It is with great sadness that we share the news that Wonil Rhee, an influential Korean curator and advocate of Asian contemporary art, passed away on January 11, 2011 at his residence in Seoul. He was 50 years old.

He was an outstanding person, a passionate lover of art, a global traveler and a brilliant curator. His sudden death is a real loss for the art world and of a dear friend of Vancouver.

Centre A, Vancouver Biennale, and Yishu Journal are very honored to co-host a memorial reception to commemorate Wonil Rhee from 7:30 pm to 9 pm, on Wednesday, March 16. Please join us to celebrate his life and important contribution. At the memorial, we will invite his friends from Korea, China and Europe to present short speeches in person and via Skype.

This event will be streamed live at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/wonilrhee

Selection of Wonil Rhee’s main activities: Artistic Director of Media City Seoul 2002, 2006, Korea; Curator of Digital Sublime, 2004, Taipei MOCA, Taiwan; Co-Curator of Gwangju Biennial 2004, Korea; Co-Curator of Shanghai Biennial 2006, China; Curator of the exhibition “Thermocline of Art. New Asian Waves”, 2007, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Germany; Co-Curator of BIACS 3 – 3rd International Biennial of Seville “YOUniverse”, 2008, Spain; Artistic Director of DIGIFESTA 2010, Gwangju Biennial, Korea; Curator of Nanjing Documenta 2010, China; Co-Curator of Prague Biennial, 2009-2013, Czech Republic; Co-Commissioner of Vancouver Olympic Sculpture Biennial 2009-2011, Canada; Curator of BSI AG Lugano, Switzerland; Asia Editor, Flash Art, Milan, New York.

Date: Wednesday, March 16, 2011, 7:30 pm – 9 pm

Venue: Centre A (2 West Hastings Street, Vancouver)

Live Streaming: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/wonilrhee

For more information, please visit:

http://www.centrea.org

http://www.vancouverbiennale.com

http://yishu-online.com

Editor’s Note:

Yishu 43 marks the second time that this publication and the Long March Project in Beijing have collaborated on a special full issue. The first was in the fall of 2006 with the publication of the Yan’an Forum on Art

Education, an ambitious event organized by Cai Guo-Qiang and Lu Jie and consisting of lectures, discussions, and on-site artworks. This forum took place in Yan’an to coincide with the sixty-fourth anniversary of Mao Zedong’s famous lecture presented for the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art in 1942.

This current special issue of Yishu focuses on the Ho Chi Minh Trail Project, which has been ongoing for the past two years and is intended to generate ongoing dialogue between China and some of its geographically closest neighbours—Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Most discussions about contemporary Chinese art in relation to the international have tended to fixate on its relationship to the West, which is understandable considering that the evolution of contemporary Chinese art in the 1970s and 80s was strongly influenced by information coming from the West. But in recent years there has been a move to examine contemporary Chinese art in relation to its neighbours in Asia. This relationship is more deeply embedded in social, cultural, and political histories than in art histories, and the Ho Chi Minh Trail Project explores how these histories affect philosophical perspectives, creative processes, and the making of art.

As the texts in this issue reveal, those participating in the Ho Chi Minh Trail Project have not been without their disagreements, but the project has been carried out in a spirit of cooperation with the aim of proposing new approaches to the relationship of art to society, of looking beyond what has become an overbearing art industry, and embracing both shared and unshared experiences relative to the context of Southeast Asia.

I would like to thank all those who contributed to the realization of the Ho Chi Minh Trail Project, and thus this issue; their names are listed at the back of the journal, with special thanks extended to Lu Jie, Sheryl Cheung, and the Yishu staff.

Keith Wallace

A roundtable discussion focusing on the work of Song Dong, how it relates to that of other artists who emerged in the 1990s; the impact it has had on the younger generation of Chinese artists; and how it has been received both inside and outside of China. Participants include: Song Dong, Britta Erickson, Wu Hung, Zheng Shengtian.

