For more then seventeen years inSite has commissioned and facilitated place-based art practices at the US-Mexico border of San Diego-Tijuana. In 2006, inSite launched a new curatorial initiative designed to make this rich history more accessible, entitled the inSite Archive. Over a three-year period organizers systematically compiled and cataloged ephemera and documentation charting the development and realization of over one hundred art works in the public sphere. These works, which frequently developed out of extended artist residencies in the region, include monumental sculpture, site-specific installation, performance, actions, interventions and participatory engagements.

The early 1990s through to the 2000s is an especially compelling period in the evolution of place-based art practices. This is a period when the concept of site as a fixed location shifted as artists began to re-imagine place as a fluid, evolving entity produced by social, economic and cultural processes. Likewise, artists challenged the notion of the public as audience by engaging various constituencies as active co-producers of their work. A new model of place-based art practice emerged that, while context specific, is also dispersed across place and time. Often performative, this work frequently includes a temporary event, situation or unfolding process. While responsive to site, it also disrupts the idea of place as an immutable concept. A sense of location is re-conceptualized as a wandering position – always in the process of becoming and extending beyond temporal and geographical boundaries.

This uniquely time-based practice erases the traditional divide between the archive and the artwork. Since it is non-object based, archival material is the primary means through which the work continues to communicate beyond its original context. What was once durational gains symbolic status as it circulates as texts, photography, video, artifacts, and artist notes and sketches in the art economy.

Highlights of this work from the inSite Archive are organized here according to the following five groupings: circulating objects, public address, co-producing event experiences, performance interventions and recording trajectories. -Donna Conwell, curator

Krzysztof Wodiczko, Tijuana Projection: Centro Cultural Tijuana, 2001

Yukinori Yanagi, Proposal for Wandering Position, 1994

Silvia Gruner, Untitled (La Mitad del Camino), 1994

On June 11, 2006 the haudenschildGarage collaborated with the Visual Arts Department of UCSD, inSite and Casa Familiar to present the Political Equator I Conferences: Urbanities of Labor and Surveillance. This three-day, trans-border public event took place in San Diego and Tijuana from June 9 – 11 2006.

Cao Fei and Pi Li presented at the haudenschildGarage on June 11. The moderators were Norman Bryson and Paul Pickowicz. Other participants included Eyal Weizman, Andrew Ross, Teddy Cruz, Steve Fagin, Vicky Funari, Sergio de la Torre, and Roberto Tejada.

Cao Fei’s film Whose Utopia? had its world premiere at the haudenschildGarage on June 11. Her film with Ou Ning, The San Yuan Yi Project, was also screened at the haudenschildGarage.

For Whose Utopia?, Cao Fei spent six months at the OSRAM China Lighting Ltd. factory in the Pearl River Delta in China. Located in Guangdong Province, the Pearl River Delta has led the massive boom in China’s economy since the late 1970s. From 1980 to 2001 the region’s gross domestic product grew from eight billion USD to just over one hundred billion USD. A major manufacturing base for everyday products for Chinese and foreign markets, the region has drawn workers from throughout China in search of economic opportunities and a better life.

According to Cao, “most of the workers left their hometowns in pursuit of their ideal and dream in the Pearl River Delta area.” In the piece she focuses “on the innermost feelings of every individual in this globalized production chain, this giant and complex system of business, placing them at the center of attention, so as to let them rediscover their personal value which is often neglected during the process of creating huge business value.”

About the Participants

Cao Fei

Cao Fei was born in Guangzhou, China in 1978. She earned a BFA from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in Guangzhou, China (2001). Cao Fei’s work reflects the fluidity of a world in which cultures have mixed and diverged in rapid evolution. Her video installations and new media works explore perception and reality in places as diverse as a Chinese factory and the virtual world of Second Life. Applying strategies of sampling, role play, and documentary filmmaking to capture individuals’ longings and the ways in which they imagine themselves—as hip-hop musicians, costumed characters, or digitized alter egos—Cao Fei reveals the discrepancy between reality and dream, and the discontent and disillusionment of China’s younger generation. Depictions of Chinese architecture and landscape abound in scenes of hyper-capitalistic Pearl River Delta development, in images that echo traditional Chinese painting, and in the design of her own virtual utopia, RMB City. Fascinated by the world of Second Life, Cao Fei has created several works in which she is both participant and observer through her Second Life avatar, China Tracy, who acts as a guide, philosopher, and tourist. Cao Fei’s work has appeared in solo exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2008); Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California (2007); Museum Het Domein, Sittard, Netherlands (2006); and Para Site Art Space, Hong Kong (2006). She has participated in the New Museum Triennial (2009); Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2008); Prospect.1 New Orleans (2008); Yokohama Triennial (2008); and Istanbul, Lyon, and Venice Biennials (2007). Her work has appeared at the New Museum, New York (2008); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2007); P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2006); and Asia Society, New York (2006). Cao Fei lives and works in Beijing. Click here to visit Cao Fei’s website.

Whose Utopia?

Whose Utopia? was produced as part of the Siemen’s Art Program, ‘What are they doing here?’, in which artists were invited to make work as part of a residency in a factory. Cao Fei chose the Osram lighting factory located in Foshan, near her home in southern China. Whose Utopia? documents the conditions faced by an increasing number of workers, as factories like Osram move their production to China, further integrating the country into the global economy. The repetitive work is contrasted with dreamlike episodes in which the workers act out their private dreams. The work is lyrical in its portrayal of subjective dreams within a working context, and of individual subjectivity in a rapidly mechanized world, in which individuality has traditionally been subordinate to class or other abstract and generic groupings.

Pi Li

Pi Li, born in 1974, has constantly changed his career direction in recent years. He was once the Art Director for the Chinese Contemporary Art Award sponsored by Uli Sigg. He also showed up in the Cannes International Film Festival as the producer of the Chinese movie Shanghai Dream. After over one year of operation, the U Studio (now named Boers-Li Gallery), founded in 2005 with curator Waling Boers, has also changed its direction. Now Pi Li decides to develop whole-heartedly the studio into a commercial gallery, and he has opened up a 100-square-meter affiliated exhibition area beside the main hall to promote the experimental solo exhibitions. The once mixed-orientated U Studio finally begins to transform into a professional gallery.

The gallery represents a selective group of internationally operating artists. The gallery program is not media-specific, and includes installation, sculpture, painting, works on paper, audio work, photography, video, film, performance, and digital art. Each year, approximately six major solo exhibitions are organized, along with an irregular number of smaller solo and group exhibitions. Boers-Li emphasizes its support for the production of new and experimental work, utilizing its unique position both at home and abroad to open new pathways for artistic development. The program focuses on new developments in international art, as well as on the changing contemporary positions of established or older-generation artists. In addition, Boers-Li participates in a selection of both Chinese and international art fairs. The program also includes the publication of catalogs, both to accompany major solo exhibitions and to offer retrospectives on our artists. Click here to visit Boers-Li Gallery’s website.

Political Equator

Tracing an imaginary line along the US / México Border and extending it directly across a map of the world, what emerges is a political equator that roughly corresponds with the revised geography of the post-9/11 world according to Thomas P. M. Barnett’s scheme for “The Pentagon’s New Map,” in which he effectively divides the globe into “Functioning Core,” or parts of the world where “globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security,” and “Non-Integrating Gap,” regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and … chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists.

Along this imaginary border encircling the globe lie some of the world’s most contested thresholds: the US-Mexico border at Tijuana/San Diego, the most intensified portal for immigration from Latin America to the United States; the Strait of Gibraltar, where waves of migration flow along with the embattled frontier of Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Jordan; the Line of Control between the Indian state of Kashmir and Azad (or free) Kashmir on the Pakistani side; the Taiwan Strait where relations between China and Taiwan are increasingly strained as they Pearl River Delta rapidly ascends to the role of China’s economic gateway for the flow of foreign capital, supported by the traditional centers of Hong Kong and Shanghai.

These are only a few of the critical thresholds of a world in which the politics of destiny and labor are transforming not only the sites of conflict but also the centers of production and consumption, while unprecedented socio-cultural demographics rearrange flows of information and capital. The dramatic images emerging from the political equator are intensified by the current political climate in which terrorism and its opposite, fear, set the stage for the current confrontations over immigration policy and the regulation of borders worldwide. The result is an urbanism born of surveillance and exclusion which casts these geographies of conflicts as anticipatory scenarios of the 21st century global metropolis, where the city will increasingly become the battleground where control and transgression, formal and informal economies, legal and illegal occupations meets.

Click here for more information on the conference.

Participants included Dennis Adams, Doug Aitken, Doug Ashford, Judith Barry, Ute Meta Bauer, Mark Beasley, Bulbo, Teddy Cruz, CUP (Center for Urban Pedagogy), Tom Eccles, Peter Eleey, Hamish Fulton, Gelitin, Joseph Grima, Maarten Hajer, David Harvey, Mary Jane Jacob, Nina Katchadourian, Vasif Kortun, Laura Kurgan, Rick Lowe, Markus Miessen, France Morin, Antoni Muntadas, Kyong Park, Anne Pasternak, Vong Phaophanit, Michael Rakowitz, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Osvaldo Sanchez, Saskia Sassen, Allan Sekula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta (Raqs Media Collective), Michael Sorkin, Javier Tellez, Nato Thompson, Anthony Vidler, Anton Vidokle, Judi Werthein, Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Mans Wrange.

The Situational Drive was made possible, in part, by Artography: Arts in a Changing America, a grant and documentation program of Leveraging Investments in Creativity, funded by the Ford Foundation.  Additional support provided by the haudenschildGarage and the Ronald and Lucille Neeley Foundation.

About inSite

inSite is dedicated to the realization of binational collaborative arts partnerships among nonprofit and public institutions in the San Diego-Tijuana region. Operating through a unique collaborative structure that is based on the active participation of cultural and educational institutions in the US and Mexico, inSite is focused on promoting artistic investigation and activation of urban space.

The distinctive character of inSite, understood as a cultural practice of intervention in the urban social weave, stems from a commitment to facilitate new works developed through a long-term engagement with the artists. The core of inSite, as it has evolved over the past twelve years, is commissioning projects as interventions in the extraordinary context of the San Diego-Tijuana border region. The axis of this project is a process of two-year periodic residencies that culminate in the realization of works sited in the public domain throughout the two cities. The flexibility to respond to the shifting interests of artists and institutions and, in turn, to test new structures of collaboration and venues for the presentation of innovative work, has been a fundamental characteristic of this project.

Held at the haudenschildGarage and envisioned as working sessions centered on questions pertinent to the terrain of San Diego/Tijuana, the inSite_05 Conversations were conceived to rethink issues of local import within a broader frame.

October 22, 2005

Participants included Carmen Cuenca (San Diego), Tania Ragasol (USA), Chris Ferreira (San Diego), Joshua Decter (Los Angeles), Beverly Adams (USA), Osvaldo Sánchez (Mexico City), Donna Conwell (Los Angeles), Bulbo (Tijuana), and Sally Stein (Irvine). The moderator was Michael Krichman (San Diego).

September 25, 2005

Participants included Chris Ferreira, Javier Téllez (Venezuela/USA),Maurycy Gomulicki (Poland/Mexico), Itzel Martinez de Canizo (Tijuana), Hans Fjellestad (Los Angeles), Magaly Ponce (Massachusetts), and Joshua Decter. The moderator was Michael Krichman.

August 25, 2005

Participants included Mans Wrange (Stockholm), Mark Bradford (Los Angeles), Bulbo, Judi Werthein (Buenos Aires), and Paul Ramirez Jonas (New York). The moderator was Michael Krichman.

About the Participants

Bulbo

Bulbo (Tijuana, Mexico, 2002) explores the possibilities of exchange and collaboration while employing broadcast media to constructive ends. Each of the collective’s projects enables people, who in their daily lives do not pursue an art practice, to participate in a creative process and helps nurture other ways of understanding our context. Bulbo intervenes in media with bulbo TV (throughout Mexico); bulbo press (magazine); disco bulbo (record label); and bulbo broadcast web streams at www.bulbo.tv. Other bulbo projects include Tianguis de Diseño, Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso (Mexico City, Mexico, 2007) and La Tienda de Ropa, inSite_05 (Tijuana-San Diego, Mexico/US, 2005). Bulbo have also participated in group exhibitions, such as Tijuana Organic, Cornerhouse (Manchester, UK, 2006); IV Bienal de Estandartes, CECUT (Tijuana, Mexico, 2006); Strange New World, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (San Diego, US, 2006) and Santa Monica Museum of Art (Santa Monica, US, 2007); and Tijuana Sessions, ARCO (Madrid, Spain, 2005).

Carmen Cuenca

A native of Mexico City, Cuenca graduated in 1980 from the Universidad Iberoamericana with a degree in Art History. Prior to moving to Tijuana in 1989, she served as Associate Curator at the San Carlos Museum in Mexico City. For the past 20 years, Cuenca has been actively promoting contemporary artists and artistic practices in the binational region. She recently resigned as subdirector of visual arts at the Centro Cultural Tijuana, where for five years she directed the curatorial and programmatic development of El Cubo, the first international-scale museum in Baja California. From 1994 through 2005, Cuenca played a central role in the inSite project, a binational venture focused on commissioning new public projects by artists in the San Diego/Tijuana region. She served as coordinator of Mexican projects for inSite94 and as Executive Director, Mexico, for both inSite2000 and inSite05. During her work with inSite, Carmen Cuenca was responsible for completing over 200 commissioned projects, from site-specific installations to performances to the production of film and video works. Prior to joining inSite full time in 1997, Cuenca served as cultural attaché for the Mexican Consulate in San Diego, and before that as chief curator at the Centro Cultural Tijuana.

Cuenca has served as a board member of various non-profit arts organizations in San Diego, including the Children’s Museum of San Diego and the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library in La Jolla. Cuenca is currently working on the development of several exhibitions of Tijuana artists that will be presented in Mexico City and elsewhere, as well as the planning for the next version of inSite that is scheduled to begin in 2010.

Donna Conwell

Donna Conwell is a curator-producer and writer, and Project Specialist, Contemporary Programs and Research, at the Getty Institute. From June 2003 to September 2006, she was associate curator of inSite_05 where she co-organized a three-year residency program and co-curated eight interventions in the public domain. From November 2002 to June 2003, Conwell was commissioning editor for Latinart.com, a web-based magazine concerning art and culture in the Americas. From September 2001 to November 2002, she served as assistant curator at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City. Her independent curatorial projects include From A to B, Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the inSite Archive Project, inSite, San Diego-Tijuana, where she acted as consulting curator. She is currently a project specialist at the department of Contemporary Programs at the Getty Research Institute, where she recently co-curated Overflow, a reinvention of Allan Kaprow’s Fluids by the LA Art Girls.

