This week: Yi Xin Tong’s field recordings album release party; a discussion on feminist activism in China; talks about the challenges contemporary writers have handling the country’s tumultuous history and photography in Chinese landscape art; and a presentation about the evolving formation of Asian families; and more…
Coming up:
3/31 – Chinese musician-founded International Chamber Orchestra of America presents New World, New Music, in which an orchestra plays as a performer wearing a VR headset interacts with a virtual environment
Early April – Huang Hsin-yao’s The Great Buddha + 《大佛普拉斯》 and Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still 《大象席地而坐》are the Chinese language films screening at Film Society and MoMA’s New Directors New Films.
Our weekly listing now includes open calls and other opportunities for artists, filmmakers, and others involved with Chinese culture in this intro section.
41st Asian American International Film Festival – Asian Cinevision is accepting entries for the 41st Asian American International Film Festival to be held July 25 – August 4, 2018 in New York. The festival the longest running and, with over 100 features and shorts, largest Asian/Asian American film festival. Work-in-Progress Deadline: April 6, 2018
We add talks, films, performances, exhibitions, featuring or relating to Chinese, Taiwanese, diasporic artists and topics to our event and ongoing exhibition calendars as we learn of them.
We post frequently on our Facebook page. So check the page for links we share and get a heads up on events before we include them in these weekly posts. For art, images, and other instances of Chineseness we see, follow us on Instagram.
We’re looking for contributors! If you’re interested in writing an article, contributing photos or artwork to be featured with our weekly events and exhibitions listing, letting us know about an event, send a pitch at beyondchinatown@gmail.com.
UPCOMING EVENTS
1) Yi Xin Tong Album Release Party – Artist Yi Xin traveled from New York to Shanghai, Mohe County, Harbin, Kashigar, Ürümqi, Lanzhou, and Sanya to make field recordings for his new album titled Ultima Thule, a phrase meaning “distant regions beyond the known world.”
A limited edition of 50 CDs were produced with Katydid Records. Participants will have the chance to win signed copies by lottery at the event, after which the full album will be released on the artist website, YouTube, and Xiami.
Saturday, March 24, 8 PM
Yve Yang Gallery, 532 W. 43rd Street
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2) Police Story 《警察故事》– A bone-cracking landmark in Hong Kong beat-‘em-up action, Police Story stars director Jackie Chan as Ka-kui/Kevin, an inspector assigned to protect a key witness (Brigitte Lin) in a drug case from the agents of her former employer, a task which will require him to dangle from a speeding bus by umbrella, go through (conservative estimate) one billion plate glass windows in the film’s department store finale, and maintain the affections of his fickle girlfriend, May (Maggie Cheung). Chan never looked better as a full-body performer—and his performance looks better than ever in this brand new restoration by L’Immagine Ritrovata Hong Kong.
Saturday, March 24, 8:30 PM
Metrograph, 7 Ludlow Street
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3) #mìtù: Teach-In on Feminist Activism in China – A bilingual teach-in related to feminist activism in China, in the wake of the closure of feminist online platforms such as Feminist Voices on International Women’s Day. We hope to discuss together the challenges, strategies and histories of feminist activism in China. The event is also intended to be an opportunity for international students, Asian-Americans, and our allies to learn from each other and strategize next steps.
Tuesday, March 27, 6:30 PM
963 Schermerhorn Hall Extension, Columbia University
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4) Shen Wei: Expressions in Dance, Art and Film With Shen Wei Dance Arts – Shen Wei, the acclaimed choreographer, painter, and founder of Shen Wei Dance Arts, reveals his artistic inspirations and working processes as a multi-media artist in a far-reaching dialogue on Buddhism, childhood memories, explorations of dreamscapes, and his journeys to Tibet with YiLing Mao, Executive Director of Art Collectives LLC. For this illuminating evening, Shen Wei’s dance Company will perform some of his most iconic pieces including Folding, Re-Part II, and Neither. Selections of his paintings will be discussed in depth alongside a world premiere screening of his recent short film, Innerspace, a poetic exploration of how we navigate space, untethered from nature in our vast modern constructs–set in and around one of China’s striking new works of architecture. The evening celebrates Shen Wei and his artistic vision upon the third decade of his active engagement in the arts on the world stage.
Tuesday, March 27: 7 PM
Asia Society
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5) In Search of China’s Soul: Facing History: Best-Selling Author Xue Yiwei on Navigating China’s Complex Literary Scene – Xue Yiwei’s books are popular in China – but his latest, Dr. Bethune’s Children, has not been published there. That’s because it touches on sensitive moments in history. Xue’s experience raises a question: in a country that has trouble facing its painful past, from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Resolution, how can China’s authors handle history in a way that is true? Xue discusses how contemporary Chinese writers navigate those challenging waters.
Dr. Bethune’s Children, which is banned in China (it is available only in a Chinese language version published in Taiwan), focuses on individual lives marked by some of the traumatic events of recent decades that have been veiled by official secrecy. In showing us the effects of the distress and repression that have marked his whole generation, Xue Yiwei unveils the human heart.
Wednesday, March 28, 6 PM
China Institute
6) Curator’s Lecture: Part Two New Shanshui Photography—Chinese Landscape Photography with a New Dimension – Art of the Mountain’s second curator’s lecture will be conducted by renowned photography critic Jiang Rong (江融), guest curator of the exhibition, member of the United Nations Exhibitions Committee, and columnist in Photo World magazine. Jiang’s lecture will focus on the elements of the exhibition’s third section: New Landscape Photography.
Wednesday, March 28 6:30 PM (rescheduled from March 21)
China Institute
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7) RU Talk: New Family – Wu Jianru’s upcoming New Family project features the urgent tendency of diversifying relationship structures in East Asia. With the phasing out of the one-child policy in China, an irreplaceable national biopolitical experiment, the millennial generations’ unborn siblings await historicization. Monogamy, the core of the traditional family is menaced by the dramatic rise of Sangs (a generation of giving up), while professional affection, friendship, filial piety, apology, and comfort are available and affordable through mobile apps. In the presentation at RU, Wu will share her curatorial research regarding this evolving formation of Asian families followed by a conversation with Zoe Jiang Meng, the Ph.D. candidate of cinema study in NYU, while showing the work by NY based artist Dachal Choi.
Wednesday, March 28, 6:30 PM
Residency Unlimited, 360 Court Street, Brooklyn
ONGOING FILMS, SHOWS, AND EVENTS
1) Shed Skin Papa 《脫皮爸爸》– A down-on-his-luck man is tasked with taking care of his elderly father only to discover that the man is shedding a layer of skin every day, making him younger in the process. Forced to deal with a completely different person, his son has to engage him on a more meaningful level while finding out just what’s happening.
At AMC Empire 25
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2) Operation Red Sea 《 紅海行動》 – Famed action director Dante Lam returns with this explosive follow-up to his 2016 box office smash Operation Mekong. When a terrorist plot to obtain nuclear materials is hidden under the cover of a violent coup, only the Chinese Navyas elite Jiaolong Assault Team have the deadly skill and precision needed to take on the situation.
At AMC Empire 25
ART EXHIBITIONS
Group Shows and Local Artists:
Lu Zhang’s artist studio during her residency at NARS foundation becomes a dating hotspot through her project It Takes Ten Years Practice to be on the Same Boat. Inspired by the Chinese proverb “十年修得同船渡” translated as “it takes ten years practice to be on the same boat,” the project builds the concept of yuánfèn in which one’s good deeds in past lives will lead to the “fateful coincidence” of meeting another person in this current life, whether as friends, lovers or acquaintances. The proverb also implies that we be open, patient and appreciative of moments when we encounter each other. Read more about it here.
Hong Kong artist Wong Ping and Chinese artists Song Ta and Shen Xin are part of the New Museum’s triennial group show Songs for Sabotage which “questions how individuals and collectives around the world might effectively address the connection of images and culture to the forces that structure our society. Together, the artists in Songs for Sabotage propose a kind of propaganda, engaging with new and traditional media in order to reveal the built systems that construct our reality, images, and truths. The exhibition amounts to a call for action, an active engagement, and an interference in political and social structures urgently requiring them.”
