The Hayward Gallery’s Wide Open School is an unusual experiment in learning. Its programme of classes is devised and delivered by over 100 artists from approximately 40 different countries. It is not an art school however. Instead it is a wide-ranging forum where artists lead and facilitate workshops, collaborative projects, collective discussions, lectures and performances about any and all subjects in which they are passionately interested. That is a territory as expansive as the imaginations of artists.

Cao Fei's project The Orchid Pavilion is based on a cultural gathering/drinking contest that took place during the Six Dynasties era in China: cups of wine were set afloat down a winding creek and poets would have to drink and compose a poem each time a cup stopped near them.

For the class, Cao Fei focuses on the Taoist concept of 'effortless action', which cultivates a state of being in which our actions are aligned with the elemental cycles of the natural world to allow us to respond to situations with ease. Participants are asked to discuss a subject chosen by the artist each time they drink a cup of wine.

Cao Fei leads the discussion with fellow artist Pak Sheung Chuen.

more info:

http://www.wideopenschool.com/

http://www.wideopenschool.com/about-school

http://www.wideopenschool.com/artist-classes-main/by%20class

http://www.wideopenschool.com/class/The%20Orchid%20Pavilion

100 DAYS BEFORE TRACK
ARTISTS ANNOUNCED

© S.M.A.K.
TRACK
A Contemporary City Conversation

TRACK is a temporary exhibition in the public and semi-public space of the city of Ghent. Philippe Van Cauteren and Mirjam Varadinis invited 35 artists to make an in-depth exploration of six typical neighbourhoods in Ghent and to come up with artistic proposals that interact with the different communities in various ways. The curators took the time to select surprising, meaningful and hidden locations in the wider city centre of Ghent and invited artists who have an affinity with the thematic context of the various places. The selected artists use the local reality as a fertile source of inspiration to reflect upon the city and the contemporary human condition in a global light. The results of their explorations are not simply traditional works of art, but artistic projects with an intense relationship with the city and its inhabitants that will leave permanent traces.

TRACK was initiated by S.M.A.K. It continues the tradition established by the large-scale exhibition projects Chambres d’Amis (1986) and Over the Edges (2000), that had installed contemporary art in the context of the city and entered into a direct dialogue with the public.

More info:

www.track.be

www.e-flux.com/announcements/announcing-artists-for-track/

Cao Fei, “Live in RMB City,” 2009, video. Courtesy of Vitamin Creative Space, Beijing.

Game On / Re-Newing Media Art is a touring screening programme of artist’s film and video works that utilise the imagery and media of desktop interfaces, video games and online software. Curated by Chris Clarke (Curator of Education and Collections, Lewis Glucksman Gallery). Game On explores the ways in which contemporary artists appropriate and manipulate extant online materials and applications, often in order to challenge the rhetoric of user-interactivity and to highlight the aesthetics of the computer screen.

While new media artists have often explored computer technologies in their practices, the featured artists in Game On appropriate existing software; an approach shared with hackers and ‘hacktivists’ who often re-programme mass-produced video games and applications as a strategy of subversion. While hacking has generally concerned itself with forms of sabotage through computer viruses and website vandalism, the artists here use widely-available software to create films that emphasise the aesthetic qualities of the virtual landscape.

Artists: Peggy Ahwesh (US), Paul B. Davis (US), Michael Bell-Smith (US), Cao Fei (CN), Faith Denham (IE), JODI (NL), Oliver Laric (AT), Conor McGarrigle (IE), Takeshi Murata (US)

More info:  

www.glucksman.org

www.e-flux.com/announcements/game-on-re-newing-media-art-a-touring-initiative/

Cao Fei: Simulus 

Incorporating elements of video-game interactivity and cinematic viewing, gallery visitors will experience an uncanny parallel city that has been created through the virtual computing community known as Second Life. China’s dynamic new urban landscapes inform a future threatened by uncertain ecological transformation in Cao Fei’s re-imagined China.

