Towers of destinations

Just to update to those who missed the last (additional) meeting in Monday afternoon, we have come up to this idea of building towers as a conceptual/physical framework to sum up our experience/knowledge exchange in the workshops. It's a result after many mutations and subject to mutate further. Tobias and Heague will further develop it and we expect soon concrete ideas will be coming into action. Stay tuned.

individual/organization

Who are the individuals and who are the organizations? It’s not rare they are just the same party in our art world. S/he is an artist or curator and COULD BE also an art space. This oneself just so often has a symbiotic relationship with an organization. So an art space in Asia can think, act and create like a person. An art practitioner at the same time can be regarded as an organization simply as granted, representing a thought, a movement or a trend for others.

After all, individualism in Asia could hardly be anything highly regarded in the tradition, or maybe even in our modern society. When making any telephone inquiry, the receptionist would most likely ask from which company you are. It seems that individuals are simply not expected to take responsibility as organizations. If they are recognized as such, they will definitely be highly respected.

Perhaps the art world might be slightly different as the history of art is per se a history of individuals in spite of its complementary part of institutions like art groups, movements, trends and museums. Small organizations are allowed to be not so organized like loose groups of individual artists, at the same time attaining importance in contemporary art development as an institution especially where the establishment is either too old or simply not existing.

It’s a privilege for art practitioners to wear different hats within this context who are as individuals never too small and as organizations never too big.

lee kit - sealed

Sealed (moment at home) 2008
Hand-painted tape, readymade, video.
Dimension variable

1. I want to make use of some domestic scene as a metaphor to organization, or institution. Every piece of furniture has at least, a function and its structure. Every corner or places at home have its function and structure, or rules to use according to the people living in. Just like any organizations in the world, have a function, structures and rules.

2. Policemen will sealed a crime scene with tape and freeze the locale. The locale's original function and rules are temporarily stopped. I want to make some tape which is similar to those policemen used to seal a place, but with something like 'This is more than I wanted.' hand-painted / printed on it instead of 'Police'. The 'locale', or the structure is sealed with an individual's comment instead of a name that represented another institution. The locales and the furniture are sealed like goods.

3. Too much, too much. Why not sealed some. May be it's too much even at home, may be. (tbc)

Updated title and synopsis

On July 6 & 7, there will be a conference related to the GZT in Hong Kong. Tobias and me will do a brief introduction of our project. We have updated the title as Organizing Mutation. Below is the synopsis. Comments are welcome.

How do we think about (self) organization and what does it mean in today’s art world in Asia? Trying to analyze this question, we planned a three day workshop in Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, to bring together twelve art-workers from different Asian countries to discuss the idea of organization. In the course of this workshop we try to find a way to come up with a common presentation at the exhibition of the Guangzhou Triennial. In line with an experimental spirit, we realize however that a workshop or seminar can never be over-planned and should not anticipate a predictable outcome. Instead of conventional conference structure and agenda, we try to focus on its space and time, in form of a journey across cities in the Pearl River Delta, which constitutes the ground work of a mobile organization of intense communication. We have however assured that the participants all are concerned with the idea of (art) organizations in some way or the other in their daily professions, be it as artists, curators or critics. In general we presume that organizations are mostly self-motivated and result of a personal interest and history imbedded in bigger local and global circumstances.

A school

Posted for Doris Wong:

As long as I tried to talk about my personal relationship with organizations, I am confused with which kind of organizations should be talked about. I wanted to talk about something that is related to my values. In recent years the most difficult struggle to me is the teaching experience I had last year. Teaching in a high school to me is like speaking with other people's voices. Some voices from the education department, the parents, the principal, the pupils but not your own. I still remember my colleague asked me to talk about "The Last Supper" but not mentioning anything about religion. How can one learn about Western Art history without knowledge of Christianity? Because of the different Gods of the international pupils, the art history is written in a new way. I must say that I found myself not suitable to be a teacher because of all these sorts of occasions. I quitted my job because I don’t understand why the school rules stated that girls can have long hair but boys cannot. Do you guys remember that there are teachers’ comments on the exam reports? When I was the class teacher last year, I got a word file of 120 sample comments. When you comment on a pupil, you can choose from those 120 samples. I felt myself writing “Arcades Project” when finishing the reports.

Let's start to build it.

As the theme is on art institution and organization (in very broad sense), we suppose each participant contribute something about it (be a new project, essay or previous ones with such a focus). Curators/writers probably can contribute a lot of cultural/ historical references and help to disseminate the whole project. From the very beginning, we intended to take a rather open approach, hoping for more creative but not old fashioned academic modes. So I confess it may be still confusing....

Now Tobias and I will take part in a conference organized by the GZ Triennial in Hong Kong on July 6 & 7. We're going to present our project in progress. It's indeed helpful for us to clarify what we're going to do in our workshop. But we need your guy's help first. So, I think we should start with something practical and substantial. I'd like to collect 4 or 5 images of each one's new ideas or old projects somehow related to the theme. Of course, please also feed us some texts about your thoughts and works. (Tobias, please feel free to amend....)