The Artists’ Roundtable for the Song Dong exhibition is made possible by The W.L.S. Spencer Foundation.

Date: February 26, 2011, 2-4PM

Venue: Yerba Buena Center

About the Exhibition

Song Dong is known for his innovative conceptual videos and photography that quietly reveal the societal implications of modern China. They also express how he personally copes with his country’s rapid development, while retaining a spiritual connection to the past. A highly skilled artist, Song Dong’s works are especially powerful in expressing the effects of radical change and social transformation on members of his own family. It is this latter aspect of his work that has set him apart from the many extraordinary artists who have also been grappling with the rapid changes China is experiencing.

The centerpiece of Song Dong: Dad and Mom, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well is the much heralded, large-scale installation Waste Not comprised of over 10,000 items ranging from pots and basins to blankets, bottle caps, toothpaste tubes, and stuffed animals collected by the artist’s mother over the course of more than five decades. This installation has been shown at prestigious venues across Asia, Europe and North America since it was first created in 2005, but YBCA will be the first venue to present Waste Not in a larger context of Song Dong’s work focusing on his family.

Waste Not follows the Chinese concept of wu jin qi yong or ‘waste not,’ as a prerequisite for survival. The project evolved out of a family necessity and the artist’s mother’s grief after the death of her husband. The assemblage of thousands and thousands of items takes up a 70 x 60 foot area that viewers can navigate around and through. The centerpiece of the installation is the architectural armature of the building where the artist was born. A core theme of Waste Not is the idea that people, everyday objects and personal stories are not only spiritually rich in thematic material but recognizable evidence of the impact of politics and history on family life.

The exhibition also features a selection of the artist’s videos, photographs and a newly commissioned work. Collectively, the works create a longitudinal portrait of Song Dong’s use of art as a way to form closer bonds with his mother and father, as well as his siblings, wife and daughter, and to express the power of the family as a social unit. Other works in the exhibition include Touching My Father (1997), Father and Son in the Ancestral Temple (1998), Listening to My Family Talking about How I Was Born (2001) and Chinese Medicine Healing Story (2011), all of which use photo-based imagery to consider familial identity, individuality and the legacy of ancestors.

Vist: http://www.ybca.org/song-dong

Whether by the censor’s pen or the demands of commercial development, China has long excelled at erasing its past. In the last decades of the 20th century, many of Beijing’s traditional neighborhoods, courtyards, and shopping centers were bulldozed in favor of new commercial districts, gated communities, and tourist attractions. The Cultural Revolution demanded the elimination of “the four olds” — culture, customs, habits, and ideas — not only destroying existing works of art but requiring contemporary artists to adapt new genres like socialist realism. And what the West considers the most iconic photograph of modern China, the lone protestor standing before a line of tanks in Tiananmen Square, is unknown to most Chinese. But today, a new generation of Chinese artists is harking back to old forms — incorporating pre-Revolution imagery, centuries-old dynastic painting techniques, and allusions to the Mao era to comment on today’s politics and culture. In conjunction with the Getty exhibition, “Photography from the New China,” Zócalo invited a panel featuring USC School of Architecture Dean Qingyun Ma, artist Shengtian Zheng, and New York- and Shanghai-based artist Wenda Gu to explore creativity, capitalism, and the conflict between past and present.

The panel was moderated by Melissa Chiu, director, Asia Society Museum.

photo (from left): Ma Qingyun, Melissa Chiu, Zheng Shengtian, Gu Wenda

Date: Thursday, February 10, 2011, 7:00 PM

Venue: The Getty Center

1200 Getty Center Drive

Los Angeles, CA

Since he began exhibiting his art in the late 1970s, Vancouver-based artist Ken Lum has developed a complex body of work that includes performances in public spaces, sculptures produced from rented furniture, studio portrait photographs that merge with faux corporate logos, paintings of incomprehensible language, mazes made of mirrors inscribed with texts, and works that mimic the signage found in low-end strip malls. With each of these varied forms, Lum engages with the structures, systems and ordeals that shape our lived experience of the everyday world. His strategies often involve manipulating the mechanisms deployed to attract attention in consumer culture — for example, by using an unexpectedly personal or political statement on a commercial business sign — in order to articulate the anxieties and contradictions that mark social spaces in which disparate traditions collide and mutate in a globalized world. Lum consistently evokes the gestures, utterances, tensions and often mundane exchanges that mark the intersection of public and private space in everyday life. Often drawing upon established conventions of portraiture, his work locates the individuals he depicts as subjects whose desire for autonomy sits in tension with the conditions that shape their position as social subjects.

The most extensive survey of Ken Lum’s work to date, the exhibition features a number of works not previously exhibited in North America, including Mirror Maze with 12 Signs of Depression, produced for Documenta 11 in 2002, House of Realization, produced for the Istanbul Biennale in 2007, and his recent Rorschach Shopkeeper Signs. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, published in partnership with Douglas & McIntyre.

Photo (top): Ken Lum, Red Circle, 1986 fabric, wood. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Acquisition Fund. Courtesy of Trevor Mills, Vancouver Art Gallery.

On View: February 12 to September 25, 2011

Venue: Vancouver Art Gallery, 750 Hornby Street, Vancouver, BC V6Z 2H7 Canada

Gallery Hours

Daily 10 am to 5 pm; Tuesdays until 9 pm

http://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca

The relationship between contemporary Chinese visual art and criticality is a highly problematic one. In producing and exhibiting their work internationally, contemporary Chinese artists are not only made to negotiate often strongly contrasting restrictions on freedom of critical expression within and outside the People’s Republic of China (PRC), but also differences in established cultural understanding between China and other parts of the world about the potential function of art as a focus for public critique. This special edition of the peer-reviewed journal Contemporary Art Practice will seek to address issues relating to the relationship between contemporary Chinese art and criticality taking into account as wide a range of differing cultural and intellectual perspectives on the subject as possible. Potential contributors are invited to address specific questions relating to the critical significance of contemporary Chinese art as well as the differing cultural, social, economic and political conditions within which that art is produced and received both inside the PRC and internationally.

Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:

• The nature of political suppression within the PRC and how artists seek to construct a critical art and critical discourses related to the production of art within that context;

• Cultural resistance in China to Western(ised) conceptions of artistic criticality;

• The public impact of a critical contemporary Chinese art both within and outside the PRC;

• The relationship between aesthetics and criticality in relation to contemporary Chinese art;

• The relationship between Contemporary Chinese art and the possible construction of a civil society within the PRC;

• The openness of contemporary Chinese art to contrasting interpretations of its critical function within differing cultural, social, economic and political settings;

• The problematic effects of cultural translation on an understanding of the relationship between contemporary Chinese art and criticality.

The editors invite abstracts of original essays and reviews that address the theme of ‘Contemporary Chinese Art and Criticality’. Abstracts should be between 250 and 500 words and should be submitted in electronic form to paul.gladston@nottingham.ac.uk by 31st March 2011. Abstracts submitted after that date will not be considered. Invitations to submit full essays or reviews, including style guidelines, will be sent out by 21st April 2011. Completed essays or reviews should be submitted no later than 31st August 2011.

All abstracts should be presented in either English or Mandarin Chinese. Essays and reviews may be presented in Mandarin Chinese by agreement with the editors for subsequent translation into English.

Please note: the editors welcome contributions from artists, curators, critics, doctoral students and post-doctoral fellows as well as from established academics.

For further information, please contact

Paul Gladston at paul.gladston@nottingham.ac.uk

and/or

Katie Hill at hill.cai@gmail.com

A Special Guest Edited Edition of the Peer-Reviewed Journal: Contemporary Art Practice

Publication: Spring 2012

Guest Editors: Dr. Paul Gladston, Associate Professor of Critical Theory and Visual Culture, the University of Nottingham; Dr. Katie Hill, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Chinese Art and Curator of the Chinese Poster Collection, the University of Westminster