ici dispatch 2 interview with carol lu (on letterhead) · 2014-04-24 · 401 broadway, suite 1620...

401 Broadway, Suite 1620 New York, NY 10013 T +1 212 254 8200 F +1 212 477 4781 www.curatorsintl.org

DISPATCH Interview with curator and critic Carol Yinghua Lu July 23, 2011 I remember getting to know Carol Lu at a small dinner party that she and her husband, the artist Liu Ding, hosted at their home in Beijing during the winter of 2005. As I sat at a metallic silver, Regency-style dining table—which, I later learned, had belonged to the apartment’s previous owners—I watched Carol rush around, welcoming people as they arrived, monitoring the cooking, making sure that bottles of wine were opened, leaping to fetch a book she wanted to show us, and plunging into discussions about the Beijing art scene. I recall noticing at some point that the pleats of her skirt were still sewn together at the hemline. Carol had probably been distracted by something more pressing—perhaps a conversation with Liu Ding, or an essay she was editing—and had prioritized accordingly. It struck me then that this was a woman of action, rather than appearances, engaged by ideas and a sense of possibility, quick to laugh and intensely focused.

Another memory, three years later: Carol was curating the inaugural show for Beijing’s soon-to-open Iberia Center for Contemporary Art. I was working around the corner at another art center, and had been hearing reports that construction on Iberia’s renovated factory space was behind schedule. It was no wonder: the Olympics were upon us, and the 798 Art District looked like a warzone as crews struggled to complete staggering, last-minute beautification projects before the moratorium on building

Carol Installing


took effect. The grand opening of Iberia—and Carol’s exhibition—was less than a week away. Carol and I decided to meet for coffee nearby. She was unworried and enormous. Nearly nine months pregnant, she showed no signs of fatigue and no interest in slowing down. She offered to take me over to Iberia so that I could get a sense of what she was working on. I held my breath (the baby!) as we struggled to keep our balance, climbing over and through the mountains and valleys of mud that surrounded Iberia’s entrance. Inside, the new art center was striking: well proportioned, beautifully designed, and far from finished. I recall with clarity an image of Carol—surrounded by the deafening buzz of power tools, mud on her shoes, hugely pregnant—undaunted as she showed me where she planned to place the artworks. It is this tenacity, coupled with her insatiable curiosity, which continues to serve Carol as she forges ahead with increasingly ambitious projects, even if it sometimes seems that she’s pulling the whole of contemporary Chinese art behind her. The Venice Biennale and the Question of Contemporaneity

David Spalding: Let’s begin by talking about a recent adventure. You served as a juror for the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion Awards this summer. What did you take away from that process? Carol Yinghua Lu: As jury members, we got to see everything—every piece of work in the international pavilion, as well as the 89 national pavilions, which is an unprecedented number for the Venice Biennale. What I realized through this process is actually how different the understanding is about contemporary art among the various geographical, economic, and political contexts of the participating countries. Many have participated for a long time, and they have a certain level of exposure and vision, but still there were many newcomers this year. Many of them presented a very unedited representation of what they consider to be contemporary art, and you understand that this is the reality of their cultural

Jury of the 54th Venice Biennale: Hassan Khan, Christine Macel, Letizia Ragaglia, Carol Yinghua Lu, John Waters (left to right)


