Raphael, Turner, Monet, Munch, Chagall, Picasso, Giacometti... Under the background of many classic masterpieces from the history of Western art coming to the two sides of the Pujiang River, how can Shanghai's art museum industry enhance its core competitiveness, enrich its collections, improve its academic research capabilities, and conduct in-depth two-way exchanges between Chinese and foreign cultures in the face of the global art world?
In 2022, the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art (PSA) will usher in the tenth anniversary of its opening, this decade is also a decade of vigorous development of the Shanghai art museum industry, and now there are nearly 100 art museums in Shanghai, how to "break the circle" of public art museums, how to be more standardized for private art museums, and how to recall more thinking power in culture and art? The Paper, Art Review (www.thepaper.cn) recently interviewed Gong Yan, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai.
"Culture and art should recall more thinking power, the exhibition system is not planned, but through a unique exhibition to form an atmosphere, to place the anxiety and difficulty of urban people, to provide a space for communication, sharing, and co-construction." It is not so much a system as a unique spiritual field. She said.
Located on the banks of the Huangpu River, the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai (PSA) was converted from the former Shanghai Nanshi Power Plant
On October 1, 2012, the 100-year-old Shanghai Nanshi Power Plant "re-generated electricity" as the first state-owned contemporary art museum in Chinese mainland after the renovation of the "City Future Pavilion" at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. This year, the "Electric Field: Beyond the Surreal - Exhibition of the Centre Pompidou Collection" of the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai (PSA) was the first exhibition in China to introduce the collection of the Centre Pompidou in France.
The practice of the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai, in Gong Yan's view, "'breaking the circle' is comprehensive, there can be a variety of attempts, but the content is the core", and the art museum cannot exist in isolation, "if the front end of the art museum is artists, display their works, behind it must have a certain degree of research, collection and popularization education." In particular, the voice of art criticism is very beneficial to institutions and artists. ”
Today, the city has a large number of art galleries and exhibitions. Gong Yan believes that a situation is that many large exhibitions give people the mentality of buying luxury goods, and they feel that they are not fashionable enough without punching in. Culture and art should bring back more thinking, not just discuss the question of beauty or not. In addition, the museum cooperates with third-party institutions, "The important thing is to learn from each other through cooperation, not only to leave traces of capital, but to leave traces of culture." ”
Poster for the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai (PSA) exhibition
Gong Yan, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai
The Paper: Looking back at the past exhibitions of the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai (PSA), there are architectural exhibitions, artist case study exhibitions, collection exhibitions, as well as a number of continuous exhibition themes such as the Shangshuang and Qingce Projects, how do these exhibitions constitute PSA's exhibition system?
Gong Yan: The Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art was established in 2012, and the reason why this building has become a museum of contemporary art is related to the Shanghai World Expo. The World Expo is the earliest prototype of a public museum, which allows rare treasures to move from the "curiosity house" of individual collectors to the public, making itself a carrier of cultural dissemination. Speaking of PSA, the building itself tells the story of Chinese generating electricity by themselves, even if it is only to light a dozen lights on the dock, it is a very courageous attempt and voice, so we want to continue this self-conscious voice at that time to the present and bring new energy to the city.
The Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai is more like a mini-city about imagination, it welcomes all forms of expression, we connect all the media related to perception, such as contemporary art, contemporary architecture, design, sound art, social theater, etc., hoping to trigger topics and cause thinking, and everyone who comes here can participate in it and build a city together.
Following such a thread, whether looking for artists or curating, we want to be able to maintain a certain avant-garde and experimental nature. We have very few collections, and our strength or necessity is to explore and discover. No matter how big the size of the art museum is, the art museum must always maintain a state of "exodus", and the staff must also do fieldwork and cannot face the editing and production of second-hand materials. The same goes for selecting artists.
We have careful and advanced exhibition planning, but the exhibition system is not planned, but through a unique exhibition to form an atmosphere, to place the anxiety and hardship of urban people, to provide a space for communication, sharing and co-construction. It is not so much a system as a unique spiritual field.
