JIN JIANGBO

CURRENT FUTURE PREVIOUS Jin Jiangbo : Shanghai, Ye! Shanghai 15 February - 20 March 2010 We are pleased to present Shanghai, Ye! Shanghai, an exhibition of panoramic photographs by Shanghai/Beijing-based artist Jin Jiangbo from 15 February to 20 March 2010. The exhibition follows Jin Jiangbo’s recent visit to New Zealand under the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery’s International Artist Residency Programme and to participate in China in Four Seasons, a one-year project at the GBAG comprising four residencies and exhibitions of artists working in China today. Shanghai, Ye! Shanghai is one of a series of projects by Jin Jiangbo that investigate the past twenty years of economic, social and cultural upheaval that has taken place in China since 1989. GBAG director Rhana Devenport says: “The 21st century has seen unprecedented enthusiasm for Chinese contemporary art from the western international arts community, paralleling the flourishing of the Chinese economy on a global stage. Simultaneously, art production, distribution and consumption within China has dramatically expanded and redefined itself. Museums alone have grown exponentially from 300 to 2,300 over the time. The recent global financial crisis provoked an equally spectacular deflation of the Chinese art market bubble. Jin Jiangbo’s work interrogates the very heart of these recent decades as evidence of China’s economic miracle as its subsequent retreat and re-balance plays out on a massive scale.” Against this backdrop of worldwide economic malaise, Jin Jiangbo presents his photographic works as gestures of archaeological and economic investigation undertaken since 2007. He says: “My process enters a space of expressionless aesthetic research. Within the long process of history, things and people shuttle through, and as time passes by they gradually disappear and are lost leaving only the buildings and spaces as witnesses to history.” Leaving his familiar mode of new media technologies and taking up the historic process of analogue photography, images are shot using the bare technique of a medium format panoramic camera and then digitally manipulated into large format panoramas. Using series titled Prospects of the Chinese Market, The Great Economic Retreat: The Dongguan Scene, and Shanghai, Shanghai Engine Plan; Jiangbo’s arresting panoramas offer an immediate and urgent response to the unique socialist economic landscape of China as it negotiates within wider frames of globalisation, integration and recession. Based in Shanghai and Beijing, Jin Jiangbo is one of China’s foremost recent generation of media artists. He was born in 1972 in Zhejiang province. He is director of Digital Arts at Shanghai University and is completing his PhD at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Recent exhibitions include: Never Equal Distance to the Moon: Power, Politics, and the Environment, Faureschou Copenhagen, Denmark (2009/2010); China in Four Seasons: Jin Jiangbo, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2009); Booming, Wall Art Museum, Beijing and Shanghai Gallery of Art, China (2008); 3rd Nanjing Triennial, China (2008); Remote/Control, MOCA - Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China (2007); Shanghai Surprise, Lothringer 13 - Stadische Kunsthalle Munchen, Munich, Germany (2005); and Venice Biennale, Italy (2003). Located in New Zealand on Auckland’s Karangahape Road, Starkwhite presents a programme of artists’ projects, solo shows, independently curated exhibitions and occasional forays into new music and other interdisciplinary practices. Starkwhite also represents artists from New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific Rim.