the Californian ideology at long last. Hoping to hear a more personal perspective on how this technical framework may one day be implemented, Isaac Mao met with me in the basement cafe of the Sogo Department Store in Causeway Bay on a rainy Hong Kong day, just days before his second child was born.

RP: I’m glad we found the chance to meet today, because I was moderating a panel on the opening up of digital art archives at the Wikitopia conference on collaborative futures yesterday and we talked briefly about Sharism. In that vaguely academic context, it seems that the theoretical framework of the project is relatively clear at this point, but have you made any progress in actual implementation, in getting the word out to a wider audience?

IM: That’s part of the philosophy of Sharism: you have to tell people how it can work in the physical world, the real world. I try to observe how people can benefit from these ideas in daily life, particularly through their organizations and other social activity like so-called social enterprises. Sharing is not just giving; there is also a return on your interests. It amplifies your contribution to society, without which you cannot be sustainable all the time. Before I started the Sharism project I focused more purely on technology, especially on how people implement different kinds of new technologies that help people meaningfully collaborate. We should try to think about the marks and traces that we create over time. The traditional system does not truly log our achievements in the long-term. Sharism gives you a path: you can always look back, and we can maintain have our own grassroots space on a human scale, a history written by individuals. With this we can create a scenario of cloud intelligence, and as people relay their knowledge into this cloud one by one these changes can reach a certain level.

You can easily see with Twitter how an idea travels around the world very quickly now because people can use a tool as simple asthe “RT,” or retweet. The message can break through borders, from country to country and community to community, from language to language. By the way, “RT,” this short form, was created by me several years ago, because when I started using Twitter people used the phrase “retweet,” but in 140 characters that presents a severe limitation. We had to shorten it, so I started using this very short form, “RT,” and people liked it, and it has now become an official terminology. It helps speed up the relaying of information. This is actually long-term thinking. Others had used other forms, like “RET” and others, but I thought if we wanted to keep both the meaning and the pronunciation “RT” made the most sense. My son, who should be born later this week, will be named Retweet. Just kidding–his name is Ricky, or Ruiqi in Chinese, which does sound like retweet. My daughter’s name is Vicky. It’s all related. If I have a third child I will call him Blog, maybe.

I keep everything in mind. We are living in a new world. People are not just single individuals. We’re living in separate islands, but we’re creating a new topography. There is infrastructure now to connect with other islands. There is a sense of intrusion. Traditionally we had our privacy borders, but if we expand our social borders we will unavoidably overlap with others. The expansion of this social radius can help people connect to each other in a more coherent way. People can send content and pure connection. In this current setting, we have to sit down to have this conversation–that’s okay, it’s a traditional way of communication. Sometimes we have to focus on a task at hand. But we now have many other options. Even when I’m focusing on something, maybe talking to you, other ideas appear and can connect with some friend online, maybe putting me in touch with someone else at the same time, because we are now connected more than ever before.

RP: Speaking of which, how does privacy fit in with the context of Sharism?

IM: I think privacy is becoming more important. Sharism gives people a better sense of the social spectrum. Previously, we only had two polar modes: private and public, and of course we don’t like our private things to become public. However, we are now living in a spectrum that we never sensed before. Some things are private at some times, but at others they are not, depending on the context or who we are with. This is a spectrum that we can manage and come to consensus on what kind of information we can share or don’t like to share. Sometimes I share different things to different people. It’s a kind of strategy. We intuitively manage privacy now. Of course sometimes I don’t like to share my private phone number and private address in some places, like perhaps in China. But in other countries it may be different, depending on cultural difference or safety.

But we are seeing changes. In China, many dissidents and activists are open up their personal information. Why? Because previously they just wanted to close it down to protect themselves without being tracked by the government. Someone might want people to know his position so he can do things secretly. But now many are opening up this information because they see the social power. Once they’ve opened up their position, home phone, and travel plans, more people in the cloud know where they are at the same time as the authorities. He is protected even as he is tracked. This has happened over the past two years.

There was the case of Peter Guo in Xiamen, for example: he was arrested last July in the early morning. Several policemen knocked on his door and took him to the station, then fell asleep again because it was so early. Peter was able to take back his mobile phone from the desk and sent out a Twitter message saying “SOS, I have been arrested in Xiamen.” He just shared this message openly, and then it was retweeted and became a major topic of conversation. I didn’t see the message until 12 hours later, because I was in a conference, and I checked my timeline and saw many people were buzzing around this incident. So another idea popped up: if I retweet it, I’m just telling people what happened, but I could do it in a creative way. So I said “Guo Baofeng, your mother is calling you home for dinner.” This became another meme that appeared everywhere and became very popular. Then, two weeks later, after more people had sent messages to the police station on traditional postcards, he was eventually released. A different case in our history.

People want to support dissidents and rights organizations, but at the same time they have to care for personal safety. If you support someone, you could get into trouble as well. But if you only send a postcard, or 140 units of information, who can touch you? There is very little information in this meme transferred from one person to another across weak links. You don’t need to put very much effort in to support this. But if you are connected, this can become a huge thing. So Sharism is about studying the path of value: how people transfer some information based on a value trajectory from A to B to C to D, and D might be quite different from me, from a different cultural background, different language, or different country. But we share the same sentiment in this message, maybe just a portion. For example, the sentence “I live in Beijing.” The “Beijing” could be a part of the information that shares a sentiment with other people who have lived in Beijing or are living in Beijing. If you have more information with this sentence we can see how many people can share the same sense and generate resonance from this message.

For those people doing social marketing work, I suggest they create interesting and creative sentences to transfer their marketing ideas to people, because they can reach more people and get more retweets and copies. This can change a lot of traditional business models. We are starting a new world with a new information pattern. People are not living in an information bubble any longer; they are living in an information web. It’s a fabric, all woven together. The key thing is the node. Who links who together? It’s a network in parts. When the information, the meme, is transferred from one to another, why does it stop? Or why is it relayed onwards? There are a number of interesting theories.

I studied neuroscience a bit, and the neurons inside your brain tend to resemble social structures, so our individuals can be social neurons. Perhaps they different from biological neurons in structure, but the theory can be similar. We can see how people create their own input and output channels to each other. We all have many different channels to connect to different people in different contexts. If we could bring such things into a technical setting we wouldn’t need to take care of each channel manually all the time–otherwise we get totally overloaded. Many people are concerned with this right now, information overload. It is already a huge burden. How can I deal with it all? How can I manage to keep up with blogs, microblogs, social networks, and so on? Technologies can try to simplify all of this. By sharing such information, more people can join and more information can be shared.

We do not just copy but also relay information. I call this role the intelligence agent, something similar to the process of biological evolution from very simple elements to a DNA structure with information embedded in cells to more complex organs and then species. This kind of information is cumulative, and can be stored, copied, derived, and relayed. We can see the changes of the biological world that eventually became the human being through this transformation of information. We have 100 billion neurons in our brains, and perhaps many more in our networks. If we can develop those networks we can reach a higher level of intelligence. However, these discrete individuals have never been socially well-connected in the past, and there has been nothing to assist in establishing connections between them. Now we have our own agents online. Even if I were to die today, my Twitter account could still impact people. It still works. It’s like a life extension, very much like the transhuman imagination of many physical futurist expectations.

This is the social transhuman revolution, an agent of change. You are no longer just yourself, but actually a part of a social being trying to develop a higher level of intelligence based on collective output that can then be transferred to another node to collaborate. Things like Wikipedia, a kind of simultaneous collaborative archive, put us into real time intelligence. All the information relayed from one agent to the next is intended not just for that one person, but rather for one larger social body. There are many synapses around me: I can manage, publish, subscribe, and so on.

Publishing will become a very important action in the future. We have some applications today already, like RSS feeds for blogs. When we subscribe to already published feeds, we usually do not know exactly how many feeds we are viewing, because we are always adding new ones and deleting older ones, or merging multiple feeds into into new ones. These kinds of things always evolve, and if we use these channels all the time we can begin to control our own social neurons. But the neuron may have more emergent possibilities than we expect. For example, when I ask something on Twitter I never know where the answer will come from. Many people are socially active in the Twittersphere, but this is incomplete. We need to see more kinds of applications and pipelines linking them together, but then this process could be sped up very quickly.