understanding. So for me, this is a very good reminder that while we are living in a globalized context, people are still so different from each other, and it's very important to recognize these differences. Back to the international pavilion—we had quite a difficult time choosing the winning pieces in the end. We felt that the whole Biennale itself was very informed by the art market. It had a very strong synergy with what is favored in the market and gallery scene. Actually, from the very beginning, the Biennale was set up as an instrument to cultivate a market for contemporary art. And throughout its history, it has evolved to become an independent platform. For the first edition of the Biennale they set up a sales office. This office helped the artists to sell the works in the Biennale and they received a ten percent commission. They sold so well that they actually managed to donate a very generous sum to charity afterwards. So they continued with this model for many years—until 1968, when protesters criticized the organizers for promoting a bourgeois, monetized vision of the Biennale. In response, they eventually got rid of the sales office, and they slowly became a more independent platform. But I think now this kind of market influence has become more and more apparent, especially in the latest Biennale. The preview ticket cost €200, and I think that fact limited so many visitors—professional visitors—and it encouraged a certain tendency. Another observation I made is that this Biennale presented a very strong European view. The artists in the Biennale were mostly from Europe and America, whereas we saw little art from elsewhere. One of the threads that runs throughout your recent critical writing is this issue of how to define or evaluate contemporaneity in a global context. As a juror comparing the various national pavilions at Venice, you had an opportunity to again approach these questions and test out some of your ideas. If, as you say, the various countries presented different ideas of contemporaneity, then to what universal standard do you hold the pavilions? How can you create a single standard by which to judge them? That’s a very interesting question to think about. In the end, it’s actually not “contemporaneity” that defines art. I found that, finally, when we went back to the jury room and tried to have a discussion, we were really talking about the quality of art, and the issues that individual works were trying to address. It was really a moment when one could forget about nationalities, economic levels and political powers, and art itself could be discussed on a level that was free of these boundaries. So you were asking whether the art itself was successful in realizing the goals set by the artists—such as formal innovation, or the ability to address a particular set of concerns? Yes. During the Venice Biennale and Art Basel, it was the general observation that Chinese artists and Chinese artworks were very marginalized. Recently, there was a question for me from a Chinese magazine. The journalist from this publication asked me if we, as Chinese arts professionals, should continue to “play the game with the West,” or whether we should completely ignore the West. You were only offered these two choices? It feels rather narrow… Yes. So I gave them the example of the Lithuanian pavilion. Lithuania is a very small country, but the project itself was so strong that actually the jury gave the pavilion a special mention. And after we made that decision, we reviewed the history of the Biennale and realized that the Lithuanian pavilion has received three special mentions throughout its history. I don’t think that this has happened because “the West” has intentionally tried to bring them into the game. It’s up to the artists. To realize projects which deserve recognition? Exactly. So in the end what is important are the core values of art, and how committed an artist is to his or her projects.


What about the Chinese pavilion? Some people here have said they felt it was very retrograde; others have said it was quite an interesting view into what the official (state-sanctioned) vision of what Chinese contemporary art might look like. How did you see the Chinese pavilion in relation to the overall Biennale? It’s a very isolated situation, and it has always been like that, throughout the history of the Chinese pavilion. Maybe occasionally there has been an exception, but for me, this Chinese pavilion was about politics, and politics alone. Art was very much secondary. You mean the political agenda of the organizing body?

Absolutely. The politics of the Ministry of Culture. And in the end, art was not something that was valued or paid attention to in that context. So in terms of the artistic quality, I don’t think there is anything worth saying about the pavilion at all. But then, as you said earlier, it was also a very realistic portrait and even caricature of the current situation of what contemporary art is in China. And I don’t think it reflected only the official vision; I think it also reflected a popular vision. How would you characterize that vision? It’s colored by self-satisfied pride, but without an awareness of one’s context. There is a Chinese expression that one is “like a frog sitting at the bottom of a well.” From this position, you only see a bit of the sky, but you believe that you have a complete picture, and that this is all you need. Lifting the Frog from the Well In your own critical writing, it seems like you’re doing a lot of work to broaden that perspective, to coax the frog out of the well. Can you tell me how you have approached this problem? I can give you two examples of ongoing writing projects that I’ve been working on. One is a collaboration with the critic Su Wei, who has been translating a book by Hans Belting called Art History After Modernism [1995]. So in every issue of Contemporary Art and Investment magazine, he translates one chapter from this book, and I write an article that starts the discussion with the issues

Chinese Pavilion, 'cloud-tea' by artist Cai Zhisong. Photo: © designboom


raised in Belting’s text—re-defining the museum, for example, was the subject of the last installment—but then I bring in local examples relevant to that concern, so that the Chinese audience can actually relate to such discussion with their own experiences. I think this kind of bridging is very important. Here, in particular, people tend to think that theory from Europe or America is not applicable when, in fact, many of these ideas can be applied to help us understand our own context here. It’s very important for us look at things from various perspectives. At the same time, I have also been working with a curator called Nikita Choi from the Times Museum in Guangzhou to develop another regular column in Contemporary Art and Investment called “The Issue of Curating.” We take turns, so that in one issue, I identify a text that is about a certain issue in curating—for example, in the last column, I chose a text by Patrick Flores about the model of artists working as curators. We have a text like that translated into Chinese and then, in this case, I write a text raising questions in relation to this critical essay. In response to my questions, Nikita writes something based on her observations gained through working in China. In the next issue, she identifies a piece of writing to be translated and throws out some questions, and I write an answer specific to the local context.

