Jiang Jun • Underline Office • David Cotterrell • John Ingledew • Lee Walton • Shanglie Zhou •
• Jan Van Woensel • Rose Tang • Martin Tzou • Annie Wang • Allard van Hoorn •

• curated by Allard van Hoorn •
• art direction by Thomas Charveriat •

• Urban China • Hi-China • Model Junction No. 1 • Visual Ping Pong • Remote Instructions • Shanghaid •
• Contribution • Daddy & Aunties • Tracking Annie in Shanghai • Reappropriation of Geometry •

People

Jiang Jun
Designer and critic, Jiang Jun has been working on urban research and experimental study, exploring the interrelationship between design phenomenon and urban dynamic. He has been the editor-in-chief of Urban China magazine since the end of 2004, in the meantime working on a book. Born in Hubei in 1974, he got a bachelor's degree in Tongji University (Shanghai) and a master's degree from Tsinghua University (Beijing), he is now teaching in Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. [ ↑ ]

Underline Office
Underline Office is a project-oriented group founded in 2003 by designer, photographer and critic Jiang Jun. Based in Guangzhou and registered in Hong Kong, most of its members came from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. Since the beginning of 2005, Underline Office has been fully engaged into the founding and researching for Urban China, an urbanism magazine based in Shanghai, and also involved into a series of important exhibitions. Main works include: Systematic Superficiality (Exhibition analysis and Design) for Get It Louder Exhibition 2005; Hi-China (An interactive installation for the images from 100 cities of China) for Guangdong Triennale 2005; Directory Lianzhou (A Branch work for Hi-China) for Lianzhou International Photography Festival 2005; Objects to Come/Objects in Disappearing and Future Past Tense (A video installation cooperated with Crystal CG) for Shenzhen Biennale 2005; Informal China for China Contemporary Exhibition in NAi, Rotterdam, 2006; Urban Image & Text for China Contemporary Exhibition in Fotomuseum, Rotterdam, 2006. [ ↑ ]

David Cotterrell
received an MA in Fine Art: Combined Media from Chelsea College of Art and Design in 1997. David is an installation artist working across varied media including video, audio, interactive media, artificial intelligence, device control and hybrid technology. His work exhibits political, social and behavioural analyses of the environments and contexts, which he and his work inhabit. Recent work has involved research into computational models of conversational speech, an artificially intelligent pedestrian urban population and a self-sustaining gridlock generator. He is currently working in Shanghai, China on research into the impact of population expansion with the support of an Arts Council England and British Council award. [ ↑ ]

John Ingledew
Head of Photography at Central St Martins College of Art and Design, the University of the Arts London and a visiting Visual Communications Lecturer at Raffles Design Institute, Dong Hua University Shanghai. He has run projects and workshops with students in Europe, America and Japan and instigated projects with leading creative companies and magazines including Diesel, Illy, Jigsaw, Getty, Vogue and Elle. His book of pictures A View From the Bridge was published in 1998. His book Photography was published in the UK and USA last year and will be published in Spain, Holland and Italy in 2006. [ ↑ ]

Lee Walton
Lee Walton is an Experientialist whose projects and performances are full of humor, detailed planning, and interaction with the outside world. Serendipitous combinations of rule and chance, Walton's projects are always playful, precisely calibrated, conceptually on-target and deeply attentive to the everyday patterns and rhythms of contemporary city life. Walton has exhibited at numerous venues both nationally and internationally, most recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art Berlin and Clubs Project Inc., Australia. He has been invited to lecture and lead projects at various institutions, including the Reykjavik Museum in Iceland and the Psy-Geo-Conflux in New York. [ ↑ ]

Shanglie Zhou
Shanglie Zhou (1958, Shanghai) arrived in Antwerp about fifteen years ago where she further developed her career as a visual artist. "Throughout the years, the works of visual artist Shanglie Zhou have continued to astonish the audiences by their originality and strong identity. Sometimes shocking and bizarre, at other times sober and serene or even witty and playful, this chinese artist, now residing in Antwerp, always surprises us with the only thing we can always expect from her: the unexpected." (Quote: Alex Otterlei) [ ↑ ]

