Tour Without End (excerpt)

Artist: Laura Parnes

Year: 2017

Runtime: 19’

Since the 1960s, New York City has witnessed a rich and ongoing history of DIY venues for visual and performing arts, providing a variety of outlets for artists and audiences to convene and push the boundaries of art making. Tour Without End zooms in on underground musicians and venues in New York City. Following a darkly comedic fictional band named Munchausen, the film explores their complex band dynamics, the strain of touring and collaborating, and the process of aging while immersed in a youth-driven DIY music scene. This hybrid documentary features live performances by more than 30 local musicians and profile ten underground music venues in Brooklyn.

Paradox of Praxis 5

Artist: Francis Alÿs

Year: 2013

Runtime:7’49’’

One of Francis Alÿs’ series of performative videos that politicize absurd or seemingly futile gestures, Paradox of Praxis 5 documents the artist’s nocturnal perambulations through Juárez as he kicks a ball of fire along the city’s desolate streets. Transcending metaphor, the eerie mobile conflagration traces out an imaginary map of a devastated city.

Untitled(Eels)

Artist: Patty Chang

Year: 2001

Runtime: 16’

SAMSUNG MEANS TO COME

Artist: Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries

Year: 2016

Runtime: 10'2"

Based on the South Korean conglomerate SAMSUNG, the story uses dead-pan humor and language to speak of the delirious and pervasive ability of brands, and how they enter into the psyche of our everyday lives. Drama and rhythm is manipulated by adapting the scale and rapid pace at which the text appears. The result is an online vignette portraying a surreal interaction with consumerist culture——a flash-based scenario, which becomes enlivened suddenly in the moment when the corporate brand enters into the sexual fantasies of a person inside a kitchen while washing dishes.

Hacked Circuit

Artist: Deborah Stratman

Year: 2014

Runtime: 15’5”

Hacked Circuit is a single-shot, choreographed portrait of the Foley process, revealing multiple layers of fabrication and imposition. The circular camera path moves us inside and back out of a Foley stage in Burbank, CA. While portraying sound artists at work, typically invisible support mechanisms of filmmaking are exposed, as are, by extension and quotation, governmental violations of individual privacy. The scene being foleyed is the final sequence from The Conversation where Gene Hackman's character Harry Caul tears apart his room searching for a 'bug' that he suspects has been covertly planted. The look of Caul's apartment as he tears it apart mirrors the visual chaos of the Foley stage. This mirroring is also evident in the dual portraits of sonic espionage expert Caul and Foley artist Gregg Barbanell, for whom professionalism is marked by an invisibility of craft. These filmic quotations ground Hacked Circuit, evoking paranoia, and a sense of conviction alongside a lack of certainty about what is visible. The complication of the seen, the known, the heard, and the undetectable provides thematic parallels between the stagecraft of Foley and a pervasive climate of government surveillance.

Prophet

Artist: Su Yu Hsein

Year: 2017

Runtime: 22’35”

Prophet was originally a play written by Taiwanese avant-garde artist Huang Hua-Chen and one of the first programs performed by Theatre Quarterly at Tien Educational Center in 1965. It marked the beginning of experimental play writing in postwar Taiwan. The play depicts a married couple going to see a stage show, but the only things on the stage are the movement of light/shadows and screen, coupled with the sound of rope pulleys, while the male and female lead sit in the audience talking. They start by discussing the banalities of daily life in a whisper, but this gradually devolves into complaining and arguing. As a professional copyist, the husband believes he’s played the role of mentor since the May Fourth Movement in China and defends himself, saying he could not realize the movement’s ideals due to a lack of resources. His character showcases the psychological disorder of a modernist.

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For this event, UCCA members will enjoy:

• Exclusive seats reservation service

• Members-only guided tour

For UCCA members, please send us your name and mobile number to RSVP (ve@ucca.org.cn) or call UCCA membership hotline: +86 10 5780 0200

13:00-13:20 Ticket pick-up at the reception desk (for UCCA members who RSVPed)

13:20-13:50 Exclusive UCCA members-only guided tour

13:30-14:00 Ticket distribution at the reception desk (for UCCA members who didn’t RSVP and non-members)

14:00-16:00 Screening followed by conversation

Screening (80-90 minutes)

Conversation with Q&A (40 minutes)

*Please arrive promptly.

