shu and joe

For 200 – 1600 RMB ($30 to $250), audiences can see the conductor play in the Great Hall of the People in Tian’anmen Square. My parents always loved Clint Eastwood westerns…

Giant neon by Chinese artist He An.

Artist Wang Gongxinn has taken over an empty storefront next to a pancake shop where he projects an exact replica of the shop at night. From the artist’s website:

During the day, It’s Not About the Neighbors is a sculptural installation, an uncanny imitation of the neighboring pancake shop’s façade—a simple aluminum and glass storefront commonly found in Beijing’s older neighborhoods. At nightfall, a video projection on the façade depicts the neighbors at work making and selling their bread and noodles. The work’s relationship to the adjacent business changes depending hour of the day; at times it is a physical imitation, at times it is a virtual simulation, and sometimes it’s both. The overriding visual connection between these two adjacent spaces is undermined by their different functions: one is an operating business that depends on local residents and neighbors for its income; the other is independent and non-functional, relying instead upon the visual economies of the hutong and patterns of everyday life. The dual meaning of the word “neighbors,” proposed by Wang’s installation refers to both those who occupy the adjacent shop as well as those who frequent the shop for their daily meals. Offering an indexical relationship to its own location It’s Not About the Neighbors also uncovers new questions about presenting contemporary art in public contexts.

Sad to read that the TVCC tower was destroyed last night when a blitz of New Year fireworks in downtown Beijing set the building on fire. Luckily the building was not in operation yet and no injuries have been reported only one fatality has been reported. Friends of ours spent years developing this project only to see it ruined.

Photo: David Gray/Reuters

Converse sponsored a documentary last summer about Beijing bands, one of which was Jonathan’s band PK14. Along with Queen Sea Big Shark, the bands toured 6 cities on a converted bus, at the same time as the Summer Olympics hit.

[via Shangahiist]

French photographer Pierre Siedel takes eerie photos of people stopped in moments within the chaos of Beijing subways.

In these photographs, the subject in the midst of the bustling is being stripped away from his/her surroundings, transcending space and time.

This method became my “artistic medium” in which the subjects are placed in the artificial urban landscape, contemplating time. The subway, hidden and secluded, became an underground bubble that holds the flow of people.

Being isolated from the rushing crowd, one feels alienated, lonely, detached even abandoned. In this artificial universe, the underground transit bubble stirs the mind to a kind of self-reflection. I thought it would be interesting to explore through photography such absurd places like the subway where everyone is running in the same direction and never stops.

Swiss architecture firm HHF teamed up with Ai Weiwei to produce this gallery space for the collection of a New York/Beijing-based gallerist. The building is located in Salt Point, NY – about 1.5 hours from the city.

Images by Iwan Baan via Dezeen.

Two from Pash.

lived in China for five years and took note of the tiny, sometimes beautiful details of humans.

More work here.

Williamsburg, Brooklyn. 1983

Flea Market at Union Square. 1987

Chen Kaige. 1985

Before he was a superstar artist and architect, Ai Wei Wei spent ten years in New York City, photographing his friends and capturing everything he saw.

Ai Weiwei on his NYC photos:

These photos were taken between 1983 and 1994 during the decade I spent living in New York before returning to Beijing. At that time, I didn’t really have anything to do. I was just hanging out, whiling away my time everyday by taking pictures of the people I met, places I went, my friends, my neighborhood, the street and the city.

In a flash twenty years have past, and the New York I knew no longer exists. The appearance of the East Village has totally changed, and many of the people in my photographs are no longer in this world. I took these photos casually, and most of my subjects probably don’t even realize that they are in them. Today, looking back on the past, I can see that these photographs are not true anymore. After all, any reality is just a fact of change – an unconfirmed moment in the slow march of time. The present always surpasses the past, and the future will not care about today.

What drives me to organize and publish these photographs is not nostalgia, for I believe that past occurrences do not matter much. We are not destined to meet those whom we’ve met, and humans are by nature lonely. Rather, the photos themselves are concrete objects that form a kind of orderly arrangement despite their free-floating nature as disassociated images on photo paper. The specific people and things involved, including my own past, are not important anymore.

Life in the past fifty years has been much like a falling leaf with no goal or direction. In the end, however, the leaf will land in some corner. The images’ appearance and order are much like this. They are disorganized, but paths of thought appear that seem most clear when the photos are all mixed up.

Today, I still always have a camera in my hand, accustomed as I am to the click of the shutter. What I should explain though, is that I am not interested in photography, and don’t really care about the subjects of my photos. In the end, they are part of a different reality than that of my own existence. Every time I look at these photographs, I always discover that there is more strangeness in them than familiarity.

A selection of Ai Wei Wei’s photos are being exhibited at Three Shadows in Beijing through April 2009.

All images courtesy of Three Shadow Photography, Beijing