More student projects

Our seminar has concluded and is over and done. But I'll still post a few more things from the members of our blog. Last week was about Anne Cecile Desjardin. This entry is about Zoe Yeh and also Šárka Teleka.

Zoe Yeh was an assistant to the curator of the show in the Kuandu Fine Arts Museum, the little one in the ex-cafe on the 2nd floor. The show is about site-specific art, and interestingly invited several "outsider" people to install something, custom crafted for this specific site. By "outsider" I mean that they are not professional artists, and some are not even art students. But they all have a strong interest in art and at least some background in the field. Zoe assisted this show from the beginning of the long process, and she also wrote a review or a kind of curatorial overview of this titled "Project: a Possibility of Site-specific Art". She wrote this in both Chinese and English, accompanied with photos of the 8 installations. You can ask Zoe for a copy of her overview, if you haven't already seen it in the museum.

Šárka Teleka sends news that she's almost finished with a Czech translation of Agamben's essay "What is the Contemporary?" You might remember way back to the very beginning of our seminar, I used this as a kind of beginning. (If you can't remember, look in our photocopy packet at the first item.) While many teachers used to deal with the question of "What is Art?", instead I insisted that this is no longer a problem, or at least not my question. But if you want to talk about what we talk about when we talk about "Contemporary Art", then the more interesting and surprisingly deep problem is "what is really contemporary?". Šárka plans to submit her translation to an art magazine in Prague. I hope she sends me a copy when it is published, even though I can't read Czech any more than I can read Chinese. But it will cheer me up!

This translation of Agamben appears to be part of a larger project. Šárka and Juliana Höschlová have been working on a project titled: 田, Field, Políčko Art in Asia / numer 1 / Taiwan - Taipei
Their blog about their project -- http://xxfieldxx.blogspot.com/2010/01/english.html

So, congratulations to these three students, who are professional-izing themselves in very smart ways.