Arndt & Partner cordially invites you to the opening with new bronze sculptures by Chinese artist Wang Du on 29 September from 6 to 8 pm.
The show is on view at Arndt & Partenr temporary (Zimmerstarße 88-90 - next to DAAD GAllery, ground floor)
INFOGANDA by Pascal Beausse
Information is the world’s rumor. Newsflashes, commercial breaks, fragments of data, messages, signals, these things constitute the environment we move around in. Further, they offer a preeminent referential framework for the many decisions, actions and fantasies that punctuate our days and nights. Wang Du has a wonderful phrase that expresses that encroachment on life’s time and space by the information sphere, “The media are the air, blood, nearly everything we have lived.”1 The media have a life of their own, like an autonomous organism, beyond any control. [...]
Today, a piece of information is above all an image. If we broaden its sense to include advertising and propaganda, the information image is what Wang Du in fact works with. It is the raw material of his activity as an artist, who completely reconfigured his work in terms of its concepts, methods and forms in the early 90s (when he arrived in the West). Dubbing his workplace in the outskirts of Paris the Wang Du Studio he devised an eloquent name for where he lives and works, locating himself at an original juncture of the flow of information and the production of forms. In the American sense of the word, studio challenges the myth of the artist’s atelier as a secret closed-off place where the alchemy of artistic creation is carried out. The studio Wang Du is referring to is rather that strategic, crucial locus of the world of communications. Radio and television studios, dubbing or editing rooms, or special-effects labs are factories in a global network. Setting up the tools of his trade in the grand framework of a former mid-sized business, Wang Du has thus created his very own artist’s factory. The Wang Du Studio mischievously pits itself against the symbolic strongholds of the news business and the major studios [which] reformulate each day an ideal reality in an ever-growing proximity to the economy and politics. […]
Like a press editor-in-chief, Wang Du pages through, selects and cuts out information or advertising photographs, which go to form the models for his art. However the methods are not those that are taught in journalism schools and which figure prominently in the code of ethics of the professional information media. Wang Du is more of a practitioner of a new form of Gonzo journalism as it has been renewed in the past few years by amateur bloggers on the internet, who create their own information websites without claim of objectivity or verification of their sources—quite the opposite. “I want to be a media.” When Wang Du came up with this now famous declaration in the grand tradition of artists’ statements, he was of course openly referring to Warhol's ambitions to be a press baron and producer of cable television. But above all, Wang Du was placing himself at the very heart of current theoretical and practical developments in the information system, precisely when, according to Ignacio Ramonet, the founding event of a new informational equation was playing out, i.e., during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. That mix of deviant fairytale and saga marks the sudden emergence of a new medium. It was in fact Matt Drudge’s internet site (The Drudge Report, where gossip, leaks and unsubstantiated rumors are published) that revealed the affair, scooping the major media.2 There now appeared a new media operator, the self-media, who was coming into his own as the global information age was starting. 3
Wang Du is not a critical artist. He works in a place that does not kit himself out in the showy rags of the activist artist. Acting as the media’s double, he pretends to accept the duplicity in order to get beyond morality by taking propaganda images as his models. The media are imbued with the dual logic that marks all instances of power in hypermodern society, infusing information with ambivalence. It is the ambivalence of information that is indispensable to the proper functioning of democracy while being an agent in the construction of consent and the control of public opinion through the mechanisms of propaganda. To shed light on that world, that place beyond candid morality, you have to enter the false image to be able to point out the truth of the system. Wang Du's sculpture reproduces the initial framing of the image selected by the photographer. But the artist also acts, using fragmentation but in terms of volume, i.e., in a much more physical and spectacular way. Rendered in three dimensions, and monumentally enlarged the distortions produced by the optical aberrations of the media’s deforming lens generate images that are monstrous, grotesque, obscene, like a swelling of the object-images that make up the information show business. This process of re-presentation allows Wang Du to bluntly lay bare the spectacle of reality.
Since 2001, alongside the plastic surgery he performs on images, Wang Du has also applied his monumental enlargements to the very pages of the newspaper or the cover of magazines. Wang Du crumples up the sheet of paper into a ball, like the kind we intend to toss in the wastepaper basket. To that act of negating information as well as affirming the extremely fleeting and volatile character of daily news, Wang Du then applies his method of playing with scale. [...] Le Tapis du piéton (2003) features a straightforward metaphor of the collapse of the Twin Towers by transposing the gesture of trampling a magazine under foot into both a sculpture-generating procedure and an experience of the work of art, offered to the heels of passing visitors.
Wang Du has carried out a highly personal synthesis of the various propaganda models he has come to know throughout his life, either in China, Europe or the United States. Rather than use the term propaganda we might employ a brand-new neologism to conjure up Wang Du more accurately, i.e., Infoganda.4 In a suspicious era characterized by a wave of information of doubtful veracity, in the face of this crisis of uncontrolled communicational madness, Wang Du’s answer lies in No Comment (2001), an immense trashcan that makes clear the perishable nature of the newspapers, television sets turned to Euronews and computers filling it. Wang Du places side by side a future as commodity for information and a future as a world to itself for this absolute commodity. Intox [brainwashing] or info? Infox!
Pascal Beausse (Excerpt from: INFOGANDA – Notre environment mental selon Wang Du, in: Jérôme Sans ; Frédéric Grossi, Wang Du, exh.-cat., Palais de Tokyo, Paris 2004)
SHI XINNING - Polyphony Arndt & Partner is pleased to present the first solo show of the Beijing-based artist Shi Xinning in Europe.
Among the genres of contemporary Chinese art, none is more deeply ingrained in the visual memory of the West than that of Mao Pop. The way to this state of affairs was paved by adaptations of Mao portraits by Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter. As early as the first officially sanctioned exhibition of contemporary Chinese art in China’s National Art Gallery in Beijing (China/Avant-Garde, February 1989), Wang Guangyi’s portrait of Mao Tse-tung – overlaid with a grid of red paint – proved controversial. Then came artists such as Xue Song, who reduced Mao to a mere contoured outline, and Yu Youhan, who depoliticizes propaganda images by embellishing them with folksy floral motifs. The Beijing-based painter Shi Xinning explicitly distances himself from this tradition. The son of an officer in the People’s Liberation Army, he was born in 1969 in the northeastern province of Liaoning. In a series of oil paintings on canvas that he has been working on since 2000, an idealized energetic Mao is seen in the company of Hollywood stars, artists and political figures. But these works do not present retrogressive arguments. Instead they tell fictitious or, as he calls them, utopian stories. Shi Xinning compares his work as an artist with that of a film director. He often uses newspaper images as the basis for his paintings. In keeping with the visual qualities of these media images, he employs barely visible brushwork and a washed out, muted palate. Shi Xinning then develops his narratives, substituting objects or people in the original with his own selections, adding elements that were not there in the original, and adjusts the lighting of the scenes. “I almost always work with a staging of completely incompatible props and scenery. For example, Mao views a Duchamp exhibition in China – something that never took place. Or I place a curved steel sculpture by Richard Serra in Tiananmen Square – facing Mao’s famous portrait at the entrance to the Forbidden City. Or I arrange a meeting between a Mao statue and New York’s Statue of Liberty. […] I am not interested in Mao Tse-tung as a real person. Today, Mao is still an icon in China. He is omnipresent; he defined my childhood and the lives of my parents. I never show him in the real context of the 60s or 70s. I present him as a visual memory.” History is either a three- to five-thousand-year continuum that can enable individuals to define their place in the present, or something that can be willfully revised to produce formulas that summarize the deeds of Mao as: “70"> good, 30"> bad” (Deng Xiaoping).
Arndt & Partner is pleased to present two solo shows at the Gallery 2nd Floor. From 4 September through 20 October three space consuming work by the American artist Sue de Beer. Parallel, drawings and paintings by Japanese artist Aya Uekawa will be shown for the first time in a solo show in Europe.
SUE DE BEER I think that a lot of what was said about Sue de Beer being the grand dame of adolescence aesthetics missed her treatment of that category as a strategy. It is not the agonies of youth in her early works, nor the melancholic stupor of her more mature protagonists in a later work, The Quickening (2006), which she found interesting and she knew well to guard herself against their ululations by putting in their mouths or as a voice over ( the voice of God) texts written by fanatics like Jonathan Edwards in his fire and brimstone style of preaching or decadent like Joris-Karl Huysmans. That created a discrepancy that destabilized meaning and located de Beer as a true voyeur of the modern. Moreover, though it was the pleasure of their beauty rather than their tortured souls which gave grace and made it possible to mobilize the youths as compartments of minute rituals, de Beer maneuvered them into reflecting a much wider topic, that of the passage from modernity to all its posts – the passage, its illusions and traumas. As reflectors, they build the visual matrix of her works.
AYA UEKAWA Lost in thought, inaccessible, defiant yet vulnerable, the young women populating the visual world of Japanese-American artist Aya Uekawa (born 1979 in Tokyo), appear to be waiting for something we remain oblivious to. The features of Uekawa’s mysterious, slightly disturbing female figures invoke elements of medieval altarpieces, renaissance effigies and Japanese manga. Their clothing and settings however, are clearly inspired by op and pop art – an unusual and at first glance, perhaps awkward conflation. This tension gives Uekawa’s paintings their characteristic lure and distinct style and underscores her contribution to contemporary figurative painting.
