Production Fever 2008, Study Materials

NAC Reading Room

E. A. Jonušo str. 3

Nida LT-93127

Open daily, 11am – 8pm

Curator: Zian Chen

Concept, installation and materials’ layout on site: Egija Inzule

Technical installation: Pranas Gudaitis, Milda Laužikaitė

Installation support: Martina Marini, Agne Jokšė, Anastasia Sosunova 

Today’s gift is tomorrow’s commodity.

Yesterday’s commodity is tomorrow’s found art object.

Today’s art object is tomorrow’s junk.

And yesterday’s junk is tomorrow’s heirloom.

- Arjun Appadurai 

Installed at the NAC Reading Room are materials: print outs and videos from the project ‘Production Fever 2008: A Reading of In Production Mode: Contemporary Art in China’ that initially took place in 2019 at 798 Art Zone in Beijing. The materials gathered here have been selected by the curator Zian Chen, as a further step to working with the topic of production conditions in art (with a focus on labour and real estate) by presenting it in an educational context as well as in another (besides China) geopolitical context that has gone through the transformation of a socialist society towards a neo-liberal one. The materials on view will be used for teaching purposes, as part of a seminar with VAA students in March 2022. In this context the materials on display will be used to reflect upon and apply the methodology presented in the project to the Baltic region and Lithuanian context by looking into the conditions that enabled the development of ‘contemporary art’ since 1986. 

Initially intended as a residency project that would enable Zian Chen to spend time at NAC and work further on the project on site, the plans were adapted and formulated in the current form, following the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. In association with this project is the exhibition that took place in summer 2020 at NAC by the artist Liu Chuang: Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities. 

‘Production Fever 2008’ reflected on the boom in art production in China that preceded the global financial crisis in 2008. The exhibition began by re-thinking the modes of art production documented in In Production Mode: Contemporary Art in China (2008) by curator and writer Pauline J. Yao. Yao’s writing may be seen as an explication of the ambience of production, lending discernible form to this background condition. Works in the exhibition functioned as artefacts that were a testimony of the active engagement and rapidly changing ecologies in art, which were critical in their ability to respond to new tangible conditions emerging from the changing relations of production (cheap labour, for example). They are audio-visual texts that inscribe the productive rhythms of their respective urban and social contexts. Accordingly, these works are important not just as documents of the material conditions of their time, but also as a response and critique of the current shifting modes of art production in China.

Surveying the productive conditions before the 2008 crisis, Yao’s theses look into the ways in which Chinese artists responded to the neoliberal market’s demand. At the time, working conditions were cheap, and fabrication lines stood next to the studios. In the late 2010s, with the apparent increase in labour cost in China and the moving out of artist studios, the old production mode is no longer suitable for most artists. Among other materials on display, the work by Liu Chuang also touches on people’s imagination of sustainable production. In this regard, finding the production mode of art means how the artist can creatively find one’s own ‘means of production’.

The project is co-funded by Lithuanian Council for Culture.