Studio International Art Magazine

Paul Carter: ‘There’s an invitation that only takes you so far’ Entering the gallery, visitors enter a new world – a liminal space, with an empty lift, piss-stained walls, and a municipal blue hotel sign on a cracked concrete wall. The artist explains his interest in civic architecture as social sculpture and a site of social exchange As the title of this immersive exhibition, Municipal, suggests, its artist, Paul Carter, is interested in ideas of communality and civic architecture, and it is filled with quasi-architectural sculptural installations. Building on the notion that his studio – and, indeed, the gallery space and all communal spaces around us – is a hotel, or a kind of social sculpture, in which people are invited to come together and connect in their isolation, his installations reference public buildings and often quite communist architecture, considering their functionality and dysfunctionality as places of social exchange. Here, a lift stands centrally, opening and closing at timed intervals. Visitors may enter it, press the buttons, and wait to be transported to another place. Where or what this place might be like, only their imaginations can tell. They may, of course, also walk around the outside of this object, a view they would never normally have, opening up a liminal space, a place of division. Carter, who has claustrophobia and never uses a lift, enjoys watching people interact, or stand waiting for “residents” to appear. He describes his phobia as coming from “a sculptural sensibility of space”, and this sensibility resonates throughout his work. The “piss corners”, recreating abandoned walls of buildings where men give dysfunction a new use, line the left-hand-side of the main gallery space, inviting visitors in, while, perhaps, once they recognise the reference, repelling them at the same time. A film plays in the background, showing a man destroying his down-filled padded jacket – feathers flying everywhere, a gesture of despair and isolation, almost soundless, “a crisis of materiality” as the subject seeks to understand his place within a municipal structure – a municipal society. An everyman, or a resident in the municipal hotel, who travels in the motionless lift, and pisses between stained yellow Plexiglas frames. Municipal is on show at CGP London until 25 September 2016. Interview by ANNA McNAY Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Xu Yong: ‘Negatives act as witness’ Twenty-five years after Tiananmen Square, the Beijing-based photographer took the brave decision to publish his images of the event in negative form. Here, he talks about his work One of the pioneers of 798 Art District in Beijing, Xu Yong (b1954, Shanghai) is a longtime resident of that city. A photographer of note with more than 20 books to his credit, one of his most acclaimed photographic series is the enchanting 101 Portraits of Hutong, first published in 1989. It records the poetic charms of the traditional Beijing courtyard houses separated by narrow lanes (hutongs), neighbourhoods that were on the verge of extinction, indiscriminately demolished in China’s rush to modernise. That same year, he took another important historical series that was published in Hong Kong in 2014 for the first time. Called Negatives, it presents selected images in negative form (you can view them as positives through an iPhone or iPad by a simple adjustment of settings). Xu took countless snapshots with a Konica of the momentous Tiananmen Square protests that roiled China and the world in the spring of 1989. Hiding the cache for nearly a quarter of a century, fear that the film would deteriorate beyond repair outweighed fear of reprisal, and he bravely risked publishing them, emphasising that it is an art book. He is cognisant of the danger. A topic of extreme sensitivity, all accounts of 4 June 1989 (known in China as 6/4) have been ruthlessly suppressed by the Chinese government. The eradication has been successful enough that many young Chinese know nothing about it. Negatives is currently in an exhibition in Cologne at Galerie Julian Sander. Originally self-taught, Xu Yong later graduated from the Luoyang Polytechnic in 1978 and worked for the creative art department of a state-run advertising agency in Beijing from 1984-88. He had his first solo exhibition in 1986, and, in 1993, he initiated cultural tours of Beijing’s hutongs to give foreigners a glimpse of a vanishing culture and architecture in an effort to preserve them. He shows internationally and his work ranges widely in theme and style. His newest body of work is on aluminium. Suggesting minimalist paintings, it actually depicts ephemeral, barely visible portraits and landscape. Negatives is in an exhibition at the Galerie Julian Sander in Cologne from 2 September to 15 October 2016. Interview by LILLY WEI Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY Translation by CATHERINE CHENG

Cui Xiuwen is a conceptual artist best known internationally as a video filmmaker and photographer. A creator of edgy, outspoken work, she began her career as a painter and has recently returned to making paintings and sculpture, exploring contemporary formulations for venerable traditions, in combination with new media. The fourth edition of the Dame Jillian Sackler International Artists Exhibition Program at the Arthur M Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University in Beijing features conceptual artist Cui Xiuwen’s exhibition, Light, curated by Miguel Benavides, with the support of Professor Cao Hong, Professor Wang Weihua, and Dr Lu Jing. Born in 1970 in Harbin, China, Cui lives and works in Beijing. She studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, earning an MFA in 1996. Her series Intersection (1998) was extremely controversial, featuring not only nudity (stringently banned in China then and still banned, if only intermittently enforced now) but male nudity, which was even more shocking. Focusing on her subjects’ genitalia, it would have raised eyebrows in the West, where female nudes, not male nudes and not viewed frontally, have long been the norm, a critique of historic gender disparities, social mores and aesthetic conventions. She followed this up with the even more confrontational Lady’s Room (2000), based on footage taken from a video camera concealed in the ladies room of a Beijing club, which was removed by official censors from the 2002 Guangzhou Triennial, its first edition. In later works, Cui has turned from social issues to more existential, Taoist and Buddhist themes that include the evolution of self, that self’s journey through the world and cosmos, the definition of its humanity and its relationship with others in works such as Existential Emptiness (2009) and Spiritual Realm (2011), concerns that she continues to explore in her exhibition Light. She has shown at Tate Modern in London and the Today Art Museum in Beijing, as well as galleries in New York, Hong Kong and Singapore and is represented in several museum collections, including that of Tate Modern and the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York. Cui Xiuwen: Light Arthur M Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University, Beijing 27 May – 27 August 2016 Interview by LILLY WEI Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY Translation by ALEX MA

