2012

THE HUMAN FACTOR 

Rethinking Relationality (or the artist as bricoleur)

Published by: cura.books
Produced by: qwatz, artist in residence program – Rome
Editor: Beatrice Leanza 

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Essays and words by:

Beatrice Leanza (curator The Human Factor), Mami KATAOKA (chief curator Mori Art Museum, Tokyo), Pauline J.YAO (curator M+ museum, Hong Kong), June YAP (curator Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative – South and Southeast Asia), Mike SPERLINGER (assistant director LUX, London), Chris MANN (composer and performer), and the artists.

An Introduction by Benedetta Di Loreto (director qwatz, artist in residence program – Rome)

 

Part of the project The Human Factor organized by qwatz, artist in residence program – Rome and curated by Beatrice Leanza, the publication features Koki Tanaka, Charles Lim, Hong-Kai Wang and Liang Shuo,  the four artists who were part of an exhibition of the same title held at Museo Pietro Canonica in Villa Borghese (May 23 – June 3), presenting  a selection of both existing and newly created works as a result of a two-months research period at qwatz in April and May 2012.

The book collects the critical reflections of artists, leading writers and curators invited to expound upon this cross-section of Asian contemporary art practices, as proponents of discerning perspectives around the meaning and criticality of ‘rethinking relationality’  in order to reinforce transregional narratives within global cultural practice and discourse.

Arranged in four focused chapters (1.Situational Objects – 2.Beautiful Evidence – 3.Musical Memory – 4.Neutral Spaces) the commissioned contributions – presented in form of essay, interview or deferred dialogical experiment – incubate deepening social and philosophical interpretations departing from each artists’ practice by rendering a transformational architecture of experiential knowledge that identifies itself with change and situated relations:  through the sonic space of speaking and listening (Hong-kai Wang), in the sensorial and affective relationship with things and people (Koki Tanaka), in the social and aesthetic process of inhabiting (Liang Shuo), in the construction of narrative dispositives mapping real and imaginary territories (Charles Lim).

‘Relationality’ is addressed here as a crucible for the articulation of theoretical thinking that can eventually interrogate normative paradigms of visual and material production engrained in the Western modern project and its contemporary accounts. Taking an interest in a history of associations of ‘relation’ within transcultural positions that advocate divergent models of sociability, materiality, concepts of interdependence and spatiality, this publication looks at the work of writer and poet Edouard Glissant as a guiding intellectual inspiration for an exploration of the entanglements of contemporaneity and globalism stemming from other-than-western historical and aesthetic traditions.

Language: English
Dimension (Width x Height): 140×200
Color: blue and CMYB
Pages: 80
Graphic Design: Andrea Baccin
Editor: Beatrice Leanza
Year: 2012
Produced by qwatz artist in residence program Rome
ISBN: 978-88-97889-10-6

 

The project THE HUMAN FACTOR is made possible by the generous contribution of various supporters and sponsors:

Ines Musumeci Greco; Agi Verona; Japan Foundation; Cultural Affair Department, New Taipei City Government; FARE in collaboration with Open Care and with the support of Fondazione Cariplo, NABA – Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, GAI – Associazione Circuito Giovani Artisti Italiani; O’A.I.R.; ArchiviAzioni;  ROMA CAPITALE, Museo Pietro Canonica in Villa Borghese – musei in Comune, in collaboration with Acea, BNL, Unicredit, Monte dei Paschi di Siena, Acqua Claudia, Finmeccanica, Lotto, Vodafone, with the support of Atac, la Repubblica.

OBBLIGO DI SOSTA | 密度 0% DENSITY

Italian Architects and Designers in China—Call for Ideas!

27 September – October 6, 2012
Beijing Design Week, Beijing

A project promoted by the Embassy of Italy to the People’s Republic of China in collaboration with Beijing Design Week 2012.

Supported by: Rizzoli China, Beijing Industrial Design Centre

Exhibition: 751-DPark, Watertank (Beijing Design Fair), 27 September – 2 October, 2012

(posters and custom envelope: 60 x 90 cm)

 

The call for ideas promoted by the Embassy of Italy to the P.R.C was launched on the occasion of BJDW 2012 as an open platform for creative expression dedicated to the large community of China-based Italian studios and independent professionals in the field of architecture and design. Dubbed Density 0%, it asked for original visual contributions and reflections around the much urgent and debated topic of ‘urban density’. Participants were to submit realistic or imaginative renderings of a space of pause and suspension responsive to the highly congested cityscapes of contemporary China. Chinese urban areas are spaces of flow per excellence where spontaneous forms of communal anchorage and aggregation seem inexorably thinning out of their spatial memory while increasingly becoming product of artificial zoning built in new commercial and residential quarters insulated from the porous fabric of the ‘social’.  The theme ensues from a wider perspective, one that concerns man and ‘world’ – world intended as a space of sharing and coexistence, therefore a prelude to a process of action for and of the community that is inseparable from a form of ethical and civic thinking. The participants had to offered their own interpretation and perception of a possible space of decompression and its functions, a hiatus within the uninterrupted urban context, in form of an image, providing a title and short description of the concept.

The posters were also presented in an exhibition on display in the Watertank of 751 D-PARK, one of the main hubs of the design festival, and were collected in a limited edition publication realized by Rizzoli China.

May 24 – June 3, 2012
Museo Pietro Canonica in Villa Borghese | Rome, Italy

Organized by: qwatz – artist in residence program, Rome
Artists: Liang SHUO, Charles LIM, Koki TANAKA, Hong-kai WANG
Curator: Beatrice Leanza

 

The Human Factor is a research project featuring artists Liang Shuo (China), Charles Lim (Singapore), Koki Tanaka (Japan) and Wang Hong-kai (Taiwan) organized by qwatz artist in residence program – Rome, and curated by Beatrice Leanza. The artists’ two months residency (April-May 2012) informed an exhibition of both newly created and selected works as well as a unique book of commissioned essays and interviews published by cura.books in November 2012 [The Human Factor – Rethinking Relationality (or the artist as bricoleur)].

A meaningful cross-section of contemporary Asian art, the practices here presented subtend to strategies of perception and cognition of reality where oppositional paradigms between otherness and individuality, nature and culture, man and world are abandoned to make space for an architecture of knowledge intrinsically ‘transformational’, ‘ situationally interconnected’ and ‘relational’. Drawing upon an acentric universe of experiential nature mobilized by a phenomenology of “becoming” that offers itself supplementary to a more inherently western-made anthropology of “being”, they collectively conjure the hypothesis of a space of action and contemplation of the world deliberately removed from the political terminologies of a ‘dichotomous’ predicament, to propose instead a culturally asymmetrical thought of social and philosophical inclusiveness – an identification with change and situated relations.

Featuring installations inclusive of photography, sculpture, video, sound and performance, the exhibition infiltrated the private rooms and studio spaces part of Museo Pietro Canonica in Villa Borghese by way of subtle strategies of juxtaposition and substitution, played out throughout the interlocking rooms with the rich collection of paraphernalia, furnishings and art objects found wherein. Spotted by means of a color-coded parkour the works were carefully interspersed inside Canonica’s domestic landscape of personal grandeur and monumental formality so creating a diachronic configuration of affinities among diverse life paths and experiences, the artists’ and Pietro Canonica’s (1869 – 1959). Canonica was an Italian academic and mannerist artist from the first half of the 20th century, whose diplomatic savoir-faire earned him the favors of ruling classes and conservative elites of foreign governments (from Russia to Thailand) where he often travelled as a political and cultural mediator – a proponent of classicism and high-culture that distanced himself from the conceptual and formal upheaval brought about by the historical avant-gardes. The works in “The Human Factor” operated with knowing irony aside the dignified art that surrounded them, bringing it back to a transformed social context in the present times.

Like the complementary publication, the show highlights the four distinctive practices as focused critical explorations into the human mechanics of the architecture of knowledge (a ‘rethinking of relationality’) across four central modes of envisioning and creating the perimeters of its structure: that is, in the sonic space of speaking and listening (Musical Memory/Wang Hong-kai), in the sensorial and affective relationship with things and people (Situational Objects/Koki Tanaka), in the social and aesthetic process of inhabiting (Beautiful Evidence/Liang Shuo), in the construction of narrative dispositives mapping real and imaginary territories (Neutral Spaces/Charles Lim).

The project THE HUMAN FACTOR is made possible by the generous contribution of various supporters and sponsors:

Ines Musumeci Greco; Agi Verona; Japan Foundation; Cultural Affair Department, New Taipei City Government; FARE in collaboration with Open Care and with the support of Fondazione Cariplo, NABA – Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, GAI – Associazione Circuito Giovani Artisti Italiani; O’A.I.R.; ArchiviAzioni;  ROMA CAPITALE, Museo Pietro Canonica in Villa Borghese – musei in Comune, in collaboration with Acea, BNL, Unicredit, Monte dei Paschi di Siena, Acqua Claudia, Finmeccanica, Lotto, Vodafone, with the support of Atac, la Repubblica.