So these efforts are intended to show that what’s happening in China is in fact part of a much larger, ongoing conversation? Exactly. And to say that these debates are relevant to us, that we need to put ourselves into this broader context in order to consider our situation. Here, people always tend to make a distinction between what is happening “internationally” and what is happening in China. This is an unconscious, automatic way that we in China often think and speak about the art world. What I try to make clear is that we are all together, and it’s no longer so relevant to say “the West” and “the East.” These terms have problematic definitions that we have to look at again and re-examine. We need to truly put

ContemporaryArtandInvestment,The3Period(PublishedMarch6,2011)


ourselves into the bigger picture. It’s important to reiterate this possibility of thinking without borders. It might sound very cliché, but it’s crucial. Last year, Yishu magazine organized a conference called Critical Art Writing from a Local Perspective at the Xi’An Art Museum, which was moderated by art historian, critic and curator Gao Minglu. Participating critic Sheng Wei put forward an argument that we often hear in China: During the 1980s and 1990s, the production of art criticism was geared towards promoting the development of contemporary Chinese art by importing new theories from the West as a catalyst…We should refrain from using Western art methodology too much. It’s been said that there’s a lack of scientific approach in Chinese art criticism. But the problem is we cannot use this approach to understand contemporary Chinese art because there is no support of an established system or critical tradition that enables this.1 Anyone following the critical debates here will encounter this position, which is characterized by a hostility toward—or the wholesale rejection of—theories being imported from “the West” and used to talk about contemporary Chinese art. This is coupled with a struggle to define what constitutes the local critical frameworks that are more suitable for this cultural context. How do you operate in a system where this is a legitimate position? First of all, I think there is laziness in the claim that these theories have come from the West and that they might not apply to our situation in China. For me, on a personal level, I often feel that these kinds of claims are very repressive. There is certain undermining feeling of inferiority there, but also nationalism. To give you an example, recently, I posted something factual on my micro-blog [weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter]: When I first met [fellow Biennale juror] John Waters in Venice, I asked him if he had ever been to China. And he told me no, that he didn’t think he would ever visit, because all of his films have been pirated there. I posted this anecdote online without conveying any of my own feelings. All of the sudden, there were so many responses to this posting, all offering very nationalistic interpretations and projections. So you see the general atmosphere is such that people have a very strong hostility toward external criticism. Very unconsciously, it just comes up. And for me, it’s really a projection of our own complicated feelings underneath. In general, I often feel disturbed by such comments and posts, which are very common. It’s quite easy for everyone to say that they feel the same, but then I may not agree, so I get singled out, and I can easily be attacked. I just have to be more solid and be more formed in my position. Little Movements But back to a professional understanding of this issue, it’s a very complex situation. You might be aware of a project that I have been recently developing with my husband, the artist Liu Ding, called Little Movements: Self-Practice in Contemporary Art. The exhibition component will open at OCAT in Shenzhen in September. This project is constructed in four different chapters, and the first chapter that serves as the beginning of the discussion is actually called “Anxiety of Self-Definition.” It’s very much about this issue. What is troubling to people here in China also troubles people in Western contexts, but in a different manner. So in this chapter we look at, for example, the Former West project, which examines how Europe can re-define itself after the events of 1989.2 Also, Belting’s Global Art and the Museum project, which addresses how the art system is defining and presenting itself beyond an art

1 The English translation of parts of this panel discussion appears in “Critical Art Writing from a Local Perspective: First Yishu Awards for Critical Writing on Contemporary Chinese Art,” Yishu Vol. 10, No. 3 (May / June 2011), pp. 6-21. 2 Former West is a long-term international research, education, publishing and exhibition project (2008–2014) organized and coordinated by BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, in Utrecht, the Netherlands. See http://www.formerwest.org.


historical narrative, so now the art market comes into play, the cultural industry comes into play, the museums come into play.3 It asks what are the forces that are actually shaping the discources of art – not only art history. In this chapter, we are also thinking about, for example, the fact that e-flux organized this panel discussion about contemporaneity, “What is contemporary art?”4 For me, that’s all very much the product of this anxiety to redefine ourselves. So we are thinking about contemporaneity in a dynamic global context.