Jan Van Woensel
Jan Van Woensel is a freelance curator based in Antwerp, Belgium. He was appointed as a guest-professor at the Karel de Grote Hogeschool, dept Audiovisual and Fine Arts in Antwerp. Since 2003 he works as a curator, co-director and co-editor of a.o. Vlucht magazine Amsterdam, The Fields Projects publications, Kunshart magazine, free-Flux and Markers project VI at the Documenta in Kassel. He is also the founder of ICPA (International Curators Platform Antwerp) [ ↑ ]

Rose Tang
Rose Tang was born twice, first as a boy, on the beautiful hills surrounding Taichung(Taiwan) in 1967; and then again, in Shanghai, at the turn of this century, as the most promising Chinese artist of her generation. Rose is extravagant, rebellious and fearless, and she indiscriminately touches on all aspect of Chinese culture. Her daddy (2006) and Aunties (2005) will be displayed at Island6 during the Platform for Urban Investigation. [ ↑ ]

Martin Tzou
Martin Tzou, 31 years old, architect from Belgium, based in Shanghai since 2004. [ ↑ ]

Annie Wang
from Beijing, 30 years old. Profession: TV program manager. She lives in a tower, works in a high-rise office, and takes underground transportation to move around in Shanghai. [ ↑ ]

Allard van Hoorn
Allard van Hoorn creates a visual language made of signs, symbols and demarcations that indicate alternative routes in contemporary society. It is a visual code he co-develops with people he works with in all parts of the world and, specifically, in local communities. His complete body of work is aimed at assisting mankind in obtaining another way of looking and seeing, discovering that we now have the option to make it work for all of humanity. [ ↑ ]

Projects

Urban China
Urban China magazine is reflecting on urban culture throughout China and has issued themes like We Make Cities. Hong Kong Alphabet with guest editors Gutteriez + Poertefaix, Made in China (Reality and Identity of the World Factory) and City Sculpture. The next two issues will coincide with China Contemporary, a simultaneous exhibition at the Netherlands Architecture Institute, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and the Nederlands fotomuseum in Rotterdam, to be opened at the 10th of June 2006, where Jiang Jun and Underline Office will show their work. [ ↑ ]

Hi-China - Jiang Jun & Underline Office
Hi-China is a database based on the excursion of 100 Chinese cities as well as over 200,000 images systematically taken from it. It is also the name of the generic directory constructed for the massive database, whose target is to set up an aggregate, which can both reflect the multiplicity of Chinese cities in the greatest possibilities and offer the most efficient way to be managed and searched. Not only can this generic directory classify the large numbers of images from each city quickly, but also it sets up parallel relations between different cities, so that it generates links between the parallel segments of them in a generic directory. As the subdirectories of all levels are simultaneously a series of independent urban projects, Hi-China is gradually evolving into a Project of Projects, in which each project can be linked to all the cities that have the same segments. In this way the invisibility of order is indicated by the visibility of phenomenon, the incredible super-reality is constructed by the ordinary and trivial reality. Hi-China is an on-going project that is being revised and optimized constantly. The phased outcome will be presented as books, magazines and websites. More sub-projects and marginal projects will be generated through the extending and detailing of its local elements. [ ↑ ]

Model Junction No. 1 - David Cotterrell
Based on study of various models of traffic simulation of, amongst others, Shanghai, an attempt is made to forecast the ultimate road-planning scheme if car ownership would be the only driving force within this framework. Step-by-step growth from footpath to clover highway structures are developed and shown during the Platform for Urban Investigation. [ ↑ ]

Visual Ping Pong - Students from Raffles Design Institute / Dong Hua University in Shanghai and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London.