Information that took a night to travel around a year ago, might now take only 10 hours, and soon just five minutes. It becomes a challenge for people. As we can imagine, privacy is something very significant for many people, and now that we see more and more information shared there are private things that come into play, like my location. I may want to share my location, here in Sogo in Causeway Bay. Or say because I am talking with you I don’t want to share the location, because I don’t want other people to know I’m talking to someone here, or maybe I do want them to know because I see it as a kind of opportunity. This thought process is an economic pattern. If I share this information, who might see the message? I have 17,000 followers on Twitter, so I think perhaps 1,000 are now watching my feed. I will weigh the value of sharing this information with these people. But I don’t think about this consciously anymore. I just enlarge my thinking, and it happens intuitively. It’s actually very subtle. This value judgment is very important. Is something valuable to me or others? Is it good for me, or for society? Constant judgement.

With Sharism I see the many effects and achievements of sharing, which have helped me open up my own life further. When I see a chance to use Foursquare or Gowalla, I evaluate what this may be able to do today that it could not do yesterday. When I share, I see the effects or returns that can be good for me, a very good cycle, and not just in one direction. There is a circuit between social neurons from A to B to C and then back to A, and the object of circulation can be a result, an answer, or an entire upgraded intelligence. I see the benefit to me, a kind of return throughout this process. So if it doesn’t require too much effort, why don’t I share more? I see return around me constantly. Then I can share some information, some propaganda peraps, because I alreay have the network. If I want to save someone, say a child in Shanghai who needs a blood transfusion, if he reaches out to someone like me that information can achieve better propagation.

I can thus do something good for society. This was the work of the media in traditional society. People want to dominate the media, be it a newspaper or a TV station, in order to broadcast a brand name or a product, but now this is a mission for everyone. Everyone becomes a media outlet, but also a brand. We are channels, and we can easily use this tool to do good. Or maybe something bad, but then people will do the same things to us. When we tries to do something bad, our social surroundings judge the value of our node and unsubscribe from us, disconnect us, drop us. Our value drops, and we can only raise our value by doing more good things. This is social balance. This is more like the utopias we have imagined over the past centuries. How can we do this?

We cannot rely on just a few elites to do this; we must rely on the whole social fabric. Sharism offers a chance to peer through the whole media landscape. You can see Barack Obama, the Dalai Lama, and Ai Weiwei, but they are on the same level as you, not like the hierarchies of traditional social status. We can see through to these people. So in theory we can move from six degrees of separation to five or even less, because now we have more social synapses touching other people. Perhaps they are very weak links, but you can see through the world with little separation. We need this connectivity because we need more justice, more openness and transparency around the world. We need to reduce disputes between people. Not debate, because it is good to argue, but we don’t want people to just fight. This can be peaceful. We can see the balance. Living in a well-balanced world is much more harmonious. There is no harmony in China. It is passive. Someone wants to “harmonize” you. I am looking for a harmonious world in which people use diversity to adjust the world by themselves.

We see solutions emerging from these connections on a large scale, solutions to problems of the environment, global conflict, and poverty. We can see that many of these solution rely on new information. The media industry has changed. They cannot easily control the flow of information any longer–corporations have to rely on the people to evaluate their products and services. If you do something bad as a corporation, I can challenge you directly through your own channels. You now share the status of the consumer in the media. Many people are worried about this, because the users may not care about the well-being of a corporate entitty but you still have to care about them. Many companies today are using social media to try to promote themselves, touch base with potential customers, and also better serve people. Two years ago when I was a curator of Ars Electronica, we defined cloud intelligence as our theme, hoping artists and technicians could work together to see through the bubbles. Artists live in art bubbles and educators in education bubbles, but they never try to connect with one other. We are trying to break through those boundaries.

RP: I’d like to stop you there for now and move on to something a bit more specific. The last time we spoke in Shanghai at Xindanwei last spring we talked about the ideology of Sharism, growing out of your widely circulated essay in Freesouls. I think a lot of people are now pretty clear on that. Today I want to know a little more about implementation. Last spring you were still brainstorming with collaborators Jon Philips and Christopher Adams, talking about whether this should become a software service based in the cloud, some kind of general platform, or what. Would you hook it into blogs and other formats, like the plugins that now allow trackbacks on shared content? Is that where Sharism is going now? Do you have a technical platform that you’re working on at the moment?

IM: Exactly. We are using Sharism.org as an open platform to identify a protocol. A protocol, like the GSM protocol that makes phones talk to each other in the same language, allows two entities to shake hands and then transfer information. We are all social neurons with synapses and nodes, and if we care about those connections through something like Sharism we need a common protocol to communicate. We have now defined something called the Open Share Protocol (OSP) based on the description of value-added paths. This is about trying to give technical tools to individuals and interfaces to businesses.

Essentially, if I mention something about Coca-Cola, their system will collect my post and give me a credit, recording this mention and linking it to my identity (which may include my own website, a Twitter account, or other objects), increases my :share” through the protocol. Shares are accumulated in this way, and there is now a relationship between Coca-Cola and me. I store one share in their share bank, and it is impossible for anyone else to remove this share from the cloud. As Coke now stores one share for me, other systems in other banks copy that share. Perhaps Air China also copies the share, copying all of my shares from Coke to their own system, and then synchronizes this data with other businesses through my system. It’s an open source system, an open share system.

If something is regarded as valuable, it will be shared. The basis of the share bank system is the OSP, which is entirely based on goodwill. We want people to be more open to do more things together on the side of justice. This will help more people to understand and recognize influence: if I have more shares and have become influential, I can then recommend you as a “good” person, a shareable person. So then at that point other businesses can reward you, not only for mentioning their corporate interests but also for sharing in general. You might receive a voucher to buy a Coke at 10% off. In this way, people are rewarded and will have incentives to share more, thereby becoming a social gatekeeper to evaluate these businesses. The more they share the more incentives they attain from different businesses. And the shares are never reduced, because once you’ve shared no once can say you didn’t share.

RP: So who signs the shares to begin with? All corporations?

IM: I think some of the first entities to start the share bank systems will be social enterprises, because they encourage people to share most of the time anyway. They want people to contribute and give. At the same time, they also want to record your contributions. For example, we now have billboards that announce the largest charity donors each year. But that’s not enough, because there millions of people who contribute time and social power, much more than just that leading financial portion of the long tail. We need more social contributions from everyone. This kind of sharing system can be implemented first in social enterprises, like Xindanwei, which will support the OSP. Any time you blog your blogging platform will record your shares within your own system, but if you mention Xindanwei the two systems will talk to each other through this protocol, and then the blogging system will trackback to the share bank in Xindanwei, which will add value to your share account.

RP: Does that happen automatically, or is it reviewed personally by someone on the corporate end? What if there is a “bad share” that negatively affects the corporation?

IM: It has to be done manually. They judge the work. But there are no good or bad shares. That’s an argument at the moment amongst the developers. I strongly suggest that an organization like Xindanwei should still be required to recognize even negative comments. The protocol supports mentioning, the fact of mentioning, because we see a lot of rubbish online today for purposes of search engine optimization. But if it leads back to a real identity, like Isaac or Robin, we won’t want to just publish rubbish because then our social value would be quickly reduced. The businesses should not care too much that they are criticized. If your blog tracks back to the Xindanwei protocol, they cannot easily refuse that publicity. But this system might evolve with further discussion.

RP: It seems like this could be really easy to send spam, effectively. If you were to want a lot of free Coke you could write about it all the time, completely ignoring more central things like Creative Commons or Sharism itself, in your case.

IM: This is a very interesting thing. Because you can share a lot of things, and no matter what you share one system or another will record you. But if you put out too much, your social network will dramatically reduce your value. You have to judge for yourself.

RP: So how does your network affect the shares that you’re collecting?

IM: The network itself is a kind of gatekeeper for the platform as a whole, which is a very distributed system. These people, these human nodes, can add more weight to the value of your sharing. For example, if the Coke share bank tries to record your sharing, it will judge your points based on the surroundings of your social graph, or how far your share gets. How large or how distant your sharing can reach generates an impact on your worth. They might recognize you, for example, for one share per instance of sharing plus one share for each person you influence with that instance. This kind of sharing might differ from one bank to another. Xindanwei, for example, might have some alterations. Perhaps one blog post might be worth one share in that bank, but when you collect one thousand shares you can get a 20% discount. You have to share more to reach this kind of incentive.