Hans Fjellestad

Hans Fjellestad is a musician and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. He studied music composition and improvisation with George Lewis at University of California San Diego (UCSD), and classical piano with Krzysztof Brzuza. Fjellestad has composed for film, video, theater, dance and has presented his music, film and video art throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil. His film and video work has shown at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Tokyo’s Shibuya Cinema Society, Los Angeles Grand Performances Series, BorDocs Foro Documental Tijuana, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Point Loma Wastewater Plant, Cleveland Museum of Art, Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center, Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Miami Art Central, Salina Art Center, IAF Videoart Festival Tijuana, and the São Paulo International Short Film Festival.

inSite

inSite is dedicated to the realization of binational collaborative arts partnerships among nonprofit and public institutions in the San Diego-Tijuana region. Operating through a unique collaborative structure that is based on the active participation of cultural and educational institutions in the US and Mexico, inSite is focused on promoting artistic investigation and activation of urban space. The distinctive character of inSite, understood as a cultural practice of intervention in the urban social weave, stems from a commitment to facilitate new works developed through a long-term engagement with the artists. The core of inSite, as it has evolved over the past twelve years, is commissioning projects as interventions in the extraordinary context of the San Diego-Tijuana border region. The axis of this project is a process of two-year periodic residencies that culminate in the realization of works sited in the public domain throughout the two cities. The flexibility to respond to the shifting interests of artists and institutions and, in turn, to test new structures of collaboration and venues for the presentation of innovative work, has been a fundamental characteristic of this project.

Javier Téllez

Video installation artist Javier Téllez’s films combine documentary with fictionalized narratives to question definitions of normality and pathology. Collaborating with institutionalized patients living with mental illness to rewrite classic stories or invent their own, he creates what he calls a cinematic “passport to allow those outside to be inside” by renegotiating sociocultural barriers. This approach to using art as a voice for the marginalized positions itself within the tradition of art therapy, though Téllez attempts to “cure” viewers of false assumptions, rather than the patients of their disorders. Circus tents and other props provide ironic references to historically carnivalesque exploitations of abnormality, epitomized in director Tod Browning’s films. In contrast, Tellez’s projects assert the individualism and competence of his actors and emphasize their human dignity by engaging their creativity on sophisticated intellectual levels. Working intimately with his casts, Téllez blurs distinctions between artist and patient to consider the arbitrary boundaries of reality, reason, and insanity.

Made for inSite_05 in San Diego, California, and Tijuana, Mexico, One Flew Over the Void (Bala Perdida) (2005) documents Téllez’s “self-organized circus” of patients from Mexicali’s CESAM mental health center, who, wearing animal masks and carrying handmade signs, walked in protest against general views on mental illness in today’s society. The procession culminated at the site of a performance in which human cannonball David Smith was shot over the Mexico-U.S. border to critique current immigration policy. Combining two disparate political concerns, Téllez’s film takes issue with larger notions of exclusion. Bright color footage of patients marching and playing horns, interspersed with shots of Smith’s audience, suggest humor and celebration as healing alternatives to isolation, segregation, and racism. In the last sequence, entitled “Circus Performers,” participants remove their masks for individual facial close-ups, the pleasure they experienced from the event obvious.

Joshua Decter

Joshua Decter has been a critic, curator, and art historian since the mid-1980s. He is a contributor to Artforum, Afterall, and other periodicals, and has organized exhibitions at PS1 in New York, The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Apex Art in New York, The Kunsthalle Vienna, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, among other institutions. Decter was a curatorial interlocutor for the inSite_05 San Diego/Tijuana Interventions exhibition project, and organized the conference, The Situational Drive: Complexities of Public Sphere Engagement, in collaboration with inSite San Diego/Tijuana and Creative Time, New York, presented at The Cooper Union, NY, in May 2007. Decter has been a member of the graduate faculty and graduate committee at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies, where he developed and supervised a number of curatorial practicum seminars. He has also taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York, New York University, UCLA, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently Assistant Professor and Director of MPAS Program at the Roski School of Fine Art, USC.

Judi Werthein

Judi Werthein was born in Buenos Aires and lives in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated with a degree in Architecture and Urbanism from the University of Buenos Aires. Her work has been exhibited in various institutions including: The Vera List Center for Art and Politics, New York; Tate Modern, London; Centrum Beldende Kunst, Rotterdam; Americas Society, New York; De Appel, Amsterdam; CAC Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, Lithuania; Studio Gallery, Budapest; Musee de Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxemburg; Bard Mseum, The Center for Curatorial Studies Annandale on Hudson, New York. She has participated in many biennales and similar events such as: Manifesta 7, Bolzano, Italy; 41 Salon Nacional de Artistas, Cali, Colombia; Bienal de Pontevedra, Galicia, Spani; inSite_05, San Diego/Tijuana, USA/Mexico; S-Files, Museo del Barrio, New York, and la 7ma Bienal de la Habana, Cuba. Her solo exhibitions include: Corporate Logo, Art in General, New York; The Doc Art Center, Ireland; Manicurated, Bronx Museum, New York; Jessica Murrary Gallery, New York; Galeria Ruth Benzacar, Buenos Aires. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Village Voice, Artforum, Art in American, Art Nexus, Frieze, Another Publication, and Flash Art.

Magaly Ponce

Magaly Ponce is a video and installation artist from Chile. Ponce studied Graphic Design at Universidad de Valparaíso, Valparaíso Chile. Received a Creative Video Grant awarded in Latin America by the Rockefeller, Mac Arthur and Lampadia Foundations. Later, received a Creative Video Grant awarded by Fundación Andes, in Chile. She graduated with a M.F.A. degree thanks to a two-year Fulbright grant and a Syracuse University fellowship. Ponce currently teaches New Media at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts. Her work has been exhibited widely in her home country, Denmark, Korea and in the US. Ponce’s inspiration comes from a variety of sources; ranging from repression, anxiety, anger, love, admiration and contemplation. She uses metaphoric language to convey the complexity of the subject matter, something explicitness cannot convey. Her work gravitates from the Poetic to the Political maintaining a love for audio and crafted imagery.

Mans Wrange

Mans Wrange is an artist based in Stockholm, who works with long-term projects in which he explores strategies that influence opinion forming, such as lobbying, opinion polls and focus groups, as well as techniques on how to alter human behaviour through social organization, objects and architecture. He is the founding member of OMBUD (www.ombud.org), a combination of think tank and creative studio, which conducts these projects and is organized as a network of people from the fields of science, media, politics and the arts. His and OMBUD’s projects include The Average Citizen Lobbying Project (1999-), in which the views of a statistically average citizen affect public opinion through a combination of political lobbying and product-placement; The Good Rumor Project (2004-), in which two positive rumours about both sides of the US-Mexican border were created through the use of focus groups, and then spread epidemically through a viral marketing campaign involving thousands of people in Tijuana and San Diego; The Compromise House (2001-), an experimental house project where social and aesthetic solutions are based on the principle of compromise as a positive and productive principle.