Each week visual messages are being sent by email between Raffles Design Institute/Dong Hua University in Shanghai and Central St Martins College of Art in London. Like a game of visual ping pong the images move quickly to and fro between the two sides with each player adding their own imaginative spin to the pictures. Like any game each player cannot predict or change what the other player does. [ ↑ ]

Remote Instructions - Lee Walton
Lee Walton will provide instructions from Brooklyn, New York for the Platform for Urban Investigation to be executed in Shanghai. [ ↑ ]

Shanghaid - John Ingledew
Posters project, SHANGHAID - vandalised billboards of future Shanghai, photographed in Pudong, May 2006. [ ↑ ]

Contribution - Shanglie Zhou and Jan Van Woensel
Their contribution to the Platform for Urban Investigation-project elaborates from their specific local orientation and aims to changing the environment through a direct intervention in the public space. Ten postcards representing monuments, historical buildings and famous touristy places in Antwerp will be appropriated by the artist and reprinted on poster size to be displayed at ten different locations in Shanghai. The postcards are addressed to specific persons that are significant for the cities' cultural scene; Zhou Benyi (former Professor at the Shanghai Theater Academy), Chunming Gao (Director of Shanghai Arts Research Institute), Sheng Han (Vice-president of the Shanghai Theater Academy), Jianguo Zheng (Director of Shanghai Oriental Publicity and Education Service Center) a.o. As the handwritten messages on the back side of the postcards will be presented alongside the colorful images of this Northern Belgian city, they become public notes. Hereby the artist introduces a personal reflection on the project by integrating her situation of being disconnected from her original habitat to generate moments of concentration in the changing cityscape. These messages will include impressions from both cities; their cultural scene and historical background; but will as well reflect upon the rapidly changing and expanding city and the social conditions this irreversible evolution evokes. This contribution to the Platform for Urban Investigation aims to reach the people of Shanghai and establishes a public debate through a socially engaged intervention in the public space. The concept for this project was designed by Shanglie Zhou and Jan Van Woensel. [ ↑ ]

Daddy & Aunties - Rose Tang
Rose Tang was born twice, first as a boy, on the beautiful hills surrounding Taichung (Taiwan) in 1967; and then again, in Shanghai, at the turn of this century, as the most promising Chinese artist of her generation. Rose is extravagant, rebellious and fearless, and she indiscriminately touches on all aspect of Chinese culture. In daddy (2006) and Aunties (2005), Rose tries to understand the impact and influence that culture, relationships and family values had on the development of her sexual identity. Rose Tang's work captures much of the essence and uniqueness of her identity journey by presenting a delicate balance of sociological analysis, social perception, facts, style and history. [ ↑ ]

Tracking Annie in Shanghai - Martin Tzou & Annie Wang
Contemporary urban life implies more and more vertical movements in the city, which however are not often investigated. The project wants to explore the vertical dimension of the movements of citizens in the city of Shanghai. Annie and Martin, two characters who know each other, are to be tracked in the city during one week. Using GPS technology, geographic positions indicating the movements of the characters will be recorded. The data will be put into graphs and 3D models, and displayed along with photographs and videos of the experimentation. [ ↑ ]

Reappropriation of Geometry - Allard van Hoorn
One of the projects that will take place at Island6 Arts Center is Re-appropriation of geometric forms. The public is cordially invited to actively participate in the development of this activity. Fellow humans like R. Buckminster Fuller have thoroughly proved we are the first generation that can fully make the whole of the system of cohabitation on this planet work, that we have more then sufficient technological standards, non-organic energy resources etc. to provide a high standard of living for all people on earth. The only thing that keeps us from doing so is knowledge. This project uses the re-appropriation of geometric figures as a method of stimulating an alternative look on the world. By defining the properties of the line, triangle, square and circle differently and using these physical forms accordingly is intending to change our perspectives on the world around us. The way humans have evolved on our planet is to a certain extent arbitrary. So is the way we describe the world around us. Accordingly, formulas and descriptions in physics and mathematics are developed over many generations, building theory upon theory. One can imagine that in a slightly distinctly developed world these descriptions of the world around us would have developed differently, giving other meanings and functionality. This project is an exercise in imagining other functions and definitions of very common forms in our daily lives like a line, triangles, squares and circles. Together we will investigate how to re-interpret or re-appropriate these forms in a different manner from their currently known geometric realities. [ ↑ ]