Chinese Art and Energy: Broken Tools (Cultures of Energy)


Jenny Lin, U Oregon

“Floating Social Sculpture: Contemporary Chinese Art amidst Global Change,”  paper given at the Cultures of Energy 2nd Annual Spring Research Symposium, April 19–21, 2013



2010 tweet “crazy bad”
pm2.5 deep tissue penetration
three decades: socialist >> market based economy
great costs, environmental degradation
16000 dead pigs in river near Shanghai
Americans seen as meddlesome and arrogant
movies: Jia Zhangke, Still Life
Liu Jianhua: ceramics. Sculpture. Transformation of Memories 2003. Fallen trees as corpses. [me but it also has to do with torsos and legs] Outsourcing work to factories. Daily Fragile. Large scale installations. Lots of tools removed from use... [OOO!] churning out ever more useless objects
[Lin does not talk about the relation to Hans Belmer]

Xu Bing, Tobacco Project (Duke). “Even Communists are free to smoke”
Shanghai Gallery of Art. Tiger skin rug made of cigarettes! 
Forest Project. Using art of children. Children’s drawings >> trees

Ai Weiwei: 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds >> Tate’s Turbine Hall. Viewers invited to frolic. Hand painted, hand crafted. Grasp connection between imported objects and their production. But seeds emitted dust. Proved hazardous >> roped off side room and gaze from distance! 
art projects like these uncover cross cultural relationships
Joseph Beuys: social sculpture; meaning in handling and so on (correlationism)
China as waste ground 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's Hard to be a Hornworm

Image
In Ohio, there's a delightfully gregarious caterpillar known as Manduca sexta , or the tobacco hornworm. It's placed within the Sphingidae family, which is composed of the hawk moths. Take a look at the Wikipedia page for the hawk moths: they're all spectacular. Some of the adult moths resemble birds or bees, they're just amazing. To get back on topic, the tobacco hornworm feeds on tobacco (obviously), as well as other plants within the family Solanaceae , which includes tomatoes. This makes them pests to gardeners, which is pretty unfair. Tobacco hornworms develop into some beautiful moths and are quite large, so they're truly a sight to see once they reach maturity. Luckily for me, they also feed on Datura wrightii , a plant within the same family as tobacco and tomato, which grows near my house. I had the fortune of finding a few of the caterpillars on the Datura plant, so I plucked them along with some leaves and placed them in a container in my room. They were...
Read more

A Primer on Ohio Millipedes

Image
Millipede - Abacion sp. I've been doing some research lately on a few millipede genera and have found myself lamenting the lack of well-written and accessible resources for millipedes. I have a good enough knowledge base to navigate through the published literature, but it's too inaccessible for general audiences. BugGuide's millipede page is probably the best online resource, but it still lacks good introductory resources for people wanting to learn more about the many-legged critters. You're able to submit a picture, and if you're lucky, someone will help you get it down to genus and maybe tell you how they identified it. Concise keys for the millipedes don't really exist like they do for other arthropods, due to the characteristics used to identify millipedes. It's not like identifying a moth or a beetle, where coloration, pattern, and overall look can go a long way. You can get to Order from a photograph relatively easily with millipedes, ...
Read more

A Portfolio of Historical Insects

Image
I had some extra time after work today, which I used to visit Marietta College's Special Collections . They keep scores of old documents, many dating back to when the Ohio Company of Associates first established Marietta in 1788 as the first settlement in the Northwest Territory. What I was after today, however, had an Entomological bent to it. A young Hildreth, via Wikipedia . Samuel Prescott Hildreth, a doctor who lived in Marietta during the early to mid-1800s did some of the first work in Ohio studying insects. He was a naturalist and published the first observations of the periodical cicada's 17 year life cycle, which is what I was after. I didn't find any of his cicada papers, but the librarian did bring me a book he wrote and illustrated, entitled " Portfolio of Insects ." This book includes paintings by Hildreth of various insects from Marietta and elsewhere in Ohio. When I first opened the book, I was greeted with beautiful illustrations of the tobacco ho...
Read more