40+4: Art is not enough. Not enough!
This project is a series of videotaped interviews, by Davide Quadrio, Lothar Spree and Zhu Xiaowen, in cooperation with Xu Jie, with some forty Shanghai-based artists, dealing not with artwork per se, but rather with how artists themselves perceive their activity, their role and position in a changing, post-conventional society. It seeks to “map out” some of the contours of the city’s artistic imagination, providing a cartography of the force fields of its subjectivities. And above and beyond an unsparingly critical, and at times partisan analysis of artistic imaginaries, it provides a heuristic focus on the urban subjectivities of one of the contemporary world’s most intense urban experiments—Shanghai.
Interviewed Artists:
Ding Yi, Gong Yan, Gu Wenda, Hu Jieming, Huang Kui, Huang Yuanqing, Jin Feng, Li Shan, Li Xiangyang, Li Lei, Liang Yue, Liu Dahong, Liu Jianhua, Lu Chunsheng, Luo Yongjin, Pu Jie, Qiu Anxiong, Qiu Deshu, Shen Fan, Shi Yong, Song Haidong, Song Tao, Tang Maohong, Wang Nanming, Wang Tiande, Wang Xingwei, Xiang Liqing, Xu Longbao, Xu Zhen, Xue Song, Yang Fudong, Yang Hui,Yang Zhenzhong, Yu Xiaofu, Yu Youhan, Zhang Ding, Zhang Enli, Zhang Haitian, Zhang Peicheng, Zhou Tiehai, Zhu Julan
At the time that I was director of the ZKM Institute for Visual Media in Karlsruhe, Lothar Spree became Professor of Film at the Karlsruhe University of Design. Lothar was looking for ways in which we might work together and this initially resulted in a cultural heritage project on Catal Huyuk that became a pioneering work of virtual 3D reconstruction. After he moved to Shanghai and I to Hong Kong we began to discuss his 40+4 documentary video project and how it might be adapted as an immersive interactive experience in AVIE. Knowing of Prof. Bernd Lintermann’s pioneering ‘Cloud Browsing’ installation at the ZKM, I suggested that Lothar work with him to develop an appropriate interaction design and software application for the AVIE version of the work. This was done with the blessing of the ZKM director Peter Weibel.
Jeffrey Shaw