At the same time, we are looking at things like Mike Kelley’s exhibition The Uncanny,5 which the artist organized much earlier. We cited this as a key example in our project, because it also speaks to this anxiety to define the self through other references, because he drew very broadly from medical references, popular culture, and other artists’ works to offer legitimacy and contextualization for his own work. And also you can think about October magazine, which had a questionnaire two years ago, asking people about contemporary art. The e-flux panel was actually inspired by this October questionnaire, and I think this anxiety had already been emerging for some time—a wave of desire to 3 In the words of its initiators: “GAM – Global Art and the Museum was initiated by Peter Weibel and Hans Belting in 2006 at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. The project represents a first attempt at documenting the contested boundaries of today’s art world; its aim is to spark a debate on how the globalization process changes the art scene and to undertake a critical review of the development 20 years after its onset.” The exhibition component of this multiform project, The Global Contemporary. Art Worlds After 1989, will open at ZKM on September 17, 2011. See http://globalartmuseum.de for more information. 4 A conference organized by Anton Vidokle in Shanghai in 2009, the transcripts of which have been edited into the publication What is Contemporary Art? (Sternberg Press, June 2010). See http://www.e-flux.com/shows/view/8420. 5 The Uncanny, an exhibition curated by Mike Kelley, was on view at Tate Liverpool (February 20 - May 3, 2004) and Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (July 15 – October 31, 2004). See http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/kelley/. This exhibition was a reiteration of the artist’s 1993 project, The Uncanny, at the Gementeem Museum, Arnhem, The Netherlands.

John Isaacs, Untitled (Monkey) 1995, in “Mike Kelley: The Uncanny” at Tate Liverpool, 2004


define ourselves.6 So no matter what kind of position one occupies in the world, with the collapse of the economic order, people have begun to have a more introspective view. All these references are what we have termed the “Anxiety of Self-Definition.” In the Chinese context—and this is not a positive example that I am citing—one thinks about Gao Minglu, who has come up with terms like yi pai to discuss contemporary art.7 You mean the development of a specifically “Chinese” critical perspective? Exactly. But I think it’s too limited a view. And last August, there was an exhibition in the Shanghai MoCA called Contemporaneity: Contemporary Indonesian Art. The curator, Jim Supengkat from Jakarta, came up with the term “sensitivity” to frame contemporaneity. He believes that instead of other cultural, economic and political parameters, we should return to a sensitivity to craft making—the argument is that skill should be a defining feature of contemporaneity. That is also problematic, but you see in each of these examples different attempts to define contemporary art. So this kind of anxiety is very apparent. You mentioned that there are four chapters in the Little Movements project. Can you give me an overview of the chapters and the various structures you’re working within? Little Movements is a research project that takes place through a series of round-table discussions, a publication and an exhibition. This project is actually going to travel to a few different venues. We are now wrapping up the first stage of the work, but we are already expanding the concept for the second venue, which will take place in a new wing of the Tate Modern in 2012 as part of a program series called “Being There.” We have four chapters: the first, which I’ve just been talking about, is “Anxiety of Self-Definition.” The second chapter is called “Individual Systems.” It comes very much from the idea of artists and practitioners trying to create an autonomous system of practicing that can be independent from structural support, especially resources and recognition, but that creates within itself a momentum to continue practicing. So we look at models such as the Librería Borges Contemporary Art Institute, instigated by Chen Tong [in Guangzhou]; Elaine Ho’s Home Shop;8 Caochangdi Workstation [both in Beijing], and a curatorial collective called FormContent in London.9 FormContent has a project that it has developed over 15 months called It’s moving from I to It, thinking about how to develop a practice without a physical space and within a limited period of time, without securing a funding structure. They want to have an autonomous program they can grow, reflecting on how we look at art. That is the second chapter. The third chapter is called “Away from the Crowds: Unexpected Encounters,” which looks at practices that are very much about their own internal fulfillment and improvement. Not aiming at immediate visibility and results, these projects and collectives can exert influence over a long period of time. So we have included practices by Chinese collectives such as Polit-Sheer-Form Office and the Company, among others. There is also a project called “Once is Nothing” from the 2008 Brussels Biennial, which

6 According to October editor Hal Foster, “The ‘Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’” was “sent to approximately seventy critics and curators, based in the United States and Europe, who are identified with this field. Two notes: the questions, as formulated, were felt to be specific to these regions; and very few curators responded.” Results appear in October 130, Fall 2009, pp. 3–124 and online at http://www.rae.com.pt/debate.pdf. 7 For more information about “Yi Pai,” see Gao Minglu’s text “What is Yi Pai?” here: http://www.artresearchcenter.org/ExArticleDetailsEnglish.asp?ArticleID=34&ID=13 8 http://www.homeshopbeijing.org/ 9 http://formcontent.org/