For Air China, perhaps you may need 10,000 shares directly related to their airline for an incentive, but you will be able to reach this through sharing about different things, not just about the airline. In the traditional mileage system, you have to depend on their flights to accumulate points, but they never really reward people who are generally open in society. It’s a closed system, and it doesn’t try to reward people for being good in life. If you don’t take Air China, you have no points. If this value were reflected across systems and corporations, it could be judged more easily. Although you’ve never touched base with this specific airline before, they may still reward you for your ability to share. This sense of value can break down the borders between different enterprises and their values and true social values.

RP: Would that unduly reward people who are already influential and well-connected for reasons that might not be related to sharing? For example, someone like you or Joi Ito might write a lot about open culture and this world is a part of what you do, so it makes sense that you have tens of thousands of followers and can accumulate that level of share value. But what about someone like pop star Justin Bieber, real estate mogul Pan Shiyi, or even the fake Sina Microblog account for Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. How do you accord value to their work? Is it all done through follower counts?

IM: It’s about resonance. We can use a Twitter mention as an instance of sharing, and that can trackback to your original source and also support other systems like retweeting. It can calculate how much retweeting you have done and how many Google links point back to your post. All of this can help recalculate sharing value. So one share today might become 10 shares tomorrow, and 100 shares next week. This is based on a changing timeline, but it requires computing power allocated at all times. With all these users and all these records, we need some kind of distributed computing, or a supporting system like Google or Twitter itself to do this kind of thing.

There are people who gain a million followers in one night, perhaps because they’re already famous in the real world, but then never say anything really valuable, only tweeting a word or a line every week. That makes it hard for valuable shares to accumulate on the various systems. They cannot generate dynamic share accumulation without a blog and other content tools. It could happen that, with a million followers, someone could be influential just because he has value in the traditional world that’s already recognized. But someone else with just a thousand followers could have a similar effect through the strength of sharing, content, and networks. A good message could generate a million retweets. I think this is actually more fair than before. In traditional media theory, if I have a million subscribers I’m on top of everything. But then someone else yelling on the street, and only five people can hear him and no one cares because the message is inaudible and cannot be relayed. But now we have persistent paths from one person to the next. I cannot just become disconnected. This value gives that peson more power, helping common people to become collaborators more important than celebrities.

So what we want to see is of course a better world , but we have to do something technically, like the OSP I mentioned. It’s something we have to promote to businesses, explaining why they should like to see this kind of system implemented in their airline company. They won’t see immediate return, but we want to tell them that they can see very quick return through this kind of collaboration. First, you have to be more shareable to the public, you have to create publishing channels and use social media to build your social identity online. You have to be more interactive with consumers. This is one part.

Another part is that you if you want more people to mention your brand name, talk about your product or service, and help you improve your quality, you have to use this kind of system to quantify how much value people contribute to your business. You have to recognize their value, not just by using your service and paying money to you but also by paying attention and giving information to you. This kind of value hasn’t really been evaluated before, a lack most visible with Apple. They sell a lot of iPads and iPhones these days–I might talk to ten friends showing off my new iPad, and maybe five of them would go to the Apple store the next day, but Apple does not reward me for my contribution. Quantifying this was not easy before, but today I think people can be rewarded more easily. If I like an application, maybe ten of my followers will go to the app store and purchase it. Apple should recognize that. That’s a kind of referral, similar to the traditional sense but now quantified.

RP: What about referral codes now where you go to a website and, if you add my name, I get points attributed to my account?

IM: It’s good, but it’s like a coupon system: it’s very narrow. It’s always a closed system, because it cannot be used again the next day and my referral to others can easily be collected by middlemen in a moneymaking system. They don’t really know the real value of this productivity system–they’re just exchanging coupons for cash. This kind of thing is always abused in some way. Because it is not open enough, it does not really encourage people to reuse your services and becomes less effective when misused. Other people who contribute to your service outside this channel are not rewarded, so they give up telling other people about it. It’s not fair. We are looking for a fair system. This kind of system, if we have a good implementation in some good seed companies, we hope to see positive feedback for the sharing system. people who intend to share care about their social reputation, so they will use it properly. The share system will try to balance itself, and we believe these social effects always work. It is a planning system in itself.

RP: People are talking now about how Google Instant will kill SEO, because now when you attempt to search for something you can change your search in the middle of typing and never see the same keyword-based structure again. Are you worried that this kind of Sharism referral system will lead to a new form of social media optimization in which people begin to use only keywords as the content of their sharing?

IM: We have experienced many cases of abuse throughout the two years of our intensive study of social media development. We have seen some identities that try to spam other people with hashtags, a lot of hashtags in their messages and retweets, in addition to adding a large number of other people to get attention, and so on. But after a period of time people learned to recognize that, starting to pay attention to these people not for the information but for the bad behavior. They learn to unfollow them, block them, cut them out. Twitter also pays attention to this. There are many levels of gatekeepers. I very much emphasize the social part of this equation. When more people begin to pay attention to these issues, they will move these problems out of the network, filtering them out. If anything, spam becomes less important than before and after a while these identities give up on their own, because it takes more effort to maintain it this way. If a spammer senses that it’s less viable to pay that price, he will quit. It’s an economic evaluation.

As social neurons we are always evaluating our output and input. We have to put in effort to create output. How can we assure that our subscribers are important for our contributions? These kinds of things help me adjust my own contributions to sharing and to media in general. This happens on a macro scale with a large-scale impact. Looking at a large scale over a period of time, we ultimately see balance. There may be disturbances and bubbles, but they are easily balanced out over time. It is very exciting to witness. I want to see more people joining such movements in order to benefit from their sharing. With the current quantity of sharing, if I share today I can accumulate a large number of pieces one by one, but next year I might lose my records of today’s sharing entirely.

I’m thinking of how important people in business can be to this sharing moment, allowing us to see the effects. People can recognize each other and their intentions. Like Chris Anderson said, we can see more freebies from the world. What many people care about is money, because it can be exchanged for other things. But now we are exchanging another currency–that is what we are defining here, a currency called the share. The airline company uses shares to reward, and consumers use shares to exchange services from the airlines, getting a better discount. At the same time, however, the airline is also exchanging with other businesses, so these other businesses can have discounts like guest flights and so on. People are using this currency to move from one person to another business to another business. This can become its own economic system. Talking about something in traditional business, we might not want to say too much because it cannot be rewarded with actual money. But in the new economic world the mentioning is part of the currency. The physical world connects to the information world.

RP: We’ve talked a bit about how that connection works for the user, rewarded through the corporate share banks. But you, of course, in addition to being a social activist interested in the new economy, are also a venture capitalist working with investment technologies, among other things. Have you found a way to monetize this platform, particularly for your development company?

IM: The protocol is open, but I am trying to invest in new businesses to adopt the share bank system, plugging into their existing business models that for the moment only care about money. For now we have to live in a world in which a business must still stand up in the traditional world, but as much as we want the money back we also want more businesses sharing better goods and services with the public. We want people buzzing and mentioning. We see that this could happen within two to five years, with more social values for the business in which we invest today. That’s our belief. And we can get more products and services sold to the traditional world this way. Looking at consumer psychology, they believe the mentions of other people. And today we only use one part of the sharing system, one particular value–we like people to mention our business, so we reward tastemakers who like to share information. If we can get their attention, get them buzzing, we might be able to create influence over people who don’t like to share.

RP: Does Coca-Cola or any other corporate entity have to pay you in order to use the protocol? Or is your business model is all external services?

IM: No. I don’t want to charge anyone to use an open sharing system. Or the conceptual design work. However, we may launch some kind of Sharism University program to teach people how to design their product and build their business along these lines. We may collaborate with certain MBA schools on how to develop curricula and demo courses on how to redefine businesses, or on how to invest in sharing and social media in order to enable you to earn more from your business strategy. This kind of work could generate money from training and teaching. It’s a kind of service.

RP: And what about user data? Are you collecting, caching, or keeping in any profitable way?

