so since i’m trying to be ‘professional’ now that i’m in grad school, i’ve decided to keep my personal life separate from my art and research and work stuff. hence, i have created an art-oriented-research- work blog:
i’ll still be writing in this one, but just about my travels and random details of my life that shouldn’t be of interest to anyone anyway. if you want to know more about my artmaking process and work, then go to the artblog.
thanks for reading!
beautifully written and eloquent account of Joe’s perspective on XLIEUX:
“XLIEUX is a section of the infinitely small distance between people that internet has made possible.”
thanks Joe - it was definitely a pleasure collaborating with you! let’s do it again, perhaps an architectural project? 
finally!
photo blog of Charm City:
starting off with a gorgeous pic of my apartment. yes, this is where i live and i love it. small and cosy, super dusty but with three big bay windows and high ceilings. and my own bathroom (MY OWN BATHROOM I LOVE IT), albeit no kitchen. i love looking at the tree outside my window, it’s slowly turning brown now that fall’s here. i have a basil plant that is dying on me (i can’t nurture anything for the life of me, hence i do not have a pet) and a ‘rose of jericho’ - a desert plant that ‘opens up’ when watered, though no flowers bloom. oh, that book is the ‘collected writings of robert smithson’. note, ‘collected’, not ’selected’. as much respect i have for his artwork and thoughts, that guy must have been stoned for most of his very short life.
just to emphasize how baltimore can be pretty too, here’s the view from my window. that domed thing in the distance is a church. i am living in the ‘mount vernon cultural district’: theaters, concert halls, galleries, museums, indie cinema, bike co-op (filled with too-hipster-bike-hipsters), anarchist cafe, thrift stores. how’s that for accumulating cultural capital? beats cliche greenwich, eh?
perfect time for farmer’s market! so many queer-looking tomatoes. where i am going to get my fresh produce when winter rolls around?
first awesome speaker in the line of awesome speakers at MICA (that’s where i’m studying by the way): ANGELA DAVIS! AMY GOODMAN! DEMOCRACY NOW! by the way, amy goodman blew. my. mind. so powerful. so eloquent. so inspiring. everyone needs to hear her speak at least once in a lifetime
(then we had Annie Sprinkle. oh and guess who’s coming next? DJ SPOOKY aahhhh! so nice to be a student again)
what we do at art school: throw parties in our studios! nothing beats getting drunk on a dancefloor next to bansaws and tablesaws. here’s the balloon room
art student solution to stolen bike seat: build your own! and what’s even better, leave the pencil marks on the plywood for all to see! this is potentially a cool performance piece. how much do i love perpetuating the art student stereotype? sooo much.
lantini party! helping out with nana projects right now, and as a fundraiser for the annual great halloween lantern parade, we hold adult-oriented lantern building workshops + martinis! lantinis! i’m planning to learn how to stilt walk at the parade school -
quintessential american disclaimer, right there on my “small” styrofoam cup of watered-down nestea (to wash down my $1 hot dog at the Sam’s Club in-store fastfood stand. ugh). strip mall after strip mall. reminds me of time in canada, i haven’t been to a strip mall since i moved back to hong kong, not even in philly. and now im cruising the highway with my mates in a pickup truck, jumping from costco to home depot practically every other day! YES AMERICA
speaking of philly, i was there a couple weekends ago and loved it. it was wet, it was cold, it was fantastic. here’s a melancholy pic of a long stretch of highway from the bus
…
cause in my head there’s a greyhound station/
where I send my thoughts to far off destinations/
so they may have a chance of finding a place/
where they’re far more suited than here/
-Death Cab for Cutie, Soul Meets Body
haven’t blogged in over a month, but now that im more or less settled in baltimore, i can finally catch up on some posting again. to start off, summer in germany!
this was the first time i visited over summer, and the first time i went to the southern part of deutschland. it was also the longest stay ive had so far, and very very pleasant.
in Tuebingen, Moessingen, and other -ingens:
we stayed at a sort of commune place with friends, and here’s a picture of catnip. that thing on the ceiling is not the cat, but just a bizarre thing in the kitchen…
we went to many castles around the area. all the little towns have names that end with -ingen. this is just one of the many pictures i took of a castle in XXX-ingen.
here’s me being intense
i’ve never seen these before, but apparently little children go around during christmas time to sing for people, and afterwards they make these little chalk symbols on your door so that god’s deadly plagues will pass over the household peacefully. or something.
beautiful little displays of medieval spelling exercizes.
more beautiful displays
when i was taking this photo, some old man who was passing by could not resist but ask “what is so interesting here??”. i could have told him that i like the pile of rocks and the cute little windows and the wooden door (i have a thing for taking photos of windows and doors), but in the end i just stayed quiet and left him to ponder.