2021 "Tree, Tree" exhibition, by Irish artist John Gerrard
The Paper: The "Urban and Architectural Research Series", which began in 2014, is an exhibition feature of PSA, which is also the first contemporary art institution in China to include architecture and cities in the scope of display and research. Like Jean Nouvel, Renzo Piano, Ito Toyo, etc., show their achievements to the audience, and then continue to the relationship between local architecture and context, and introduce Shanghai-related architectural practices such as "Citizens' Metropolis" and "Awakened Modernity".
Gong Yan: These are all learning from history. Learning how Western societies can develop towards sustainable cities after experiencing modernity, facing the dilemmas of metropolitan transformation and energy scarcity, does the clear development context of the West and the practice of early Chinese architects who stayed abroad enlighten to today's urban construction? We invite architects to speak about their insights into urban development, whether personal, macro, or utopian, and everyone is a case that cannot be replicated. For example, "Jean Nouvel: In my head, in my eyes... The exhibition breaks the convention of architecture exhibitions, with a simple film of nearly eight hours and 6 architectural models in the minds of architects, allowing us to see his love and unwillingness for the city of Paris.
In November 2019, "Jean Nouvel: In my head, in my eyes ... Attribution..." At the opening ceremony, the architects gave a guided tour to the public.
Film screening at jean Nouvel's exhibition.
Love for a city is a quality that architects especially need. Buildings are difficult to eliminate, and once formed, they will remain for many years, and if there is no love and responsibility for the plot, the city and the residents, what will be left behind will be a pile of reinforced concrete garbage that cannot be removed. Another example is Yuna (in 2015, the Contemporary Pavilion held "Mobile Architecture – Yuna Friedman"), who has only realized one building in his lifetime, is a primary school, but he raised the core question of "who is the master of the building" more than half a century ago, his reverie of the city, his reflections on the gaps in the building, such as parabolas, continue to give new revelations over time. There is also Junya Ishigami, who considers the relationship between architecture and nature, and he discusses from a very delicate point of view how architecture disappears into the natural environment, but still maintains the most basic function of architecture.
In 2019, Japanese architect Junya Ishigami's solo exhibition "Freedom Building" modeled the "Forest Kindergarten"
These architectural exhibitions are not placed in the School of Architecture, but in a more comprehensive art museum, hoping that more users of the city can see the thinking behind capital, shape, material and function, and hope that the practice of architects can stimulate more interdisciplinary exchanges and play a role in promoting urban renewal.
"Awakened Modernity: China's First Generation of Architects Graduated from the University of Pennsylvania" exhibition scene, 2018, photographer: Jiang Wenyi
The Paper: Junya Ishigami's exhibition is a collaboration between the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai and the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, but in fact, PSA has reached strategic cooperation with the Municipal Museum of Modern Art in Paris, France, the Museum of Native Art in Lausanne, the Swiss Design Center, the Yves Klein Archive, the Architectural Research Center of Columbia University in the United States, and M+ in Hong Kong. And what happens like pushing the exhibition?
Gong Yan: Cooperation is a process of mutual attraction, not the concept of buying things. The premise of "mutual attraction" is that the art museum's own academic positioning can clearly express to the institutions it wants to cooperate with, and what kind of chemical reaction the other party's collection may have when it comes to Shanghai. The two sides jointly inject content and join local thinking, which is the real sense of cooperation.
For example, our collaboration with the Fondation Cartier is based on each other's understanding of art and the role of museums, which led to the 2018 exhibition "Fondation cartier Contemporary Art: Strange Landscapes". The exhibition originates from its 30-year collection, in which we also invite Chinese artists, and now the works of these Chinese artists have become their collections, and to some extent, it is also a cultural exchange and recommendation.
"Paint a Flag for Me", Cartier Contemporary Art Foundation "Strange Landscapes" exhibition site, Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai
At the end of the "Tree, Tree" exhibition in the fall of 2021, our two institutions will invite artists, philosophers, botanists, landscapers, field photographers, etc. to join the discussion of this global topic, so that the public can get closer to the "tree", a friend who is both close and strange. Although the "tree exhibition" has taken shape in the Cartier Foundation, the contemporary pavilion and the foundation space are completely different, and we have made a complete change in the design and spatial narrative of the exhibition; in terms of selecting artists, we also hope to present the different attitudes of Chinese artists or Chinese philosophy to the "tree". The number of discussions and forwards on Weibo of this exhibition has exceeded 100 million, and the number of views of short videos has reached nearly 35 million, reaching such a high degree of attention, indicating that this topic is perceptible and participatory, and we also hope that the exhibition can have a relationship with the city.