Mark Bradford

Mark Bradford is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow and received a B.F.A. (1995) and an M.F.A. (1997) from the California Institute of the Arts. His work has appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions at such venues as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art, among many others. Mark Bradford is an artist who incorporates ephemera from urban environments into mixed-media works on canvas that are rich in texture and visual complexity. Though he has experimented throughout his career with many different artistic media, including public art, installations, and video, his signature and best-known work takes the form of massively scaled, abstract collages that he assembles out of signage and other materials collected, most frequently, from his own neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles. Bradford’s aesthetic language makes use of such elements as bits of billboards, handmade advertisements, foil, string, and permanent wave end-papers from beauty shops, which he arranges, layers, singes, sands, and bleaches into brilliantly hued, painterly structures that appear to sprawl and swirl. Loosely gridded and often cartographic in character, these pieces both reflect his interest in the formal traditions of modernist abstraction and reference the communities from which he culls his materials. Glimpses of partially legible text and imagery within his map-like works evoke a multitude of metaphors and suggest intricate systems in a constant state of flux. In the multilayered tableau Los Moscos (2004), bursts of bright yellows and reds radiate through a predominance of darker fragments, calling to mind clusters of pulsing city lights viewed from a collapsed and distanced perspective. With this piece and numerous others in his increasingly ambitious body of work, Bradford is developing a visually arresting means of representing in two dimensions the dynamism and depth of the sites and streets he excavates.

Maurycy Gomulicki

Maurycy Gomulicki, born 1969, lives and works between Mexico DF and Warsaw. His attention concentrates on subjects of fantasy, pleasure and idealizations. Works on mixed fields between of them photography, installation and digital graphics. His method could be defined as lyrical minimalism and abundant minimalism. His work is often based on exploration of phantoms of pop culture on a wide range of significance. Author of space arrangements, objects, murals, mosaics, art books, animations, photographic diaries from exotic to everyday travels. Collector, between 1996 and 2005 was showing in various magazines obsessive typologies of different pop cultural phenomena developing an extensive archive of common imagination and iconography. Co-participant (as artist and consultant) of ABCDF Project — Visual Dictionary of Mexico City (2003). His work was shown in many exhibitions in Poland and abroad (Mexico, Russia, Japan, Belgium, US and others). His recent important projects are Air Bridge at InSite — Art Practices in Public Domain Tijuana/San Diego (2003-2005) and the creation of the visual and architectonical image of a sex shop chain named Erotika (Mexico, 2005 — together with Jorge Covarrubias and Salvador Quiroz). Author/artist/curator on the project Pink not dead! — Mexico City and Warsaw(2006). His two art-books “Funebre” (together with Jeronimo Hagerman, Editorial Diamantina, 2006) and W-wa (Bec-Zmiana Fundation, 2007) were published recently. His latest realizations on big scale were: Eco Feler (Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico DF, 2008) Pink Bridże (San Diego, Children’s Museum, 2008), Fertilty Pop (Zachęta Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, 2008). Since October 2009 his Lightspurt shine on Kępa Potocka in Warsaw. He lives and works alternately in Poland and Mexico.

Michael Krichman

Michael Krichman obtained a JD at Georgetown University and a BA at Brandeis University. Krichman has served as the Executive Director of inSite since 1995. From 1993 to 1994, he was President of the Board of Directors. During his seventeen-year tenure at inSite, a collaborative project of nonprofit and public cultural institutions in the United States and Mexico, he has facilitated the creation of over 200 works by artists in the context of residencies in the San Diego-Tijuana region. For the past two years, Krichman has led the development of the inSite Archive (to be presented in spring 2010 at MUAC in Mexico City) and managed the completion of El Ágora, a commission with Mexican architect Gustavo Lipkau that transformed a 9,000-square-foot area of the Centro Cultural Tijuana into a new space devoted to public discourse. Together with Osvaldo Sánchez and Carmen Cuenca, he is currently planning the next version of inSite, with programming slated to begin in 2010. From 1989 to 1992, he was a partner in Quint-Krichman Projects (QKP), a San Diego-based residency program for artists from Europe and the United States. Prior to founding QKP, he was an associate in the environmental department of the law firm of Latham and Watkins, where he specialized in state and local agency compliance under the California Environmental Quality Act. Krichman has served as an advisor to numerous city and state public art commissions and, currently, is a member of the board of directors of the Orange County Museum of Art in California and the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City.

Osvaldo Sánchez

Osvaldo Sánchez is the artistic director of inSite_05, and he was cocurator of inSite_2000. From 1998 to 2001 he was director of the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, and subsequently the director of the Museo Tamayo, Mexico City. His essays and articles on Mexican and Latin American art have appeared in Third Text, ArtNexus/Arte en Colombia, Poliester, Curare, Arte Internacional, Revista de Occidente, and Sulfur, among other publications. Sánchez was involved with Mexico’s National Fund for Culture and the Arts, the IADB’s First Competition for Young Painters, and the Central American Biennial in Costa Rica. He has lectured and taught courses on contemporary and Latin American art at universities in Guadalajara, Mexico; Austin; Alicante, Spain; Mexico City; Madrid; and Buenos Aires.

Paul Ramirez Jonas

Paul Ramirez Jonas is a contemporary artist whose work currently explores the potential between artist and audience, artwork and public. Many of Ramirez Jonas’ projects use pre-existing texts, models, or materials to reenact or prompt actions and reinsert himself into his own audience. His works have been exhibited internationally, most recently in the 53rd Venice Biennale. Currently, Ramirez Jonas sees his role as “extending beyond the private reader, and into someone who invites viewers to join in. The result of this shift is the reassertion of a contract between the artwork and its public.” In 2008 at the 28th Sao Paulo Biennial, Ramirez Jonas arranged for members of the public to a receive a key to the front door of the biennial venue, the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion. Each person who received a key was required to leave behind a copy of one of their own keys as well as sign a contract that established an agreement between themselves, the curators, the artist and the biennial foundation. For the 7th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2009, Ramirez Jonas altered three large boulders by carving into them a space for monument plaques to be placed. Instead of creating permanent monuments to a State honored figure or event, he turned the monuments into platforms for cork boards for the fleeting message or personal note-the ephemeral voice of his public. In 1987, Ramirez Jonas graduated with a BA from Brown University and went on to earn his MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989.

Sally Stein

Sally Stein, Emeritus Faculty of Art History and Visual Studies at University of California, irvine, has focused her research and writing for many decades on the history of photography, particularly the work of documentarians Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano, Rondal Partridge and, most recently, John Gutmann.

The haudenschildGarage wishes to thank inSite_05 for the presence of Shuddhabrata Sengupta.

About the Participants

Shuddhabrata Sengupta

Shuddhabrata Sengupta is a media practitioner, filmmaker and writer with the Raqs Media Collective, and one of the initiators of Sarai. His recent work involves textual explorations of aesthetics, surveillance and cyberculture. He is currently working on a series of new media and digital culture projects at the Sarai Media Lab.

