Cover feature: Sound Plus
Sound art seems to forever occupy a misunderstood and marginalized position in society and culture. In China and Taiwan, the ostracism is no different. LEAP’s August issue creeps into the periphery to briefly untangle the mess of people, artworks, and happenings that constitute this surplus of culture. FM3, Yan Jun, Qiu Zhijie, Li Zhenhua, Dajuin Yao, and others figure into a sweeping survey of the stop-and-go history of sound art in the Mainland, and cultural activist Ya-Zhu Xu organizes a textual quartet on noise in Taiwan: Huang Sun-Quan considers noise and neo-liberal social order; Wang Mo-Lin and Dawang Huang discuss the resistance of noise against capitalism’s structural exclusion of the body; Liao Ming-He traces the history of materials in his noise work; and Yannick Dauby narrates two journeys into the materiality of peripheral sounds. The package culminates with Shanghai sound artist Lou Nanli, commissioned by LEAP to transform an ancient Chinese scroll into a work of contemporary electroacoustic music.
Other features
The lower body of our middle section is a case-by-case study of art’s treatment of power. Sun Dongdong delineates political allegory throughout the ink wash of Yun-Fei Ji; the artist Jiang Zhi shies away from statement, but infers himself and everyman in his self-curated latest solo show; architect Wang Jiahao deconstructs the rhetorics of power and exhibition via the practice of Shi Qing; and Aimee Lin elucidates the carelessness of Birdhead in the face of the ruling aesthetics of photography.
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LEAP 16 opens with an overarching review of dOCUMENTA (13) and its host city by Kito Nedo, which is followed by an optimistically elegiac round-up of all things contemporary in Athens from Stephanie Bailey. Further on: An argument for the metaphoric functionality of the images of Andreas Gursky; profiles of the painter Gong Jian and the actor/artist Hu Xiangqian; in conversation with Shumon Basar, a leisurely serious reiteration of Posthastism; over the information superhighway, the corporation MadeIn Company get acquainted with the collective LuckyPDF; and so much more.
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June and July offer plenty of critical fodder, as this month’s reviews section takes us to Manifesta 9, La Triennale 2012, the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, ten solo shows including Zhao Yao, Zhang Hui, Paola Pivi, Yang Xinguang, Zhang Ding, and Song Kun, and group outings in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Excerpts from this issue
“If the exhibition presumes to bring distant ideas into proximity, then it also assumes that the original distance between these positions can be measured in Fear.”
–Kate Sutton (Review: La Triennale 2012)
“Lawrence Grossberg painfully points out the reasons why the children who grew up listening to rock and roll would come to elect Reagan and Bush in the 1980s. Alas, we may finally understand where capitalism and the record industry have grown together…”
–Huang Sun-Quan (Cover Feature: If Noise Ever Was, It Was Far From Revolt)
“Perhaps the slightly biting tone here will estrange critics. But what 30 years of sheer fact tell us is that obedience to a single art historical logic inevitably leads to the omission of countless moments of brilliance in artistic creation.”
–Pu Hong (Review: The 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale)
“The issue of cultural identity as raised by the process of modernization is for Yun-Fei Ji not an end but a beginning, proffering material for new lines of inquiry and reflection.”
–Sun Dongdong (Feature: Yun-Fei Ji: Allegory in Ink Wash)
“Everything is a process of formation and disappearance, the intellectual perception of which must be based on experiential understanding of that open space of a canvas.”
–Bao Dong (Review: Zhang Hui: Groundless)
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