IM: We don’t keep any data at the central core. We don’t want to be the Google for mentions or reputation banking. We want that data to reside on different clouds that may be required to automatically synchronize data, or work through conflicts of record inconsistency. For example, say Coke recognizes you for one million shares and Air China values you very differently. The system itself will adjust that value discrepancy over time, so some days later these companies may communicate and technically negotiate the value of your sharing. That’s the algorithm, like page ranking at Google, which is constantly adjust. The same thing could happen for different companies. Your value would then never be a million at Coke and zero at Air China. Perhaps for the first day, but after a few days they would renegotiate. The system would dilute itself.

This is a kind of social power as well. The system, from initial conception to its current state, has become more and more integral, explaining on its own those missing parts of the world. Traditionally, we do business with one track and charity with another. If an evil man makes a lot of money and then does good things after a long time, there might not be any records of his wrongdoing. That’s not fair. Naturally we try to integrate every part of human behavior: business, creativity, and information. So the world can hopefully become more just, as in our imagination. The theory of really doctrine of Sharism is becoming more and more integral to self-implementation. More and more people are joining this research, but it’s certainly not completed yet. I still have to do more to evangelize, to try to get more people to develop these technical portions in order to see through the inefficient parts of the system so we can implement and adjust it in the real world. But we have a good mission.

RP: Do you have a launch date for the protocol yet?

IM: We want to try to do some soft launch activities first, like the upcoming Sharism conference during the Get it Louder festival in Shanghai in late October and different training or educational events in different areas for MBAs, businesses, artists, and educators. Looking at the whole community, when we have the whole thing buzzing we will set a real launch date for the protocol. The technical implementation could be more mature at that point. Roughly, I think maybe by the end of 2011 we might have a more official announcement about the project first, and then a publishing date for my Sharism book with a stronger collection of more supporting historical theories. This is not a theory that was developed overnight, but is rather based on a large number of educational examples. It’s not just for business. We want students and teachers to share, to become another realm of sharing. The system is not just one-directional; it is far more complex. We want to inherit the legacies of behaviorism, constructivism, and so on, helping students to understand that if they share more, they can gain more from their surroundings and build their confidence. More confidence for the children could be a beautiful thing. They could trust the world. They could trust their surroundings. That’s Sharism.

During a recent debate over sound art that seemed to grip several quarters of the Hong Kong art world for the better part of the summer of 2010, one of the recurring topics of discussion was the relationship between art and music. Dominated by figures emerging from the contemporary classical and experimental spheres, however, this has been a distinctly theoretical conversation, revolving around the parallel but temporally offset historical development paths taken by the contexts of music—in and beyond the concert hall—and art—in and beyond the white cube of the gallery. Setting aside, for a moment, the many sensitive and intelligent artists working with sound as material, medium, and genre, of which there are many in China–from Yan Jun in Beijing to Yao Dajuin in Taipei and Cedric Maridet in Hong Kong–one particularly overlooked territory may yet contribute something additional to the field: that of independent popular music.

This is a fraught topic, one that often devolves all too quickly into hype for “genre-spanning hipsters” and other distasteful members of the fray labeled “creative China.” On the other hand, this was also, until recently, a marker of some cultural resentment, especially as the period that saw musicians like Zuoxiao Zuzhou sharing live-work space in the East Village with artists like Ai Weiwei gave way to the auction bubble for Chinese contemporary art and international obscurity for domestic music. For the historical background to this transition, see the important scholarly work on politics, identities, and relationships within and between these two communities carried out by critic and curator Maya Kóvskaya. The topic of this column, however unfortunately, is both less expansive and more prosaic, attempting to examine several of the more recent instances of exchange between contemporary art and independent pop music in an effort to determine what further dialogue might be able to accomplish, and what alterations to this process may be necessary.

In Hong Kong, at least two of the leading artists working locally also lead independent bands. Nadim Abbas, who has lent keyboard and vocals to the disco punk and modulated noise quarter A Roller Control since 2008, is recognized primarily for his visual work, as with the project installed in the Hong Kong Museum of Art exhibition The Hong Kong Seven that compared the varying shapes of window barriers to Rorschach blots and assigned a new superhero identity for each. Having completed advanced formal studies in literary theory and being widely read in critical modalities, Abbas represents a more intellectual pole of the Southern Chinese art scene. With A Roller Control, on the other hand, he fabricates walls of noise uniquely suited to art contexts—which is appropriate, given that the best live music venues in the city more or less recreate the rote/cookie-cutter post-industrial shells from which gallery spaces are created. This is a new incarnation for the group—which previously emphasized more danceable styles—but this seems likely to stick given the increasing preponderance of large-scale cultural festivals, exhibitions, and other events, even as longstanding performance venues like the Fringe Club fade into the background of the local scene.

Also in Hong Kong is the part-time resident, Adrian Wong, who teaches for a portion of the year at the University of California in Los Angeles. He has just recently taken the helm of an energetic group that has seen a quick succession of names, and is at the moment working under the label Fantastic, I Love You. Born and educated in the United States, Wong brings the tactics of rigorous archival and scientific research coupled with a crude sense of humor to the Chinese art world, thus rarely fitting in amongst the more subdued artists emerging from the official Hong Kong art education system. His latest project may be the consummate demonstration of this approach, investigating sobriety as a parameter of expressive performance and offering an unbridled space of energy to a quiet scene.

Artists moonlighting as musicians (or musicians making art, or dilettantes trying out a bit of everything) are nothing new, of course; this is a long-standing tradition in many parts of the world, and the nexus of independent music and experimental art has played an integral role in the historical development of scenes from Los Angeles of the 1960s to the Lower East Side of the 1980s. In Hong Kong, however, this offers new possibilities for less systematic, more purely affective or sensory approaches to the creation of cultural objects, creating a plane of exchange removed from the straitjacketed processes of traditionally insular studio practice that is derived from an odd imagination of scholarly painting implicit to the post-colonial ideologies of education at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, from which (until recently) the majority of practicing local artists graduated. We are also beginning to note similar trends in mainland China, though the quality of musical practice in that situation is highly variable.

The most interesting example at the moment may be the relationship between N12, a group of painters who studied together at the Central Academy of Fine Arts that once included now well-known figures like Qiu Xiaofei and Wang Guangle, and Shanshui, a record label operated by Sun Dawei that represents 8-bit and intelligent dance music artists like Sulumi (a stage moniker for Sun himself), Liman, Dead J, and B6. Recognizing that commercial success had bolstered visual art long before music, a nebulous organization known as the N12 Foundation has offered funding for publicity and compilation publications for the label, while Shanshui events have also seen participation from a crowd of like-minded painters and other artists. This cooperative relationship is no doubt spurred on by the relationship between Cao Yang, the lead singer of the respected electronic rock band Exit A, and N12, though it should be said that there is also a certain overlap in terms of aesthetic sensibility, as with A Roller Control and Fantastic, I Love You in Hong Kong.

Other attempts at cross-genre synergy, as with those by the Modern Media music critic, Jian Cui, the second-rate punk musician, Wang (Gia) Yue, of Hang on the Box, and others to present themselves as artists, often under the aegis of exhibitions and markets known as “Mary Inn” and organized by You Yang, have fallen remarkably flat, offering stunningly naive interpretations of the discourses of contemporary art. Falling into this latter category, too, would be the “graphic art” with which many self-consciously hip foreign observers and young Chinese are enamored, works that offer nothing whatsoever for intelligent viewers and do little to enhance the music, design, and apparel with which it is associated. Much of this activity is carried out in hopes of building wider markets for this material, an explicitly statistics-oriented commercial aim for which serious artists and musicians have little patience.

