Available for tour through 2009
BUSINESS AS USUAL:
New Video from China /
Cao Fei and Yang Fudong
Tempe, Arizona
asuartmuseum.asu.edu/businessasusual
Tour information
Business as Usual includes:
Three video pieces
1,000 gallery guides
Labels (hard copy or disc)
Insurance: Provided by venue
Availability: through 2009
Security: Moderate
Space and installation req: Variable
Exhibition information
asuartmuseum.asu.edu/businessasusual
Business as Usual is an opportunity to examine two of the most prominent contemporary Chinese video artists. Both Cao Fei and Yang Fudong address the emergence of a new middle class in China. Contemporary artists in China employ a range of media to explore the experience of living in a rapidly changing urban environment. Globalization has brought them into contact with Western contemporary art, but their concerns remain unique to present-day China.
In Whose Utopia (2006), Cao Fei portrays workers who left their small hometowns to pursue life in the big city. They took with them dreams to be dancers and singers, and ended up in factories. Working with employees in a light bulb factory, Cao Fei has the workers dress in the garb of their dreams and perform within the environment of their actual lives, the factory.
Yang Fudong’s City Lights (2000) and Honey (2003) portray his generation of people in their late 20s and 30s who are part of the emerging middle class in China and who hover between the past and present. Fudong’s work epitomizes how the recent and rapid modernization of China has overthrown traditional values and culture. He skillfully balances this dichotomy to create works endowed with classic beauty
and timelessness.
Cao Fei was born in 1978 in Guangzhou, China. She received her BFA from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2001. Her work is frequently exhibited in international biennials and surveys of contemporary Chinese art. Cao Fei lives and works in Beijing.
Born in 1971 in Beijing, Yang Fudong graduated from the China Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou where he trained as a painter. He began working with film and video in the late 1990’s. Yang Fudong’s work has been exhibited in the 2003 and 2007 Venice Biennale, the first Moscow Biennial in 2005, and the fifth Shanghai Biennial in 2004. Yang Fudong lives and works in Shanghai.
Exhibition is made possible by the Haudenschild Collection, San Diego.
Business as Usual was featured in the September 9, 2007, New York Times article on contemporary art from China by Holland Cotter and in Art in America’s fall preview issue for 2007.
The exhibition is a Moving Targets Initiative of the Arizona State University Art Museum.
Curators
Heather S. Lineberry, Interim Director/Senior Curator, ASU Art Museum
Marilyn A. Zeitlin, Independent Curator, Former Director, ASU Art Museum
Moving Targets Initiative – ASU Art Museum
Moving Targets builds on the Museum’s long history of exploring the role of new media in the arts. It expands into new territory through presentation of new media and new systems for information delivery to the Museum’s audiences. The Museum presented its first media exhibition in 1993 with the exhibition Nam June Paik: Time for Change and represented the U.S. at the 1995 Venice Biennale with the work of Bill Viola. The Museum supports emerging artists and critically acclaimed practitioners of new genres, including solo exhibitions with William Kentridge, Shirin Neshat, Jim Campbell, Pipilotti Rist, Gary Hill and Francesc Torres. In 1997, the Museum developed an annual short film and video festival which continues to present the work of international artists. As technology penetrates all aspects of art, the Museum showcases outstanding innovative works.
For more information contact:
Heather S. Lineberry, Interim Director/Senior Curator
ASU Art Museum
Tenth Street and Mill Avenue
Tempe, AZ 85287-2911 USA
480.965.5272
heather.lineberry@asu.edu
