'rounding (english version)
Originally uploaded by raniaho
Just Around the Corner Arrow Factory, Beijing
August 15, 2009 - January 15, 2010
Curated by Chen Shaoxiong and Pauline J. Yao
*Announcing NEW WORK **Nov 29**, 2009** - Jan 15, 2010**:
**Li Ming, **Lin Tianmiao and **Wang Wei (this is the final rotation for
this exhibition)*
Please note: Artists and artworks in the show will be on view in four
different sections, each lasting for approximately one month. Please check
the website www.arrowfactory.org.cn for the most current information.
Participating artists: Lim Tzay-Chuen (Singapore/Beijing), Liang Yuanwei
(Beijing), Xijing Men (Beijing/Tokyo/Seoul), Yan Lei (Beijing), Ken Lum
(Vancouver), Wang Wei (Beijing), Patty Chang (New York), Liu Chuang
(Beijing), Li Ming (Hangzhou), Rania Ho (Beijing), Hong Hao (Beijing), Koki
Tanaka (Tokyo/Los Angeles), Dan Perjovschi (Bucharest), Lin Tianmiao
(Beijing)
Just Around the Corner is a group exhibition that looks at the street and
hutong environment as a site for artistic creation. Marking Arrow Factory’s
first group exhibition, Just Around the Corner invites international and
local artists to make new projects that interact, engage, embed themselves
or otherwise respond to social conditions that persist within Arrow
Factory’s storefront location. Extending beyond the four walls of Arrow
Factory’s space to engage more directly with the outdoor street and
neighboring businesses and residents, these works wish to promote a seamless
relationship with the local economies and micro-environments of hutong life.
In taking the hutong as site for artistic production, Just Around the Corner
also aims at engaging strategies of looking and visibility, especially as
they pertain to our understandings of consumption and exchange in daily
life. The audience at Arrow Factory is made up of immediate neighbors and
residents of Jianchang Hutong, namely local residents, merchants and random
passersby. Unaccustomed to the modes of visual consumption we readily
associate with contemporary art, they are regular users of the space and
inhabitants whose daily practice is composed of less visually oriented
types of consumption—buying vegetables, cigarettes, pancake bread, etc—that
permeate everyday life. Even though modern lifestyles and new inhabitants
have invaded the hutong, modern visual culture and art has yet to
incorporate the hutong and its residents into its own horizon and hutong
residents are nonchalant when it comes to contemporary art. The art world
views its audience as the museum director, curator, collector, art
researcher and art student, gradually abandoning the general public and
enforcing a high-minded view of art. But what does it mean for works of art
to be seen, noticed, witnessed, and felt in contexts where the modalities of
art merge with everyday human experience? Are there ways to approach a
particular location, like Arrow Factory Hutong, as a site for examining the
systems and structures of consumption that overlap with but remain
fundamentally different than those of the ‘art system’? These are some of
the ideas Just Around the Corner seeks to identify and pose through its own
formation and realization. *
International artist participation has been made possible through the
support of several organizations and individuals: Asia Art Archive, Hong
Kong; Libreria Borges Institute of Contemporary Art, Guangzhou;
Manufactura's Studio, Wuhan; Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou/Beijing;
Triangle Arts Trust; the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA); Waling Boers
and Beatrice Leanza/BAO Atelier. *
