http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/press-room/news/3352

ChinePlus

Explosion Urbaine, Demain Sera Vert , Issue n.13 (Dec 2009-Feb 2010)

ART CONTEMPORAIN section, Regards-Les Paysages de la Ville, Jérémie Thircuir

CAO FEI RMB CITY

Se détachant du réel, Cao Fei sous l’avatar de “China Tracy” qui avec sa RMB City créée sur Second Life intègre la ville dans une complète virtualité. Intégrant nombre d’ éléments et monuments chinois, la ville se veut à la fois oeuvre et plate-forme de création pour l’artiste qui y situe la majorité de ses travaux: vidéos, expositions…

A Dramatic “Second Life” for Cao Fei, Davide Quadrio
FlashArt, International Edition, Vol. XLIII, No. 270
January-February 2010

As part of Artissima 16 Theater project “Blinding the Ears”, Arthub invited Chinese artist Cao Fei to develop her project “RMB City” –an experimental city and community on the Internet- in a live performance, where she continued her investigation into digital fantasyscapes and the physical world.

DAVIDE QUADRIO: Why did you use Yang Ban xi as a source of inspiration for this opera?
CAO FEI: I was fascinated by how Yang Ban Xi constructed a language of “control”, both of movement and politically charged gestures. I wanted to compare this to other ways in which contemporary social and economic systems actually control us. I thought that yang Ban Xi was a great way for communicating the universal principle of social control that also characterizes the consumerist society that “RMB City” represents and destroys at the same time.
DQ: Does “RMB City” describea world of the possible future?
CF: Second Life was created in the last century. AS Hu Fang said, “RMB City” is more connected to the idea of the past/future, both in its aesthetics and representations where buildings, elements and structures are sort of “remains” of the recent past/present time. In the video making of RMB City you can see the city while it is being built, with all the buildings that represent cities like Hong Kong and Shanghai, or other aspects of material culture that made China, my country, such a syncretic experimental place.
DQ: Picking up on this, what are the inspirations for your creations in “RMB City” and particularly for this new opera?
CF: I used high and low culture. Pop culture is what I experienced in the ‘90s and pop music is indeed so universal as to efficiently reach everybody. Of course I am able to combine it with complicated narratives that I build in the virtual stage. RMB City Opera is not based on cartoon animation but real recorded interactions between the characters appearing both in the virtual and physical stages. The huge images projected on stage filled all the space, and yet the two actors physically present were sometimes the center and sometimes the background of the action.
DQ: Is this opera a new chapter of possible experimentation for “RMB City”?
CF: When we started working on this project I was unsure about how to “transport” the density of “RMB City” to the stage. I thought this was going to be a very intriguing experience, and we will see if this interaction between different realities can progress.

http://www.art-it.asia/u/admin_news/zL6sQY8bgaBjkt3TZmIK?lang=en

Make Room for Video, Performance and Paint

SINCE the 1970s people have perennially complained that while the number of artists keeps rising, the number of good ones remains the same. Many of us have nodded in agreement to curtail yet another lament that the good old days were better. But let’s do the math; the odds are very much against this equation

This was inevitable. There is now officially more of everything. Why should good art be exempt? The increased number of art schools and art students has upped the number of people determined to be artists. The globalization of art has increased the chances for visibility and market support. Various liberation movements — concerning race, gender, nationality and sexual orientation — have continued to have effect, adding participants, energy, traditions and subject matter, meeting and making new challenges.

From where I stand — which is very often in some sort of New York art gallery — the decade had a high yield of impressive debuts, along with some debutlike second shows, stirring game changers (Carroll Dunham’s latest show at Gladstone) and comebacks (Nicole Eisenman’s at Leo Koenig). And since I didn’t see every show that occurred on the planet, I can only think that nearly as many good artists made their presences felt elsewhere and have not yet passed through the New York portion of the art-world pipeline.

This situation was impressed upon me by the humbling number of unknowns in the no-frills “ ‘Younger Than Jesus’ Art Directory,” in which the New Museum published the work of the 540 artists considered for their first triennial — of which about 50 were selected for the actual show. As important as the show itself, this publication gave a new transparency to the selection process; it may contain a better show than the one chosen and could serve as a sourcebook for future exhibitions.

For proof that the last decade has been a great time for art, forget about auctions and copycat collectors. Open your personal image bank of memories, study it through a wide-angle lens and see what comes up. (The Internet of course aids greatly in the process; many galleries lavishly document their exhibitions.)