Presented as part of Yellow Signal: New Media from China that takes place across Metro Vancouver in the spring of 2012.

Cao Fei: Simulus 

Incorporating elements of video-game interactivity and cinematic viewing, gallery visitors will experience an uncanny parallel city that has been created through the virtual computing community known as Second Life. China’s dynamic new urban landscapes inform a future threatened by uncertain ecological transformation in Cao Fei’s re-imagined China.

Presented as part of Yellow Signal: New Media from China that takes place across Metro Vancouver in the spring of 2012.

http://www.surrey.ca/culture-recreation/1566.aspx

The exhibition SHOW TIME brings together eight artists that investigate the relationship between the body and its surroundings.

The participating artists—Pablo Bronstein, Cao Fei, Jacqueline Doyen, İnci Eviner, Shaun Gladwell, Nina Saunders and Sans façon—lift methodologies and ideas from the worlds of choreography, dance and architecture and use these to explore how the environment affects our movements, habits and gestures. Many of the artists work across the boundaries of specific art forms to combine sculpture, installation, film, performance and dance. Furthermore, the exhibition as a whole seeks to play with the fluidity of time by presenting an array of works that reference multiple times and unfold at varying speeds. Within this remit video works provide a universe of possibilities for the body in motion and enable the audience to traverse multiple sites and times.

SHOW TIME is created specifically for the kunsthal Gl Holtegaard, located in an 18th century country house with a baroque garden. Many of the recurrent themes in the exhibition such as baroque notions of the body in movement and slippages in time are motivated by its unique location, while unlocking the potential of Gl Holtegaard as a site for contemporary art within a historical framework.

More info:   

www.glholtegaard.dk

www.e-flux.com/announcements/show-time-choreography-in-contemporary-art/

25 January - 5 February 2012

Cao Fei's newest video Shadow Life will be screened in the Tiger Awards Competition for Short Film, 41st International Film Festival Rotterdam 2012.

more info: 

http://www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com/en/iffr-2012/programme/shorts/

Video Shadow Life: http://www.caofei.com/works.aspx?wtid=3

Shadow Life, Cao’s most recent video, is an adaptation of traditional Chinese shadow puppetry. During the Song Dynasty (960 – 1279 CE), performances known as “large shadow shows” featured actors hidden behind the screen instead of puppets.  The intricate hand puppets animating Shadow Life merge these traditional art forms to tell a distinctly contemporary story of modern China.

More info: http://www.arthousetexas.org/article/cao-fei/

Based on important video artworks from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum collection, the exhibition Once Upon a Time investigates how contemporary artists adapt motives and narrative techniques from myths, fables, and fairy tales to mirror current social phenomena and events in recent history.... In Whose Utopia (2006) Cao examines the effects of capitalism on individual workers at the OSRAM China Lighting Ltd. 

More info：http://www.deutsche-guggenheim-berlin.de/ex_onceuponatime_full.php

De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill On Sea (England)

Intellectual Marathon in RMB City, Cao Fei, 2012

"Crystal Ball" is a collection of single-channel videos by nine contemporary artists from around the globe commissioned by the IOC Olympics Media Art Collection Premiering at the De La Warr Pavilion. These new works reflect the values of Olympism through the prism of unique international perspectives.

Featured nine new media artists: Kota Ezawa, Cao Fei, Yeondoo Jung, Kimsooja, Torsten Lauschmann, Susan Pui San Lok, Emily Wardill and Hiraki Sawa. The works will be shown in special screenings with exhibition partners at AND Festival in Manchester, De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill and the Third Space Gallery in Belfast.

Sat 11 Aug 2012 - Sun 12 Aug 2012

Tickets: Free entry

De La Warr Pavilion

Marina

Bexhill On Sea (England)

East Sussex

more info: 

http://www.dlwp.com/event/crystal-ball

http://festival.london2012.com/events/9000965250