philip tinari

Simon Fujiwara, Frozen, 2010. Proposal for Frieze Art Fair.

Walking out the entrance of a hotel of a city you know only just so well is a very certain sensation, the drag of appearing to all but a very few as a resident of a place you never called home. To a certain kind of person, the offhand utterance “but you know (London)” is a compliment of the highest order, evoking in the receiver a giddiness of a variety more or less obliterated in the long arc since college, for reasons equal parts self and circumstance. To walk a long way across a metropole is a recalcitrant pleasure, decadent in its timelessness, unabated even by a hand-held device that tells you exactly where you are at every step and pulls in greetings and demands from across the chronosphere. Shanzhai flâneurs are we.

Five nights in a sparse room a stone’s throw from the South Ken tube. Alone in a city of conversations overheard or at most half-participated-in, a city in which underlying anxieties seep through the crevices of every speech-act, in which you rightfully obsess about how your scarf has been draped and delightedly wait two minutes, after a knowing rebuke from the butler, in the downstairs lobby of the member’s club for your appointment, a member, whom you know will not be late. In which the bookstores‘ stocks are rotated weekly, and the sale shelves sing of the issues of the day a few months ago. In which an Iranian-born fashion editor may regale you with tales of confounding his homeland’s pavilion staff at the Shanghai Expo by the combination of his peasant shoes and bespoke jacket. In which you you know just how you are to nod when the economist seated to your right tells you about her latest polemic against aid to Africa, or the editor explains, as the ceramic fumes mount, how people come to his magazine by stumbling upon its podcast. In which the new director of the most popular museum of this new century labors to flout to guests, gathered in his honor a few nights before the Frieze-week deluge, the duration of his connection to this place even as he is feted by two stylish benefactors, neither of whom is from there either.

“Art,” says the slowly aging Belgian YBA, “is gold for your walls,” fondling a thick impasto that hangs above the desserts. “No one wants to look at your books.”

Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds, 2010.

from a friend:

when are you back in china? how was frieze? did you steal a sunflower seed and did you get poisoned by its fumes? are the cool kids in shoreditch/tongzhou going to start grinding porcelain sunflowers and huffing the dust as the new ultimate hipster/dissident high?????

Dear Diary, Going back isn’t quite what it used to be. I alluded to this in the letter that introduces the new issue of our magazine, but there was a time when for reasons of either age or geopolitics or a different information culture or all of the above I used to feel like I needed to pretend to know what was going on in New York at most all times. I can tell you, diary, that I used to live in full-on terror of mispronouncing last names I had only seen in print. These days, it’s just another city I don’t live in, albeit the one I’d probably rather live in. That and some of my friends now have kids or at least wives. And as much as I reminisce about my early-aughties years in China, all the two- and three-day New York interludes of scrambling to see every show and squeeze in every possible coffee, I like the runaround slightly better now that I care slightly less.

Philippe Parreno, Marquee, 2008. Installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2008.

Yes diary, one trick is to stay somewhere where people will be happy to come to you, and The Ace Hotel is, as they say, so very something. It starts with the lightbulbed marquee over the entrance, which just says HOTEL, an object that works more or less like the minimalist pearly white marquees that the French artist Philippe Parreno likes to put above entrances to “announce something” without saying quite what, as he famously did in an exhibition entitled theanyspacewhatever last year. The bell captain has one of those 60s haircuts with extremely closely shorn sides. The dark and cavernous lobby, diary, at any time offers at least six possible haptic scenarios for two people to drink an espresso, ranging from lazy couches to uptight barstools. In the rooms they give you bedside music paper, because you are apparently expected to dream in transcribable movements. Downstairs, the baristas dress like characters from the 1992 motion picture Newsies! Like one friend I see when I’m in town says, hoteliers are the auteurs of our moment, creating spaces in which narratives can be staged. And narratives did we stage.

A design object potentially confusable for a work of art, 2010.