"Trees, Trees" exhibition, exhibited works by French botanist Francis Halle
"Trees, Trees" exhibition, works by Brazilian artist Luiz Zerbini
The "New Culture Producer" project launched in 2021 in cooperation with the Chanel Cultural Fund is also worth looking forward to. They want the cultural propositions we put forward to be urgent and have the possibility of future development. We mentioned the two topics of "craftsmanship revival" and "active architecture", which are related to PSA's previous research, and we hope that with the intervention of a more international stage, we can amplify the volume of thinking.
"Craftsmanship revival" has been a lukewarm topic for many years, and we have also done some research to understand the situation of craftsmen, basically seeing the so-called three fates: tourism products, becoming intangible cultural heritage, and cooperating with luxury goods. All three situations are passive. We want to throw out the topic through awards and exhibitions, and invite front-line craftsmen, artists, scholars, etc. to intervene to discuss the value of craftsmanship in the environment of mechanical production, and where can it develop? China's current processing and production capabilities are obvious to all, but the imagination of design seems to be stagnant, and every time design is talked about, it returns to Ming-style furniture, cultural nostalgia... But in what posture and manner can we say goodbye to the past? We want to open our minds through reflection on our craftsmanship. The two selected schemes show two very different perspectives, Zuo Jing and Wang Yanzhi's plan originates from their long-term fieldwork and practice, slowly extending from a region, forming a certain business model, and business feeds back research; the other Wu You and Feng Lixing's plan allows us to see that craftsmanship and art are actually one thing, and craftsmanship is the daily life of artists.
All the characters that appear in Tintin's comics "Family Portraits"
Borrowing is also a kind of cooperation. For example, the exhibition "Tintin and Hergé". Shanghai was once an important town for woodcuts, comic strips and comics. In a certain historical period, they have all played a very important propaganda role. However, with the development of the times, it is gradually declining, and few children today talk about "Sanmao". Tintin, on the contrary, is a journalist, a man without borders, who travels the world through interesting insights, including his imagination of the space industry, before Gagarin ascended to heaven, and his feelings about diverse species still resonate in the context of the present. The exhibition took 5 years from the idea to the reply of the Hergé Museum, and when it was realized, it encountered the epidemic, travel was blocked, and communication had to be separated from the screen, which also reminded us of Hergé and Zhang Chongren, how they built spiritual trust through art, especially in 1981, when their reunion after half a century apart was moving.
Hergé with Zhang Chongren, 1934. Hergé Museum
The Adventures of Tintin, Lunar Adventures, 1954. Hergé-Moulinsart 2021
The Paper: PSA's exhibitions and events are very popular with young people, and at the same time have academic heights. Some people say that the museum now needs to face three types of people, ordinary audiences, professional audiences and community audiences. How does the PSA balance their relationship?
Gong Yan: These three types of people will transform and infiltrate each other. PSA's audience is relatively young, may still be in the period of choosing future careers, perhaps through the exhibition, they will become interested in culture and art, perhaps a few years later become a professional audience.
We want professional visitors to be able to make direct criticisms. An art museum needs a sober and real presence, and if everyone says yes, maybe it's trending toward mediocrity. If the front end of the art museum is artists, display their works, there must be a certain degree of research, collection and popularization education behind them. I think a big piece that's missing at the moment is art criticism, and the voice of the commentary is very beneficial to institutions and artists, and it's also an exercise of communication. Now a lot of the comments are too simple and crude. The art criticism system is built to think about how to open up topics with each other and make constructive exchanges, rather than short definitions of black and white. In fact, the so-called ordinary audience really can't be underestimated. We sometimes see some viewers leave messages or ask questions, which also opens up our minds.
Japanese architect Jun Ishigami also toured his solo exhibition.