Some high points I remember or revisited online include the black-gray-and-white taped floor of Jim Lambie’s debut at the Anton Kern Gallery (then in SoHo) and the makeshift greenhouse in Peter Coffin’s first show at the Andrew Kreps. At Zach Feuer (or its predecessor, LFL), there were: the spongy nose picker among Dana Schutz’s early paintings, Tamy Ben-Tor’s spot-on video evocations of sundry female stereotypes and Nathalie Djurberg’s hilarious video animations of humanity’s dark side. The free-spirited Klara Liden arrived from Sweden, dancing (in video) in a trolley car at Reena Spaulings, a space that Josh Smith also filled with barstools as paintings.

Urs Fischer’s first hole in a wall (on this side of the Atlantic, at least) breezed through the old Gavin Brown’s enterprise on West 15th Street, and Cao Fei’s sci-fi photographs introduced slightly deranged action-figure devotees at Lombard-Freid.

Nalini Malani’s evocations of Indian deities at Bose Pacia were memorable for their diaphanous effects and simple hardware. Tauba Auerbach’s optical, letter-based abstractions at Deitch Projects compelled double and triple takes. Shinique Smith’s towering bales of recycled garments and fabrics revealed geologies of thrift-shop detritus at the Proposition. The Marian Goodman Gallery added Rineke Dijkstra’s “Buzzclub,” a mesmerizing video portrait of clubgoing adolescents; Pierre Huyghe’s “Third Memory,” an eerie video-installation evocation of the real story — and man — behind the 1975 Sidney Lumet movie “Dog Day Afternoon”; and Anri Sala’s video “Dammi I Colori,” which showed his shell-shocked hometown Tirana, Albania, rising from the ashes with Modernist primary colors.

Other striking video debuts included Aïda Ruilova’s percussive Goth vignettes at Salon 94, and, most recently, Mary Reid Kelley’s vibrant grisaille conflations of painting, book illustration, Dada performance and sea chanteys at Fredericks & Freiser.

Other mediums or styles were resuscitated with conviction to spare. Ellen Altfest’s debut at Bellwether, Karel Funk’s at 303 and Josephine Halvorson’s at Monya Rowe (still up) were among several to perform this service for realist painting. Sterling Ruby at Foxy Production, Jessica Jackson Hutchins at Derek Eller and William J. O’Brien at Marianne Boesky treated ceramics as just another medium, no big deal. At ATM, Huma Bhabha took figurative sculpture back to its ancient origins. In a group show at the SculptureCenter, Leslie Hewitt signaled a new phase in postconceptual sculpture and a more oblique approach to the subject of race. The Japanese artist Misaki Kawai dominated one of Kenny Schachter’s intrepid group shows with a large, determinedly not cute treehouse fashioned from cardboard and fabric and populated by decadent glam rockers, or something close.

For every incident here, there are probably four more equally deserving mention, among them Christof Büchel’s elaborate architectural intervention at Maccarone and Ryan Trecartin’s hyperkinetic, color-saturated coming-out saga “Family Finds Entertainment,” seen at the New York Underground Film Festival in 2005 and the Whitney Biennial in 2006 (albeit on a tiny monitor, one of the decade’s dumber curatorial moves). Even before art performances became as ubiquitous as photography, I remember Jamie Isenstein doing a soft-shoe with a skeleton at Guild & Greyshkul and Rachel Mason’s wobbly voice and acoustic guitar giving her own insistent update on folk music at the Alona Kagan Gallery.

Not only are there scores of interesting artists, they are working on all fronts, including some new ones. The number of mediums has expanded, thanks to the continued development of aspects of postminimalism — especially video and performance — and the rise of digital technology and the Internet. So has the ingenuity with which artists fragment and mix these mediums. The ways of being an artist — from membership in an anonymous collective with satire, social improvement or both on its group mind, to entrepreneurial mega-stardom — have also multiplied.

All this has moved beyond the simpler days of art movements, trends and warring claims for the supremacy of one medium or another. If it seems otherwise, you’re not looking hard enough or without blinkers. To beat a dead horse: even painting remains very much alive. It is a language that is too complex, widely spoken and beloved to expire, but you can bet it is changing all the time.

Finally, what might be called the liberation of art history that began in the 1970s has continued; new knowledge about and approaches to nonwestern, decorative, popular, folk and applied art forms have been grafted onto what was once called the master narrative. It is now a tree with many strong branches that gives us more to think about and greatly increases the kinds of visual culture and models of creativity that can inspire artists.