Yefu Liu (Artist)

Yuan Fuca (Co-founder, Salt Projects)

Howie Chen （C&L )

Moderator: Wang Wenfei (“The New Normal”co-curator)

Laura Parnes

Laura Parnes is an artist whose work engages strategies of narrative film and video art to blur the lines between storytelling conventions and experimentation. Parnes has screened and exhibited her work in institutions and at film festivals in the US and internationally, including the Institute of Contemporary Art University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece; LOOP Festival, Barcelona, Spain; Light Industry, Brooklyn, NY; Kunsthalle Winterthur, Winterthur, Switzerland; Overgaden-Institute for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark; iMOCA, Indianapolis, IN; Cinematexas, Austin, TX; Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius, Lithuania; Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina, Sofia, Madrid; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; and Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY.

Francis Alÿs

Born in 1959 in Antwerp, Belgium, Alÿs originally trained as an architect. He moved to Mexico City in 1986, where he continues to live and work, and it was the confrontation with issues of urbanization and social unrest in his new country of adoption that inspired his decision to become a visual artist. Throughout his practice, Francis Alÿs consistently directs his distinct poetic and imaginative sensibility toward anthropological and geopolitical concerns centered around observations of, and engagements with, everyday life, which the artist himself has described as "a sort of discursive argument composed of episodes, metaphors, or parables." His multifaceted projects in the varied forms of public actions, installations, video, paintings, and drawings have been the subject of a major survey, A Story of Deception, which was on view from 2010 to 2011 at Tate Modern, London; Wiels Centre d'Art Contemporain, Brussels; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York and MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York. Over the past decade, he has had several solo exhibitions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (traveled to the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, both 2013); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2010); The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago (2008); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2007); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and Portikus, Frankfurt (both 2006).

Patty Chang

Patty Chang has held solo shows at institutions such as the MoMA in New York; the New Museum in New York; the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. In 2009 she was named the Guna S. Mundheim Fellow of Visual Arts at the American Academy in Berlin and she is a 2014 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Chang’s latest project, The Wandering Lake, was recently featured in the 11th Shanghai Biennial 2016 and will be the focus of a solo show at the Queens Museum in NY in October 2017.

Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES is yhchang.com. Among the first artists to employ the Internet as an artistic platform in the late 1990s, Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries consists of Marc Voge from the United States and Young-hae Chang from Korea. Based in Seoul, YHCHI have created their signature animated texts set to their own music in 26 languages. Their work has been displayed in major art institutions including Tate, London, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Whitney Museum and New Museum, New York. Young-hae Chang (KR) and Marc Voge (US), the two principals of YHCHI, were recent Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Creative Arts Fellows.

Deborah Stratman

Deborah Stratman is a Chicago-based artist and filmmaker interested in landscapes and systems. Much of her work points to the relationships between physical environments and human struggles for power and control that play out on the land. Recent projects have addressed freedom, expansionism, surveillance, sonic warfare, public speech, ghosts, sinkholes, levitation, propagation, orthoptera, raptors, comets and faith. She has exhibited internationally at venues including MoMA NY, Centre Pompidou, Hammer Museum, Mercer Union, Witte de With, the Whitney Biennial and festivals including Sundance, Viennale, CPH/DOX, Oberhausen, Ann Arbor, Full Frame, Rotterdam and Berlinale. Stratman is the recipient of Fulbright, Guggenheim and USA Collins fellowships, a Creative Capital grant and an Alpert Award. She lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois.

Su Yu-Hsien

Born in 1982, lives and works in Tainan. Su Yu-Hsien studied at the Graduate Institute of Plastic Arts, TNNUA. In 2011, his works were presented at “The Heard and the Unheard Soundscape Taiwan” at the Taiwan Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale. In 2007, Su was awarded the Kaohsiung Award and the Taipei Arts Award’s first prize. His latest work was Hua-Shan-Qiang in 2013.

WMSS (Wild Magic Salt Solution)

WMSS (Wild Magic Salt Solution) is a moving-image collective, joining art practitioners based between New York and Beijing. Working in different capacities within the art world as curator, critic, or artist, WMSS is informed by a diversity of positions and interests directed towards moving-image. Through curated screenings, exhibitions, and events, WMSS explores the commonalities and differences shared by practitioners influenced by moving-image and video art from both China and US, in relation to the greater contemporary art field. A common departure point guiding the project is a shared interest in moving away from institutionalized structures that are often rigid in their expression, focusing more on the fluidity of communal interests and collective movements formed around visual and time-based forms of culture. WMSS collective is a shared network that brings together curators Howie Chen and and Andrew Lampert (C&L, Anthology Film Archives), artist Yefu Liu, curator Billy Tang, and Yuan Fuca and Liya Han from Salt Projects.