These highly visible missteps notwithstanding, the transferral of artistic energies into music (and, more occasionally, of musical energies into art, though this asymmetry derives more from the primary position of independent music in the popular consciousness rather than the elitism of high culture) can be extraordinarily productive in venting some of the pretensions attendant to the professional practice of art in a society largely ignorant of and removed from international cultural histories. This can occur through the changing relationships between subject and audience, a distinction that has attracted so much commentary in the literature that it requires no further theoretical articulation here. In the art exhibition, which is typically open to the public but limited to geographically marginal sites, entities that range from environments to objects and images rarely ever offer personal presence, no matter how impressive they may appear. In this model, such phenomena are intended for review by a large audience but, ultimately, for consumption by only a minority. In the musical performance, live human bodies present a rehearsed but transient experience funded jointly by all viewers. These two divergent models indeed can lend theoretical support for experiments in configuration within both distinct discourses; the key to success lies primarily within focus on the assemblage of the scene, as outlined here, and aesthetic coherence or at least stylistic consistency. This is where so many musicians-cum-artists fail: a lack of respect for disciplinary histories and boundaries allows for an undiscerning desire for linkage and connection between scenes and individuals, thereby bringing in cultural products with no meaningful relationship to the work at hand. Fortunately, the art scenes of Hong Kong and mainland China alike find in the karaoke lounge a litmus test pertaining to the viability of this crossover, a filter that discriminates between the endlessly devolving and overlapping categories of artist, musician, consumer, and pretender.

Marcel Duchamp inaugurated one of the manifold lineages of experimental art in the twentieth century with a push towards what he termed “non-retinal art,” launching a plea for the conceptual and the contextual; clearly, these were fertile seeds indeed. Duchamp’s thesis called for a break with art that functioned primarily on a visual level, if such a thing existed at all, but it was not long before a counterpoint emerged in the parallel narratives of minimalism and, ultimately, op art. But the non-retinal for Duchamp was more than this guarded dualism; in fact, this phrase was coined with particular reference to art that took as its primary concern the making and definition of art, a history that, in some models, reached its apex between the 1913 Armory Show and Malevich’s 1921 monochromes. Although this latter painter may have been working at the notion from the opposite direction, Duchamp insisted on the primacy of the mind, if not concept itself, over the visual plane.

It would be absurd, of course, to suggest that the visual plane was categorically dominant throughout Western art history prior to Duchamp’s intervention. Likewise, the field of music, from classical through to the avant-garde, rarely ever entailed a purely aesthetic experience. Nevertheless, it found its iconoclast in the person of John Cage, even if his revolution proved to enact a different situation entirely. This revolution was later wrapped up in the phrase “sound-in-itself,” although Cage himself rarely if ever employed the term, and it offered a wholly transcendental proposition: that “pure sound,” distinct from both music and noise, could mobilize a universalizing function. (This may be one of the root concepts behind Boris Groys’s oft-cited “weak universalism,” which, appropriately enough, discusses the monochromatic Malevich works as a major influence.) Cage also wished to dethrone the privileged status of the visual, resisting the popular model of sensation in which most auditory composition must invoke or emerge from some corresponding visual phenomenon.

This restitution of the aural found an unlikely second wave in Derek Jarman, the cult film director known within the art world as much for his garden as for his collaborations with sound artists and pop musicians on projects that could only loosely be termed music videos. Most pertinently, his haunting last film, Blue, consists of seventy-nine minutes of saturated blue and poetic audio narration; composed as the artist himself was going blind due to AIDS-related complications, the piece represents a struggle with the hegemonic terms of visuality, seemingly closing off the painterly films of Jarman’s earlier career. Derived from the monochromes of Yves Klein, themselves a lush if psuedo-spiritual rejoinder to the non-retinal Malevich, this continuous frame of blue has come to occupy an iconic position in the trajectory of queer theory. One critic has even set the soundtrack-oriented film in opposition to the opening lines of the Metaphysics: from Aristotle’s “above all others the sense of sight” to Jarman’s “pray to be released from the image.”

This last critical attempt may come across as hyperbolic, but there is no denying these ruptures in the narratives of genre and style. Potentially equaling these incidents in terms of gravity and import is Seth Kim-Cohen’s 2009 publication of the tome In the Blink of an Ear. Therein, the artist and scholar argues for a rereading of sound art history, looking towards a “non-cochlear” approach to sound art that would owe more to Duchamp than to the currently dominant justifications of sound-in-itself. Kim-Cohen cites the militant medium-specificity of high modernism as a key culprit in the transformation of sound art into a form of music culturally acceptable independent of context, and in response gestures towards the intertextuality of virtually all sonic artifacts produced today: the friction between sight and sound is collapsed, instead productively giving way to a biologically but not conceptually phenomenological model of perception.

The thesis may seem overwrought to observers of contemporary art, who will be familiar with the use of sound as a component of any number of artists otherwise working in the rhetoric of the conceptual. Indeed, sonic moving parts and, increasingly, speaker cones have become an often requisite element of such installations in the expanded field: one need only recall Bruce Nauman’s “Days,” which premiered in the 2009 Venice Biennale with several rows of whispering speakers, or, closer to home, Adrian Wong’s talking ducks and mumbling stuffed figures, or even the collaborative project recently installed by Vito Acconci and Ai Weiwei. But, like video art that happens to include an audio track, these projects do not consciously or rigorously engage with the notion of sound as medium, nor do they operate within the history of the last half-decade of what has become known as sound art.

Unfortunately, any use of sonic properties within contemporary art practice is often handed the mantle of successful sound art, even if the work in question more properly belongs to another genre entirely. In mainland China, for example, experimental musicians, noise performers, and sound artists are quite often all included in the same festival programs, live shows, and exhibitions: excluded by the art establishment on the one hand and the institutions of classical music and the performing arts on the other, this motley crew has successfully created a scene, but all at the expense of serious engagement with the material itself. In the midst of a deluge of field recordings and patches for the absurdly pervasive (and almost always pirated) Max/MSP/Jitter software package, critics have begun to wonder: Why are all of these artists using sound in the first place? How do they differentiate their practices from music or sculpture? What are they discovering about sound and how this material fits into the narrative arcs of the conceptual and the retinal?

At the limit case of “non-cochlear sound” or conceptual sound art, we approach the asymptotic value of sound without sound. Sound, removed from sound art, does not necessarily lead to the purely conceptual; indeed, it could be an intensely sensory experience in its own right, as with Stephen Vitiello’s “Fear of High Places and Natural Things” (2004). In this installation, a set of speaker cones hang from the gallery ceiling, emitting no tones audible to the human ear but nevertheless vibrating constantly. There is a sense of the uncanny at work here, imparting a feeling of nervous terror that functions physically through sound waves but aesthetically through both the visual and the tactile. Clearly borrowing the vocabulary of sound art in the form of the speaker cones, the piece nevertheless moves beyond sound proper–or perhaps defines the territory at stake in this distinction.

Similarly, former rock musician turned multimedia dramatist Feng Jiangzhou transforms sound into pressure with his installation “The Discipline in Four Parts” (2008). In a darkened cylindrical space, the visitor sits passively on a short stool surrounded by a steel cage on which some twenty speakers are positioned, emitting vast multi-channel compositions designed to disorient and construct an alternative sensation of space. Sound remains very much present in this project, but moves from a one-dimensional sonic experience to a hacking of auditory sensation for the purpose of building an invisible architecture defined by a medium rarely called upon to play such a role. Confidence in a knowable conceptual origin is disoriented in tandem with the simultaneous displacement of sonic origin. Visual deprivation may be a simplistic maneuver, but here the psuedo-musical compositions that recreate the space can be analogous to the psueo-poetic narration that recreates the visual for Derek Jarman.

Although critic-cum-musician-cum-curator-cum-artist Yan Jun launched his artistic practice with the a series of field recordings transferred directly from released on his experimental record label to the exhibition space in a darkened room, he has since moved on to an increasingly interesting series of ventures into the space of sound within contemporary art, aided by the curators of Vitamin Creative Space. In one sculpture formally resembling the Stephen Vitiello installation noted above, a lone speaker cone sits perched on top of speaker case housing; the cone vibrates and even jumps to the low rumbling sound of a heartbeat of some kind, but it is visually unclear whether this sound is actually emitted by the housing below or the cone above. This sense of ambiguity frees the piece as a whole from becoming too closely tied to the auditory experience, drawing forth an almost physical compulsion to touch the vibrating elements personally.

Approaching the sound barrier from the other direction, Hong Kong composer and artist Samson Young strips down music to some of its most basic elements, ultimately transforming it into sound. For the installation “Beethoven Piano Sonata, nr.1 – nr.14 (Senza Misura)” (2010), the artist has programmed forty-seven exposed circuit boards, each one simultaneously ticking and blinking to the tempo of a single movement of all of Beethoven’s early fourteen piano sonatas. The effect is mesmerizing both visually and sonically, recalling the aesthetics of György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes more than anything else, but simultaneously stripping down such musical experiments in timing and composition to a naked framework of pure temporality, creating a totalizing experiment that verges on pure sound without reducing itself to the exercises in taste typical of sound-in-itself.