die vögel
by bodensee. can’t get any more german than this.
such gorgeous landscapes…
we saw a double rainbow in moessingen! that was amazing. i don’t think i’ve seen two giant rainbows at such a close distance before.
in the family garden, where they grew all sorts of yummy stuff: die bonen, tomaten, salat, auberginen, blumen…
tomaten of various sizes
there were haystacks (roll?). i have never played on a hayroll before. i enjoyed posing for pictures on them. i shall not share these photos as they are too ridiculous.
pretty flowers in garden
i was attracted to the arrangement of the gardening tools.
gorgeous student-town tuebingen. looks like a postcard.
homemade spaezle! it was a real cultural experience i love cross-cultural relationships.
this was hanging in the house. thought it was very pretty
view of moessingen from above. if you look carefully you can sort of make out the family house. gorgeous view, definitely worth the hike. i felt bad though, since i was the youngest and yet the most out of shape of them all…
my first time in Stuttgart! quite different from berlin. the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart is worth a trip, lots of modern and contemporary german artists from around the area. huge collection of Otto Dix, though i’m not a big fan. they have an archive of Willi Baumeister though, who i quite like.
back in berlin, we rented a tandem and rode around like mad. tandems are so great, but they’re harder to maneuver than you would imagine. and i was lucky to have been able to catch this exhibition: Modell Bauhaus: Die Austellung. organised by the Bauhaus Archiv, the Bauhaus places in Dessau and Weimar, and MoMa to celebrate the Bauhaus 90th anniversaty, it is the most comprehensive Bauhaus exhibition to date. it was amazing.
what was even more amazing was another exhibition that was at the Martin-Gropius-Bau: Le Corbusier, Art and Architecture. i was impressed by the bauhaus, but this… this was phenomenal. i’ve studied corbusier before, but this exhibition really made me realise just how much of a genius he was. i even got myself an exhibition poster, i wanted to remember the experience of being immersed in this corbusier environment forever. too bad photography was forbidden at MGB, or i would have gone nuts.
so in the end, my trip to germany was an eye opener, and it was such an enjoyable opportunity to see friends and meet The Family. being in berlin felt a little like coming home; after all these trips, i’m really starting to feel a sense of belonging. can’t say i’m totally familiar with the place yet, but i’m getting there. and for the first time, i didn’t have the urge to do all the touristy things that i really wanted to do the last few times i visited - though we did make the usual rounds to the fleamarket at Mauerpark and stopped by the Temporäre Kunsthalle to see the Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla piece (only one of my favourite artist couples of all time).
can’t wait to be in berlin again… though baltimore ain’t bad at all. more about that next post
The limitations of installation art, in the sense that is described by Rosalind Krauss in Sculpture in an Expanded Field (1979), has become increasingly apparent with the evolution of how art is received and understood. However, contemporary installation art has become so intimately interwoven into the institutional fabric of the art gallery/museum that it has lost its former transgressional streak. It is this challenge of reinjecting institutional confrontation into installations that is the primary motivation for this project. To do so would require a rethinking of what exactly contemporary installations should be?
Place vs. Non-place
The French anthropologist Marc Augé presents the concept of non-lieux as the antithesis of the anthropological notion of lieux, or “place”. Briefly put, anthropological place signifies a space that is invested with meaning by its inhabitants who derive an identity and community from it; it has a history, it is ridden with rituals, there are relationships and interactions amongst individuals. A non-place would be what a place is not. Non-places are devoid of meaning, identity, or community; the space creates neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude, and similitude1. They are spaces formed in relation to certain ends, to pass from one place to another. Neither place nor non-place exists independent of each other. Rather than an observable fact, it is a matter of perception, how you perceive the space – an airport, for example, has not the same status in the eyes of the passenger who passes through as in the eyes of those who work there everyday.
The Institution as a Non-Place: XLIEUX
The gallery is a place. We propose to turn it into a non-place through new media and social engagement. Therefore, the gallery itself is symbolically eliminated; shut off from viewers and turned into something that no one would go to, no point to arrive at.
However, how to turn it into a space in which there are still individuals passing through, and yet not identifying or relating with it? This is where the website comes into play as a platform for interaction. Through xlieux.net, people can interact with others, engage in conversation with them and see them by the use of webcams; it will be like everyday video conferencing. What is different, and what the viewers may or may not know, is that the image of their faces are fed to a projector in the gallery. Participants permeate the gallery walls, pass through them, turning the gallery into something like a computer router and hence a non-place, non-lieux, xlieux. In this manner we are questioning the gallery as a “place”, an institution and an entity of authority.