There is also a piece of the audience is the online audience, which is unpredictable, all PSA exhibitions can be seen in a panoramic view on the Internet, so even if not present, you can also experience the exhibition through the Network, some video works We also asked the artist to win the copyright, in the small program produced by the art museum can see the video works in its entirety. However, because I did not arrive at the scene, the experience is definitely different, but there are also some unexpected ideas that will be proposed.
"Liang Shaoji: Silkworm Me, Silkworm" mobile phone terminal panoramic view exhibition
Instead of dividing the audience from a professional point of view, it is better to divide it from the relationship between people and people. For example, we have a special number of family audiences, three generations of grandchildren watching the exhibition together, their feelings are completely different, maybe there will be a big debate within the family, and this intergenerational identity difference is also the embodiment of artistic development.
The Paper: In some artist retrospectives, we will also see traces of some galleries, how to balance the relationship between art museums and galleries?
Gong Yan: The relationship between artists, galleries, and art institutions is difficult to sort out now, but everything has a "degree", and there must be a clear positioning and goal at the beginning. The art museum must be non-commercial, highlighting the academic, bringing spiritual inspiration and enjoyment to the public, which is the foundation and can never be changed. However, the realization of the exhibition of the art museum will inevitably require multi-party support, and the gallery is a difficult piece to skip. Imagine that today's artists will have a hard time surviving without the help of galleries. The art museum should be very pure in academics, and it cannot hide the purpose of management and take academia as a disguise, which will certainly not go long. Just think clearly about the goals and boundaries at the beginning, and there will be no trouble.
The Paper: PSA also has an academic committee, how do the members work?
Gong Yan: Because PSA involves a wide range of art disciplines, the academic committee includes artists, architects, managers of art institutions, theoretical scholars, etc.
The academic committee is a three-year period, each term to elect a rotating chairman, the longest re-election of two terms, the first rotating chairman is Feng Yuan (professor of the School of Communication and Design of Sun Yat-sen University), he is an image analysis scholar, after two terms of service for 6 years, the 7th year, we updated the members of the academic committee, now the rotating chairman is Fei Dawei, the new committee includes the artist Lin Tianmiao, Yang Fudong, Christian Botansky (deceased), architect Mark Wigley, architectural critic Ruan Qingyue, scholar Liu Qing, Philosopher Boris Groys. The two sessions of the Academic Committee are the academic decision-making mechanism of the Contemporary Museum and the think tank of the Museum, and we will consult about related issues.
The members of the committee come from different cultural backgrounds and different fields, and they have experienced things that this young art museum has not experienced, so let us not repeat the mistakes of the past, as light as possible, and do things that are more conducive to future development. The students are also very direct people, and their reminders are of great significance to the development of the museum. For example, if the art museum wants to collect works, we will give the collection list to the student committee and promote it under the guidance of the school committee; for example, the birth of the main curator of each biennale, the tempering of the theme, and even the selection of artists' works, the school committee will participate in it. Including cultural creation, is the cultural and creative goal of the art museum MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York)? The school committee also gave hints to the museum.
In 2019, PSA's first collection exhibition "Arrival of Guests" exhibited "Open Warehouse"
The Paper: PSA is still a very young museum, only 9 years since its establishment, the current price of art is relatively high, how to improve their collection?
Gong Yan: We call it the Museum of Contemporary Art, and collecting is a must-do thing, on the one hand, to give the audience a memory point, on the other hand, to record the development of Chinese contemporary art and do research. But our collection journey was very difficult, because there is no collection funding, and the current collection is only 176 pieces (groups). But from another point of view, when money can't compete with the market, we can expand the collection of literature, collect intangible documents, such as oral history; we also have some manuscripts by artists, as well as our own collection of exhibition history. In fact, every exhibition is like a living organism. From the moment the curator comes up with the idea, the documentation begins, after which the artist will produce manuscripts, will model the exhibition; how to do the exhibition narrative throughout the process? There will be a lot of communication between the curator and the artist and the staff, which is a hidden archive, such as a mind map of the exhibition, and we will focus on the collection of this piece of record. Including curators like the Shanghai Biennale, many of them are foreigners, and they will have the habit of taking notes in small books. Then after each session of the double, we will ask if we would like to leave the small book for us as a collection. The curators of previous editions have been very generous and have left us precious little notebooks with many interesting alterations and fragmentary records, and I think this kind of documentation may be worth more than one work. We are also constantly supplementing the literature of Shangshuang itself since its birth in 1996, including printed materials and memorized oral content. When the conditions of collection could not compete with the older museums, we took our own approach. Even with the opening of a new museum, history can be written from the present.
