Polit-Sheer-Form Office, "Only One Wall," 2005.

That first show, appropriately titled “Only One Wall,” consisted of two pieces: a blue wall, printed with a generic image of the sea, and a banner laying out the group’s inchoate manifesto. Polit-Sheer Form: like so many China-coined English names, it didn’t quite sing. The Chinese name does the project some but not much more justice, and would translate more literally as “The Office of Pure Political Form.” But in Chinese it sounds, to the properly seasoned ear, like some absurdist government organ, buried deep in one or another musty ministry and with some vague but absolute set of responsibilities. The “political” here as everywhere in China is both front and center and somehow invisible, making the inquiry less some purely aesthetic conceit and instead grounding it in the back-and-forth of now. These were regular guys, trying to distill some aesthetic precepts from the lives they’ve led. And those lives, all of which began in the early-to-mid-Sixties, are among the last in China to include conscious recollection of the way things were with/under/during Mao, albeit from the perspective of young boys who saw circus and spectacle where others may have felt tragedy. That first manifesto show didn’t make a lot of sense at the time: unconvincing language about a generation unlike any other, a wall that took a rather pedestrian visual shape.

The shape didn’t matter, they argued, because the Office was really about another forgotten valence of the older order: the collective, homosocial camaraderie that they see as once having underlain so many other interactions. High Socialism was about a lot of things, but one of them was early-middle-aged men hanging out. To this end the Office began organizing trips, first to visit sites of actually existing socialism, later to take in various forms of circumscribed pleasure as in a day in Shanghai which began with a visit to the site of the First Party Congress and continued with coffee atop the Jin Mao Tower. As artists living well beyond the danwei-induced stupor of strained interpersonal relations and managed leisure to which a great many are still subject, they were nostalgic for the sort of structure that would give them orders–enforced as much by consensus as by threat–of where to be and when, what to do and how. They yearned for that particular form of governmentality in a way not that far off the mark of how Americans of my generation might for a cultural canon, conscious all along of the flawed object of their desire, subject to it nonetheless. And so they created it for themselves. Later they made paintings and coloring books about their travels.

Polit-Sheer-Form Office, "Library," 2008.

In 2008, as the capital teetered on the brink of propaganda-induced euphoria, the Office produced its “sheerest” work ever: a Polit-Sheer-Blue library containing ten thousand Polit-Sheer-Blue books, each individually numbered, none containing anything other than pages and pages of empty blue. They took staged photos of themselves hanging out while reading the book, everyone absorbing the contentless content of the truly blue. They opened it to browsing by the gallery-going public.

Last night I went to the recently refurbished Timezone 8 in the 798 art zone for the launch of We Art Polit-Sheer-Form, a new book which details the Office’s project over the last six years. On their lapels, each member wore the Polit-Sheer-Form insignia pin: a blue rectangle with a sliver border and a tiny, rectangular indentation at top left. The indentation is there because a rafter ran through that initial blue wall they installed at Beijing Commune six years ago this week. The cool form of the pin, analogous in placement and function to the flag pins that have become part of the visual furniture of American politics, is a distillation of circumstance, which serves to highlight the specificity and contingency–cultural, historical, ideological–of any political form, no matter how seemingly ingrained. It is at once a send-up of totalitarian symbology and a distinctly insidery signifier.

Among their first pieces together was a digital composite portrait, a character named Mr. Zheng, after the first character in the Office’s Chinese name, the first character in the word for “politics.” (Perhaps not coincidentally, Mr. Zheng, while a mathematical hybrid of all five faces, most resembles Leng Lin.) For a recent show at Shanghai Gallery of Art, in that fashionable enclave Three on the Bund, they unfurled a flag bearing Mr. Zheng’s likeness out the gallery window, and let it flutter against the masonry a few stories above Guangdong Lu. Needless to say, a call asking for the banner’s removal came in from the local PSB within fifteen minutes.

After the book launch I went with four of the five Officers and critic Pauline Yao–Xiao Yu had a cold–for some late-night Cantonese. Over turtle-shell jelly and chicken-foot cassoulet, they reminisced about recent projects, and joked about a recent stay in their designated Shanghai hotel, the terrible Motel 168 on Anyuan Lu. Song Dong, secretary of the Polit-Sheer Exchequer, got up to pay. I said thanks; Thank Mr. Zheng, they replied. This morning, my houseguest for the weekend, once a part with me of a five-member crowd of Americans studying at Tsinghua, flew for Pyongyang. And then a colleague sent me this video of five North Korean kids strumming away. Must be something collective in the sheer autumn air.