The goal of this curatorial program, writ large, is to reexamine the underpinnings of the characteristic styles, concepts, and devices that have come to represent the genre of sound within the field of contemporary art. In this vision, sound moves from medium or material to a more historically and contextually loaded territory, an object that can no more reject the lineages of both Cage and Duchamp than it can avoid participation in the carnival of post-conceptualism altogether. The hope shared by the artists and writers described above, however, is that this notion of sound can find a possibility for expression and consideration in an anti-essentialist space defined as much by the cognitive as by the aural, and as much by critical reflection as by enthusiastic volunteerism. It is a goal that should resonate with other once-struggling genres, and it will no doubt continue to resonate through the gallery spaces that propose to contain it.

“Resonance: Exhibition, Performance, Talks”
Published as publicity materials by Input/Output Gallery. This text describes the specific exhibition program that emerged from the critical discussions mentioned above.
Text by Robin Peckham and Rachel Connelly.

Resonance is an exhibition about the word sound. It is about the sound of the word, the meaning of the word, and the usage of the word; that is to say, it asks what sound is, how sound is used, and what sound can do. One may wonder why an artist would choose to work with sound, as opposed to music or visual art, but would find that answers are rarely forthcoming.

Resonance attempts to present an abstracted territory for this dialogue, stripping sound down to its most basic elements; the same elements that contribute to the other creative modes and methods in question. Just as Seth Kim-Cohen, working in the Duchampian conceptual tradition in his book In the Blink of an Ear, has called for an art of “non-cochlear sound” opposed to the “sound-in-itself” associated with John Cage, this project wonders what happens when the sound is removed from sound art. As an exhibition, it engages in the transformation of music into sound, of sound into pressure, and of the sonic into an anti-essentialist conceptual program.

The goal of this curatorial program, writ large, is to re-examine the underpinnings of the characteristic styles, concepts, and devices that have come to represent the genre of sound within the field of contemporary art. In this vision, sound moves from medium or material to a more historically and contextually loaded territory, an object that can no more reject the lineages of both Cage and Duchamp than it can avoid participation in the carnival of post-conceptualism altogether. Input/Output Gallery presents the works of two artists currently working through this problem: Samson Young, the Hong Kong composer, scholar, and artist known for his contributions to everything from game art to new classical performance, and Yao Chung-Han, the Taipei-based sound artist widely recognized for his research into the breakdown points of the technological matrix that surrounds us. Both are representatives of the new wave of emerging sound cultures across greater China and into the international sphere, offering new points of entry into these questions.

Yao Chung-Han here includes the installation, “I Will Be Broken” (2010), a floor-to-ceiling suspended column of circular fluorescent lamps tied together in a mesmerizing totem with its own power cords. As the piece slowly strangles itself into forced obsolescence with the surges of electricity through both body and frame, its lighting sources fluctuate along with a soft, uncanny buzzing. Although the visual spectacle and conceptual nervousness are at first domineering, the work functions primarily on the level of and through the medium of sound, emitting an atonal and unpredictable sound that requires attention by virtue of its low volume and commands consideration based on its ever-evolving almost organic state. Here, sound is a by-product that comes to both lead and stand in for an abstract choreography of relevance and terror that plays out on the stages of perception, ultimately creating an un-composed cacophony through physical experience.

Approaching the sound barrier from the other direction, Samson Young strips down music to some of its most basic elements, ultimately transforming it into sound. For the installation “Beethoven Piano Sonata, nr.1 – nr.14 (Senza Misura)” (2010), the artist has programmed forty-seven exposed circuit boards, each one simultaneously ticking and blinking to the tempo of a single movement of all of Beethoven’s early fourteen piano sonatas. The effect is mesmerizing both visually and sonically, recalling the aesthetics of György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes more than anything else, but simultaneously stripping down such musical experiments in timing and composition to a naked framework of pure temporality, creating a totalizing experiment that verges on pure sound without reducing itself to the exercises in taste typical of sound-in-itself.

I/O Gallery is proud to offer a stage for these explorations of physical sensation, cognition, composition, temporality, and destruction. Conceived in collaboration with the Society for Experimental Cultural Production, this exhibition–along with an associated series of performances and talks featuring Yang Yeung, Cedric Maridet, and Yao Dajuin among others–hopes to throw into relief the problems that mark discourses of sound, art, music, and new media today, contributing to an ongoing conversation.

Acconci Studio + Ai Weiwei: A Collaborative Project
8 May – 4 July 2010
Para/Site Art Space
G/F, 4 Po Yan St., Sheung Wan, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

The latest culture-spanning, eye-catching curatorial endeavor by Para/Site resident director Alvaro Rodriguez Fominaya purports to bring together two legendary figures: the poet turned artist turned architect Vito Acconci, and the son-of-a-poet turned artist turned architect Ai Weiwei. In reality, these two collaborators met for the first time just several weeks before the opening of this continually evolving, process based endeavor, making it less a two-person exhibition than an experiment in the nature and possibilities of collaboration itself. Now halfway over, it is impossible to tell whether the space will work towards an overarching or totalizing conclusion, or whether it will even continue to accumulate further “works” and other visual features at all; it is the exercise in indeterminacy par excellence.

The starting point for both contributing studios (Acconci Studio and FAKE Design, respectively) is a grid of one meter squares that covers floors, walls, and ceiling, apparently drawn on in permanent marker. Many such squares on the walls have already been filled by photographs of the artists on their joint visit to Hong Kong, audience members during their joint lecture, and scenery no doubt viewed during their joint excursions. A set of some half dozen black speakers are suspended from the ceiling in facing pairs, all of which repeat in intimate whispers the names of the participants: “Vito … Weiwei.” The center of the space contains a cubic frame of white tubing (one meter across each side, of course), which was apparently shipped to the gallery by Ai Weiwei in an accompanying cardboard box of strikingly similar dimensions. To one side, Ai has also contributed a wire model of the Para/Site space, faithfully if inexpertly representing every edge within the gallery. On site it is difficult to determine which elements come from which participating studio, making it unfair to interpret the collaboration as either a single project or the collected works of two artists. It emerges most significantly as the collaborative blog of two strangers with similar interests materialized in three dimensions: an interesting enterprise, no doubt, but perhaps one that relies unduly on the reputations of its contributors.

Over the last few months, German audiences have witnessed a rare opportunity to explore the work of three significantly different but equally important approaches to contemporary art from China. Ai Weiwei is the subject of an expansive solo exhibition at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, an exhibition that documents a broad swath of his practice up to and including recent political interventions. Just as timely but a bit more cryptic, Qiu Zhijie presents a range of new work at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. And in perhaps the most ambivalent of these presentations, Chu Yun offers his first solo exhibition in some time at the Portikus in Frankfurt. All three projects represent strong showings of artists increasingly well-known for inconsistency in institutional and especially international presence; here, unburdened by the pressures and exigencies of art discourse back home in Beijing and with strong curatorial support, all three artists indicate robust methodologies and future directions for the development of socially engaged creative production.

Ai Weiwei offers perhaps the most predictable exhibition, following directly on the heels of a recent solo survey at the Mori in Tokyo. This project engages more fully with the political nature of the artist and activist’s recent activities within China: entitled So Sorry, it stands as the constructive aftermath of a life-threatening wound inflicted by the police as retribution for Ai Weiwei’s investigation into the Sichuan earthquake. This title refers to a new discourse of political communication that Mr. Ai notices emerging through the media in societies labeled totalitarian to some degree or another–including but certainly not exclusive to China. Within the discourse of “so sorry,” governmental failure is supposedly excused through apology not subject to the burden of responsibility; in terms of the Chinese government, this is symptomatic of a refusal to admit the worth of human life.