The exhibition site of "Ocean Waves- Previous Shanghai Biennale Documentation and Works Exhibition".
In "Ocean Waves: Previous Shanghai Biennale Documentation and Works Exhibition", Zhang Peili's work "Simultaneous Broadcast" (exhibited at the 2000 Shanghai Biennale)
The Paper: There are nearly 100 art museums in Shanghai, and some private art museums are popular for solo exhibitions of big-name international artists, but some public art museums have limited academic exhibition dissemination. How does the museum break the circle?
Gong Yan: Under the condition of limited economic ability, the exhibition itself is very important, and attracting the audience with the exhibition content is the first step in everything. Around the content of the exhibition, expand the scope of the discussion, invite people from different disciplines to participate in the discussion, make good use of the social platform, so that the topics extended by the exhibition will have social effects, which is also what PSA is doing. In addition, I think publishing is also important, since 2019 we have our own publishing department, there are people to dig out the spark of ideas behind the exhibition, print them out, and publish them in cooperation with different publishing houses. For example, shangshuang albums have also been distributed overseas, so that the world knows that there is such a museum in China, and what kind of artists and art types are being paid attention to, giving people more understanding of China.
During the 2021 Shanghai Biennale, "Hydrological Walk" fully uses urban geographic mapping technology to implant 35 urban hydrological nodes into a 1920 Map of Shanghai's water system, inviting visitors and citizens to leave their current footprints in the historical water system by walking in the field and unlock virtual sites.
At the same time, we also try our best to "occupy" the urban space, can not let the exhibition and activities only occur in the museum, like "Shangshuang" we have done urban projects, bringing the exhibition to the business circle, cultural venues and other cultural and tourism venues, we have cooperated with Shangsheng Xinshou, Xintiandi, Kerry Centre. At the same time, we brought art to the subway and painted the trains of Shanghai Metro Line 2 and Line 10, for example, in the "Tree, Tree" exhibition, when entering the carriage, we can see that there are poems related to trees on the handles, and there are also more direct prints of artists' works in the carriages, or the ceiling of the train is an Amazon jungle. Of course, we bring not only the works, but also the ideas. For example, do the exhibition "She: Nikki St. Faller and Shen Yuan", bring fragments of their thoughts to the subway, and maximize the display of views and attitudes in public places, not just schemas.
During the "Tree, Tree" exhibition, the works and poems related to the tree about hunger decorate the carriages of Shanghai Metro Line 10.
"Breaking the circle" takes time to accumulate, it is impossible to "break" in one move, it may rely on KOLs or stars to bring attention, but I think it is only temporary, and while having star fans, it may lose some other audiences. "Breaking the circle" is comprehensive and can have many attempts, but the content is the core.
The Paper: Doing exhibition content requires good curators, how to cultivate your own curators and curatorial teams?
Gong Yan: Curator is a very important role in the exhibition, but this role is not fully recognized at present, we have spent 9 years to let the functional departments understand the significance of curators for the exhibition, and at the same time I also feel that although the Shanghai Art Museum has developed vigorously and the number of art museums is nearly 100, some functional departments still do not have enough understanding of art museums, or the understanding of art museums, galleries and art fairs is vague.
Art galleries are certainly not commercial institutions, that's the bottom line. A city's "cultural soft power" requires both academics, markets, and business, and cannot only look at the sales of art fairs, but despise art museums that do not have huge box offices. The spiritual and ideological value that art museums bring to a city is beyond the monetary measurement system, and with the nourishment of art, there will be a longer-term art market.
The relationship between academia and the market needs to be clarified, and the birth of good curators and curatorial teams also has its own cultural laws, and curating is not a technical work, but a sublimation of cognition. Curators may be the background of art history, or they can be a sociological and philosophical background, and at the same time they can understand and enter the works of art, rather than interpreting the works as a diagram, which requires long-term cultivation and brewing.
