Tanner Menard looked at the Cantocore project from a distance stating:

I have been reading about Cantocore for a number of days totally obsessed by the complexity of the concepts presented on its site http://cantocore.com/, but it was not until I read the following statement that I was really sold on the idea; ‘Cantocore is the reality of life versus the theory set forth by jurisdictions where people live.’ As an artists who’s personal world view leans towards ontological anarchy, this statement elevates Cantocore from a link on Jon Phillip’s website to the top of the bookmark list on my favorite web browser.

I then waxed poetic about it on my website stating:

When people ask me to explain what exactly Cantocore is, I often dance around the similarities between Guangzhou and San Francisco. Both are at the far extremes from the political centers of power in China and the United States respectively. I also usually talk about the lifestyle of lowered barriers of the 3 P’s: property, privacy, and prices. These combined increase one’s state, or feeling of, personal freedom. However, this concept of the reality of life versus the theory set forth explains exactly how I feel about Cantocore: Just do it! Don’t have a meeting. Don’t make a committee. Don’t whine. Just make your project wherever you are at with what resources you have. Get it off the ground and sort out the pieces as you go.

Please check out the full text of both Tanner’s post and my re-follow-up. Please consider adding your own thoughts as your own review out there on your site, or feel free to blog here or in the comments on this site. We are eager to hear what you think about Cantocore and the latest show on in San Francisco until April 18, Cantocore Free On Board.

Guy uploaded the video of his project fully realized in Guangzhou at Cantocore: Import/Export. For Cantocore FOB, he made a video documenting the installation of this huge structure which you can view in full at Mission 17 right now.

If you want to talk with Guy more about this project, and the process of creating it, please attend the Cantocore FOB Artists Talk this Saturday, February 28 from 4-6 PM.

If you aren’t in San Francisco to see Cantocore Free On Board, then you can’t see the two-channel video installation that features this piece. Below is a web upload of all segments in their entirety.

News Reenactment from Deer Fang on Vimeo.

Read more about Fang Lu’s piece, and check out her personal website while you are at it.

Cantocore: Free On Board opens next week in SF. Here is the flier Mission 17 printed up which is inspired by the original that Asem and Pierre came up with for Cantocore in Guangzhou:

Cantocore: Free on Board (Flier)

Also, here is a static image anyone can use to help promote the show:

Guy Overfelt, one of the artists in the show, created an event on Facebook which you should join and share with others.

The shipping container has arrived from Guangzhou to San Francisco! Here is the show announcement.

Cantocore: Free On Board
This exhibition is a collaboration with The Garage Biennale, The Fabricatorz, and Ping Pong Gallery, China
Opening Reception, Friday, February 13, 6 – 9pm
www.cantocore.com

Participating Artists

JD Beltran, Fang Lu, Wang Ge, Misako Inaoka, David O. Johnson, Guy Overfelt, Jon Phillips, Lin Fang Suo, Zhou Tao, Katherine Worel, Huang Xiaopeng.
Curated by Fang Lu, Justin Hoover, Jon Phillips

PRESS RELEASE

Cantocore: Free On Board is the second installment of a collaborative project, exploring the globalized conditions of contemporary culture, through an exchange specifically between artists from the San Francisco Bay Area and Guangzhou, China.

The collaboration takes its inspiration and its name, “Cantocore,” from the rapid economic, social, and cultural changes currently taking place in Canton province. Hip Hop is thriving, heavy metal music is blasting, and the art market is booming. Over the last 20 years, cities such as Guangzhou, the capital of Canton, have changed from having a uniquely Chinese culture into global cities influenced and informed by diverse forms of representation. During the same period, Chinese artists also have exerted a growing influence on culture across the globe – and perhaps nowhere more than here on the Pacific rim of California, where Chinese Americans have played a central role since its inception. Art and culture is no longer defined by merely national boundaries – if it ever was – and yet cultural differences persist, providing productive tensions, rich with critical and creative possibilities.

Cantocore works to explore these globalized conditions of contemporary culture and the possibilities they present, by cultivating the dialogue specifically between the Bay Area and Guangzhou. Artists involved in the project include, among others, Americans with roots in China, Chinese who have come to study and work in San Francisco, and Americans who have emigrated to China. The first installment of the project, titled Cantocore: Import / Export, took place in September 2008 at the Ping Pong Space in Guangzhou. Cantocore: Free On Board provides the follow-up response.