was a recreation of the exhibition design for a previous exhibition called Individual Systems. Individual Systems was originally part of the 2003 Venice Biennale, during which Francesco Bonami invited eleven curators to curate exhibitions and projects for the Venice Biennial. It was in this context that Igor Zabel, a curator from Slovakia, organized Individual Systems, which looked at fifteen artistic positions in order to propose the idea of artistic autonomy as a political gesture—the notion that being political is not necessarily to take direct political action, but to be committed to art. The Brussels Biennial invited the same architect that designed the Individual Systems space, Josef Dabernig, to design their space as a recreation of the original exhibition, but without presenting any of the artworks (the works were presented only in the publication).10 For our show, Liu Ding visited this exhibition designer in Vienna (where he lives) and invited him to customize the same floor plan design and concept for our exhibition in OCAT in September. So we are using Dabernig’s design as a container and background for the rest of the exhibition. We also look at practices like the Second World Congress of Free Artists that was in North Denmark last year, a very interesting one-day event. We are inviting the Congress organizer, a New York group called Camel Collective, to reenact the performance (itself a reenactment) in Guangzhou.11 So we are looking at the gesture of repetition as a curatorial approach. How do you repeat, and how does one use exhibitions and events as reference points? The last chapter is called “What is Knowledge?” and we want to present non-hierarchical models of art education and knowledge production that come from the art world. So we will look at Wang Guangyi, who in 1986 organized a slide show in Zhuhai. People talk about this less than the ’89 China/ Avant-Garde exhibition, when in fact it was because of that slide show that the ’89 exhibition became possible. It was the first time that all of the artists’ groups from throughout China were able to meet and see each other’s work. They showed slides and they talked about what they were doing, and there were really heated debates among the participants. We use this as an example of self-education among artists. And we’re thinking about the 51 Square Meters [51m2] exhibition series at Taikang Space as a model of alternative artistic education.12 We also look at [pioneering artist and China Academy of Art professor] Zhang Peili’s Department of New Media Art, focusing on his teaching practice, which is very political. So Little Movements is comprised of round table discussions, the exhibition (whose parts are divided into the chapters that you’ve described) and a publication that both documents the exhibition and serves as a critical reader? Exactly. The research process took the form of [non-public] round table discussions. We have organized more than a dozen round tables now. For example, Liu Ding and I went to Zhang Peili’s home and talked with him and four or five of his students. It’s very small-scale. We sat in his garden and we had a discussion about the New Media department and his work as a teacher. And then we went to see Chen Tong in Guangzhou and we had the discussion in his space. It’s very important for us to be in their contexts, because we have projected our own views onto them, but we also wanted to have them speak from their own positions. So the research has taken form in this manner, and in the exhibition at OCAT we will present the video recordings of these discussions.

10 For more information, see “Samuel Korn (Displayer) im Interview mit Josef Dabernig,”Displayer 03 (Karlsruhe, 2009), pp.47-156. English translation here: http://www.dabernig.net/bibliografie/once-is-nothing-josef-dabernig 11 http://congress.camelcollective.org/ 12 51m2 was a 15-month long series of sixteen solo projects by emerging artists at Taikang Space, Beijing. Read interviews with the participating artists in the program’s publication, here: http://www.taikangtopspace.com/51m2/16emergingchineseartists/51m2%20Interview.pdf


What have you learned through this research process? Through this research, we have realized that we want to present a view of history that is not chronological. History is a flat surface. It’s not sequential; it is a series of parallels. The same kind of thinking may have existed twenty years ago, only it was addressing different urgencies and issues. We are also taking geography as a flat surface, and the art industry as a flat surface. That’s a very important issue for us, actually. In this presentation, the art industry is not a hierarchy. So we look at the museum as a creative subject. We look at institutions as creative subjects. We look at art historians and art history as creative subjects—all active practitioners. Our view is that of individuals as institutions and institutions as individuals. This is something that we slowly realized through the development of this project, so we are expanding our research now. One piece of writing can have the same importance as an exhibition. Everything can be considered as a creative subject. We have been talking a lot about this spirit of self-practice: about how you take small steps in life and art, and over a very long period the influence will accumulate and maybe it will exert certain effects. Are you trying to nudge these “little movements” in a certain direction through the process of documenting and presenting them? No, but there is something we would like to suggest through this project. Jingsheng is perhaps the closest word in Chinese, but it is difficult to come up with the proper English term. Jingsheng can be literally translated as “spirit,” but spirit has a religious connotation that doesn’t fit. Another choice is “intellectual,” but that’s too rational. It’s something in-between that we want to try to indicate. Perhaps “belief” is the best choice. We would like to suggest a kind of belief in art, and a commitment to art. Maybe it’s not so describable, but such belief has power.