"Youth Policy Plan 2021" was selected as the exhibition site of "Words without a Name" (Young Curators: Jia Zhihan, Qin Kechun). (On display)
In 2014, when many art museums and institutions were still doing artist awards, PSA launched the "Young Curator Program", when it felt that so many good artists needed someone to put them together and string them together into an interesting narrative, or who could form a positive barrier between the market and artists, so that artists could do pure academics and do research? Curators can play a good role in this, and curators are also bridges between the public and institutions.
So far, about 40 curators have realized the exhibition, and we have some tracking of their development, and there are some failed curators, who may not have been mature at the time, but they continue to work hard and are doing well now. We hope to build a "pool" of young curators, in which we can see their development trajectory, next year PSA ten years after the establishment of the museum, nine years of the "Youth Policy Plan", there will be a more complete combing, in order to see the problems faced by curators, new insights into the institution, and how the future exhibition will change.
"Youth Policy Project 2021" was selected as the exhibition site of "Dead Light on Coral Island" (Young Curator: Yin Shuai). (On display)
The Paper: At present, some art museums in Shanghai have done some "canning exhibitions" that lead to progress, cooperation exhibitions, and even suitable punch cards, which is not conducive to the long-term development of art museums, so is there any way to cooperate? Or how do art museums in Shanghai cooperate with international first-class institutions?
Gong Yan: We have so many art museums in our city, and we also need to guide in a variety of directions, among which we must be able to see the richness of culture, not only see one possibility, let alone go to the exhibition with the mentality of buying luxury goods. But the current situation is that many large exhibitions give people the mentality of buying luxury goods, and they feel that they are not fashionable enough without punching in. Culture and art should bring back more thinking, not just discuss the question of beauty or not.
There is no problem in the exhibition of big-name artists in art museums, but there can be a different approach, so that the public knows why big names become big names, rather than just seeing one result. Every artist who can be remembered by the public has its own way of success, how to show its development process in a complete and objective manner, and the changes that each choice may bring, is a challenge for the museum and curators, and perhaps also promotes artists' self-examination.
Whatever model of cooperation is based, it is important to learn from each other through cooperation; it is important not to leave only traces of capital, but to leave traces of culture. It is inevitable that there are still very few Chinese artists active on the international stage, and it is a good channel to promote outstanding Chinese artists to the world through institutional cooperation.
Hussein Karajan, Later, Fall/Winter 2000 series. Photo by Chris Moore. ("Hussein Karajan: Archipelago" is on display)
The Paper: PSA's architecture tells the story of "Chinese its own power generation", how can PSA continue to speak out as a public art museum and build China's own contemporary artistic discourse?
Gong Yan: The identity of the public makes the positioning and mission of the contemporary museum very clear, and what we pursue is not the box office, but hopes to bring difference to everyone's life through exhibitions, forums, educational activities, etc., and to see the world from one more perspective. In the future, PSA will continue to do case analysis of artists, not only for the creation itself, but also to put the artist in the era in which they live. For example, next year we will do a solo exhibition of Wang Xingwei and Geng Jianyi.
Wang Xingwei, Untitled (Selling Eggs), 2007, oil on canvas, 240x200cm, courtesy of the artist and Mailer Gallery
Geng Jianyi, From the First Page to the Last Page (1), 1995
The Paper: What are the future plans for the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai?
Gong Yan: Future planning may have to do more connections, and art museums are the destination of the audience, but not the end. We hope that when we get here, the audience can connect to some other categories. For example, we put forward a topic for the exhibition, which may be related to science, and the audience is interested in hoping that he can continue to research, research, and share with the scientific field; when the audience comes here, he has an interest in natural plants, then we can also lead him to the botanical garden. The art museum is an interface, a trigger, triggering the public to go in more directions.
We will also have a bookstore open in 2022, and its operation time will be independent of the museum's time. The output of bookstores is products, but also cultural values and life knowledge. Our "Library and Library" has also been waiting for permission to build, and the library will be open to all citizens free of charge, and the library will be used by appointment. What we have to do is not the standard of the art museum's annex, but to "cover" the art museum with books and ideas.
Renderings of the PSA Future Library
Note: The images in this article are provided by the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai.