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.