Raul Zamudio Man or Butterfly?

2 Surge is an exhibition that brings together some of the most interesting contemporary artists from diverse areas of the world. The exhibitions title has many allusions and one of them is movement, as in the sea surged to shore. But the inadvertent implication of this definition is unilateral flow. Surges movement, however, is multidirectional for it is rhizomatic and this malleable, amorphous quality makes it difficult to pinpoint its center from its periphery, its inside from its outside. While the subversion of hierarchies such as center/periphery and inside /outside is intrinsic to Surge, the paper tiger that the exhibition also reckons with is the twentieth-first century global / local equation. Surge approaches this framework by presenting an exhibition in China consisting of international participants including artists from the host country. Here, one can detect the global component of the exhibition, although it seems that it enters from the outside to the inside to dialogue with local Chinese artists and contexts. In order to undermine this asymmetrical construct where the global appears from without and the local from within, foreign artists will not only make site-specific works in China but their subject matter is not limited to, nor wholly representative of specific geo-cultural regions, nations or places of origin. These heterogeneous and polyvalent artistic practices originating from disparate parts of the world are conveyable to an international audience as to a local one; and this impulse is also germane to the Chinese artists participating in Surge. For their work also traffics from inside and outside of their own national borders to the degree that it is difficult to differentiate their own global tendencies from local ones. And like the aphorism by the ancient Taoist philosopher Chuang-tzu in which he woke up not knowing if he is a man who dreamt he was a butterfly or a if he is a butterfly dreaming he is a man, a paradoxical question that Surge raises is: where are the global and local located in the aesthetic register when Chinese contemporary art, for example, easily moves in international artistic circuits all the while absorbing the context of its local manufacture? But Surge is more than an exhibition that questions the global /local paradigm and its ostensible contradictory nature that can be both emancipative and oppressive. For surge, as defined in the dictionary, refers not only to movement but also to a sudden charge of electricity. Thus Surge is also a collective energy equally generated by individual exhibiting artists whose works are imbued with power, force and occasionally a wild abandon that situates them at the forefront of the international artistic arena as well as their individual countries including Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, Ireland, England, Finland, Poland, the United States, and China. Artists like Katja Loher, Przemo Wojciechowski, and Agnieszka Kalinowska, for instance, work in video and create elaborate room-size installations in which sound and image seamlessly converge space, time, and architectonics. For Surge, these three artists will individually produce site-specific works that directly engage their surroundings both physically as well as thematically. Also working in video but exploring its interactive potential is Natalie Bewernitz and Marek Goldowski. This artistic duo creates work where sound art and video formally and conceptually intersect. The sound pieces they have devised shift the role of the viewer from passive listener to active collaborator; an audio piece they will install in Beijing is contingent on audience participation. Participation in this piece, however, entails extending it beyond interactivity to the degree that the audience is as important to the work as any other of its components including its makers. Other artists that work large-scale but with different aesthetic approaches and narrative concerns are Karin Suter, Riiko Sakkinen, and Alejandro Diaz. Suter constructs sublime wall paintings, and for the exhibition she will create a mural-size piece that will incorporate research from her current artist residency in Beijing. Beijing is a historically rich and cultivated city, and it will be interesting to see how Suter filters her experiences of this vibrant megalopolis through her nomadic, aesthetic practice rooted in painting. Similarly working monumentally but utilizing individual works-onpaper, wall drawing and text is Riiko Sakkinen. Sakkinen is a Finn based in Spain, and his transnational condition is underscored in his mixing of a myriad of imagery from low and high culture that is culled from many sources including Spanish, Finnish, English, Polish, German, Japanese and Arabic. His contribution to Surge will consist of numerous small drawings that will be mounted against a polychromatic background and layered with his idiosyncratic animation; yet, the textual elements that accompany his iconography will also be written in Chinese. In this sense, Chinese characters will weave into an array of linguistic and pictorial sources mined from a global archive creating something akin to a contemporary Tower of Babel. But while some of these images seem to have a history of their own, they appear in Sakkinens work like phantasmagoria surfacing from his unconscious. Alejandro Diaz, on the other hand, creates another form of signage altogether that is self-referential and ironic to the degree that it undermines all form of decorum. He has proposed to do a site-specific installation consisting of cardboard text-pieces written in Chinese that will be coupled with similar Arte Poveralike signage from a performance that he did in New York City. Diazs action executed in front of one of New York Citys most luxurious hotels included masquerading as a Mexican vaquero or cowboy that gives a political, critical, and perverse spin on street performers who solicit money while costumed as, for example, the Statue of Liberty, Michael Jackson, or George Bush. The Irish artist Jeanette Doyle also works with displacement, albeit that her shift has nothing to do with the individual artist as is with Diaz, but instead with the beholder of her installation. Her participation in Surge consists of a video and soundtrack taken from a tour bus driven through Hollywood in search of movie stars, famous film locales and places where sensationalistic or in-famous crimes were committed. Her piece alludes to the exhibitions theme and title via the placement of the viewer as surrogate for the tourist surging through the underbelly of American culture. In short, the viewer of her piece is now metonymically transported to the Hollywood world of artifice and superficiality. Other artists, such as Jeff Gompertz, Ferran Martin, Li Wei, and Huang Yan approach the exhibition through a broad range of media primarily oriented around performance. Gompertzs project for Surge is a live work in real time that incorporates video, audio, computers and virtual space and is based on research undertaken