Building Code Violations
Curator : Lu Jie
Participating artists:
Anonymous artist, Guo Fengyi, Hu Xiangcheng, Lu Jie, Qiu Zhijie,
Wang Gongxin, Xu Zhen, Yang Shaobin, Zhao Gang, Zheng Guogu, Zhou
Xiaohu, Zhan Wang.
Exhibition Dates: April 8 – May 16, 2006 11-7 Tues-Sun
Location: Long March Space
Opening: Saturday April 8, 2006 (3pm)
"Building Code Violation: Unauthorized turning of a temporary
construction into a permanent construction."
- People's Republic of China Urban Management Department
"Building Code Violations" is a metaphor. It derives
from the legal lexicon of modern urban planning
directed at those individual actions which are in contravention
of a normalized and unified social system.
In this exhibition, "Building Code Violations" is a
cultural approach towards a "universalist" notion of
modernity, specifically as imposed upon China. This type of "top
down" revolutionary approach has resulted
not only in overturning local knowledge systems, but also in a
displacement of nature and space, a distortion
of bodily experiences, and heightening of class tensions. If the
democratic model put forth by modernity is a
universal historical process, then, how do we confront the failure
of this model to "universalize"?
The expression of "violations" are built upon offshoots
of individual needs, but beneath this surface resides
a critique towards the construction of a particular idealist aesthetics.
Confronted with failure from inception,
"Building Code Violations" are expressions that go beyond
purely material or architectural concepts, entering into
the cultural and political arenas of society. Here, the term "violation"
does not provide any basis for the judgment,
rather it is a self-constructed pronoun, an aesthetic attitude
based upon experience of the indifference of difference,
ubiquitous and decentralized, visible and invisible, and knowable
and unknown.
Venue: Long March Space
Address: Jiuxianqiao Rd #4 Factory 798, Beijing, China 100015
Tel/Fax: +86 10 6438 7107
lm@longmarchspace.com
www.longmarchspace.com
