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.

Thanks to Heather and Boing Boing for posting up about Guy’s cool piece. Also, thanks for the quote of my text

Here is the post:

Transmedia artist Guy Overfelt created this massive inflatable “smoke” installation for the Cantocore Export Guangzhou show in China a couple months ago. It follows the thread of Overfelt’s previous Inflatable Trans-AM. From the description of the piece, titled “Untitled” (Up in Smoke):

This time the inflatable Smoke is fabricated in Guangzhou, factory direct. Beyond Paul McCarthy-like reductive shapes coming off the assembly line or the Chinese Olympic team leaving the others’ in the dust, the simple shape raises questions about what these factories are pumping out in Guangzhou.

Guy Overfelt’s inflatable smoke (Thanks, Heather Sparks!)

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.