in Beijing during his periodic stays. Ferran Martins performance eschews audio and technology altogether and instead takes it point of thematic departure from a 3 600 year-old tradition in Valencia, Spain where men make wooden sculptures in order to burn them. This project will have special resonance in China since it is the place where gunpowder originated as well as its unique history of fireworks. Li Wei also explores the intersections of outside and inside, artificial and nonartificial space, and the real and fictional self in performances and photographs in which he incorporates mirrors that reflect and deflect the world around him. Working through the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacans Mirror Stage and the Renaissance theorist Alberti and his painting as window paradigm, Weis perfomances and photographic tableaus in which he appears in a variety of guises defer equally to self-representation as well the represented self. His self-portrait based, photo-graphic mise-en-scnes have been shot on location throughout the world thus underscoring his global artistic practice that originates in Beijing and then fans outward and vice versa. Like Wei, Huang Yan is an artist who operates under the cloak of a highly localized formal vocabulary. However, on closer investigation it becomes apparent that his aesthetic strategies are a conglomeration of international artistic sensibilities culled from within and without China. Mostly working in performance in which he uses his body as canvas, he paints landscapes and other recognizable Chinese signifiers on his back, chest and face. He reminds us how very much the somatic, like nature, is a cultural construct. Other artists in the exhibition extend the concept of Surge through sculptural work as is the case with Alfredo Martinez, Arturo Elizondo, Wolfgang Stiller, and Li Fei Xue. Alfredo Martinez will construct a site-specific sculpture that is a cross between Chinese mythological beasts, science fiction, and American underground comics and animation and will be constructed from materials obtained in Beijing. Also referencing a broad range of sources is Arturo Elizondos conceptual work that is situated somewhere between sculpture, painting, and design. His contribution will consist of a series of CDs whose covers were created by the artist himself. The interplay between CD cover artwork, the fictional titles he gives to the CDs, plus the ersatz singer(s) who author the music, amount to a tour de force regarding the nature of CD piracy; an illegal trade that has

4 flourished throughout the world. Elizondo questions the nature of piracy by way of the postmodern technique of appropriation. He achieves this through his own fictional recordings with their attendant artwork that gives a post-modernist spin on the culture of the knockoff. Replication, albeit not cultural but of a somatic variant, is intrinsic to Wolfgang Stiller as well. His sculptures consist of latex casts of human bodies that hang upside down and allude to a host of visual cultural practices including paper banners, flags and the French variant of the still-life called nature mort or dead nature. Serving somewhat as simulated epidermis, his human sheaths are molds that can be traced back to a variety of cultural and ethnic sources, which the artist reduces to their external yet universal essences; what Stiller is poetically presenting is a conundrum where surface is depth as well as the other way around. Li Fei Xue also sites the body, though his main modus operandi is working with signifiers of the cultural corpus rather than its human, micro counterpart. His contribution to Surge consists of a large, Minimalist sculptural block similar to Tony Smiths Die (1962), a number of pieces by Donald Judd or even Richard Serra. How Li Fei Xue undermines these icons and the dogma of high Minimalism is that his geometric sculpture will be made out of Tofu. Here, he is much more aligned with Hans Haackes Condensation Cube (1963) because both contain a temporal component, albeit that Li Fei Xues sculpture will be more radically prone to time and nature for it will be left to rot; one aspect of this process is that composition and decomposition attain formal equivalency. Another artist who works with site-specificity is Henri Seng. Sengs project consists of photographing the peculiar meteorological phenomenon of micro dustbowls that are ubiquitous in parts of China. But these dustbowls are beyond the ordinary; for they seemingly manifest anywhere, without notice, and appear more like some kind of paranormal manifestation or phantasm that seemingly have a life of their own. In one sense, then, Seng work is at the juncture of photography, performance and Earth art. Rounding out the exhibition are works by Zhang Tiemei and O Zhang. Zhang Tiemei is first and foremost a painter. But her renderings in oil and acrylic on canvas are an amalgam of disparate cultural and historical references. Some of these include Chinese animation and landscape, as well as more non-representational modes such as Color Field and post-painterly abstraction. While numerous contemporary painters have cited older aesthetic styles in their work including John Currin and Old Master painting, Cecily Brown and Abstract Expressionism, and Jenny Saville and Lucien Freud, for example, Teimei ups the ante by ironically mixing motifs not limited to cultural location or historical period. Also creating a tension between East and West within a myriad of photographic genres is the art of O Zhang. Zhangs recent corpus of photographs subsumes an array of trans-cultural practices. Although mainly working with what can be myopically termed straight portraiture, her pictures also allude to journalistic and documentary photography. At the same time, they move outside the realm of the aesthetic and fine art and into the fields of anthropology and ethnography. The reason being is that her work consists of photographing Westerners who seek to adopt Asian babies or children. Zhang does not question the ethics of cross-cultural adoption, but it is a body of work that nonetheless is charged with the subtext of Europes colonial history with Asia. In short, Zhangs work becomes the perfect coda or preface, to an exhibition that engages the dichotomies of East / West, inside /outside and, of course, the global and the local. As can be attested by the exhibitions diverse group of artists, then, Surge is distinct from other shows exhibited in Beijing that were curated from abroad including, most recently, New York, Interrupted. Surge distinguishes itself from these types of exhibitions by having a majority of the work made in Beijing or by referring to the host city or nation in one way or another, from both the inside and outside. In this sense, Surge is conceptually framed by the notion that the global and local are such where the center is everywhere and the periphery nowhere; and that the aesthetic condition is not so much embodied in the object made for static contemplation, but dynamically in relationships between things.