The Haus der Kunst was constructed by Hitler to showcase the artistic talents of the human race, a context that Ai Weiwei exploits in order to approach the question of critical reflection and aesthetic excellence under the virtually uninterrupted narrative of state power from imperial China to the present. Most poignantly in this respect, for the work “Remembering” the artist has covered the main facade of the building with 9000 backpacks in solid yellow, red, blue, white, and green, the arrangement of which spells out the Chinese characters for “for seven years she lived happily on this world,” quoting the mother of a young victim of the Sichuan earthquake. The natural disaster will be remembered not only as a tragedy of historic proportions, but also as a turning point in the political outlook of contemporary China. It was the seemingly docile and humanitarian investigation into the disproportionate death rate of children in shoddily constructed school buildings–popularly construed as evidence of widespread corruption–that ultimately lead to arrests, beatings, surveillance, and online censorship.

But Ai Weiwei remains an enigmatic figure in this regard. It is widely known that he contributed to the conceptual design of the Herzog and de Meuron Olympic stadium in Beijing, a piece of monumental architecture that stands as one of the crown jewels of the new regime. Of course he later disavowed his participation when it became clear that the international attention would not improve the political situation behind the buildings, referring to the design as a massive toilet seat. In early August 2008, Zhang Yimou animated that architectural environment with his theatrics for the Olympic opening a ceremony, a spectacle-based scenography that was intensely critiqued for its subversion of performer in favor of image. In a tactic that would later be repeated during the 60th anniversary military parade for the People’s Republic, people became pixels. Cutting-edge digital theory thus collides directly with the powerful population dynamics of urban China.

In Munich Ai Weiwei embraces the same aesthetic. Individual victims of the earthquake, represented by the backpacks hanging across the front of the building, disappear into the vocabulary of dissent. Such are the rhetorical techniques required for the serious discussion of such questions in and around China, especially as the stakes of such debate are elevated to questions of life and death. In truth the figuration of the array recurs even in less explicitly political and spectacular work here, as in the room arranged over the foundation of the piece “Soft Ground,” for which the artist photographed in minute detail 929 floor tiles over 380 square meters before having the images reproduced as carpeting at a mill in Hebei. The trompe-l’œil methodology is pedestrian, but the implication of Chinese labor provides an interesting foil to the 70 years of historical and curatorial activity that left its traces over the totalitarian architectural foundations. Nevertheless, it remains a two-dimensional attempt.

Then there is the installation “Rooted Upon,” forming a linguistic diptych with the carpeting upon which it rests. Again falling under the rubric of the array, the piece consists of 100 dead trees in seemingly molded wooden forms vaguely resembling Taihu scholar rocks. According to Ai Weiwei, this sculptural set should recall a sense of growing out of the floor in a metaphorical dialogue with history to engage with the concept of art as the ultimate dictatorship–a rather perplexing explanation indeed. Potentially more interesting is the physical and grammatical relationship between these pieces of wood, clearly acting as the materiality of historical processes, and the carpet, which stands in for the anonymity of ahistorical labor: form itself, or the power that emerges from aesthetics, may indeed be “rooted upon soft ground.”

The walls claustrophobically surrounding these two intriguing installations on all four sides are plastered with “Fairytale People,” individual photographic portraits in black and white of each of the 1001 Chinese visitors to Kassel Ai Weiwei included for his sprawling Documenta project. The massive numbers of discrete elements again recall pixels on an empty monitor, forming a productive dialogue with the nameless laborers embedded within the carpet and the sense of history implied by the wooden formtions. It is difficult to determine what makes the Documenta project compelling and precisely which aspects were destined for failure, but in this particular context the portraits seem to claim a purely visual interest in their own right. Perhaps excessively, the exhibition also includes “Template,” the massive timber temple sculpture that collapsed during Documenta, and reconstructions of visitor living quarters designed by the artist, including a bed and an old-fashioned chair: nothing but the bare physical and cultural necessities for these pixels.

In another gallery Ai Weiwei has installed the new work “Cube in Ebony,” one cubic meter of solid rosewood completed through the technical perfection of traditional craftwork pushed to the extremes of industrial production. Much of this time-intensive work is actually produced through the methodology of relational production by craftsmen who the artist implicates in an almost feudal relationship of patronage: some are employed directly by Ai Weiwei’s own studio, while others remain a phone call away in their own manufacturing settings. Results are similar, as the artist oversees their work voraciously, ensuring that cubes like this one are planed and sanded to mathematical near perfection. The sculpture is here paired with “Ton of Tea,” a cube of equal dimensions composed of compressed tea that aesthetically far exceeds the house of tea shown in the artist’s last exhibition. The visual rhyme is impressive, ultimately shifting the reading of these two works from the concept of sheer materiality back to the labor of production and bringing them back into conversation with “Soft Ground.” But where the latter is produced by anonymous factory workers (however advanced their craft), these cubes are emphatically the work of the hand–and not too many pairs of hands at that.

The exhibition also includes the usual Ai Weiwei standbys: neolithic vases dipped in industrial paint, archival videos of walks along Beijing’s major arteries, chandelier-like sculpture, wooden maps of China, repurposed ancient furniture, and so on. But perhaps most productively, the Haus der Kunst has invited the artist to reopen his blog on their website–an aggressive move to make at a time when his major domestic blog had just been shut down for the latest but certainly not last time. The blog (http://aiweiwei.blog.hausderkunst.de) appears to be run on a relatively open basis, with multiple posts from Ai Weiwei himself, curator Chris Dercon, the exhibition team, and other individuals withs some relationship to the venue. All of this textual material carries on the spirit if not the word of the artist’s previous escapades in the digital realm, inviting impassioned debate and vehement criticism while giving voice to multilingual demands for justice, freedom, or at least critical thinking.

It is gratifying to note that Ai Weiwei’s explicitly activist activities, including the blog, are finally beginning to be recognized as artistic interventions in their own right, but one major hurdle remains: critical understanding of his comprehensive practice must expand to include the possibility of statistical and epistimological methods, including the cataloguing of earthquake victims and resistance to internet censorship, as art. If installations like “Remembering” and the dragon made of backpacks presented in Tokyo are no longer required to stand in as pale epigones of this meaningful work. As the situation stands, these two elements are currently interpreted as wholly distinct spheres of practice, such that China recognizes Ai Weiwei the artist, Ai Weiwei the blogger, and Ai Weiwei the activist. Coming in the wake of time abroad spent recovering from major surgery, this exhibition represents a step towards this still distant vision of integrated practice, but it will be his continued future action in Beijing that will ultimately lead to a fuller understanding of the interplay between these components.

Wang Chunchen was announced as the second biannual recipient of the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards Criticism Prize established by Uli Sigg and judged by Sigg, Richard Vine, Xu Bing, and Qiu Zhijie. Naturally, netizens had some choice words for Wang. Some remarked that his winning topic, “Art Intervenes in Society,” is either logically faulty or old ground already covered by critics Wang Nanyan and Wu Wei, but proposing that Wang Nanyan may not be a politically viable choice. Others questioned the openness of the proceedings, noting that judges Qiu and Xu could be looking out for their own interests. Still others took the opportunity to accuse Chinese critics in general of opportunism.

Director of the Guan Shanyue Art Museum in Shenzhen, Chen Xiangbo, made a series of questionable statements to the press on the occasion of the opening of a large-scale new media art exhibition in his institution. Among other things, he claimed that art is historically behoven to its sponsors, thus justifying government interference with the content of contemporary art. Critic Wu Wei responded with an eloquent argument about the nature of government sponsorship and public tax funds, earning much support among netizens who went on to call for a “cleaning up” of the official or bureaucratic art world.

The geography of the Beijing art world continues to change as an increasing number of studio districts face demolition. The most high profile redevelopment incident occurred recently when the Zhengyang Creative Art District, home to leading painters Liu Xiaodong and Yu Hong, was levelled. Although the hastily organized protest exhibition including artists from Zhengyang and neighboring districts received criticism, netizens by and large delivered a great degree of support to the artists forcibly evicted from their studios.

Online conversation turned to censorship when major blog hosting website Blogbus suddenly became inaccessible. Blogbus was the first and largest professional hosting company in China, and this closure hits the art world particularly hard because its servers host sites for galleries like Vitamin Creative Space as well as a number of well known artists and critics. Other major websites ranging from video hosting to translation portals to microblogging have also been closed over the past several weeks. In response, netizens began posting photographs of the Velvet Revolution and poetry by Bei Dao.