Back at Home, September 14, 2011

Then, a few weeks ago some American television producers who make an ongoing series about artists and their work asked me to interview him for a segment they’d been planning, also since before the spring. I was skeptical but apparently he had also asked that I do it, and so I obliged. I showed up a few minutes before the shoot and entered, at the request of the assistant who was with him when he was arrested, through the back door which leads into the part of the compound where visitors were once never, ever allowed. As a gift, I brought a giant box of Whiskas sample pouches, schwag which had come my way via my magazine’s parent company, which counts the cat-food brand among its clients.

With a pre-assigned list of questions on my iPad, I sat down unmiked on a Qing-dynasty living-room chair, amidst an elaborate setup of lights and sound equipment. He sat squarely in the center of the only good shot the dark room allows, head framed at left by the giant wardrobe that inspired his Moon Chests, at right by the white brick of his first architectural interior. The central table had been offset into its modular components, a functional Judd. “You used to do this three times a day,” I quipped before we started, remembering how, before, one could barely open the front door for fear of disturbing a shoot just like this. “Used to,” he replied. “This is already a big violation; we can only talk about the art.”

That was all I was planning to do anyway. In Miami a few years ago, I had erred in the same direction, asking one too many questions about getting hit in Sichuan or stepping back from the Bird’s Nest so as to set him up for the crowd-pleasing one-liner, “Can we talk about the art now?” Back then, on the verge of his art-world beatification (which preceded his political martyrdom–pardon the Catholic metaphors–by just a few months), activism seemed like a diversion, threatening to cheapen his standing as a maker of intelligent objects. Of course things played out differently.

And so we talked, bouncing among the almost comically apolitical questions in no particular order other than my best reading of which might best suit him at any given moment. At one point during the interview he registered a smallish protest, noting how much my man-and-his-work line of questioning mirrored that which he had been subject to during the fifty-some interrogation sessions of his captivity. Noting the permaglaze that now covers his eyes, even if he’s got most of his gut back, I called time once we’d been through the litany of influences, biography, and work-by-work explanations. He offered bagels that his visiting documentarian had brought from New York, and we sat in the corner of the emptier-than-before office cracking walnuts one against the other until they’d been heated. The film crew asked the question that the film crew always asks after the interview, and after filming the scene in the front yard, of whether there was any art on the premises to be shot. He ordered an acolyte to open the door to the showroom, and we went in to look at the cat toy on which the polyhedron sculptures are based, to marvel at a wall full of disassembled bicycles.

Ai Weiwei, River Crabs, porcelain, 2011

There on a table was this, a few plates full of porcelain “River Crabs,” the reference immediately obvious to all of the five hundred people who forwarded or commented to the snapshot I immediately streamed to weibo with only the caption “New work by Teacher Ai! Ceramic Crabs!” Subversive internet punnery aside, the crabs were also a reference to a simpler time, before that dig, or indeed the “harmonious society” slogan it parodies, had even been coined. One night, just about five years ago, a few dozen people gathered in Qu Na’r, the restaurant the circle of Ai just called “the cafeteria,” for a long National Day night of perfectly seasonal crabs, each wearing a bracelet of authenticity. That restaurant is gone now. It was definitely better than Eudora Station.

Qu Na'r, October 1, 2006, photo by Ai Weiwei

“Really happy to see you this morning, let’s go for crabs one of these days,” I texted a few hours later.

“Indeed! A banquet is in order!” came the response.

Detail, Yan Lei, Climbing Space--Pompidou, 2003. Acrylic on canvas.

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from             [redacted]@[redacted]gallery.com
date             Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 4:29 AM
subject        Little Thigs Can Make a BIG Difference in YOUR Art Career!

Have you ever stood in an art gallery and said to yourself: “My work is better than the art in this gallery. Why are these artists selling in galleries and I’m not?”

I have spent the last several years helping artists answer this question. I have discovered it is the little things that can make all the difference in an artist’s career.

Before I share some of these little things that add up to make a big difference, let me introduce myself. My name is [redacted], I own [redacted] Gallery in [redacted], Arizona. I have owned the gallery for over eight years, and have been in the gallery business for 17 years.

You may have read my emails over the last several weeks. I am preparing to give an intensive workshop in your area to help artists, like you, become focused, organized and successful. If you are hoping to attend, I encourage you to sign up today before the class fills.

Can little things make a difference in your career? I invite you to ponder the suggestions below, all ideas I will expand upon in my upcoming workshop. These little ideas, put into practice with your marketing plan will help you present your work more professionally. They will help you get into galleries and sell more of your art.

