Emily Prager on Intrude: Art & Life 366

2008.05.21

It’s hard to describe Intrude: Art & Life 366, the massive art project organized by the Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai. Every day throughout the entire year, a different artist creates a public art project in Shanghai. The idea, as Zendai director Shen Qibin puts it, is “to intervene, to infiltrate and influence daily scenes or situations within a certain time and place.” Sometimes it’s a performance, or sometimes an installation, a video, a club, a poster, physical movement, a live band, sculpture, an internet experience, or an actual exhibition. The idea is for art of some kind to intrude on an unsuspecting public and make an impression on us, make us “ask questions” as Gina Tong, beleaguered project manager, puts it. It’s a kind of thinking man’s “Candid Camera,” to invoke that popular, long-running American television series.

Gu Wenda, Poster for Heavenly Lantern, 2008

Intrude began with a massive press conference back in December 2007 at which Gu Wenda, whom you might call the Christo of China, presented many beautiful configurations of his Chinese lanterns. Some were huge and some were little, all lit up in a gorgeous mixture of blood red and emperor’s yellow. He kicked off Intrude on January 1 by printing a composite photo of an idea in Shanghai newspapers. “Heavenly Lantern” is Gu’s wish to hang red lanterns all over the Jin Mao Tower, pictured from top to base and with the help of Photoshop. Gu describes the photo idea as “Understanding civilization from another point of view while making the decorated building more splendid and meaningful.” I asked him when he would actually realize this because I’d love to see it, but he was unclear. It turns out, according to Biljana Ciric, head of Zendai’s curatorial department, that the permits necessary for such an endeavor would reach from Shanghai to Manhattan. So for now, it is impossible. Pity.

Kang Xusheng, New Year’s Eve Dinner, 2008, video still, Chengdu

I participated in some of the events myself: Kang Xusheng’s Chinese New Year’s Eve dinner videos, for one. We were to film our Chinese New Year’s Eve dinner, a feast traditionally had with family, and upload it to his site. Later, he would make a composite and show it at Thumb Plaza, where Zendai is located. On Chinese New Year’s Eve, I went out with my daughter and two artists, Lisa Stimpson and Judy Janelli, who were in town to make hand-gilded glass panels for the 92nd floor of the new Jin Mao Tower twin, the World Financial Center. I always go to Bi Feng Tang restaurant on New Year’s Eve because they have good food and a TV tuned to the live Variety Show that all of China watches on that evening. Forget the lion dance, this is the show that really keeps the devils at bay, and it goes on for hours, Jerry Lewis telethon-style. Anyway, I filmed our dinner and it was very festive. I enjoyed being made into an artist for that important event. It made me think about culture, tradition and legacy, how easy it is in modern life to insert yourself into other peoples’ rituals, and how hard it used to be. The sad part came later when I could not upload the video, but that’s the exciting and tragic thing about creation: often, it doesn’t turn out as you envisioned it.

Utopian Group (He Hai, Da Xiang and Deng Dafei), Family Museum, 2008

In the last four months, all manner of intrusions have taken place in Shanghai. Among them, Family Museum by the Utopian Group (He Hai, Da Xiang, Deng Dafei), in which each month a different family in Shanghai hosts a museum in its house discussing some sort of situation in art or culture that pertains to that family. March, for example, took place in the home of Qian Datong, a soldering-iron artist, where Utopian Group anchored an interview with Datong about his art and life.

The Cut Club, a January offering which I visited, is a new nightspot or “interactive entertainment experiment” out by Fudan University. Volcano, their P.R. guy, told me that videos sent by the club’s patrons from their cellphones and later montaged by a video DJ into video collages would appear on a huge screen fronting the modular plastic seating area. Patrons could text each other, or send photos or art. Interesting, and people wouldn’t be yelling on those cellphones, which is great.

Cheng Yee Man and Clara Cheung, Would You Marry Me? 2008, performance, Shanghai

Annabelle Collett, a textile artist, went to Chuanbei Park and put a skirt on a tree to “celebrate the fecundity of women and nature.” Cheng Yee Man and Clara Cheung set up a marriage registration counter in a city square and encouraged people to be artists and marry curators, whom the artists feel are the new royalty. And on and on. Go to Intrude366.com and you’ll see all the projects so that have been executed far, and those planned for May.

Of course Intrude 366 is based on the idea that art should be accessible to the masses. Indeed, Shen Qibin says his intent is to “dissolve the authority of museums and let art be part of daily life.” He wants to remove the “sacredness” as he puts it, the hush of museum-goers’ worship. Some of us who have witnessed the last forty years of art history in the West might respectfully point out that some things might not only benefit from remaining sacred, but that the masses themselves quite enjoy being in the presence of sacred things, hence the establishment of religion and altars to it.

Liu Jin, Injured Angels Arrive In Shanghai, 2008 , installation view, Shanghai

But in the last four months of around one hundred and twenty art happenings in Shanghai, only one has been documented as having genuinely achieved its aim of intruding, surprising and actually changing the way the city’s denizens think about art. That was Lost Paradise in Reality – Liu Jin’s “Injured Angels Arrive In Shanghai.” Liu hung twenty life-size human-looking winged angels off the sides of prominent buildings. He describes them as “grasping the buildings tightly, for fear they might fall down,” and evidently they are so life-like that they sent the citizens living nearby into a frenzy of anxiety, making emergency calls to police to report imminent suicides. The people of Shanghai evidently never noticed the wings, or perhaps they simply took them for granted.

— 文/ Emily Prager