What common concerns inform these artists work? How does their art nevertheless read differently across the globe? How do the histories and environments of each city inform the aesthetics of the work produced and presented there; and how does the work transcend its geographic origins, drawing aesthetic and conceptual influence from elsewhere?

- Clark Buckner

硬核广州：离岸

这个展览是车库双年展(The Garage Biennale)、制造者(The Fabricatorz) 和乒乓空间的合作项目。

开幕：2009年2月13日下午6点－晚上9点
地点：MISSION 17, 2111 Mission Street, Suite 401, San Francisco, CA
展期： 2009年2月13日－4月18日

参加艺术家：JD Beltran, 方璐, 王铬, 美早子, David O. Johnson, Guy Overfelt, Jon Phillips, 林芳所, 周滔, Katherine Worel, 黄小鹏.

策划：方璐，Justin Hoover, Jon Phillips

”硬核广州：离岸“ 是一个合作项目的第二部分, 通过来自美国旧金山和中国广州艺术家之间的交换，探讨全球状况下的当代文化。

这个合作计划的启发和命名:“硬核广州”，来源于广东省快速的经济、社会和文化变迁，嘻哈(HIP HOP) 盛荣，重金属摇滚充斥着空气，艺术市场发展迅猛。在过去的20年中，像广州这样的城市，其变化从有着独特的地方文化，到受全球城市的影响和各种形式（的外来文化）的再现。在相同时期中，中国艺术家已经在全球范围内发挥着日渐明显的作用；并且或许，太平洋边没有另一个地方像加州一样，美籍华裔从一开始就在那里充当着重要的角色。艺术和文化不再被国家边界所定义－如果它们曾经有过的话－然而文化差异依旧，这提供了有价值的张力，有批判性和创意可能的丰富性。

“硬核广州”意在通过引发旧金山和广州地域之间的对话，从而探讨这些全球化状况下的当代文化和它们所呈现得可能性。这个项目中的艺术家包括，有着中国根的美国人，来到旧金山工作和学习的中国人，还有移民到中国去的美国人。这个项目的第一部分展览题目为“硬核广州：进出口，已于2008年9月在广州乒乓空间举行。“硬核广州：离岸”是对第一部分的继续和回应。

这些艺术作品的共同点是什么，全球不同范围内对艺术的解读是否不同。每个城市的历史和环境是如何影响作品的美学的；这些作品又是如何超越它们的地域局限，从其它地方提取美学和观念的影响的。

- Clark Buckner

We are on the eve of announcing Cantocore in San Francisco. Until then, check out this video Justin made showing proposed artwork in a special location in San Francisco’s mission district:

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.

Above is the full PDF of the show booklet. The physical copies are running low, so if you want to print this out, please go ahead! All the content is available for your use as long as you link back to this booklet and/or this post.

Inside the booklet are short paragraphs about each work, bios for all participating artists, and then the show statements by myself and Woo Jay. All the text is also in English and Chinese. The show statements are soon to be published along with interviews about the project in Art Map magazine.

I presented in Kansas City this last friday and made a larger write-up on my website. Here is the slide deck I used which has a bunch of Cantocore Import photos:

Opening Remix Networks at Nelson-Atkins Museum for Electromediascope

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: art media)

Here is the basic 6th grader breakdown of my presentation:

Oh, and I forgot to give a summary of my talk last night: I build remix communities which make systems for producing objects. Currently, I’m making cultural remixes.

It took a big journey for me to attempt to get to the Cantocore Export opening last night in Guangzhou. I made it in at 11:45 PM to find only a handful of friends at the Ping Pong Bar and I got to see some quick pictures of what I missed. Well, I tried to get to the opening, and let’s just say I got back in time!

Anyway, Lu and I are going to the exhibition today to take some pictures today and will get them posted up here shortly. I’m very interested to see how the show came out since I’ve been AWOL in USA for last couple of weeks and Lu has been an editor at Art Map in Beijing while teaching at CAFA’s experimental video lab.

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。