Katie Farrell from Art Slant reviewed Cantocore FOB. The piece starts off by stating:

The most successful work in Cantocore: Free on Board not only investigates the nuanced layers of trade and culture between Guangzhou and San Francisco, but also incorporates translation/mis-translation, authenticity/reproduction, and the copy-of-a-copy-of-a-translation spirit.

Cantocore: Import/Export (2008) was originally curated for Ping Pong Space, a large warehouse space in Guangzhou, China. Curator Jon Phillips invited six San Francisco-based artists and six Guangzhou-based artists to participate [1]. This second, more intimate edition at Mission 17 includes a few scaled down pieces, or in some cases, omits original work by the artists’ choice or by size constraint.

The exhibition opens with Huang Xiaopeng’s What Does “Globalization” Means To You? a wall text piece that stretches the entire hallway. A billboard contained indoors, the piece is too big to digest while remaining still. The viewer must walk back and forth, tracing the text with his body instead of his eye. The result of translating “globalism” from English to Chinese to English is “thanks to the expansion of the empire economic and culture exchanges become possible to the maximum extent and previously isolated civilizations become linked”. A very appropriate opening for Cantocore.

Read the rest of the write-up here.

NOTE: Curation duties for this show go to Justin Hoover and Lu Fang as well.

We got a small plug on Rhizome article by Claire Louise Staunton in her article: “A Short Tour of Three Major Contemporary Art Exhibitions in China.” I just did a vanity search and the good news is that the press release for the project has gotten spread around much, but thinking most art-icles and/or reviews will or will not come out in a week or month.

This is a somewhat new space for me compared with web publishing where if you do anything, it get spread or shed pretty quickly.

I just updated all the artist pages, projects, about page with Woo Jay’s exhibition statement and a big huge thanks to all contributors on the credits page.

And, don’t sit down too long, the 2nd half of the show, Cantocore Export, opens this Sunday, September 21 from 8 – 10 PM in Guangzhou at Ping Pong Space (see right-hand sidebar for address). Artists include JD. Beltran, Lin Fang Suo 林芳所, Huang Pu Village Video Group 黄埔村项目小组, Kathrine Worel, Zhou Tao 周滔, and David Johnson.

Following the opening, the Stardusted video screening is then from 11 PM until midnight in the Ping Pong Bar.

Here is a snippet of Woo Jay’s writing, Reconsidering Daily Experience in English.

Globalization and pluralism as concepts are quickly becoming clichés. The Chinese contemporary art trend has developed so rapidly that it has almost caught up with its international counterparts much like the huge trade surplus in Sino-US trade. Why do we then still invite seven San Francisco-based artists to come to Canton and make a “deficit trade” through exchange? Since 1849, when the first batch of “Mai Ju Chai” (Contracted Labors) from Taishan, Siyi and Zhongshan landed in San Francisco, did any city in the world mean so much to Canton. At the same time, Bruce Lee and Chinatown, two of the biggest symbols of San Francisco Chinese ethnicity, had become the condensed imagination for Americans to conceptualize how a modern China might look.

And the intro paragraph in Chinese:

在全球化、多元主义这些概念快成陈词滥调，中国当代艺术的走向，迅猛得都快赶上中美贸易领域的巨大顺差时，我们为什么还要邀请七位旧金山的艺术家来中国做一次“逆差型”的交流呢？自第一批台山、四邑和中山的“卖猪仔”在1894年登陆旧金山以来，全世界也许没有哪一座城市和广东如此咫尺天涯。而旧金山的李小龙和唐人街也成为了美国对于现代中国的浓缩想象。当我那些中山和四邑来的远亲，讲述着他们的旧金山表亲时，口气轻松得仿佛只是家长里短，而大洋彼岸的金门桥对我来说，却依然陌生而又遥远。直到有天在上海新天地和一个来自旧金山的年轻ABC喝酒，听着他用比我更标准的粤语，和更更标准的带着粤语口音的英语聊天时，我才突然捕捉到了一丝真正从旧金山飘来的湿濡气息。