I had lunch with that friend in the bar on West Broadway where they filmed the Jiang Wen short in the 2008 motion picture New York, I Love You, the one where Cui Jian is playing on the radio and the guy tries to pick the girl up by translating the lyrics to the former’s famous ballad Greenhouse Girl in which “greenhouse” is actually an anatomical metaphor. And then we went past the Ghostbusters firehouse and up to his loft where his one-year-old was watching a made in Brooklyn instructional speak Chinese DVD featuring someone named “Pim,” with a properly multicultural cast and repeating words like toothbrush well ahead of the curve. When the segment ended, dad put on Kings of Convenience and the kid began to dance in front of a wall of books with a ladder on wheels as we strategized over his pre-school applications. Diary did you know that lactation consultants in Manhattan, of which my mother was once one in the Philadelphia suburbs, bill at USD $400/hour?

Ah yes, ART. Well, for starters I ran into the unsung hero of the Arte Povera movement at a sample sale on Orchard Street, and we traded observations of his one-off collaborator Ai Weiwei’s ambivalent megalomania as I was trying on raincoats. That morning I saw a really nice gallery show or several, disaster-scene photos by an obscure Swiss policeman that Harald Szeemann put into his last big show but which failed to really gain traction. Leo Koenig is trying again. Then there was the Jo Bear/John Wesley show at Matthew Marks, her stylized minimalism bouncing so perfectly off of his visual jokes. I saw a guy in glasses not unlike my own stand in front of a Wesley pun about silhouettes on currency, laughing ostentatiously out loud. And I’m not sure what the big deal is with (2009 Venice Biennale Icelandic pavilion sensation) Ragnar Kjartsson, if there was a big deal. MoMA, now there’s a museum! I got a purloined copy of the TOC for their forthcoming Chinese documents anthology from some young curators, only to stumble upon the entire family of my first Beijing friend–mom, dad, bro, newly engaged sis–lounging in the lobby where that Barnett Newman used to be in front of a Yoko Ono shout into the microphone piece which seems like a really weird thing to put on the site of the Abramovic starefest so soon after the fact. In the architecture gallery they have a show about the lower Manhattan estuaries of 2100, and walltexts that simply presume that the island will go perhaps 61% under.

John Wesley, George Washington and Three Indians II, 1963. Ink and graphite on paper, 52 x 46 cm.

Of course the reason for the trip was a wedding, a three-night extravaganza which began on Thursday with fourteen men eating a set menu of “Beef Seven Ways” at the latest project of Momofuku’s Danny Chang in the Chambers Hotel. The Milk Bar upstairs at street level purveys an astounding array of dairy products including “Cereal Milk.” When the woman at the next table asked what we did, I explained that our friend the anthropologist was to wed and that half of us had just flown in from China. They believed us only upon seeing a tote bag inscribed with Chinese characters. We made our way to an assortment of downtown bars at various levels of in-ness, and then finally to a karaoke place on 17th Street where a song is two dollars and we sang a lot of them.

The wedding toast, according to the Paris Review advice column, is one of our great American folk rituals. I gave one at Szechuan Gourmet on West 56th Street on Friday. There are some funny discursive issues to be thought through with wedding toasts, first and foremost your place on the batting order. I was up early, and gave one sort of like the proclamation they encant at the beginning of Midnight Mass on Christmas, in our archdiocese of Philadelphia at least, that situates the nativity in the context of salvation history. I like that phrase, “salvation history.” Perhaps not as much as “eschatology,” but almost as much. And these are precisely the sorts of contexts, on the second floors of Chinese restaurants in midtown Manhattan surrounded by aunts and uncles, in which a sweeping statement or two about our generation and its uncertainties can do a bit of work. I told them that the reason we live in China is to prevent war, which is more than partially true.