Quality Check. I have known and worked with hundreds of artists over the years. The most successful  artists are devoted to high quality. They have the ability to step back from their work and look at it through their buyer’s eyes. Art collectors are picky. They demand attention to detail. Their homes are immaculate. You must create work that will fit seamlessly into their homes.

Your medium doesn’t matter – sculpture, jewelry, paintings, photography or fiber art – the presentation must be flawless.

Think of each work you create as a masterpiece. Treat it as such.

One small thing to improve the quality of your work: Invite someone you trust to evaluate the quality of your art. You should invite an artist you admire, or a designer, or a gallery owner over to the studio for coffee. Present 5-6 pieces. Ask the question “what are three things I could do to improve the quality of my presentation.”

An objective observer will see your art in a way you never could. Repeat this process every 1-2 years and make a commitment to constantly improve your quality.

Read a Book. Collectors and dealers love to talk history. As you begin to show in galleries and interact with collectors at shows you will find they love to talk about past masters. Your relationships with collectors and dealers will deepen if you can converse fluently about art history. I suggest you strive to understand the major art movements from the impressionists through the present day. This understanding will also enrich your work as you are inspired by the great artist’s lives and works.

One little thing to work on: Visit your local book store or Amazon.com and order a biography of one of your favorite artists. Commit to read 2 artist biographies per year. Don’t limit your reading only to artists you like. I wasn’t a fan of Willem deKooning’s work until I read about his life. He is now one of my favorite artists.

Analyze your Competition. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to marketing your work. With a little work, you will find hundreds of artists whose work is comparable to yours. Learn from them. Do what they do.

One little thing to work on: Every week, devote one hour to researching your competition online. Type keywords describing your work into a search engine and you will quickly encounter your competitors. Develop a list of 10 artists you feel are closest to you in style, genre, subject, and/or experience. Analyze them.

The insight you will gain through this weekly exercise will prove invaluable to you as you develop your marketing plans.  By understanding your competition you can better tailor your work to the market. You can price your work competitively. You can better understand the types of galleries you should approach.

Use an Inventory Number. As you begin to experience success, organizing your inventory becomes critical.  Using an inventory number is an easy way to start to control your inventory. As you move artwork from the studio to your galleries, and from gallery to gallery and inventory number will make it easy to track your work. Titles can get mixed up, but inventory numbers are almost infallible.

If you don’t already have an inventory numbering system, start with a high number (3000, for example). Nothing says “new artist” like a low inventory number.

Send a Thank-you note. As you begin to work with collectors and galleries, your goal is not to sell art. Your end-goal is to create relationships. Relationships will lead to a lifetime of sales. You will be amazed what one simple thing like a hand-written thank-you note can do for your relationships. In this age of digital communication and voicemail interaction, a hand-written thank you note stands out.

When a gallery sends you a commission check you should immediately sit down and write a thank-you note. Keep the note simple:

Spend Some Time on Marketing. I am amazed at how many artists will spend long days in the studio, weeks in workshops, but then wonder why their work isn’t selling. Often, these same artists are devoting very little time to marketing. You should be spending 10% of your time marketing. You will be amazed by how much you can accomplish in this small amount of time, and this is one small thing that will make a huge difference in your career.

My upcoming workshop will give you concrete, actionable guidance in organizing the business side of your career. I will also give you an understanding of the art business from the perspective of a gallery owner with 17+ years experience in the business.

If I can give you one idea that helps you sell one work of art would it be worth $59 and four hours of your time? I am going to give many more ideas than just one. If you are ready to put your art career on track and start selling your work, sign up now, before the class fills.

The mysterious missing Paul Simon Guangzhou and Hong Kong and Guangzhou concerts--perhaps in the space between Hollywood and Nagoya?

Yes, that’s right. Apparently the Born at the Right Time tour stopped at the Tianhe Coliseum in Guangzhou back one night in that key reform-era interregnum between the trauma of Tiananmen and Deng’s Tour South. Amateur online research reveals very little, but oral history suggests that after an appearance in Hong Kong, the tour, with its revolutionary entourage of Brazilians and South Africans, followed the only living boy from New York up the (Pearl River) Delta, shining like a national guitar, to what was still the coolest city in China. The Simon fansites can’t pinpoint the date (they make reference to only one China concert, in “Peking,” in October 1991), but the timing suggests that it happened sometime between an appearance on September 27, 1991 at the Hollywood Bowl and another on October 7 in Nagoya. Air China already flew the PEK-LAX route at this point, but I prefer to assume they arrived in Asia by way of the old Kai Tak, and then went CAN-PEK before hopping over to the land of the rising sun.

The standard inside view of Tianhe Coliseum, a 65,000-seat stadium built for the Sixth National Games in 1986, an underrated monument of the first decade of reforms.

