Goethe Open Space is a project of the Department for Culture and Education (DCAE) of the General Consulate of the Federal Republic of Germany in Shanghai. It aims at providing space for young and emerging artists to present their practice and at the same time stimulating the dialogue between China and Germany in the field of contemporary art.
Goethe Open Space invited independent curator Zoe Zhang Bing to be the curator of its 2013–2014 art programme under the theme of “9m2 Museum.” The concept of a nine-square-meter museum is proposed as an alternative to tackle the current boom of art museum construction in China. Under such circumstance, public art museums are witnessing changes in their social role and private art museums flourish in both size and number. China is now heading into an era of art museum, meaning art museum has become a phenomenon. In such a context, politics, capital and art museums are closely connected with art playing an interestingly significant role among them. Increasingly expanding museum space, in some cases, leads to an excessive dependency on good space conditions when artists want to present their practice. Given the situation, we start to wonder how artists would deal with a gallery covering only nine square meters. How to tackle the proportional relation between the volume of their work and the space? How to maintain and manifest the aesthetic tension of their work? Is a nine-square-meter museum a restriction or an interesting challenge? The 9m2 Museum is an opportunity for artists to withdraw from their previous experience of exhibition-making and to reconsider the relations between art creation and exhibition, exhibition and space, and space and the art system.
Zoe Zhang Bing, independent curator, began her career with the rise of Chinese contemporary art in the late 1990s. She was Deputy Director of Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, one of ten curators of the Kuandu Biennale in Taipei and curator of a new Chinese contemporary video art exhibition at the Rennes Video Art Festival in France. The independent spirit she embodies, her unique perspective to probe into contemporary art and rich experience in dealing with art are the reason that Goethe Open Space has decided to collaborate with Ms. Zhang in the upcoming event.
9m2 Museum consists of the following projects:
Ni Youyu, Zilch (15 November–5 December 2013)
Wang Sishun, The Indeterminate Boundless (13 December–3 January 3 2014)
The Museum of the Unknown, Society Meditation – Drift (10–30 January 2014)
Aaajiao, The Screen Generation (21 February–15 March 2014)
All these solo projects endeavor to cast light on the status quo of Chinese contemporary art from the following aspects:
– Self-construction and identity of Chinese contemporary art under the background of cultural globalization;
– The inheritance of traditional culture and aesthetics in the contemporary context;
– Interdisciplinary art practice and social intervention;
– The evolution of contemporary art language within an information-based social structure.
During the exhibition, a series of talks and seminars will be arranged and curators, critics, writers and artists will be invited to share their ideas and insights.
