Urban China： Work in Progress
Perhaps artists like to think of themselves as harbingers of social change, at least think they like to imagine themselves on the vanguard of something. In China, they seem more like backseat drivers. However, the world’s fasting urbanizing nation is heaving forward in myriad expressions, and relentlessly posing challenges to the entire globe with a host of issues that will shape the next decade.Urban China is a magazine that has hovered on the fringes of the art world since it was founded four years, it examines various urban issues in themed monthly issues, featuring intellectuals, artists and social scientists writing on topics such as Chinese creativity, education, migration, or Chinatowns. URBAN CHINA: Work in Progress (Timezone8, 2009), is a new publication co-edited by magazine founder Jiang Jun and Brendan McGetrick that seems to reiterate the supremacy of the urban machine over the artist’s ego, as the book itself grew out of a series of questions that emerged from UC’s participation in Documenta 12 (2007).The book itself was originally intended to serve as a catalog for Jiang Jun/Urban China while exhibiting last year at New York’s New Museum and Chicago’s Museums of Contemporary Art. Presented here for the first time in English are a collection of essays that are pulled primarily from three issues, “Building a Socialist New Village,” “The Chinese Family,” and “Chinese Education.”Work in Progress promises that every person with even a passing interest in China’s development will find something stimulating in its pages. For a publication that deals with issues as fundamental as mixed race families, national ideals, rural education, etc., Urban China does so artfully, and it draws from deep intellectual and artistic wellsprings. True to the magazine’s original layout, Work in Progress, also designed by McGetrick, features exaggerated magazine margins with notes that offer alternative reading paths or background information. The translations sometimes maintain some of the stale formality of academic Chinese, but are comprehensible and rich.Highly recommended, Work in Progress is an introspective look at contemporary China from a refreshing perspective; it is refreshing not only because of the native commentary, but also because it reflects the less-often heard opinion of the educated, broad-minded, curious, and humanitarian class of Chinese urbanites who are genuinely striving to create something new out of the hypnotic chaos, even if it seems undefinable now. The voices collected here are those of average (minjian) people, critics, intellectuals, artists and experts, they are insightful documentarians, and many seem to lightly skim the boundaries of being subversive. So many people wonder: when is she ready for democracy? What is an alternative future? Urban China is a “healthy” blueprint for change, perhaps one of the reasons it belongs in contemporary art museums.Danwei has posted some excerpts from the book hereMcGetrick covers the book on his blog here.The Urban China blog (Chinese only)China Daily “Separating the strands of a ‘work in progress’”
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