Graceland has always loomed for me as a canonical text of “globalization,” the album we listened to after our first-year seminars with Michael Hardt and Walter Mignolo, even if it was already ten years old by the time we got to it. The mature Simon articulated the sort of beneficent American cosmopolitanism that we could aspire to mainly by doing our nightly readings on transnational logics of capital–even if we didn’t yet realize how those logics structured the “Chinese reading room” where we did most of those readings, kitted out with the spoils of BAT’s man in China. “Aren’t you the woman who was recently given a Fulbright?” we hoped to one day be able to ask each other. And of course we ultimately were. What we didn’t realize in the fall of 1997 was that we lived at the height of the American Empire, which would reach its cultural zenith with the release of Titanic over our first winter break.

Lin Yilin, Safely Crossing Linhe Road, 1995. Performance.

The Tianhe Coliseum sits right off of Linhe Road, the street which this artist’s longtime collaborator Lin Yilin would “safely cross” a few years later, moving cinderblock after cinderblock in a wall formation from one side to the other, as the skyscraper you see through the stadium rose behind to his right. The Guangzhou concert ostensibly happened just a few months after the legendary “Concert in the Park,” August 15, 1991, in turn just four days before the Avgustovsky Putch. Twelve at the time, I vividly remember one of the lifeguards from our summer swim club leaving work early that day and making the trek from the Philly suburbs up to New York City for the show–a mass gathering weirdly mirroring the energies that loomed elsewhere in those few fraught world-systemic years. If asked, we couldn’t have found Guangzhou on a map. Now I work for a company that got its start there, a few years after that concert. Twenty years later, the fact that these same songs, then, appeared both over here and back there, heard by folks on this side and that, seems to count for something.

Album cover, Paul Simon's Concert in the Park, August 15, 1991.

Simon Fujiwara, Frozen, 2010. Proposal for Frieze Art Fair.

Walking out the entrance of a hotel of a city you know only just so well is a very certain sensation, the drag of appearing to all but a very few as a resident of a place you never called home. To a certain kind of person, the offhand utterance “but you know (London)” is a compliment of the highest order, evoking in the receiver a giddiness of a variety more or less obliterated in the long arc since college, for reasons equal parts self and circumstance. To walk a long way across a metropole is a recalcitrant pleasure, decadent in its timelessness, unabated even by a hand-held device that tells you exactly where you are at every step and pulls in greetings and demands from across the chronosphere. Shanzhai flâneurs are we.

Five nights in a sparse room a stone’s throw from the South Ken tube. Alone in a city of conversations overheard or at most half-participated-in, a city in which underlying anxieties seep through the crevices of every speech-act, in which you rightfully obsess about how your scarf has been draped and delightedly wait two minutes, after a knowing rebuke from the butler, in the downstairs lobby of the member’s club for your appointment, a member, whom you know will not be late. In which the bookstores‘ stocks are rotated weekly, and the sale shelves sing of the issues of the day a few months ago. In which an Iranian-born fashion editor may regale you with tales of confounding his homeland’s pavilion staff at the Shanghai Expo by the combination of his peasant shoes and bespoke jacket. In which you you know just how you are to nod when the economist seated to your right tells you about her latest polemic against aid to Africa, or the editor explains, as the ceramic fumes mount, how people come to his magazine by stumbling upon its podcast. In which the new director of the most popular museum of this new century labors to flout to guests, gathered in his honor a few nights before the Frieze-week deluge, the duration of his connection to this place even as he is feted by two stylish benefactors, neither of whom is from there either.

“Art,” says the slowly aging Belgian YBA, “is gold for your walls,” fondling a thick impasto that hangs above the desserts. “No one wants to look at your books.”

Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds, 2010.

from a friend:

when are you back in china? how was frieze? did you steal a sunflower seed and did you get poisoned by its fumes? are the cool kids in shoreditch/tongzhou going to start grinding porcelain sunflowers and huffing the dust as the new ultimate hipster/dissident high?????

Philippe Parreno, Marquee, 2008. Installation view, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2008.

Yes diary, one trick is to stay somewhere where people will be happy to come to you, and The Ace Hotel is, as they say, so very something. It starts with the lightbulbed marquee over the entrance, which just says HOTEL, an object that works more or less like the minimalist pearly white marquees that the French artist Philippe Parreno likes to put above entrances to “announce something” without saying quite what, as he famously did in an exhibition entitled theanyspacewhatever last year. The bell captain has one of those 60s haircuts with extremely closely shorn sides. The dark and cavernous lobby, diary, at any time offers at least six possible haptic scenarios for two people to drink an espresso, ranging from lazy couches to uptight barstools. In the rooms they give you bedside music paper, because you are apparently expected to dream in transcribable movements. Downstairs, the baristas dress like characters from the 1992 motion picture Newsies! Like one friend I see when I’m in town says, hoteliers are the auteurs of our moment, creating spaces in which narratives can be staged. And narratives did we stage.