(Wendy Tai)
—
Afterthoughts:
While XLIEUX was meant to challenge the authority of galleries/museums, whether the outcome fulfills the intention is certainly debatable. After the piece opened, we were suddenly confronted with two possibilities.
One was to further emphasize the ’subversive’ aspect of the piece, to push it so that it becomes heavily conceptual. To do so would be to seal off the gallery completely, and to stubbornly give nothing to the viewers. Meaning that instead of showing two people engaging in conversation, the projectors would only show banal images of ‘nothing’ - perhaps images of a wall, where nothing happens but the occasional insect flying by. In this manner, there truly would be ‘nothing’ to see, further reducing the space into a non-place and hence staying consistent with the initial idea of institutional critique.
The other possibility was to make the piece more engaging, more social. We would encourage viewers to call in, and push it as a platform for conversation. The gesture of allowing people to call and interact changed the space into more of a place than usual (this is also because viewers were confronted with the ambiguous situation of whether or not they should step beyond the large ‘X’ by the door). We noticed that if viewers dared to step past the boundary line, they could physically engage in the piece by standing in front of the camera, or talking to the two people on the wall, thus enlarging the conversation between the two into a group discussion. This definitely happened when Joe and I were documenting, and all four of us were able to chat together. The virtual and physical interaction encouraged social interaction rather than diminishing it,and emphasized the space as a ‘place’ - contrary to the project’s initial intent.
Along with this interactive development, the piece took on a much more performative character. We had expected those on camera to be ‘performing’, but we didn’t consider the viewers to perform as well. It was particularly amusing to watch people struggle on camera
Confronted with these two directions that this piece could go, in the end we opted for the latter. While the idea was heavily conceptual, I much prefer work that is a bit playful and that people can take part in, rather than work that is closed off to the general non-artworld public. One can argue that the concept was compromised - but I personally like to think of it as the project taking on a life of its own, starting off with a one thing and developing into something unexpected. We were asked if we would choose to seal off the entire space with a big glass pane, given the resources. Sealing off the space would definitely make a strong conceptual statement, an obvious “don’t expect to be aesthetically rewarded”. However, the ambiguity of the permeable ‘X’ gave the piece another layer of interpretation, making it more open and hence more interesting (in my humble opinion).
The experimental nature of XLIEUX provided us with the opportunity to consider the various directions to take. And though we have decided to go with the more social aspect, it would be great if there could be a second or third installment, where each of the different aspects could be highlighted - the installments could either be more unsatisfying for the viewer, or more ambiguous.
And to push it further, why not take the interactive feature to a more social level? SG suggested a website where random people could dial in and chat, any time of the day, to just talk and meet others. There is so much potential for further creative work…
Anyway, thanks to those who attended and participated. The show is still on for a couple more days - I understand that one of the bigger problems with the piece is that it doesn’t run 24/7. Sorry, but we’re afraid the projectors would burn out if we kept them running for too long! So if you’re thinking of calling in at XLIEUX, try to make it 11-19:00 HKT.
Many thanks to Gina and Linda of EXPERIMENTA. Keep your eyes open for ‘A-Usual Objects‘, an art sale that will open this month (where you will also find yours truly).
“Jetting in and out of likely locations, they have no time to assimilate, still less to understand, the artistic production in any one place. From the viewpoint of those living and working in distant outposts, mega-curators and global artists may seem well connected; but they remain, by the very nature of the enterprise, more or less culturally rootless. At the same time, this deracination gives them a position of advantage, if not of privilege; for them, biennials do indeed have no frontiers. But for the majority outside the magic circle, real barriers still remain. The biennial, the most popular institutional mechanism of the last two decades for the organization of large-scale international art exhibitions, has, despite its decolonizing and democratic claims, proved still to embody the traditional power structures of the contemporary Western art world; the only difference being that ‘Western’ has quietly been replaced by a new buzzword, ‘global’.”
-Biennials Without Borders, by Chin-Tao Wu
– — –
article only confirms what most people already know regarding the nature of biennials, with the help of statistical data drawn from Documenta.
what to take away is that contemporary ‘nomadic’ curators indeed may not live up to their superstar reputation - after all, how do you assimilate yourself with the social context in which the biennial is held, within just a time span of merely 1-2 years of preparation? to put together a biennial that is socially relevant and that truly engages the community requires more time than a few years.
what is this?
so i was wandering around the salvation army in kowloon tong the other day, when i came across at least a dozen packs of the above. it was the mini barbara kruger that caught my eye.
on closer inspection, all the little weird pieces in the pack are miniature art pieces by well-known contemporary artists, scaled 1:12. along with Kruger, there’s Sarah Charlesworth Red Mask, Alan McCollum 5 Perfect Vehicles, Lisa Yuskavage Blonde Brunette and Redhead, Alexander Ross Untitled, John Newman Bubbles Burst (the weird blue thing that dominates the entire pack).