The first UK screening of Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar’s iconic work, A Logo for America, at London’s Piccadilly Circus. It was first shown in New York’s Times Square in 1987, and again in 2014. Filmed by Martin Kennedy.

Francesca Pasquali: ‘I have a contemporary view of art, so I want to draw materials from the world around me’ The Bolognese artist uses everyday materials and plastics to replicate natural folds and textures in a manner akin to the ideas of arte povera. Currently in London for two exhibitions, she speaks to Studio International about her inspirations and aspirations. Influenced by Italian art in general, and arte povera in particular, Bolognese artist Francesca Pasquali (b1980) creates fully immersive – often site-specific – installations, using everyday and industrial materials, reappropriating them and bringing them into the public’s realm of vision, and of the other senses too. Involving the public in the work of art is part of what it is all about for Pasquali, and she enjoys the interplay of movement, sometimes engendered by the person, sometimes by the material itself. Showing in a commercial London gallery for the first time, Pasquali has created a large-scale, colourful, plastic cloud in Peckham’s MOCA London, and filled Mayfair’s Tornabuoni Art with a cross-section of her works, from her best-known pieces made with drinking straws, to a carpet of broom bristles, on which we sit to talk, during a break from installation. Metamorphoses is on show at Tornabuoni Art, London, until 17 September 2016, and Spiderwall is on show at MOCA London until 30 July 2016. Interview by ANNA McNAY Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

A Beautiful Disorder Cass Sculpture Foundation, West Sussex 3 July – 6 November 2016 Studio International spoke to the Cass Sculpture Foundation’s curatorial director, Claire Shea, about the concepts behind this first international group exhibition and the global success of this young generation of Chinese artists. Interview by ANNA McNAY Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Jennifer Wen Ma: ‘Throughout history, humans have been trying to break into or out of a paradise or utopia’ The artist talks about her new installation, Molar, at Cass Sculpture Foundation, created as a place of reflection on a disintegrating utopia Jennifer Wen Ma (b1973, Beijing) works across a variety of media, including installation, video, drawing, performance, public art and fashion design. Chosen from more than 500 applicants, she was one of the seven members of the core creative team for the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics in 2008, as well as the chief designer for visual and special effects. Last year, her opera Paradise Interrupted,with composer Huang Ruo, premiered at the Spoleto Festival USA following a special preview at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Many of her works take landscape or nature as their subject matter and her new site-specific commission, Molar, for the group exhibition of 16 Chinese sculptors, A Beautiful Disorder, at the Cass Sculpture Foundation, offers a place of reflection in a disintegrating utopia, where beauty and destruction cohabit, and inspiration can be drawn from the diseased as well as the prosperous. Wen Ma talks to Studio International about her new work and her wider practice, now split between Beijing and New York. A Beautiful Disorder Cass Sculpture Foundation, West Sussex 3 July – 6 November 2016 Interview by ANNA McNAY Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

Rana Begum: ‘I love using readymade materials in the work’ Studio International visited Rana Begum in her studio in north-east London to talk to her about her creative process, and the works she has prepared for her first solo UK exhibition at the Parasol Unit. Fascinated by readymade objects sourced from various locations, Rana Begum builds works that play with light, colour and form. Begum “started off as a representational artist”, but then realised that was not a path she wanted to go down. She became very interested in works by artists such as Agnes Martin and Sol LeWitt, which inspired her to look at her own work differently, dissecting it into its component parts – form, colour and line – “all things that can be investigated on their own”. This began Begum’s investigation into how light might change a form throughout the day, and this in turn fuelled her love of colour. Believing herself not to be “very good at mixing colours”, Begum began her exploration into colour by using the coloured adhesive tape already in her studio, which, she says “gave me a readymade palette”. Her objects shift from two-dimensional into sculptural through colour, that could be said to visually hum with reflection and glow. These pieces play games with interpretation and reception and, although Begum is quick to tell us that she doesn’t like the term “optical illusion” in relation to her work, she does like the idea of a visual surprise. Rana Begum: The Space Between The Parasol Unit, London 30 June – 18 Sept 2016 Interview by MK PALOMAR Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY

The work of rootoftwo also responds to anxiety, but by measuring social media and people’s response to, and production of, fear on the internet. Five Whithervanes, at locations across town, spin and light up in different colours, according to the messages they are picking up. The artists explain to us how the system works and how visitors – and even those across the globe – can interact and have an impact on the Whithervanes’ activity. rootoftwrootoftwo, Whithervanes Folkestone Triennial 30 August – 2 November 2014 Interview by ANNA McNAY Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY