Hammer Museum

“He Wei’s process of creating an artwork, mirrors his journey through life. It seeks to be honest, to find balance, to struggle with opposition, to rise above destructive forces and to use it all for the good of the whole. The process produces an art object but it is secondary to his quest to find freedom and balance in life. But we were made to create, and the work that he has produced is a worthy gift in itself, simple, beautiful, and true.”

Read more: http://bit.ly/1IGtDLg

Walking is a series of over 1,300 photos and a video animation made over a three to four year period of time, in different cities, always at night, using only the street and shop lights for illumination. It is simply the recording of a journey, walking on an endless road, without a map, to some distant and undefined destination.

More: http://bit.ly/1Mv0h6j

Our former curator James Elaine lives in China and documents his art adventures on our blog.

This week, he looks at Deng Tai's nighttime performance, Shadows. http://bit.ly/1x8VM6k

"Under the direction of Herring the 2 actors filled their mouths with food color tinted water from large water bottles and began to spit; at each other, into the air, onto the walls, ceiling, floor, and existing art works. Herring choreographed them into multiple positions and actions as they spit blue, green, yellow, and red colored water, Herring constantly photographing the process as he moved in and around their actions."

Continue reading: http://bit.ly/1Gt3Ea3

"Over the next 6 hours this motionless standing figure was transformed from a common man to a magnificent and never before seen creature; an ancient Chinese operatic warrior entering a future world from the emperor’s tombs of Xi’an, dazzling, but nowhere to go."

Read more: http://bit.ly/1FLLGz5

Past Hammer Projects artist Chen Qiulin’s installation at Telescope has continued to grow as more porcelain ‘zhezhi’ (folded paper objects) have arrived from the Jingdezhen porcelain factory in southern China. The title of the piece, 14,235, is also the number of individual pieces in the work of art.

Read more: http://bit.ly/126lZdZ

"Ma Qingyun, considered to be one of the most influential designers and architects in the world, presents new sculptures at Telescope of pink neon entitled Lite-urbanism. Ma suggests a new urbanism by reducing form and function to simple calligraphic lines in the fragile light of neon. These works, "whimsical" yet "alien," are based on Ma’s un-built architectural projects."

Read on: http://bit.ly/1xu86jO

"Chen Qiulin’s work for the past 10 years has been about memory and loss and the impact upon society of China’s political and economic reforms. From watching her hometown being dismantled and submerged in the waters of the Three Gorges Dam, to the devastation of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, she has experienced the reverberations of loss and has been telling this story through her and others personal experiences in various ways and mediums."

Read more: http://bit.ly/1ptQTBP

The OCT Contemporary Art Terminal Xi’an (OCAT Xi’an) is the latest addition to the OCAT group of museums, now in five cities across China. The first was founded in Shenzhen in 2005 with a mission to support emerging and established contemporary Chinese artists, and produce exhibitions, lectures, and cultural programs on an international level.

James Elaine visits OCAT: http://bit.ly/1r0uZdU

Readymades are mass-produced commercially available objects that the artist Marcel Duchamp designated as art by merely selecting, and sometimes slightly modifying, them. He believed that an artist could elevate a common ordinary object to the status of art by just saying it is so. Nowadays, China is the world’s leading manufacturer of the common and everyday readymade. 

See more photos on our blog: http://bit.ly/1i0GBoy

"The artists’ studio gives me, as the Chinese say, Double Happiness. It is not just a ‘warehouse’ of finished art but also an archeological site where I can unearth and frame my own images from their leftovers."

http://bit.ly/1cJ5NBf

Beijing artist Zhang Xinjun’s work is born out of his relationship with the common materials and objects found in his everyday life and how they relate to his local surroundings. He references a general history and his personal past through the objects and their new relationships between themselves. The elements that make up his installations are not intended to convey any specific or symbolic meaning, only to nurture an ambiguous setting suspended in time between childhood, the mother, daily life, memory, living spaces, society and the surrounding environment. --James Elaine, former Hammer Projects curator living in Beijing

More info + photos: http://bit.ly/1cpDkvG