The lack of reassuring simplification means that we are experiencing the present in a fuller, less blinkered way. We can now see that most art begins in plurality, even if it is temporarily neatened into movements by artists, critics and art historians. Thus, as it was being made, New York art in the 1940s included Jackson Pollock and Janet Sobel (whose dripped paint influenced Pollock) and Steve Wheeler (a so-called “Indian Space” painter who hated the phrase but worked small and tight in a time of Abstract Expressionist expansiveness). For a few decades all you saw was Pollock. Now Sobel and Wheeler are back in the historical picture.

In all, we are confronted with the distinct possibility that quantity and quality may not be so mutually exclusive after all. More means more better.

PRESS RELEASE- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 9, 2009

September 13, 2009 @ 7 pm ( Second Life Time)
September 14, 2009 @ 10 am (Beijing Time)

“Is this your city?” asked the young man. The angel answered: “It’s yours.”

- Italo Calvino, “The Castle of Crossed Destinies”

Many of us are born into shelter, nurtured in the arms of people who guide us before allowing us to encounter our physical realities on our own. But imagine that you are born not into the arms of your mother, but into the arms of a city; and that you are grasped, embraced and cultivated by the towers and vessels, sounds and sights of a fantastical empire. For China Sun, the baby of China Tracy, this is reality from first breath. When China Sun asks “What is life?” it is RMB City who answers.

RMB City’s original manifesto envisioned freedom from the conflict between virtual and real, positing the city not as a mirror for determining cold hard truths, rather, as a partial reflector, a magic pond of sorts for discovering the complex, layered, and fuzzy strangeness of existence. An experiment in modern urban planning, RMB City is evolving into a compact, yet whimsical and decidedly complex setting for such discovery. It now begs questions such as: Can a decision made in second life affect the first? How does density, in turn, impact our destiny? What does it mean for life in a city to be sustainable? What is it like to fly?

The answers can be found by ushering in a new phase of RMB City, an era, beginning today, in which you are encouraged to not simply visit the city, but rather to live there. RMB City has a new mayor, SuperConcierge Cristole (RL: Jerome Sans), who will welcome newcomers by answering the questions of any visitor, be they philosophical, practical, or personal. New, interactive destinations in RMB City, like an experiment in noise and listening by Yan Jun, a dynamic UFO by Neville Mars, and a Sex Parlor by Cao Fei will challenge visitors to repeat their experiences in order to understand and interpret their inherent tensions. Finally, a new building, a Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in RMB City, will open for the public to enjoy.

Please join China Sun for RMB’s grand re-opening party, a celebration of energy, vitality, and action filled with prominent figures in the Second Life community. The gala, hosted by the venerable in-world writer Hamlet Au, will feature a fashion show and photography contest presided over by in-world designer Iris Ophelia, and the premiere of a new machinima by in-world filmmaker Lainy Voom. Additionally, all of the new additions to RMB City by its real-life artistic collaborators will be open for exploration.

RMB City is a place for, among many others, the flaneur, the voyeur, the laborer, the aristocrat, the scientist, the poet, the activist, the sage, and the child alike. You are encouraged to come in, visit, and make RMB City your home.

LOCATION: People’s Palace, RMB City (RMB City 1 (220, 16, 65))
TIME: Sunday, September 13 @ 7 pm (SL Time), Monday, September 14 @ 10 am (Beijing Time)

New to Second Life?

To join Second Life and visit RMB City, register for a free account at https://join.secondlife.com/

Need Help? info@rmbcity.com

About RMB City:
www.rmbcity.com

Developer of RMB City: Cao Fei and Vitamin Creative Space
Facilitator: Uli Sigg
Public Presenter: Serpentine Gallery
Chief Engineer: Avatrian

“Revolutionary Pleasure Area” and  “Second Life Tremors”

Original works by Cao Fei (SL: China Tracy) and Neville Mars

August 28, 2009
11 am, Beijing Time

RMB City 1 (220, 16, 65)

Please join China Tracy for the unveiling of her Revolutionary Pleasure Area: RMB City’s first sex parlor.

Also debuting will be an earth-shattering new work by architect Neville Mars, creating tremors all throughout Second Life.

To visit, teleport to:

RMB City 1 (220,16,65)
or
http://slurl.com/secondlife/RMB%20City%201/220/16/65/

New to Second Life?

To join Second Life and visit RMB City, register for a free account at https://join.secondlife.com/

Need Help? info@rmbcity.com

About RMB City:
www.rmbcity.com

Developer of RMB City: Cao Fei and Vitamin Creative Space
Facilitator: Uli Sigg
Public Presenter: Serpentine Gallery
Chief Engineer: Avatrian