10/06/2010,
Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA
Images from D22, a punk rock club in Beijing.
In the lecture hall of the University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, a small crowd has gathered. Long banners hang from the ceiling. They are covered in photos depicting,amongst other things, Song Zhuang—a vibrant artist community that formed almost overnight on the outskirts of Beijing—and the graphically striking black and white graffiti covering the bathroom walls of D22, a punk rock club in Beijing.
On a large screen at the end of the hall images of artist Mr. Her, a Mongolian who makes his home in Song Zhuang, flash by depicting folktales in oil, a look slightly reminiscent of Diego Rivera. Meanwhile several small plastic boxes, all in different colors, are emitting strange sounds from their singular built-in speakers. These are Buddha Machines. Made by the Chinese musical group FM3, these individual media devices each play a single loop of ambient sound, a riff on Buddhist chants that fill the hall with a contemplative resonance. This is the start of what will be several meetings by the newly formed University of Oregon Confucius Society, and the ambiance for tonight’s meeting, an installation called Arts Scenes/Beijing, has been provided by John Fenn of ChinaVine.
The ChinaVine group, represented tonight by Doug Blandy, John Fenn, and Tomas Valladres, is fresh from their latest trip to China, and Arts Scenes/Beijing represents some of the sites and sounds they found while there. To date, ChinaVine has done research on artists in eleven villages in the Shandong Province and seven folk artists in Beijing. Blandy, addressing the crowd, talks about the installation, ChinaVine’s mission, and the primary question he and his team have asked themselves as they continue their research in China: “How is this Web-based project contributing to critical debates over the roles of technology, education, and shifting paradigms of media by presenting the parallel yet intertwined exercise of cultural practice and art’s and humanities’ research as it’s manifesting in the digital domain?” Art’s Scene/Beijing is meant to answer this question, at least in part, by combining ChinaVine’s folkloric research with an arts-based approach. The installation also highlights something else the ChinaVine team has discovered in their research, namely how contemporary Chinese art is informed by traditional Chinese heritage.