About Raqs Media Collective

Raqs Media Collective was formed in 1992 by independent media practitioners Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. Based in Delhi, their work engages with urban spaces and global circuits, persistently welding a sharp, edgily contemporary sense of what it means to lay claim to the world from the streets of Delhi. At the same time, Raqs articulates an intimately lived relationship with myths and histories of diverse provenances. Raqs sees its work as opening out a series of investigations with image, sound, software, objects, performance, print, text and lately, curation, that straddle different (and changing) affective and aesthetic registers, expressing an imaginative unpacking of questions of identity and location, a deep ambivalence towards modernity and a quiet but consistent critique of the operations of power and property. In 2001 Raqs co-founded Sarai (www.sarai.net) at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi where they coordinate media productions, pursue and administer independent research and practice projects and also work as members of the editorial collective of the Sarai Reader series. For Raqs, Sarai is a space where they have the freedom to pursue interdisciplinary and hybrid contexts for creative work and to develop a sustained engagement with urban space and with different forms of media. Click here to visit Raqs Media Collective’s website

Ricardo Dominguez

Ricardo Dominguez is a co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater ( Click here to visit EDT’s website), a group who developed Virtual-Sit-In technologies in 1998 in solidarity with the Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico. He is co-Director of Thing (thing.net) an ISP for artists and activists. His recent Electronic Disturbance Theater project with Brett Stabaum, Micha Cardenas and Amy Sara Carroll the *Transborder Immigrant Tool* (a GPS cellphone safety net tool for crossing the Mexico/U.S border was the winner of “Transnational Communities Award”, this award was funded by *Cultural Contact*, Endowment for Culture Mexico – U.S. and handed out by the U.S. Embassy in Mexico), also funded by CALIT2 and two Transborder Awards from the UCSD Center for the Humanities. Ricardo is an Assistant Professor at UCSD in the Visual Arts Department, a Hellman Fellow, and Principal/Principle Investigator at CALIT2 (http://bang.calit2.net). He also co-founder of *particle group* with artists Diane Ludin, Nina Waisman, Amy Sara Carroll a gesture about nanotechnology entitled *Particles of Interest: Tales of the Matter Market* (http://pitmm.net) that was presented in Berlin (2007), the San Diego Museum of Art (2008), Oi Futuro, and FILE festivals in Brazil (2008).

inSite

inSite is dedicated to the realization of binational collaborative arts partnerships among nonprofit and public institutions in the San Diego-Tijuana region. Operating through a unique collaborative structure that is based on the active participation of cultural and educational institutions in the US and Mexico, inSite is focused on promoting artistic investigation and activation of urban space.

The distinctive character of inSite, understood as a cultural practice of intervention in the urban social weave, stems from a commitment to facilitate new works developed through a long-term engagement with the artists. The core of inSite, as it has evolved over the past twelve years, is commissioning projects as interventions in the extraordinary context of the San Diego-Tijuana border region. The axis of this project is a process of two-year periodic residencies that culminate in the realization of works sited in the public domain throughout the two cities. The flexibility to respond to the shifting interests of artists and institutions and, in turn, to test new structures of collaboration and venues for the presentation of innovative work, has been a fundamental characteristic of this project.

The organizers were Steve Fagin, Yoshua Okon, Roberto Tejada and Rubén Ortiz-Torres.  Participants included Gerardo Estrada (UNAM & former Minister of Fine Arts, Mexico), Cuauhtémoc Medina (Art Critic & Curator, Tate London), Rubén Ortiz-Torres (Artist), Yoshua Okon (Artist), Monica Manzutto (Co-Director, Kurimanzutto Gallery), and Carmen Cuenca (Co-Director, inSite).

“The 1990s in Mexico City were a period of tremendous political upheaval and incredible cultural energy. The art that grew out of that was socially interactive. Today, that art is internationally recognized. But does that mean it might lose its living spirit? The goal of this conference is to take a breath before the art has become ‘official, important art.’ We want to recapture its undergroundedness, its funkiness – and its politics.

Is the image of Mexico City circa 1995 no longer one of experimentation and anarchy-or of putting whatever together? Without us noticing, has it now been refigured as a minor capital of arriviste entitlement? To what degree are “we” willing to settle for only this Mexico City, a dot on the map of the moveable feast that is the art world’s list of usual suspects: “If it’s Tuesday, it must be____________. (Fill in the blank with GATT member wannabe of your choice.)” With “Before the Paint’s Dry,” we wish to revisit 1990s Mexico City: bars, cantinas, the pre-”Fondesa” cafes, alternate spaces, “bad music,” and strong opinions. What stories and histories and political interventions were being imagined-and are still to be written now? We wish to convene a día de los muertos to see if this corpse called Distrito Federal can still sing a calavera to us from the mid-1990s in a charmed and off-tune timbre: tuba as melody; tambor militar as rhythm.  Mexico City, circa 1990s: The art scene was blooming and bleeding-edge – and as complex and messy as those adjectives imply. Before the story is sanitized and boiled down to a simple chapter in an art-history tome, the Visual Arts Department of the University of California, San Diego is convening some of the scene’s leading participants to argue alternative accounts.” – Steve Fagin

About the Participants

Carmen Cuenca

A native of Mexico City, Cuenca graduated in 1980 from the Universidad Iberoamericana with a degree in Art History. Prior to moving to Tijuana in 1989, she served as Associate Curator at the San Carlos Museum in Mexico City. For the past 20 years, Cuenca has been actively promoting contemporary artists and artistic practices in the binational region. She recently resigned as subdirector of visual arts at the Centro Cultural Tijuana, where for five years she directed the curatorial and programmatic development of El Cubo, the first international-scale museum in Baja California. From 1994 through 2005, Cuenca played a central role in the inSite project, a binational venture focused on commissioning new public projects by artists in the San Diego/Tijuana region. She served as coordinator of Mexican projects for inSite94 and as Executive Director, Mexico, for both inSite2000 and inSite05. During her work with inSite, Carmen Cuenca was responsible for completing over 200 commissioned projects, from site-specific installations to performances to the production of film and video works. Prior to joining inSite full time in 1997, Cuenca served as cultural attaché for the Mexican Consulate in San Diego, and before that as chief curator at the Centro Cultural Tijuana.

Cuenca has served as a board member of various non-profit arts organizations in San Diego, including the Children’s Museum of San Diego and the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library in La Jolla. Cuenca is currently working on the development of several exhibitions of Tijuana artists that will be presented in Mexico City and elsewhere, as well as the planning for the next version of inSite that is scheduled to begin in 2010.

Cuauhtémoc Medina

Cuauhtémoc Medina is an art critic, curator and historian who lives and works in Mexico City. PhD in Art History and Theory from the University of Essex, UK. Researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at the National University of Mexico and Associate Curator of Latin American Art Collections at Tate Gallery in London. He is also a member of Teratoma, a group of curators, critics and anthropologists based in Mexico City. He has just curated the Francis Alÿs exhibition Walking Distance from The Studio at the Colegio de San Ildefonso Museum in Mexico City and is currently preparing an exhibition of British-Mexican artist Melanie Smith titled Ciudad Espiral/Spiral City. Among his recent publications is When Faith Moves Mountains, coauthored with artist Francis Alÿs, documenting the action produced in Lima in 2002, released by Turner in Madrid.

