[ISEA2006] Curator Statement: Zhang Ga — Beijing Container

Artist Statement

Theme: Pacific Rim. Container Culture: Beijing Container. Venue: South Hall

The shipping container is a space that travels. Neither an empty space nor a neutral white cube, the container carries within it commodities of livelihood as well as emotional residues. The container bears useful items that sustain life and waste that must be dis-carded, to be relocated far from where it was produced and even turned to profit. Legality is often an ambiguous notion on the open sea; justice becomes an equivocal contingency of the perilous waters. Traversing territories of the haves and the have-nots, the container moves the world in directions most evident in its economic aspects. The container records history; its trajectory reveals the global tides of political intricacies, economic speculations, human mishaps and a collective unconsciousness.
This shipment from China apparently contains no goods, at least not as commonly understood; rather, it holds a body of art objects with no particular use value. It tries, however, through its voyage to San Jose, to unveil the various sentiments that a shipping container might invoke as an epiphany of the global phenomenon of container culture.

Zhong Chen (Prophecy) faithfully presents a set of original accounting paperwork, bank records, receipts and other historical artifacts that document the business transactions of the British American Tobacco Company in China during its formative years, plus records of artist Xu Bing’s personal financial transactions with the Duke Foundation during the creation of the artist’s Tobacco Project in 2000. Understated, almost detached from the common denominator of art objects, Xu Bing’s deadpan scrutiny of the generations-old financial paperwork reflects on China’s modern and contemporary experience as a marketplace as well as its interaction with the global economy, implicitly invoking multiple interpretations disCONNEXION uncovers, through Xing Danwen’s unforgiving eye, a story underneath mountains of electronic garbage. Xing traveled many times to southern China to photograph a population of over 100,000 living on the fringe of life, recycling thousands of tons of electronic waste dumped in China by the West. Under the dense webs of wires and machine debris, one attends to the groaning of a people left crushed by the unstoppable global economic engine.
Hu Jie Ming’s seemingly benign and poetic interactive installation Altitude Zero contemplates the growing tension between dominant cultural forms and others, marginal and fragmented, often disparaged and in danger of extinction.
The desire for hope and connection, however, and therefore for understand-ing and reconciliation, is not just the stuff of ancient romance. Shanghai-based artist Jin Jiangbo builds a well to the other side of the world (Color Plate A) to link people through smiles and laughter — a handshake across the ocean, a peace sign transmitted through an electronic pulse that speaks the language all cultures understand.
Finally, we have Huang Shi’s reinvention of the lost legacy of medieval sailors who communicated by means of drifting bottles. For the artist, this intimate, crude mode of communication is of particular metaphorical importance in a world increasingly permeated by technologically aided synthetic forms of transmission. His nostalgic, simple wish may help us to reappraise the long-forgotten Marxist idea of alienation.

  • Zhang Ga (China/USA) is a media artist, curator and co-director of agent. netart. He has exhibited internationally -including the Ars Electronica Center (Austria), Adelaide Art Festival (Australia), Dutch Electronic Art Festival, Whitney Museum of American Art, Singapore Art Museum and Nabi Art Center in Seoul (South Korea) among others- curated exhibitions, organized conferences and digital salons, written and lectured on new media art practice and criticism, and served on juries for media art grants. He is co-artistic director of the Millennium Dialogue: Beijing International New Media Arts Exhibition and Symposium. He is on the board of the curatorial committee of the 13th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA2006).
    Zhang Ga has taught at the MFA Design and Technology Program at Parsons School of Design, School of Visual Arts and Pratt Institute. In 2005, he joined the New York Institute of Technology as associate professor of communication arts. He is also a guest professor of Information Art at the Academy of Art and Design and visiting fellow of Art and Science Research Center at Tsinghua University, China