Think!Chinatown’s Everyday Chinatown invites you to call in to listen in on members of the Chinatown community as they share stories of commonly found household items in Chinatown. Window displays of these objects will be scattered around the neighborhood from the Lunar New Year to March 31. This project of cultural translation, self-representation, and inter-generational exchange is funded by the Citizen’s Committee for NYC.
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Opening and Newly Listed:
1) Brush and Beyond: Wu Dayu, Yu Youhan, Zhang Wei (Boers-Li Gallery, 3/16 – 4/28) – A group show of rarely-exhibited and ardently sought-after paintings and drawings by Wu Dayu (1903-1988), Yu Youhan (b.1943, Shanghai), and Zhang Wei (b.1952, Beijing). Curated by the scholar Gao Minglu, this exhibition presents a study of the evolution of mainland Chinese abstract painting, and embodies a dialogue between the tradition of Chinese ink and that of Western oil painting. Internationally-acclaimed painters in their own right, Wu Dayu, Yu Youhan and Zhang Wei represent three different conceptions of early abstract painting that anticipate more recent waves in Chinese contemporary art. Brush and Beyond brings together for the first time Wu Dayu’s intimate oil paintings and works on paper from the 1950s, 1970s and 1980s, and more recent pieces by Zhang Wei and Yu Youhan.
Foregrounding abstraction as subject matter, the paintings on view portray images forged upon the artists’ living experience and their reflection on the relatedness between these two major painting traditions. From the perspective of the East, the three artists push the boundaries of painting as a universal and visual language by means of its materiality. The techniques themselves invite the viewer to a shared aspiration towards freedom, creativity and individuality; resistance to order and liberation from legibility, while challenging the impulse to rationality.
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2) Wang Ping: Mad World (YUI Gallery, 3/17 – 4/16) – Mad World uses symbols and metaphors, the language of 20th-century Surrealist art, to create a dream-like alienated and bizarre visual world, which explores the connection between inner emotions and nihilism.
The past, present, and the future are manifested through the combination of photography and digital painting. Most of objects in this project are based on the real memory, so first of all photography is a way to remodel the past scene. After that, on the basis of digital painting, to surrealize the true world, distorting and incorporating it within emotions. Therefore Mad World is not only a relic of the past but also an unfinished dream.
Chasing the madness is easy to get lost, because in the course of time, life and death, pain and fragility, affection and tranquility are always alternating cycles in nothingness. The answer might never be found, whether the obsession and memories is the only theory that can keep people survival in the mad world?
No link available on gallery website. See http://pingwangstudio.com/mad-world/
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Closing soon:
Made in Asia (Opera Gallery, 3/14 – 3/27)
Shifting Momentum: Abstract Art in Taiwan (Taipei Cultural Center at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, 3/8 – 3/30)
Art Across Archives (384 Broadway, 2/17 – 3/31)
Zhang Engli – The Garden (Hauser & Wirth, 1/25 – 4/7)
Liu Shiyuan: Isolated Above, Connected Down (Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 2/22 – 4/7)
Current shows:
Visit the exhibition calendar for details for the current shows listed below. Check the museum’s or gallery’s website for hours of operation.
The Fuck Off Generation: Chinese Art in the Post-Mao Era, Part 1 (Ethan Cohen Gallery, 1/31 – ??)
Made in Asia (Opera Gallery, 3/14 – 3/27)
Shifting Momentum: Abstract Art in Taiwan (Taipei Cultural Center at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, 3/8 – 3/30)
Art Across Archives (384 Broadway, 2/17 – 3/31)
Zhang Engli – The Garden (Hauser & Wirth, 1/25 – 4/7)
Liu Shiyuan: Isolated Above, Connected Down (Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 2/22 – 4/7)
Wang Dongling: Poetry and Painting (Chambers Fine Art, 2/25 – 4/14)
Zao Wou-Ki: Watercolor. Ink on Paper. Porcelain (Marlborough Gallery, 3/15 – 4/14)
Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong: Constellation (Seward Park, June 2017 – June 2018)
Spirited Creatures: Animal Representations in Chinese Silk and Lacquer (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 10/21/17 – 7/22/18)
Streams and Mountains without End: Landscape Traditions of China (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 8/26/17 – 1/9/19)
Lead image: At a temple in Tainan, Taiwan. Photo by Andrew Shiue