Exhibition Introduction (Part 1)

Next stop London. Stay tuned for more information.

China Chair Project opened during Art Basel Miami, 4 - 7 December 2007 and until 9 January 2008 at The Carlyle, 1250 Ocean Drive, Miami Beach, Florida.

Check out the Vernissage TV movie (QuickTime required) of CCP at The Carlyle, Miami Beach.

CCP then moved to Palm Beach 3 Contemporary Art Fair in Palm Beach (Stand A5), 11 - 14 January 2008, pieces were also placed throughout the fair.

The new exhibition 'Chinese Art on the Oceans' comprises of Chinese contemporary photography and digital works, the show runs along side CCP and includes artists; Qu Yan, Jin Jiangbo, Wang Ningde, Zuoxiao, Zuzhou and Miao Xiaochun. Works soon to be posted.



Functional Contemporary Chinese Sculpture

Art is useless; furniture is useful. If you sit your ass on it, it's a chair, if you walk around and look at it, its art... In fact, the more layers of meaning the better.
- Richard Artschwager

My first encounter with the fascinating and mysterious country of China began in 1987. This was a time when the art scene was given a bad name by ducking and diving - hastily assembled garage-style exhibitions being aggressively shut down by the authorities. This art scene, then in its germination, has since blossomed to become one of the greatest contributions to world art within the last five years. Western museums now go to extraordinary lengths to nurture sustainable, ongoing relationships with those who they hope will come to represent Chinese talent of both today and tomorrow. Since 2005 the major Western auctions houses have devoted entire sales to Chinese contemporary art, the result of which being that today two of the top ten selling, living artists in the world are Chinese. Like everything else from this country, Chinese art leaps forwards in a meteoritic fashion.

This catalogue and exhibition series are by no means an attempt to try and present an overview of what Chinese contempory sculptural practice is; addressing this question today is akin to asking a fish about water. This project is, at best, a glimpse at the work and artistic developments of a few very gifted artists that I am privileged to know and with whom I have been fortunate enough to work. The project mutated and grew organically. I was invited to commission a group of artists to create a chair. It was then up to each individual artist to experiment with this starting point as they saw best. Many of the artists had never worked in three-dimensional media before, and all but one had never worked on a chair, yet the enthusiasm and unbridled creativity that all the artists unleashed on this project more or less astounded me.

The realm of a project such as CCP runs the risk of being misunderstood as a kind of gag, poking fun at the design world when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. In the past artists who have worked on functional, usable sculpture include some of the greatest names of the post-war era including Isamu Noguchi, Franz West, Donald Judd, Rachel Whiteread, and Scott Burton to name but a few. There is little to be gained today in trying to decipher the finer points of what constitutes the difference between art, sculpture and design, their blurred boundaries making them in a sense as one.

Art is an individual's viewpoint or interpretation of society or the world at large, in that only the artist knows the origins of their work. This other-worldliness is what makes art so vibrant for it allows the viewer the freedom to interpret and comment as they wish. Functional art surpasses the idea of design in favour of more complex objects which can appropriate the daily uses of furniture in order to articulate a series of visual and ideological solutions. If comfort and practical use come into play within the finished work then all is well and good, as it was certainly not the brief for CCP.

Design as a discipline, on the other hand, is, by and large, basically not self-expression; the essence of design lies in the process of discovering a solution to a problem shared by many. Designers must often follow the conditions posed by industrial logic. But there are certainly numerous product designers working today whose work deserves to be elevated to the realm of 'art', such as Marc Newson, Shiro Kuramata, Ettore Sottsass, Ron Arad, and Droog. These are designers who seem to be operating more and more within the sphere of art. Their approaches, labelled 'conceptual design', are appropriated from contemporary artistic practice. Even if, after seeing this catalogue or exhibition, you lose sight of your understanding of what sculpture or design means, it may not mean that you have understood less about sculpture or design - it could mean that you have progressed deeper into the meanings inherent to both worlds.

This elopement of art and design allows a freedom for both artists and designers to experiment in distinctly new ways, creating some of the most exciting and resonating works to be produced today. The results are mutations which defy description; of this merging of disciplines, one of the most celebrated examples is the work of the trio Unmask - to experience their creative process is, first of all, to be drawn to the pull of what might be termed as the attraction to gravitational delight. Their works have a sense of sheer immediacy and aesthetic force, compelled by their forms, composition, and texture. A marked contrast is to be found in concept of the work of Shi Jianmin, an artist interested in opposing forces: the old and the new; natural and man-made, and the friction created when these forces meet. Experiencing the junctures where these forces collide, Shi's works create a timeless, updated elegance of form in which echoes of poetry are to be found.

The playful sensuality of Xiang Lun's cactus-inspired works possesses a surreal quality, inviting, and yet defying, the results of some extraordinary experimentation with materials, colour and form. Her entire artistic career has been characterised by her love affair with cacti, resulting in her rather odd, but majestic works. Less exuberant is 'Black Beauty' by Muchen and Shao; the work is positively melancholic, like the echoes of rustling leaves in the passage of time - a testimony to the annals of change in China. Wrapped or bandaged, like a willing victim, silent yet unbowed, mysterious yet revealing - these are all aspects of the mastery and wit that characterise the pair's profoundly meditative works.

The work of Wang Qingsong belies his deeper sense of irony. The cryptic undertone of the classical chair being uncomfortable is brought out through instruments of massage so that we find ourselves caught up in a sea of conflicting emotions. Qingsong has that rare ability to take a familiar object and transform and imbue it with a strangeness that both excites and surprises long after the initial impact arrested us.

Zhan Wang's subtle gestures are expressed obliquely through an almost silence, formed by a lyricism that touches the very depths of our soul.

From a purely Chinese standpoint, these works exist in an indescribable time of upheaval, blending the past, present, and future into an unfathomable time that defies description in everyday language. Each work transcends the impotency of language to furnish us with glimpses of what it is to be an artist in China today. What animates and unites the various works in CCP is they have not lost the will to continue to possess meaning. Nevertheless, whatever they might mean, whilst at times seemingly discernable in terms of form, can remain almost incomprehensible given their poetic expression. Undertones of brutality, for example, are evident in Shi Jinsong's Torture Chair, a serenely perturbed object whose sole function is that of recounting pain.

Most important, perhaps, is that each work requires the presence of the human body to complete its function, some obviously more inviting than others. Their vocabularies are purely artistic in their intent, their beauty belying the textures and materials used - bronze, wood, metal, foam, silicone. The artists offer a diversity of methods that suggest a new range of possibilities in redefining not only sculpture and furniture, but also the role of 'the sculpture of space' as Isamu Noguchi so eloquently expressed it. These works subvert the cosy, friendly relationships between the usual pieces installed in the interior for which they are intended.

The technical skills and virtuosity involved in creating the works for CCP are testimony to the workforce available to artists in China today. It would be virtually impossible to find such diverse manufacturers in the West willing to take on and to respond to such challenges, often in haste and at the very last moment. At such a reasonable cost, perhaps its not unreasonable to assume that this is yet another service that China will supply to the world in time - manufacturer par excellence to the art world!