A design object potentially confusable for a work of art, 2010.

I had lunch with that friend in the bar on West Broadway where they filmed the Jiang Wen short in the 2008 motion picture New York, I Love You, the one where Cui Jian is playing on the radio and the guy tries to pick the girl up by translating the lyrics to the former’s famous ballad Greenhouse Girl in which “greenhouse” is actually an anatomical metaphor. And then we went past the Ghostbusters firehouse and up to his loft where his one-year-old was watching a made in Brooklyn instructional speak Chinese DVD featuring someone named “Pim,” with a properly multicultural cast and repeating words like toothbrush well ahead of the curve. When the segment ended, dad put on Kings of Convenience and the kid began to dance in front of a wall of books with a ladder on wheels as we strategized over his pre-school applications. Diary did you know that lactation consultants in Manhattan, of which my mother was once one in the Philadelphia suburbs, bill at USD $400/hour?

Ah yes, ART. Well, for starters I ran into the unsung hero of the Arte Povera movement at a sample sale on Orchard Street, and we traded observations of his one-off collaborator Ai Weiwei’s ambivalent megalomania as I was trying on raincoats. That morning I saw a really nice gallery show or several, disaster-scene photos by an obscure Swiss policeman that Harald Szeemann put into his last big show but which failed to really gain traction. Leo Koenig is trying again. Then there was the Jo Bear/John Wesley show at Matthew Marks, her stylized minimalism bouncing so perfectly off of his visual jokes. I saw a guy in glasses not unlike my own stand in front of a Wesley pun about silhouettes on currency, laughing ostentatiously out loud. And I’m not sure what the big deal is with (2009 Venice Biennale Icelandic pavilion sensation) Ragnar Kjartsson, if there was a big deal. MoMA, now there’s a museum! I got a purloined copy of the TOC for their forthcoming Chinese documents anthology from some young curators, only to stumble upon the entire family of my first Beijing friend–mom, dad, bro, newly engaged sis–lounging in the lobby where that Barnett Newman used to be in front of a Yoko Ono shout into the microphone piece which seems like a really weird thing to put on the site of the Abramovic starefest so soon after the fact. In the architecture gallery they have a show about the lower Manhattan estuaries of 2100, and walltexts that simply presume that the island will go perhaps 61% under.

John Wesley, George Washington and Three Indians II, 1963. Ink and graphite on paper, 52 x 46 cm.

Of course the reason for the trip was a wedding, a three-night extravaganza which began on Thursday with fourteen men eating a set menu of “Beef Seven Ways” at the latest project of Momofuku’s Danny Chang in the Chambers Hotel. The Milk Bar upstairs at street level purveys an astounding array of dairy products including “Cereal Milk.” When the woman at the next table asked what we did, I explained that our friend the anthropologist was to wed and that half of us had just flown in from China. They believed us only upon seeing a tote bag inscribed with Chinese characters. We made our way to an assortment of downtown bars at various levels of in-ness, and then finally to a karaoke place on 17th Street where a song is two dollars and we sang a lot of them.

The wedding toast, according to the Paris Review advice column, is one of our great American folk rituals. I gave one at Szechuan Gourmet on West 56th Street on Friday. There are some funny discursive issues to be thought through with wedding toasts, first and foremost your place on the batting order. I was up early, and gave one sort of like the proclamation they encant at the beginning of Midnight Mass on Christmas, in our archdiocese of Philadelphia at least, that situates the nativity in the context of salvation history. I like that phrase, “salvation history.” Perhaps not as much as “eschatology,” but almost as much. And these are precisely the sorts of contexts, on the second floors of Chinese restaurants in midtown Manhattan surrounded by aunts and uncles, in which a sweeping statement or two about our generation and its uncertainties can do a bit of work. I told them that the reason we live in China is to prevent war, which is more than partially true.