Gerardo Estrada

Dr. Estrada is Coordinator of Cultural Diffusion at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He is also a full-time Professor in the School of Political and Social Sciences of UNAM and President of its Association of Graduate Students since 1991. His career has provided him with a vast experience in the cultural sector. Since the beginning, he has occupied important positions such as Director of the House of Mexico in Paris, Director General of the Mexican Radio Institute, Cultural Attaché of the Mexican Consulate in Chicago. From 1992 to 2000 he was Director General of the National Institute of Fine Arts, a position which he held for 8 years, and before assuming his current position at the UNAM, he was Director General of Cultural Affairs of the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 2000 to 2003. Estrada received his BA degree in Sociology from the School of Political and Social Sciences of UNAM in Mexico City. From the École d’Hautes Études des Sciences Sociales of the University of Paris he later received his MA and PhD degrees in Sociology.

Monica Manzutto

Manzutto is the co-director and co-owner of the internationally influential Kurimanzutto Gallery in Mexico City.

Roberto Tejada

Roberto Tejada is the author of many books that include, most recently, “National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment” (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and “Celia Alvarez Muñoz” (UCLA/CSRC; University of Minnesota Press, 2009). He has served also as co-curator on the exhibitions “Manuel Álvarez Bravo: Optical Parables” at the J. Paul Getty Museum (2001), and “Luis Gispert: Loud Image,” at the Hood Museum of Dartmouth College (2004). His research has earned awards from the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation (2009) and from the National Endowment for the Arts (2007). His writings appear frequently in exhibition catalogs, among them “Images of the Spirit: Photographs by Graciela Iturbide” (New York: Aperture, 1996); and “Mexico/New York, Photographs by Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Walker Evans” (New York: DAP, 2003). Tejada has published critical writings on contemporary U.S., Latino, and Latin American artists in Afterimage, Aperture, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, SF Camerawork, and Third Text. He lived in Mexico City (1987 – 1997) where he worked as an editor of Vuelta magazine, published by the late Nobel laureate Octavio Paz; and as executive editor of Artes de México. Tejada is, as well, the author of several poetry collections, including “Mirrors for Gold” (Krupskaya, 2006) and “Exposition Park” (Wesleyan University Press, 2010); he founded and continues to co-edit the journal “Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas”. Tejada’s research and teaching methods interrogate modern and contemporary image environments from an interdisciplinary viewpoint: a critical art history whose visual knowledge can locate objects and actors in the global-culture context. He received his Ph.D. from the State University of New York, Buffalo, and has taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM); at Dartmouth College, where he was the César E. Chávez Fellow (2002 – 2003); and at the University of California, San Diego (2003 – 2008). He is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Texas, Austin.

Rubén Ortiz-Torres

Rubén Ortiz-Torres is an artist who is joining the Visual Arts Department effective Fall 2001. He began his career as a photographer, printmaker, and painter in the early 1980s, well before he received his M.F.A. from the California Institute of Arts in 1992. Ortiz-Torres is a Mexican-born artist who has been living and working in Los Angeles since 1990. Ortiz-Torres is widely regarded as one of today’s leading Mexican artists and as an innovator in the 1980s of a specifically Mexican form of postmodernism. Over the past ten years, he has produced a body of work in a wide range of media — extended series of photographs, series of altered readymades, a feature film, several videos (including three in 3D), large scale video installations, major painting series, sculptures, customized cars and machines, photocollages, performances and curated exhibitions. Since 1982, Ortiz-Torres’s work has been featured in 25 solo exhibitions, over 100 group shows in the United States, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, and more than 50 screenings of his films and video works. Over 150 written pieces cover his work in mainstream media such as The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Reforma (Mexico), La Jornada (Mexico), and El Pais (Spain); in significant art world publications with international circulation such as ArtForum, Art Images, Frieze, New Art Examiner, Poliester, Bomb, Flash Art, and Art in America; and in numerous exhibition catalogues and books. Ortiz-Torres has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants from, to name a few, the Andrea Frank Foundation, the Foundations for Contemporary Performance Art, the U.S. Mexico Fund for Culture, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the Banff Center for the Arts, and the Fullbright Foundation.

Steve Fagin

Steve Fagin (stevefagin.net) is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, and has produced a series of feature length videos including The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel, The Machine That Killed Bad People and TropiCola. These films have been featured prominently at museums, international film festivals, art biennials and have been screened on Bravo International in Latin America, Canal + in Europe and PBS in the United States. His work has had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and is the subject of a book from Duke University Press, Talkin’ With Your Mouth Full: Conversations with the Videos of Steve Fagin. The work has been presented at both the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in many contexts including both of their summary shows of the essential art of the twentieth century. From 2005-2009 he worked as creative consultant for the haudenschildGarage and commissioning editor of the hG, Spare Parts projects. The Last Book, an hG, Spare Parts project, was conceived and directed by him. Currently he is working on a feature film, A Cloud of Hope, about the independence movements in Africa, circa 1960 and on a series of “smart phone pieces”, both as commissioning editor and as one of the artists for LACMA.

Yoshua Okon

Yoshua Okon, artist and founding co-director of La Panaderia which was a key arts crossroads space in Mexico City. Since the late 1990s Mexican artist Yoshua Okon has been developing his own variation on these themes. Okon considers himself a performance artist, even though most of his work takes the form of videos that document invented scenarios set up in collaboration with invited participants. Among his best-known projects is Orillese a la Orilla (1999–2000 – the title, a command meaning ‘move to the curb’, is a grammatically incorrect phrase that, to the local ear, suggests both poor education and low social status), in which Okon asked Mexico City policemen to act out the threatening techniques they employ in everyday life.

With the introduction of digital photography and high-tech printing facilities in China in the 1990s, a new generation of artists immediately embraced photo-based media as the perfect means for expressing the changes taking place around them.

The face of the new China is not the medical masks spawned by the SARS outbreak or the bubble- headed visor of the country’s first astronaut. Rather, it is the image of a lone young businessman howling in the middle of an empty highway, having just been hit in the head with a brick. This photograph, The First Intellectual (2000), by Shanghai artist Yang Fudong, captures the anxiety of life in a society undergoing rapid industrialization. And like its subject, the artist himself has been struck by an onslaught of international attention. His work, which sells for around $2,000 to $7,000 for photographs and $6,000 to $10,000 for videos, was featured at the Pompidou Center, the 50th Venice Biennale, Documenta 11, the Fourth Shanghai Biennial, and the First Guangzhou Biennial-all in the last two years. Yang, 32, describes his film Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest (2003), which he showed at the Venice Biennale, as one of his favorites. “I have only finished the first part,” he explains. “The whole work will have five parts and should be completed in two years.” The work reflects his early idealism as well as the disillusionment of his generation. “When I was younger, I was very idealistic and had some very pure dreams- deep beliefs that I wished to express,” he says. “The expectation in school when I was growing up was that we’d be inspired to be idealistic and pure and always pursue what we believe. Basically, the beliefs haven’t changed. Yes, school was under the Party,” he continues, “but you also learn to apply these lessons in your own life.”

The current international wave of shows focusing on China’s burgeoning photography and video scene are certain to draw ever larger American and European audiences to artists like Yang. This past summer, the Pompidou Center in Paris opened “Alors le Chine?” (What About China?), an exhibition of contemporary art from China, in conjunction with a cultural-exchange program, L’Annacute de la Chine en France, sponsored by China and France. And through April 21, part two of Zooming into Focus: Contemporary Chinese Photography from the Haudenschild Collection is on view at the art gallery of San Diego State University. The Denver Art Museum is showing, through May 9, Over One Billion Served: Conceptual Photography from the People’s Republic of China Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, curated by Julie Segraves of the Denver-based Asian Art Coordinating Council. Also, this month New York’s Museum of Modern Art has scheduled China Now, a survey of recent video works by 18 Chinese artists, including Yang, organized by film and video curator Barbara London. But the most extensive show is expected to be New Photography from China, a joint effort of the International Center of Photography (ICP) and the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, organized by ICP curator Christopher Phillips and Wu Hung, professor of Asian art at the University of Chicago and consulting curator to the Smart Museum. On view at the ICP and the Asia Society in New York from June through September, the show will include some 100 works by 45 artists.

While the global art world has arrived on China’s shores-including biennials in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, and the annual Pingyoa Photography Festival- contemporary artists in China are still relatively isolated, by language and geography, from Western influences. “For the moment,” says Phillips, “Chinese artists are paying attention mostly to their own country and their own context, and that has given recent Chinese art a very interesting and individual stance.”

Phillips notes how “industrialization, urbanization, dislocation of enormous populations from the countryside – the social conditions that spurred an enormous artistic response in the West between 1880 and 1920 – are happening and will continue to happen in China.” But certainly the images he and other curators are finding are a far cry from the pathos-filled village scenes Henri Cartier-Bresson portrayed in 1948 or the nostalgic temples that Lynn Davis created as recently as last year. Today photographers in China are being driven in large part by the swift development of Chinese cities and the introduction of a market economy, just at a time when “globalization” has become the hot topic at international biennials.

Weng Fen, 42, who shows with Courtyard Gallery in Beijing, has created a haunting series of images, which include Sitting on the Wall-Guangzhou No. 2 (2001), and Bird’s Eye View-Shenzhen (2001), in which two schoolgirls in uniform, backs to the camera, look toward the skyline of their once-rural hometown, now populated by skyscrapers. Yang Zhenzhong, 35, represented by ShanghART in Shanghai, will present his videos in the MoMA program, but he has also worked extensively in digital photography. His photo series Light and Easy (2002) shows him walking in city streets, balancing towering office buildings in the palm of his hand (an optical illusion generated in Photoshop), as if urbanization were merely another juggling act. His works sell for around $1,000 to $3,000 (photos) and $5,000 to $10,000 (videos). By contrast, Chen Shaoxiong, 41, favors lower-tech manipulation. This artist takes cutouts of street scenes in China that he had shot just a few years before and holds them up in front of the same, but newly developed, locations today. In the resulting photographs, such as Street-Haizu Square (1999), the juxtapositions of the old and new-bicycles vs. sports cars, kiosks vs. billboards-are disconcerting but beguiling.

Photography is a recent development in China’s relatively young contemporary-art history, which in itself is a post-cultural revolution phenomenon, emerging in the late 1970s with the relaxation of Communist controls, in force since 1949. But while an earlier generation of artists-many featured in the Inside Out exhibition (in New York at the Asia Society and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in 1998)-was described as post- Mao, the younger generation is clearly post-Tiananmen Square, reflecting the modernization that has taken place since that event in 1989 and the adoption of a market economy in the late ’90s, when galleries began to open and foreigners provided a fledgling collector base.

The world learned about Tiananmen Square instantly through a photograph, headlined “Man Blocks Line of Tanks, Tiananmen Square, Beijing,” taken by AP photographer Jeff Widener. It was transmitted by the protesting students instantly over the Internet, documenting not only the event but also the ways in which technology was already transforming the country. In 1995, with the introduction of digital photography and high-tech printing facilities, a new generation of artists, though trained in traditional painting and sculpture at art academies, immediately embraced photo-based media as the perfect means for expressing the changes taking place around them. “When you speak to artists in China, they say that you can take a photo today and get it developed before tomorrow,” explains Melissa Chiu, curator of contemporary art at the Asia Society. “Photography represents an immediacy that allows them to record the changes going on in China as they are happening.”

Though all of the works discussed here were made in China, they avoid stereotypes of Chinese art-traditional scroll paintings and calligraphy and the Socialist Realism of the cultural revolution. “The biggest mistake that people make when looking at contemporary art from China, is either they look for Western references that are totally irrelevant or they look for very simplistic icons, like Mao,” says Meg Maggio, an American and longtime resident of Beijing, where she is director of the Courtyard Gallery. Maggio notes that the first Chinese contemporary artists to gain recognition in the United States and Europe in the mid-1990s capitalized on this “mistake,” working in the style of Political Pop, a blend of cultural-revolution icons with American Pop art. Though most of these artists are painters, there are a few photographers who continue to mine this vein. The Luo Brothers seamlessly insert Coca-Cola and McDonald’s logos into happy-faced scenes from cultural-revolution posters. And Zhao Bandi, 40, represented by Ethan Cohen Fine Arts in New York, is accompanied by a panda in his digital self-portraits, carrying on humorous dialogues (through cartoon-strip-style bubbles) with this symbol of Chinese kitsch. His photographs sell for $600 to $25,000.

But the University of Chicago’s professor Wu traces the various movements in contemporary photography in China to Beijing East in the early 1990s. This fringe neighborhood on the outskirts of the city was a convergence point for the most experimental artists in China at a time when arrests and government closures of exhibitions were still rampant; it spawned the first wave of art photographers. Rong Rong, who photographed the street life and happenings in this fragile bohemia and showed recently at Chambers Fine Art in New York, is often described as the black-and- white Nan Goldin. He cofounded the first avant-garde photography magazine, New Photo, in 1996 with Liu Zheng, another photographer engaged in capturing China’s transvestites and sick and homeless people, but in a style more akin to August Sander and Diane Arbus.

By contrast, performance artists such as Zhang Huan, 38, Ma Liuming, 34, and Zhu Ming, 31, among the first to gain gallery representation in New York and Europe, used photography to document their events, but those images often superseded the performances themselves. Photographs of Zhang’s works, such as To Raise the Water Level in a Fish Pond (1997), in which people stood naked in a pond of turquoise blue water, conveyed the quiet revolution taking place in China and became symbols of the avant-garde.

“I think it is impossible not to call it ‘Chinese,’ because that is the cultural context it came from,” says Chiu, “but at the same time, the kind of imagery that is being produced has an international relevance and is speaking about more universal issues.” Indeed, if there is anything unique about the situation of artists working in photography and video in China, it is the fact that they are working in a culture that intentionally separated itself from the modernist photography movements of the 20th century. Under Mao, photography was a propaganda tool, and during the cultural revolution, it could be downright dangerous, especially in family albums. “Chinese traditional history is very well recorded, more than that of any other civilization,” says Maggio, “so for a people who have always had an official record of history to suddenly have that ruptured in the 20th century, well, now everyone is hunting for their own take on history.”

Photography has become a means for reconstructing an erased past-or for underscoring the ways in which it cannot be eradicated. Hai Bo, 41, another Courtyard Gallery artist included in many shows, spent several years tracking down individuals whose anonymous faces he’d found in family photographs from the 1930s. He restaged the pictures with the people in the exact poses of the original snapshots and then exhibited the pairs of images, old and new, as individual artworks with titles such as The Three Sisters or Middle School. (Those now dead or missing are represented by an empty space in the newer grouping, a reminder of the casualties of political upheavals.) Similarly, the couple Shao Yinong and Mu Chen have photographed former Communist Party meeting halls, now reception halls, movie theaters, and senior centers. Again, the juxtaposition of old and new in these not-quite-renovated interiors demonstrates photography’s ability to wait out and to outweigh history.

Other photographers are going back further, to the iconography of Chinese scroll painting and the literati tradition, to find ways to incorporate their 3,000-year-old cultural history into contemporary art. Xiang Liqing, 31, who studied oil painting at the China Academy of Fine Art, has digitally manipulated views of China’s gaudy new apartment buildings into grids that resemble ancient calligraphy in his series Rock Never (2002). His images are priced between $800 and $4,000. On a much grander scale, Wang Qingsong, 37, is staging tableaux involving as many as 30 people, in ways that might be compared with Gregory Crewdson or Jeff Wall.

Wang, who is having his first solo show in the United States at New York’s Salon 94 in May, co-organized by Jeannie Greenberg and the Courtyard Gallery’s Maggio, says, “My works are looking at the changes in China in the last two decades and from before I first came to the U.S., in 1999. I thought these changes meant that China was becoming Westernized. But, then I came to the U.S. I found that so many of these changes were not exactly what the U.S. or other foreign countries are like.” They were something entirely new, he says. “The modernization China is undergoing,” he observes, “is a very backward kind of modernization, such as destroying all the ancient architecture in the cities. In the U.S.,” by contrast, he notes, “there is so much concern about preservation.” Although the photographs, he explains, “let people from outside learn about China, when I create the work, I don’t think how it would be accepted or not outside of China.” While Crewdson and Wall may allude to European history painting, Wang appropriates the elongated format of Chinese narrative paintings. His work Night Revels of Lao Li (2000) imitates the arrangement of figures in a 10th-century Song dynasty painting, Night Revel of Han Xizai by Gu Hongzhong, drawing parallels between the voyeuristic role of the painter in the emperor’s court and Wang’s own position as a successful artist in relationship to the contemporary-art scene in China.

But even as all this art represents a leap forward for China culturally, remnants of the past linger. Despite Mao’s famous adage that “women hold up half the sky,” women are still admitted to art academies at a lower rate than men, and fewer have garnered international attention. One exception is Lin Tianmiao, 42, who originally created installations, like Go? (2001), commissioned by Cleveland’s Museum of Contemporary Art, in which she wrapped once popular but now discarded objects, such as bicycles, in white thread and then placed them in front of photographic murals. Lin has since shifted her attention from issues of industrialization to more personal statements about the body, especially in Plait/Braid, shown at the Guangzhou Biennial in 2002. In this piece the artist, who trained as a textile designer, projects a monumental self-portrait in which her head is shaved, onto a white cloth; from behind, streams of white thread sprout from the fabric, falling to the floor behind the image, an exploration of female identity. In collaboration with her husband, Wang Qingxin, she has also been making videos. Several other women photographers surfacing in international exhibitions are Cao Fei, Liang Yue, and Danwen Xing, whose 2002-3 disCONNEXION series of images of electronic detritus was one of the highlights of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s “The American Effect” last year.

Censorship is another lingering concern, though government intervention has subsided since the 1990s. “At this point, in terms of visual art, as long as the artists don’t verbalize the meaning, they can get away with the depictions,” says Segraves. Professor Wu sees the situation as being far more complicated. “When you try to avoid censorship, it may become self-censorship, which is even more dangerous,” he says. “The artists now know the system so well and want to be part of shows that the government is sponsoring or supporting, and they may be becoming less radical.” Government officials still make the rounds before the opening of large exhibitions and biennials, which has a chilling effect. One incident occurred during the 2000 Shanghai Biennial, when a spin-off exhibition titled “Fuck Off” included photographs of performance artist Zhu Yu reportedly eating a dead baby. The work was singled out as a “social evil” by conservative delegates to the 2001 National People’s Congress. But, as Shanghai-born Zhou Tiehai made abundantly clear with his digital portrait of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani weighted to the floor by two lumps of elephant dung (also in “The American Effect”), the threat of censorship is not restricted to China.

As there are no constitutional guarantees for free expression in China, artists, dealers, and curators must feel their way, on a case-by-case basis. When asked if censorship is a concern, Lorenz Helbling of ShanghART Gallery replied, “There has never been a show that I knew for certain would not be closed.” But for most contemporary-art dealers in China working with new-media and photo-based artists, the primary concern is not avoiding censorship but finding buyers. “For several years, even at sophisticated places like Art Basel, we showed Yang Fudong and others-no reaction,” says Helbling. “These works do not shout ‘Chinese,’ so people did not know how to respond.” While many collectors of contemporary photography are adding this work to their collections in anticipation of the upcoming shows, few can match the depth of San Francisco and Vail, Colorado, collectors Kent and Vicki Logan’s holdings in contemporary art from China. Eloisa Haudenschild, president of inSITE in San Diego, the collaborative exhibition program between Mexico and the United States, has also assembled a major trove, specifically concentrating on photo-based works created in the past three years. “These artists are good enough without being too Chinese-y,” she explains. “I stay away from works that are directly political or exploit any kind of exoticism.”

Yet even as these artists gain recognition in the United States and Europe, many New York dealers who worked extensively with Chinese artists in the mid-1990s have concerns. Zhang, like other Chinese artists today – Xu Bing, Cai Guo-Qiang, Chen Zhen – is “independent,” after having had one-shot solo shows with Max Protetch Gallery, Deitch Projects, and Luhring Augustine Gallery. Dealers, both in China and in the West, say they have found that many of these artists are unfamiliar with the gallery system and the politics of “exclusive representation.” Curators confirm that even when they are working through a gallery, the artist often approaches them directly, offering works on the side. Max Protetch, who still works with painters Fang Lijun and Zhang Xiaogang, stressed the importance of avoiding generalizations but noted that it takes a number of years to develop the artists’ trust. “With Chinese artists, I felt that I had to buy the work in order to get them to save it for a show,” he explains. “With artists from Europe or even Mexico, I could take things on consignment with no difficulty. After all, this is a very well known gallery.”

Ethan Cohen explains the current status and the reasons for it: “Ten years ago, people would say that there was only enough room for one or maybe two Chinese artists in the contemporary-art market. Today we are seeing that more and more Chinese artists have become powerful forces in that market. Everyone thought this was going to be a short trend, the way it was with the Russian artists, but an abundance of fresh material keeps coming out.” Cohen sees great talent in China-”their refinement, innovation, and seriousness is simply outstanding,” he says. “The art schools there are so good and so selective that even before the artists enter, many have been recognized as virtuosos. These artists worked very hard, and as they became more exposed to the West, they worked at becoming more sophisticated.”

Recently, Zhu Ming, who is represented by Cohen’s gallery, performed his Bubble Man, naked on the beach at Art Basel Miami. He comments on censorship and body art: “I don’t believe that the government clampdown in the early 1990s had any effect on my work, but I felt it always in my bones. I feel more liberated these days, but my mind has never been free, ever since I went to prison in 1994 for three months. From that moment, I have always been terrified, in my body, in my human core, and I have never done a performance in China without feeling scared that a policeman would come and arrest me.” Photographs of Zhou’s performances sell for $2,000 to $20,000.

He found this, his first performance outside China, liberating. But then Cohen interjects, “I felt like he feels in China, worrying about the police, whether the nudity would be permitted. I was haunted by the shadow of Giuliani, or maybe the mayor of Miami.”

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Barbara Pollack is a contributing editor of ARTnews