Inside a Book a House of Gold

The 212 intimately scaled works housed under the UCCA’s vast, slanting ceilings are the sum (thus far) of collaborations between Swiss art journal Parkett and 192 artists from around the world. Over the course of 28 years, for each printed edition, a piece was specially commissioned. These incorporate print, installation, painting, photography and all variety of media, with the journals themselves piled into a single reading room, separate from the rest of the gallery.

Words for different areas of a typical, bourgeois household – ‘playroom’, ‘studio’ and so on – appear on the brightly coloured walls, with a ‘city’ area bringing this conceptual house into an urban context. The result is an ordered cacophony that continues to unfurl in your mind long after you leave.

Though many works were intended to be handled, from Jeff Koons’s inflatable flower to an orange trussed-up doll of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner by Jon Kessler, take note that, for visitors, there are glass cases to keep our hands off. The decision to divide the works from their corresponding journals is less understandable, though. Yes, they are allowed the freedom to stand on their own merits, but it would be interesting to see them displayed in the context of each Parkett, to give a bigger picture of the world it came from.

Nevertheless, this is a wonderland of sometimes-fantastical treasures. These include the last work by Andy Warhol, whose career began with magazine illustrations and, fittingly, reached its endpoint in another publication, with memento mori black-and-white photographs of skeletal figures.

A plaster cast, ‘Switch’, by Rachel Whiteread, was designed for hanging on a wall. At first glance, it’s just another light switch. But the indentation made by the lever and two small screws are just shadows of the original’s function, transformed into pure form.

This exhibition can be a lot to take in – the works are broad and cover a multitude of eras and ideas. But the scope and quality of what is on display, not to mention the artists involved (from Ai Weiwei to Damien Hirst and Sophie Calle), make this show one of the strongest so far this year. Clare Pennington

Originally posted in Time Out Beijing

Art news: UCCA

 The UCCA's upcoming exhibitions and its future with multiple funders


This Saturday, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) will open its first exhibition Inside a Book a House of Gold: Artists' Editions for PARKETT with new director Phil Tinari as curator.  He has brought together a wide range of works commissioned by the Swiss journal Parkett, results of a collaboration between the publication and various artists.  As the founder of the Chinese bilingual arts magazine Leap （艺术界） an interest in recording, assessing and archiving is clearly one that can be seen in his own visions for the future of the UCCA.  A retrospective of works made in collaboration with Parkett was held at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) back in 2001, featuring giants like Andy Warhol. This time round, there will be 192 artists including the likes of Yang Fudong and other Chinese peers who have more recently been launched into the international art scene.

 

The upcoming Gu Dexin exhibition will follow a similar trend. It represents an attempt to gather as comprehensively as possible a group of works in the possession of various private collectors. And the UCCA will certainly be dipping into the Guy and Myriam Ullens collection for this one.

 

But what about the art centre itself? The role of director is not just one of curating. After last year's Sotheby’s auction, caused many to lament the partial breaking up of the Ullens’ art collection, doubts about the future of the UCCA were also circulated. That the centre was also looking for local patrons such as banks and businesses to replace the Ullens family did nothing to quell rumours that the Ullens were abandoning China.

 

Happily the UCCA is restructuring with both its space and staff becoming more 'localised,’ according to Tinari. If you’ve been to 798 recently you might have noticed that Switch, the short-lived UCCA-owned restaurant has now shut down. ‘The UCCA’s resources are perhaps not best spent operating a restaurant,’ says Phil Tinari. ‘Reshaping the UCCA is not about ego or a curatorial vision’ - Jérôme Sans, Tinari’s predecessor, helped to determine how the UCCA’s space would be used from the beginning of his own tenure until he left last year - ‘It’s about making who we are manifest itself onto the street.’ Work is being undertaken to move the old UCCA shop, a small space near the hidden main entrance, to where Switch was, facing 798’s central road. The old shop space will then become another exhibition room, which You Yang, the centre’s new assistant director, says will be used to showcase parts of the Ullens collection.

 

And there’s more. What about the lease that we heard would be running out in 2013? ‘Different areas of the centre actually have different leases, so it’s down to details at this point. We have no plans to move,’ says Tinari, before moving on to telling us a little bit about the board of Chinese patrons the UCCA is developing. He’s not giving us the numbers yet, but says, ‘We are moving away from a single-funder situation to one like any international museum…about half of the patrons have subscribed at this point, and they are people who are very influential in the art world.’ Clare Pennington

 

 

Originally posted in Time Out Beijing