For his latest piece of art writing intended for reading only within an online forum, critic Zhu Qi compares the situation of Chinese contemporary art to the parable of Achilles and the tortoise. As usual, netizens were divided over whether this is a profoundly deep analysis or just petty personal criticism of a handful of artists, but a game of guess-the-artist ensued to the delight of all commenters. Zhu Qi mentions Li Songsong and Yan Lei by name, while netizens also suggested He Yunchang, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Wang Jianwei, Qiu Zhijie, Zhu Yu, Liu Xiaodong, Yang Fudong, Cao Fei, Liu Wei, Cai Guo-Qiang, Gu Wenda, Chen Zhen, Wang Du, Zhang Huan, and Gu Dexin.

In an exciting development, Hey! Shehui announced and began accepting nominations for the 2010 Miss Gallery Pageant, a competition that aims to provide a platform for gallerinas to show off their many assuredly impressive talents. So far notable entries include Weng Ling, curator of Beijing Center for Contemporary Art, Agnes Lin, owner of Osage Gallery, Sun Ning, director of Platform Gallery, and Han Ji Yun, owner of Art Issue Projects. The winner of the prestigious prize should be announced by the end of January.

Netizens proved their willingness to jump the gun when they accused artist Mariusz Tarkawian of copying a range of well known artists ranging from Damien Hirst to the Gao brothers. The truth ultimately emerged that Tarkawian works by sketching iconic sculptures and compositions in large-scale wall drawings, but not before getting in an inordinate amount of criticism for all involved: “Weird, this fucking foreigner even copies Chinese artists–it’s not good to copy anyone, but are the Gao brothers really that famous?”

Ai Weiwei remains a popular subject of discussion as he continues along his trajectory from contemporary art to professional activism. Recently a large number of interviews with the artist have surfaced on the major forums, allowing netizens an opportunity to air their political grievances. At this point they remain relatively evenly split between the camp with no tolerance for the art or politics of Ai Weiwei and the group that sees him as a visionary leader, but the domestic art world seems to pay less and less attention on the whole.

As we embark on a new decade, some netizens have been enjoying making predictions for the next two years in the Chinese art world. According to the professionals, painting will reconsolidate mainstream trends, Wu Shanzhuan and Wang Xingwei will reassert and strengthen conceptual painting, Liu Wei the younger will contribute to trends in abstraction, Chu Yun, Pak Sheung Chuen, and Cao Fei will popularize “junk food art,” the sea turtle “China card” artists like Cai Guo-Qiang, Xu Bing, and Ni Haifeng will deliver new perspectives on China, Shi Qing and Zhang Hui will emerge into the mainstream, Qiu Zhijie will continue unabated but unchanged, Gu Dexin and Chen Zhen will become more important the less they are exhibited, MadeIn will break theoretical barriers, and Ai Weiwei will offer new creative possibilities. One commenter wonders: “Prediction or divination?”

Also falling under the question of censorship, Shanghai art-punk band Top Floor Circus has been banned from performing for some weeks, and their viral anthem “Shanghai Doesn’t Welcome You” has been deleted from all online video hosts. The incident, which sparked a gag order in the media and may have contributed to the closure of live music venue Yuyintang during the Shanghai Expo, encouraged solidarity between art and music circles in the online forums. Rumors circulated that lead singer and sometime artist Lu Chen had been fired from his job as a clerk with the customs department, but this was quickly proven false.

During an apparent lull in the news cycle, netizens were absorbed in highly abstract questions like “why are Ai Weiwei and the Gao brothers more famous than F4 overseas?” The name F4, originally referring to a Taiwanese boy band, has been repurposed to refer to the stars of the Chinese art world, generally some combination of Zeng Fanzhi, Zhang Xiaogang, Fang Lijun, Wang Guangyi, Yue Minjun, Liu Xiaodong, and so on. This debate largely took the form of an excuse for commenters to complain about how foreigners will never understand China.

As painter Fang Lijun attempted to add some critical and historical weight to his tarnished image with an archive exhibition at the Guangdong Museum of Art curated by Guo Xiaoyan and “academically chaired” by Lv Peng, the critics ran rampant. Zhu Qi published an essay mocking the pretenious exhibition, and even the Southern Metropolis Daily got in on the action. In an intriguing but perhaps confused metaphor, one journalist compared Fang to teen idol Li Yuchun. Meanwhile, Artforum published a series of F4 portraits taken at the opening in Guangzhou.

During a panel discussion at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art including Liu Wei and Lu Jie among others, Chen Shaoxiong took Xu Zhen to task for his flippant outsider approach to art–a rant that has since made the rounds as a popular video. Xu Zhen, proud of his lack of formal training in art, was accused of failing to graduate from middle school when he misinterpreted the exhibition title, literally “Core,” as “In the Middle.” Chen Shaoxiong expressed his dissatisfaction with generational dynamics in the Chinese art world to the delight of observers and commenters: “Xu Zhen’s success explains the failure of Chinese art.” Fortunately an equal number of Xu Zhen fans came to the rescue, and the debate continues.

Speculation arose around an announcement that artist Gu Dexin would be retiring from the art world. Following on his refusal to exhibit in Beijing during the year of the Olympics and several well-received solo exhibitions after that, the declaration had something of the sound of an attempt to leave triad society behind. Although Gu Dexin’s supposed retirement may be more or less political, commenters noted that Cang Xin has also been refusing phone calls from curators and collectors, albeit for different reasons. In related news, Faye Wong may also return to show business this year.

Relatively obscure scholar Huang Yiming announced that he would be suing Fan Di’an, head of the National Art Museum of China, for plagiarism after an essay by the former appeared in a catalog under the name of the latter. The incident (and the artist and exhibition involved) remain relatively obscure to most art world observers, but commenters took the thread as an opportunity to discuss issues about bureaucratic art criticism, the widespread practice of scholarly ghostwriting at the level of figures like Fan, and the unimportance of extra-institutional scholars like Huang.

In a rare crossover appearance on the art websites, godfather of Chinese rock music Cui Jian has been making waves for his views on the entertainment industry (“collective fraud”) and politics. Following trends similar though not as extreme as Ai Weiwei within his own world, Cui Jian complains about the “so-called culture” of contemporary China, pushing for more political engagement within art and music. Netizens reacted less positively than with Ai Weiwei, and it seems that Cui Jian’s audience continues to shrink.

Rumors continued to circulate regarding the untimely death of Taiwanese gallerist Chen Ling-hui, whose Beijing space faced property management and debt collection issues over the last year. Her husband, artist Chang Zhi-cheng, has since been formally charged with assisted suicide, confirming all but the most macabre suspicions of online commenters. A small gang was also arrested for debt collection tactics that supposedly pushed to couple to suicide over a surprisingly small amount of money, rumored to be less than RMB50,000.

The ongoing open-ended debate between critic Zhu Qi and artist Qiu Zhijie continues, recently congealing around the participation of the latter in a government-established institute for research on contemporary art. This move was widely received as an attempt to gain more official control over the image of China within international contemporary art circles in a push for “soft power.” Netizens have been openly critical of this institute and its attempt to hire the majority of major Chinese artists, but offer little sympathy to Zhu Qi.

Hong Kong collector Hallam Chow was apparently punched in the face in a gallery in Shanghai, an incident he described in length in an email and forum post in an attempt to garner support for his cause. The offender was a gallery assistant in Hangzhou, and Chow requested that Ai Weiwei, Zhang Peili, and other major figures cut ties with the gallery in question as part of his plea for the elimination of gangster behavior in the art world. Commenters, who had never heard of Chow prior to the post, politely reminded him that Shanghai is not Hong Kong, and the name of the website is, after all, “heishehui.”

Ye Yongqing, one of the earliest artists to face studio demolition, has come out as a supporter of a potential reduction in art districts–a position many cynically tie to his newfound status as a member of the government-backed contemporary art institute. Ye claimed that art districts, as a combination of art and real estate, are the purest form of speculative bubble imaginable (though one commenter disagrees: “Ye Yongqing is the biggest bubble”). The senior artist also implied both that not every young artist needs a large studio and that many individuals in art districts now would probably not continue as artists if they were to lose their property.