Installation shot of Community of Tastes: The Inaugural Exhibition of Iberia Center for Contemporary Art April 15, 2008 to June 9, 2008


Art’s Power and Willpower We've talked about your curatorial practice in terms of a case study. Perhaps we could talk more generally about the working conditions in China. Can you speak to the opportunities and challenges facing independent curators working here? In developing Little Movements for a Chinese exhibition context, we were not allowed to talk about Ai Weiwei. In fact, we originally wanted to include excerpts from his Grey Cover, White Cover and Black Cover books in the exhibition’s publication, because that project was also so important for the artists here. It was the first time for many of them to learn how to make project proposals and to think about how they can work to develop professional practices in their own contexts. This is something crucial that changed the inner-momentum of the art system in China, but it has not been fully recognized yet. So how do you deal with censorship? If we want to realize the project here in China, we have to live with it. But we want to do it elsewhere [abroad]. To return to your question, I think the physical and technical conditions in China are nothing to complain about. In general, it’s a little bit harder for projects to be viewed in the right context here. That is the biggest difficulty: you develop a project and you present it, but the right intellectual context is still missing. You mean it doesn’t necessarily spark the kinds of conversations you hope for? Yes. Or it’s viewed very differently from how you had hoped it would be viewed. Have you tried to make adjustments? Does it affect the way you conceive of a project? I’m a very impulsive person. To put it very generally, I tend to just go for it. I keep my eyes closed and jump in, and then endure frustration and learn from it. In thinking about your practice, what drives you forward? Because it’s a great deal of work, and I don’t think you would persist without some very fundamental impetus. From the very beginning, when I started working as a writer and a curator, Liu Ding told me that I should write and curate as a creative subject, rather than serve a certain purpose; I should always have my own willpower, my yizhi [willpower], as he says in Chinese. He said it very well, just last week, because we have been thinking a lot about this issue of the curator as author, but we both felt that the yizhi of a curator must be visible in an exhibition, or in a piece of writing. But this yizhi, this willpower, doesn't mean “power,” as in “power over something;” it means something more like “understanding.” What is essential is how well you understand the particular subject you are dealing with. And it’s the same with an artist as well. The better you understand the subject you’re dealing with, the more the intensity of the work comes through. And for me, to think about writing and curating as a real creative process—to curate and write like an artist, this is something that I try to emulate. It gives me a sense of self-expression and freedom, and this has often been very fulfilling.


About Carol Yinghua Lu Carol Yinghua Lu (b. 1977, Guangdong, China; lives and works in Beijing) is a Co-Founder and Co-Editor of Contemporary Art & Investment magazine and a Contributing Editor for Frieze. She has written frequently for international art journals and magazines including e-flux journal, The Exhibitionist, Yishu, Tate Etc. and Contemporary. Her texts on contemporary art have appeared in many art catalogues, books, publications and critical journals. From 2005 to 2007, she was the China researcher for Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong). Her curatorial work includes The Temperament of Detail, Red Mansion Foundation (London, 2006); Foreign Objects, Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna, 2007); The Weight of Reality, Marella Gallery (Beijing, 2007); curatorial projects in ARCO'06 and ARCO'07 (Madrid); Community of Tastes: The Inaugural Exhibition at the Iberia Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing, 2008); and There is No Story to Tell: An Exhibition of International Artists, Tang Contemporary (Beijing, 2008). Carol Lu was Founder and Art Director of Suitcase Art Projects, a project space of the Today Art Museum (Beijing, 2009-2010). Lu is one of the Artistic Co-Directors for the 2012 Gwangju Biennale. She is also currently working in collaboration with the artist Liu Ding on an upcoming project at OCAT (Shenzhen) entitled Little Movements: Self-Practice in Contemporary Art, which includes an exhibition, a series of round table discussions, public programs, and a critical reader / exhibition publication. Lu was a Fellow at the ZKM 2009 Summer Seminar: Contemporary Art and the Global Age, led by Hans Belting. She has served on numerous juries and advisory panels, including: International Advisor for the Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto (2009-2010); advisor to Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council for its program China 2008-2010; and jury member for Geisai #11 (Tokyo), among others. Most recently, Lu served on the jury for the Golden Lion Award at the 2011 Venice Biennale.

Carol Yinghua Lu

ici dispatch 2 interview with carol lu (on letterhead) · 2014-04-24 · 401 broadway, suite 1620...

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