» Archive for 29 March 2010
Open House: “A Room of One’s Own”
Last sunday, Chart Contemporary invited Chen Ke to display “A Room of One’s Own,” a temporary installation that is the fourth in an on-going series of Open Houses, art interventions in some of Beijing’s unique spaces. Chen Ke’s room was a tiny closet of a room in a damp underground maze of dwellings near Lido Hotel. The space seemed perfect for Chen Ke, whose relentless and non-apologetic embrace of the dainty and quaint has come to personify the “cartoon” style of her age-group, but whose open embrace of feminism seems just as subverted as the room itself. Chen says that the idea was inspired by Virginia Woolf, but that the safe space atmosphere of cleanliness and respite was a reaction also to the city’s migrant population.
The objects in the room were embroidered by “aunties,” who followed the artist’s instructions and sketches to the thread. (more…)
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Madein “Spread” to Caochangdi
“Love in fact results from an excess of dopamine in the brain” by Madein from lee ambrozy on Vimeo.The above art work was produced by the artists’ collective Madein (also associated with artist Xu Zhen) and is currently on show at Beijing Caochangdi’s ShanghArt gallery.Their cartoonish rug canvases and plush sculptures notwithstanding, I fell in love with this behemoth made of discarded styrofoam, and held together entirely with bamboo skewers. Inside this half-Star Wars, half-garbage chamber is an automated spotlight which careens on its chassis and seems to be tweaked into permanent freak-out mode––it convulses 360 degrees, its colored lenses whirring in a hebephrenic frenzy.The title of the work is “Love in fact results from an excess of dopamine in the brain.”
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