My own bit part in this transformation, via involvement in the touring exhibition “The Silent Strength of Liu Xia,” came to the foreground last Saturday, June 9, in Hong Kong. The show, for which I now serve as co-curator and tour manager, had its first-ever opening on Chinese soil: a featured role in the 2012 Annual Event of the Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC). […]
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You can attribute the paucity of posts here over the past two months to my concentration on initiating a new traveling exhibition project: “The Secret Strength of Liu Xia: Photographs 1996-1999.” Currently ending its 3-month run at the Italian Academy at Columbia University in New York City, it goes next to Hong Kong, thence to Taipei, after that to Madrid, and returns to the U.S. toward the end of this year. Its tour will continue (if I have my way) until Liu Xia and her husband are free. […] I’ve tracked the “pepper-spray copy” story here at Photocritic International because it’s as vivid and immediate an example of the potency of citizen journalism via the lens media as a commentator on lens culture like myself could want. I’ve said, from the beginning, that without Lt. John Pike’s bring-it-on turning of this situation into a police-brutality photo op in front of a crowd of amateur paparazzi, heads would not have started to roll at UC Davis and he would not have become an international symbol of uniformed thuggery. […] These two dozen works from the Polaroid Collection included in the upcoming April 4 auction represent a very small selection from the almost 700 items consigned to Swann. Keep in mind that while a few of these items were withdrawn from the Sotheby’s auction due to protest by the artists, Sotheby’s skimmed the cream off the collection for those sales. What’s left, then, are either the few globules of fat left floating on the surface or else the best of the skimmed milk that remains — from the perspective of the secondary market, that is. (I’d consider all of this group of works historically significant and museum-worthy, though some of it primarily as study material.) […] |
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Slow Boat in China (2)
Unimaginable that — except as explicit satire — 100 writers and artists from the former Soviet Union would inscribe by hand today the loathesome principles set forth by Zhdanov and enforced thereafter by his goon squads. What a bizarre reaffirmation of a long-discarded set of prescriptions and proscriptions this book represents, then — a self-abasing modern version of the obligatory “loyalty dance” performed under his portrait as a morning ritual by all mainland Chinese citizens at the height of Mao’s cult of personality. […]