The next night, they had a bluegrass band beside their chuppa on the bluffs above the Hudson in a state park way way uptown. Orthodoxim on nearby benches looked on in disapproval as the setting but not yet set sun turned the lovers into silhouettes. They looked stunning, saying their seven prayers in Vera Wang and John Varvatos. Wallace Stevens was the scripture and the self-written vows included the phrases “condition of possibility” and “future anterior.” When the groom drank from the cup of blessed wine, he made the wine-tasting face. The shawl their fathers wrapped around them at the very end said on it “Property of Congregation Beth El, Great Neck” in black permanent marker. We walked down a hill into the WPA-era maintenance shed turned bistro for vodka ginger martinis and rock shrimp, then sat down and ordered our mains as if at a restaurant. There were more toasts, then dancing in a circle with joined arms.

Adam Bund and Carley Ross, A Particular and Poignant Instantiation of an Archetype, 2010.

Later the sweet strains of bluegrass rang out as they rendered Michael Stipe’s straightforward lovesong which includes the line “I count your eyelashes” and the bride and bridegroom danced a routine, a routine with a higher degree of difficulty than most pre-instructed wedding dance routines. Soon it was 4 a.m., and then 9 a.m., and then 12 p.m., and before I knew it I had eaten a bagel toasted with cream cheese and drunk a carton of Tropicana Ruby Red Grapefruit Juice and taken the NJ Transit Northeast Corridor line to Newark Liberty International Airport and passed the TSA inspection and was aboard Continental 89 with nonstop service to Beijing.

Cover, LEAP 1, February 2010. Shown: Huang Yong Ping, Sand Bank/Bank of Sand, 2000.

In light of Evan Osnos’s link earlier today, I’m going to quickly post something to counter LEAP’s lame slowness in getting a website up and running. This is the editorial statement (call it a manifesto) I wrote back in late January, as we struggled to get our first issue together. It was later harmonized to about half this length (a story for another time) but here you go anyway. We are now one more all-nighter away from finishing LEAP 3, and I’m hard-pressed to believe that half a year has gone by since the snowy day when I sat down to write this.

We have been up all night, my editorial staff and I…you’ve heard that one before, right? Actually we haven’t. Our genesis was strategic and our quick formation contingent on the ready mobilization of corporate capital. We’ve got a parent company, an official publishing partner (and the censors that come with such), distribution channels, a room of new computers, a ratecard, revenue targets. Pretty standard stuff, really. What’s different is that this is a magazine about art in China, or rather art and China, that aims to do things ever so slightly differently from the dozens of art magazines which have emerged here in Beijing since auction fever began in 2006. And yes, it’s a print magazine, with a web presence, but with the bimonthly rhythms of paper. Sounds retro, but we’re no hipsters. Our company, remember, is called Modern Media, without a lick of irony.

So what makes us different? For starters, we don’t sell coverage. Sounds like the sort of thing you wouldn’t need to put in an opening statement, but that’s the context we’re up against, New York and London friends. Next, we take to our work with a basic understanding that serious criticism, serious journalism, assume sometimes incompatible registers in Chinese and English. Which is why we believe in editorial standards, a curatorial sensibility, and the very best translation, as translation is the only metaphor anyone should believe in anymore. We believe that the fundamental aesthetic quality of this time and place is its eclecticism, and our editorial choices reflect that: artist portfolios, woman-and-her-work profiles, rigorous reviews, panels re-rendered as cartoons, timely Chinese translations of key texts from Artforum, and a fashion shoot, unproblematically juxtaposed. Because our hang-ups are not quite yours.

Then: we’re not nationalist, mostly because we believe that “China” is more than a nation. We don’t particularly like the word “Asia,” mostly because we haven’t figured out where it is, and deep down we don’t believe there’s any more connection between what goes on in Tehran and Seoul or Ekaterinburg and Phnom Penh than between, say, Buenos Aires and Johannesburg, or for that matter, Cleveland and Hefei—which is to say, all and none. We do believe that China, owing to its distinct culture (yeah, yeah) and informational strictures (that just this week asserted their persistence), is its own context, and a Beijing-centered one at that. We have seen the cracks in the wall, we understand the skewing logic by which knowledge makes its way in and out, and that’s right where we intend to work.

We fantasize about Rauschenberg’s visit to China in 1985, and Warhol’s in 1982, and Gilbert and George’s in 1993, in dreams that jump from there right to the Ai Weiwei/Xu Bing basement apartment on East 7th where they shot Beijingers in New York in 1992. We’re not ardent patriots, and we’re certainly not detached Sinologists, but we believe that the moment has come for a magazine deeply of this place and this scene, presuming the sort of background knowledge that you won’t have unless you’re an insider, the better to create new and better insiders. We’re junkies for old exhibition announcements and interviews with avant-garde almost-beens. We are not looking to promote “Chinese contemporary art” (Oh! Those three words!); we just believe that enough people believe in them already (first it was foreigners, who are no longer necessary to the concept’s prolonged existence) that it’s time for a smart take on a special sphere. Ours are no rose-tinted glasses, although if you want a pair of those, we know a great place on the East Third Ring. We don’t deal, but we’re not so innocent or aloof to deny that everything here is transactional. We realize there are more interesting bars on four blocks of the Lower East Side than in all of Shanghai, but instead of claiming that this will all change in five years, we’re interested in why it never may.

We presume a readership like ourselves, which is to say, one that doesn’t necessarily exist in great numbers—the Dongbei lady with a Goldsmiths master’s and a non-object-based gallery, the Jonathan Spence Ph.D. who gave up teaching American undergraduates to interview Chinese tycoons, the art-school professor in Chongqing who wants to feel part of the action in the big city he visits a few times each year, the HON Circle curator who devours a thousand pages with every long-haul, and maybe most of all, the college student up in Haidian who speaks perfect English despite never having left the country and stumbles upon us at a Taiwanese café named after some director’s memoirs.

What’s in a name? In Chinese we’re called Yishujie, which just means “Artworld,” with all the implications of relationality and contextuality that Danto intended when he coined that phrase back in 1964. LEAP, which we like to write all in caps, is the Derridean supplement that completes the circle by standing just outside it—a four-letter word that evokes dialectical progress, hapless futurism, and historical tragedy, with the slightest hint of the country-specificity that is our original sin. Our magazine is structured with a top, a middle, and a bottom, each with its own team and style. That’s just the beginning. We publish on the first of every other month, and hope you’ll come along for the ride.

Philip Tinari
Beijing, January 25, 2010

Cai Guo-Qiang, Du Wenda’s Flying Saucer D on top of the Rockbund Art Museum, 2010. Photo by Lin Yi, courtesy Cai Studio

Of course one sometimes does thought experiments that involve substituting Beijing for New York or London. They’ve become harder in recent years, but I still believe in the delightful ridiculousness of taking the Chinese city at its own word as metropole. In that spirit, I bring you notes from the shanzhai fast lane, the one in which you overtake peasant-built sports cars.

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The Shanghai government did a brilliant thing by making the World Expo a reason for a long vacation. This is what my deputy editor Aimee and I realized on Sunday afternoon as we made the leisurely Air China hope to Shanghai aboard a near-empty 777. She dropped me at the newly opened Minsheng Museum–where we had been a few weeks earlier for a carefully orchestrated opening, but with all the people, unable to properly see the show–and headed back to her place on Xiangyang Lu to unload a suitcase and hard drive containing 120 gigabytes of pictures from our Beijing launch party last week. A few hours later she and I were reunited on the site of the new Rockbund development in Huangpu district, along with our advertising director Philana, fresh in from a day with a client in Kunming.

Beyond the Expo, the Rockbund is the talk of the art-world town these few weeks. A strip of buildings expertly–albeit not yet completely–renovated by architect David Chipperfield, it revolves around one that housed the Royal Asiatic Society back in the 1860s and has just now been rechristened a museum–the Rockbund Art Museum (RAM for short), with Taipei MoCA alumna Lai Hsiangling installed as its inaugural director. The fuss was for a show by Cai Guo-Qiang of works from his latest “Peasant DaVincis” project. If this sounds like it needs some explaining, it does. Back in 2005, Cai curated the first Chinese pavilion at Venice (along with NAMOC director Fan Di’an) and one of the key works was a piece by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu in which a peasant named Du Wenda attempted to send a homemade saucer into flight. The art world, rather cruelly, stood around drinking champagne, puzzled and derisive. Cai has reappropriated this concept, finding a whole army of peasant inventors who have made everything from aircraft carriers to submarines, peering out from the austere new museum’s various terraces and public spaces.

It was a bubbly affair, with food stands denoted by China’s various regions–Sichuan! Dongbei!–serving local peasant delicacies to the assembled nouveaux riches. I must have gotten sick on a yam taken from a wicker basket, because after the rest of a night that included drinks at El Coctel on Yongfu Lu and a quick visit to the curiously named Club Obama beneath the Yan’an Elevated Road, I spent the entirety of the next day in my hotel room at the curious Moller Villa (that multi-towered Austrian curiosity you see as you drive in from Hongqiao) trying to work up the energy to catch the evening’s other openings. It was the last “weekend” night of the five-day break for the Shanghai crowd, but I called it an early evening after a look around Yue Minjun’s show of deserted landscapes at Three on the Bund and a simple Shanghainese dinner on Maoming Lu.

On Tuesday I woke early to catch the first Dragonair flight to Hong Kong, then remembered how much I love the SAR as I sped through the immigration “e-channel” with a bar code and a fingerprint and booked my hotel room for the evening aboard the Airport Express over the city’s ubiquitous PCCW wi-fi network. I decided to sample “East,” the newest member of the Swire Hotels group, right around the corner from our Hong Kong office in Quarry Bay. To my surprise, “boss” Thomas Shao was also working from Hong Kong, so we arranged for dinner at a new Japanese restaurant in the Heritage 1881 complex on the Kowloon side, the latest addition to Glibert Yeung’s small empire of Hong Kong eating and drinking establishments, which most famously includes Dragon-I. It was a very Gilbert evening, as dinner faded into drinks back on the Island side at his Tazmania Lounge. I found myself deep in conversation with a structural engineer who had abandoned wind-resistant design for a hedge fund and his girlfriend Nadia who staffs Gagosian Gallery’s HK office.

Wednesday was one of those PRD days, with a morning run through a few of the current Hong Kong exhibitions in preparation for the supplement we are preparing for the Art HK fair later this month and even an iPhone purchase on behalf of a colleague. My 24 hours in HK ended in a quick coffee with critics Robin Peckham and Venus Lau before a hurried boarding of the KCR through train to Guangzhou. Back aboard the Chinese train, I spent two hours on the phone with our Beijing office as the attendants came by with instant coffee, thankfully not to the disturbance of my fellow passengers, all of whom were similarly engaged.

In Guangzhou I was slightly thrown off by the relocation of the East Rail Station’s cab stand to the far side of the plaza, next to a massive waterfall. I walked the three hundred meters through the humid air and hopped a taxi straight to the Garden Hotel to meet Charlie Koolhaas, just returned from London, about her contribution to our upcoming Africa issue. (Charlie, a photographer, has done extensive research on the southern city’s African community.) We selected images over Campari and soda in the Lotus Pond bar, surrounded by traders in town for the commodity fair. Dinner was with her cousin Rem D and his wife Ferrari Koolhaas Xiao, principals of the shoe brand United Nude which is headquartered in Guangzhou. A lavish Korean banquet with the Kool clan and their team ensued, diligently waited upon by the Canto-Korean owner. Back at the Garden Hotel I spent an hour on the phone with my brother, about to leave Senegal for Mauritania, working on his contribution to our next issue. It was all I could do to get my four hours before heading to Baiyun for good old CA 1310, the first link of the day back to Beijing and the world of work waiting there.

On our cover this month you’ll see an image that might not make sense at first. From a corner, our photographer—Shanghai artist Song Tao—captures the workshop in which sculptor Zhan Wang’s stainless steel scholar’s rocks come to life. Under his direction, a team of highly skilled workers bring the unlikely objects into existence, first hammering out shapes against existing stones, then welding them together, then buffing and polishing until the sculpture becomes seamless and shiny. If you look closely at the rock-in-progress, you can see that trademark sheen just beginning to emerge.

This is a state we at LEAP can relate to: the past two months have given us time to refine our process and product, continuing to ask ourselves the key question of what it means to make an international contemporary art magazine in, for and about China. The mass of our magazine, in all its contoured complexity, is there; what remains to us now is the crucial and no less difficult task of making it shine.

Appropriately, then, our second issue revolves around the question of what it means to make things. Our cover package asks this question directly, taking the almost comically overdetermined site of the Chinese factory not as a means to an end but as a realm in its own right. While the question of production has become a commonplace in art criticism over the past three years, we attempt here to approach it from a less polemical position, interested less in questions of authorship or social relations than in the compelling stories behind these charged sites. If we can conclude anything from these investigations, it might be that a very special power lies with the people who actually do the work.

The rest of the issue does not stray far from this mark, first with an in-depth look at some of the art made for the upcoming World Expo. Director Tian Gebing talks about making a work of theater on a site far from home. Our portfolio recalls a time sixteen years ago in which a daily newspaper offered a rare forum for artists to exhibit far-fetched proposals for fabricating new domestic spaces. We also introduce new elements, chiefly an ongoing collaboration with the fine folks at the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, who have amassed a remarkable well of interviews with key figures from the 1980s. Up front, you’ll notice new design elements and some new columns, including “Leapt,” which looks at lesser known moments and movements in the ongoing story of advanced art in China.

From the window of the Shanghai hotel where we stay during the final phase of making our magazine, one can see the still unfinished World Expo Garden stretching out toward the banks of the Huangpu. There are just forty days left until the world descends on the city, expecting something great. Sure, there is a lot of work still to be done, and not long to go. But our experience tells us that in China, in 2010, things have a way of coming together just in time.

Philip Tinari
Shanghai, March 22, 2010