The next night, they had a bluegrass band beside their chuppa on the bluffs above the Hudson in a state park way way uptown. Orthodoxim on nearby benches looked on in disapproval as the setting but not yet set sun turned the lovers into silhouettes. They looked stunning, saying their seven prayers in Vera Wang and John Varvatos. Wallace Stevens was the scripture and the self-written vows included the phrases “condition of possibility” and “future anterior.” When the groom drank from the cup of blessed wine, he made the wine-tasting face. The shawl their fathers wrapped around them at the very end said on it “Property of Congregation Beth El, Great Neck” in black permanent marker. We walked down a hill into the WPA-era maintenance shed turned bistro for vodka ginger martinis and rock shrimp, then sat down and ordered our mains as if at a restaurant. There were more toasts, then dancing in a circle with joined arms.

Adam Bund and Carley Ross, A Particular and Poignant Instantiation of an Archetype, 2010.

Later the sweet strains of bluegrass rang out as they rendered Michael Stipe’s straightforward lovesong which includes the line “I count your eyelashes” and the bride and bridegroom danced a routine, a routine with a higher degree of difficulty than most pre-instructed wedding dance routines. Soon it was 4 a.m., and then 9 a.m., and then 12 p.m., and before I knew it I had eaten a bagel toasted with cream cheese and drunk a carton of Tropicana Ruby Red Grapefruit Juice and taken the NJ Transit Northeast Corridor line to Newark Liberty International Airport and passed the TSA inspection and was aboard Continental 89 with nonstop service to Beijing.

Cover, LEAP 1, February 2010. Shown: Huang Yong Ping, Sand Bank/Bank of Sand, 2000.

In light of Evan Osnos’s link earlier today, I’m going to quickly post something to counter LEAP’s lame slowness in getting a website up and running. This is the editorial statement (call it a manifesto) I wrote back in late January, as we struggled to get our first issue together. It was later harmonized to about half this length (a story for another time) but here you go anyway. We are now one more all-nighter away from finishing LEAP 3, and I’m hard-pressed to believe that half a year has gone by since the snowy day when I sat down to write this.

We have been up all night, my editorial staff and I…you’ve heard that one before, right? Actually we haven’t. Our genesis was strategic and our quick formation contingent on the ready mobilization of corporate capital. We’ve got a parent company, an official publishing partner (and the censors that come with such), distribution channels, a room of new computers, a ratecard, revenue targets. Pretty standard stuff, really. What’s different is that this is a magazine about art in China, or rather art and China, that aims to do things ever so slightly differently from the dozens of art magazines which have emerged here in Beijing since auction fever began in 2006. And yes, it’s a print magazine, with a web presence, but with the bimonthly rhythms of paper. Sounds retro, but we’re no hipsters. Our company, remember, is called Modern Media, without a lick of irony.

So what makes us different? For starters, we don’t sell coverage. Sounds like the sort of thing you wouldn’t need to put in an opening statement, but that’s the context we’re up against, New York and London friends. Next, we take to our work with a basic understanding that serious criticism, serious journalism, assume sometimes incompatible registers in Chinese and English. Which is why we believe in editorial standards, a curatorial sensibility, and the very best translation, as translation is the only metaphor anyone should believe in anymore. We believe that the fundamental aesthetic quality of this time and place is its eclecticism, and our editorial choices reflect that: artist portfolios, woman-and-her-work profiles, rigorous reviews, panels re-rendered as cartoons, timely Chinese translations of key texts from Artforum, and a fashion shoot, unproblematically juxtaposed. Because our hang-ups are not quite yours.

Then: we’re not nationalist, mostly because we believe that “China” is more than a nation. We don’t particularly like the word “Asia,” mostly because we haven’t figured out where it is, and deep down we don’t believe there’s any more connection between what goes on in Tehran and Seoul or Ekaterinburg and Phnom Penh than between, say, Buenos Aires and Johannesburg, or for that matter, Cleveland and Hefei—which is to say, all and none. We do believe that China, owing to its distinct culture (yeah, yeah) and informational strictures (that just this week asserted their persistence), is its own context, and a Beijing-centered one at that. We have seen the cracks in the wall, we understand the skewing logic by which knowledge makes its way in and out, and that’s right where we intend to work.

We fantasize about Rauschenberg’s visit to China in 1985, and Warhol’s in 1982, and Gilbert and George’s in 1993, in dreams that jump from there right to the Ai Weiwei/Xu Bing basement apartment on East 7th where they shot Beijingers in New York in 1992. We’re not ardent patriots, and we’re certainly not detached Sinologists, but we believe that the moment has come for a magazine deeply of this place and this scene, presuming the sort of background knowledge that you won’t have unless you’re an insider, the better to create new and better insiders. We’re junkies for old exhibition announcements and interviews with avant-garde almost-beens. We are not looking to promote “Chinese contemporary art” (Oh! Those three words!); we just believe that enough people believe in them already (first it was foreigners, who are no longer necessary to the concept’s prolonged existence) that it’s time for a smart take on a special sphere. Ours are no rose-tinted glasses, although if you want a pair of those, we know a great place on the East Third Ring. We don’t deal, but we’re not so innocent or aloof to deny that everything here is transactional. We realize there are more interesting bars on four blocks of the Lower East Side than in all of Shanghai, but instead of claiming that this will all change in five years, we’re interested in why it never may.

We presume a readership like ourselves, which is to say, one that doesn’t necessarily exist in great numbers—the Dongbei lady with a Goldsmiths master’s and a non-object-based gallery, the Jonathan Spence Ph.D. who gave up teaching American undergraduates to interview Chinese tycoons, the art-school professor in Chongqing who wants to feel part of the action in the big city he visits a few times each year, the HON Circle curator who devours a thousand pages with every long-haul, and maybe most of all, the college student up in Haidian who speaks perfect English despite never having left the country and stumbles upon us at a Taiwanese café named after some director’s memoirs.

What’s in a name? In Chinese we’re called Yishujie, which just means “Artworld,” with all the implications of relationality and contextuality that Danto intended when he coined that phrase back in 1964. LEAP, which we like to write all in caps, is the Derridean supplement that completes the circle by standing just outside it—a four-letter word that evokes dialectical progress, hapless futurism, and historical tragedy, with the slightest hint of the country-specificity that is our original sin. Our magazine is structured with a top, a middle, and a bottom, each with its own team and style. That’s just the beginning. We publish on the first of every other month, and hope you’ll come along for the ride.

Philip Tinari
Beijing, January 25, 2010

Cai Guo-Qiang, Du Wenda’s Flying Saucer D on top of the Rockbund Art Museum, 2010. Photo by Lin Yi, courtesy Cai Studio

Of course one sometimes does thought experiments that involve substituting Beijing for New York or London. They’ve become harder in recent years, but I still believe in the delightful ridiculousness of taking the Chinese city at its own word as metropole. In that spirit, I bring you notes from the shanzhai fast lane, the one in which you overtake peasant-built sports cars.

***

The Shanghai government did a brilliant thing by making the World Expo a reason for a long vacation. This is what my deputy editor Aimee and I realized on Sunday afternoon as we made the leisurely Air China hope to Shanghai aboard a near-empty 777. She dropped me at the newly opened Minsheng Museum–where we had been a few weeks earlier for a carefully orchestrated opening, but with all the people, unable to properly see the show–and headed back to her place on Xiangyang Lu to unload a suitcase and hard drive containing 120 gigabytes of pictures from our Beijing launch party last week. A few hours later she and I were reunited on the site of the new Rockbund development in Huangpu district, along with our advertising director Philana, fresh in from a day with a client in Kunming.

Beyond the Expo, the Rockbund is the talk of the art-world town these few weeks. A strip of buildings expertly–albeit not yet completely–renovated by architect David Chipperfield, it revolves around one that housed the Royal Asiatic Society back in the 1860s and has just now been rechristened a museum–the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM for short), with Taipei MoCA alumna Lai Hsiangling installed as its inaugural director. The fuss was for a show by Cai Guo-Qiang of works from his latest “Peasant DaVincis” project. If this sounds like it needs some explaining, it does. Back in 2005, Cai curated the first Chinese pavilion at Venice (along with NAMOC director Fan Di’an) and one of the key works was a piece by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu in which a peasant named Du Wenda attempted to send a homemade saucer into flight. The art world, rather cruelly, stood around drinking champagne, puzzled and derisive. Cai has reappropriated this concept, finding a whole army of peasant inventors who have made everything from aircraft carriers to submarines, peering out from the austere new museum’s various terraces and public spaces.

It was a bubbly affair, with food stands denoted by China’s various regions–Sichuan! Dongbei!–serving local peasant delicacies to the assembled nouveaux riches. I must have gotten sick on a yam taken from a wicker basket, because after the rest of a night that included drinks at El Coctel on Yongfu Lu and a quick visit to the curiously named Club Obama beneath the Yan’an Elevated Road, I spent the entirety of the next day in my hotel room at the curious Moller Villa (that multi-towered Austrian curiosity you see as you drive in from Hongqiao) trying to work up the energy to catch the evening’s other openings. It was the last “weekend” night of the five-day break for the Shanghai crowd, but I called it an early evening after a look around Yue Minjun’s show of deserted landscapes at Three on the Bund and a simple Shanghainese dinner on Maoming Lu.

On Tuesday I woke early to catch the first Dragonair flight to Hong Kong, then remembered how much I love the SAR as I sped through the immigration “e-channel” with a bar code and a fingerprint and booked my hotel room for the evening aboard the Airport Express over the city’s ubiquitous PCCW wi-fi network. I decided to sample “East,” the newest member of the Swire Hotels group, right around the corner from our Hong Kong office in Quarry Bay. To my surprise, “boss” Thomas Shao was also working from Hong Kong, so we arranged for dinner at a new Japanese restaurant in the Heritage 1881 complex on the Kowloon side, the latest addition to Glibert Yeung’s small empire of Hong Kong eating and drinking establishments, which most famously includes Dragon-I. It was a very Gilbert evening, as dinner faded into drinks back on the Island side at his Tazmania Lounge. I found myself deep in conversation with a structural engineer who had abandoned wind-resistant design for a hedge fund and his girlfriend Nadia who staffs Gagosian Gallery’s HK office.

Wednesday was one of those PRD days, with a morning run through a few of the current Hong Kong exhibitions in preparation for the supplement we are preparing for the Art HK fair later this month and even an iPhone purchase on behalf of a colleague. My 24 hours in HK ended in a quick coffee with critics Robin Peckham and Venus Lau before a hurried boarding of the KCR through train to Guangzhou. Back aboard the Chinese train, I spent two hours on the phone with our Beijing office as the attendants came by with instant coffee, thankfully not to the disturbance of my fellow passengers, all of whom were similarly engaged.

In Guangzhou I was slightly thrown off by the relocation of the East Rail Station’s cab stand to the far side of the plaza, next to a massive waterfall. I walked the three hundred meters through the humid air and hopped a taxi straight to the Garden Hotel to meet Charlie Koolhaas, just returned from London, about her contribution to our upcoming Africa issue. (Charlie, a photographer, has done extensive research on the southern city’s African community.) We selected images over Campari and soda in the Lotus Pond bar, surrounded by traders in town for the commodity fair. Dinner was with her cousin Rem D and his wife Ferrari Koolhaas Xiao, principals of the shoe brand United Nude which is headquartered in Guangzhou. A lavish Korean banquet with the Kool clan and their team ensued, diligently waited upon by the Canto-Korean owner. Back at the Garden Hotel I spent an hour on the phone with my brother, about to leave Senegal for Mauritania, working on his contribution to our next issue. It was all I could do to get my four hours before heading to Baiyun for good old CA 1310, the first link of the day back to Beijing and the world of work waiting there.