aside from boxes of this ‘art collection #2′, i found boxes and boxes of figurines, toiletries, teacups and mini furniture designed by established architects and artists, all part of The Kaleidoscope House. weird. the only thing that i couldn’t find was ‘art collection #1′. and everything was copyrighted under Bozart Toys and Laurie Simmons. another artist? that was enough to make me want to buy an iphone just so i could google this thing right away.
upon returning to my cubicle at work, this is what i found:
The Kaleidescope house is an interactive creative play environment for 6-year olds, conceived and designed by Simmons and Peter Wheelwright. Here’s an NYTimes article regarding the project. Simmons also has a blurb about it on her site. Bozart itself seems to be missing a website, despite all the hubbub surrounding their artist-type toys.
since everything at the salvation army was donated, i figured a toy manufacturer gave away all of these. selling price, HK$25. take note of the original selling price here, and the ebay prices here.
seems like an investment opportunity (and not really)! i’m a little disappointed by the quality of the toys… they look sort of rough and unpolished. so random to come across this in the least likely of places.
just little snapshots of life:
my two friends from catholic school got me this cute windchime made of shells. it cheers me up when im stuck in my research assistant cage with no windows in the basement.
on my way to tutor my kiddie, in repulse bay. a rare gorgeous sunset.
during our little tutorial session of french + arts and crafts (yes, an unlikely combination). as a treat, i brought him coloured dot stickers… i think he has the makings of the next yayoi kusama.
during a crit at scm. i’m very glad that my job allows me to sit in classes… i miss college…
inside a work that was part of William Lim’s “Illegal Structure” exhibit at Tang Contemporary. the show was okay, i like pieces that incorporate bits of architecture. however, considering that the subtitle of the show is “a site-specific architectural installation exhibition”, it lacked the incorporation of the existing gallery space into the pieces themselves. why call it site-specific then?? the good thing is that the pieces made really interesting photos…
saw my first HKIFF film of the year - Gotz Spielmann’s Revanche. veeery Austrian film, and very enjoyable, in a macabre, dark manner. but funny too. great plot, great cinematography, and a great mix of sexy and seedy at the same time. see it if you can, i know the screening i went to was sold out.
i was in seoul for a weekend… can’t say i saw a lot, but had a great time. we stayed at the shilla, which is the fanciest hotel i have ever stayed in so far (they had contemporary ‘art’ in the lobby!), and the best part is i didn’t have to pay a cent 
we had a traditional korean meal at a homey restaurant. at the time i took this photo i thought that this was all our food… little did we know that it’s only half of what they served us in the end.
the restaurant was very cozy indeed; the floorboards under the tables were heated. i have no idea how koreans/the japanese can endure sitting on the floor like this though…
went to ssamziegil in insadong. really hip shopping center… and purchased little goodies for my friends, like… kimchi chocolate. it’s a definitely an experience.
a piece by Yi Jeongheah at ArtSonje Centre. it reminds me loads of William Lim’s “Illegal Structure” exhibit… actually, it’s more or less the same, just minus the cats. weird, i wonder if they know each other?
i have to say, the seoul contemporary art scene seems more vibrant than the hong kong one (a quick walk through samcheongdong is enough to judge. ArtSonje Centre is a good space, though when i was there the exhibitions weren’t terribly interesting… all very ‘pretty’ installations, if you know what i mean. one piece on the wall did catch my eye though, which is this one by Bae Young-whan. i love the seemingly arbitrary tape. overall though, korean contemporary art is good, but the pieces are all very similar. ive seen way too many cutesy minimalist pieces. time to branch out guys… there’s potential!
i wanted so badly to go see the Nam June Paik Art Centre, but when i found out it takes over two hours to get there, i gave up on the idea. boo. next time if i am staying there longer i will make my pilgrimage to the granddaddy of video art!
she asked me if i’ve considered making a piece out of it.
.
.
.
of course i have. i’ve come up with sketches and written notes, with various versions and series, i’ve even considered where and how to show it.
but you know what, in the end, nothing can capture it. the complexity, the feelings. the loss of innocence, the harsh reality, the loneliness. more than anything, the sadness. because there is really no way to accurately portray it, any attempt at trying would be futile. i’m not ready, and i don’t think i ever will be. i dont believe in art being therapy. if i turned it into something concrete, it almost seems to belittle it, stripping it, oversimplifying it.
somehow, ive come to realise that keeping silent and inactive is the best way to preserve its intensity and dignity. it is what it is already, there is no need to reinterpret it.
