Hu Xiangcheng, Building Code Violations, architectural and video installation

Hu Xiangcheng is an important artist from the older generation, who resided in Japan for 20 years and has a firm and thorough understanding of the Japan's Chinatown. Since returning to China 10 years prior, he has been examining the condition of contemporary Chinese art, holding a critical attitude of the increasing trend of narrow essentialism. Turning away from this, he has entered into the public spaces of the Chinese town, conducting experimental work in the field of construction and architecture.

The concept of "Code Violations" connotes the concepts of "temporary", "mobile", "alterable", and "passive". It is a resistance and dissolution of ordinary life to the "ordinary" regulations of the system. This type of "limited creativity" hides a double meaning between passivity and subjectivity. "Building Code Violations" is also a universal concept. Within the passageway between "reason" and "law" there lies a process of expansion of humankind's organic needs and psychological needs. Well beneath the surface of a well established area lies the traces of a never ending battle of humankind with nature, society, politics, and community. The artist uses the issue of "Building Code Violations" as a point to begin peeling back the layers to uncover the veins of the experiences of battle underneath the surface. To artists, an opportunity to explore the "Long March" of this particular group of migrants in the Chinatown area is full of meaning.

"Life - Models of Building Code Violations"
For the exhibition the artist will construct illegal buildings made of a motley assemblage of cheap materials on a long tree branch covered with mushrooms and fungus. If one were to speak of art as a greater project aimed at providing a metaphor for the "reality" of this world, then this piece provides a focused cross-sectional view of the "realm of existence". From this cross-section it directly enters Chinatown - the physiological struggles of this communities "Building Code Violations." The work reveals Chinatown, its surfacization and weakness of the parasitic, and visually appealing nationalist symbolism.

Evoking the entire Long March curatorial discourse for the Yokohama Triennale, the work creates wtihin the exhibition space a Chinatown, an "illegal building" of mistakenly entered the area of the Other. It is a subjective idea, a guess, a mis-reading, all is overly correct, the mutual imagination between the totally different sides has led to everything being exaggeratedly revealed. But this mutual relationship has also been languished within the cultural symbols of historic memory. What is revealed is not a "real image", only the meaningless original code.

What is the corresponding "code" to a "code violation"? Who is the "standard"? The problem is that, if you say Chinatown is a foreign imagination of a local ethnicity, then the surface layer worship of Western style's that fully infiltrate on a large level within China's building construction, is it not also a Chinatown? The artist's intent is to use "building code violations", something that on the surface appears clear, to point to a completely different historical paradox.

Life - Building Code Violations 1	Life - Building Code Violations 2

View of the gallery