osage

osage shanghai
Room 101, Block 5, Wang Zu City,
251 Cao Xi Road, Xuhui District,
Shanghai 200235
T: +86 13581929608
E: info@osagegallery.com
W: www.osagegallery.com

PRESS RELEASE
To Arts and Features Editors
For Immediate Release
8th November 2014
Osage Art Foundation presents

JUST AS MONEY IS THE PAPER, THE GALLERY IS THE ROOM
Curated by Biljana Ciric

The first exhibition of nudes held at the Shanghai Art Museum, 1988. Photo by Gong Jianhua.

Featuring work by:

3-PLY (FAYEN D'EVIE, MATT HINKLEY & NICHOLAS TAMMENS) | CHARDA ADYTAMAYASON BANAL | SÉGOLÈNE DUBERNET | GONG JIANHUA | HU YUN | IRWIN
MARYSIA LEWANDOWSKA | LI RANSHI YONG | LUKE WILLIS THOMPSON | MONA VATAMANU & FLORIN TUDORYU YOUHAN with contributions from DING YI, FAN JIMAN, FENG LIANGHONG, QIN YIFENG,SHEN FAN and ZHANG JIAN-JUN | ZHANG PEILI | ZHOU ZIXI

EXHIBITION PERIOD: 20.11.2014 – 28.2.2015
PRESS PREVIEW: Wednesday, 19 November, 2014, 3.30pm to 4pm
OPENING RECEPTION: Wednesday, 19 November 2014, 6pm to 7.30pm
DIALOGUE: Untitled Files - With Hu Yun (Shanghai) and Luke Willis Thompson (Auckland/Frankfurt)
Wednesday, 19 November 2014, 4pm to 7.30pm
Bella Ciao! – The Institutionalisation of FriendshipWith IRWIN member Miran Mohar (Ljubljana), Huang Xiaopeng (Guangzhou) and Sang Tian (Beijing)
Friday, 28 November 2014, 7pm to 9pm
TALK: The Art Practice by IRWIN and NSK State in Timeby IRWIN member Miran Mohar (Ljubljana) with Zhang Peili (Hangzhou) as respondent
Friday, 21 November, 2014, 4pm to 5.30pm(Dialogues & talk conducted in Putonghua and English with consecutive interpretation provided)
VENUE: Osage Shanghai
Room 101, Block 5, Wang Zu City, 251 Cao Xi
Road, Xuhui District, Shanghai(Gallery entrance at Caodongsan Road)
EXHIBITION OPENING HOURS: Tue – Sat: 10.30 am – 6.30 pm
Sun: 2:30 – 6:30 pm
Open to special appointments outside of these times.
Closed on public holidays.

Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room1 takes as its point of departure artist organizedexhibitions between 1979 and 2006 in Shanghai. Local and international artists have been invited to reexamine and respond to an archive of materials relating to such exhibitions.2 The archive takes achronological approach, starting with the 12 Men Painting Exhibition that took place in 1979, and forthe first time publicly showed different works by artists who did not belong to any artist association.
Rather than institutions, artists were the sole aggregators of knowledge production through exhibitionmaking in the early 20th century, and later during the early 80s - making these exhibitions an importantvehicle, not only for making art public but as the only site of discourse due to the failure of institutions to
do so. The artist initiated exhibitions represented in the archive were significant in introducing so called
new art or new practices as well as new exhibition formats
However, the role of artists as ‘curators’, in today’s terminology, has since more or less vanished fromthe scene due to the commercialization of art practices, which in turn changed exhibition-making
practices. Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room thus attempts to re-activate this local
knowledge and practice of artist-led exhibition making, hoping to bring together common threads
from the larger context of exhibition making practices across the region, as well as globally, to explore
exhibitions as an epistemological engine rather than strategized showcase events, and to re-think therituals within the art system. The exhibition will also touch on issues such as the experience of art
1 The exhibition title is taken from a quote from artist Mladen Stilinovic’s The Praise of Laziness, written in 1993 and first published in Moscow
Art Magazine in 1998.
2 Part of the archival material for the exhibition is kindly provided by Zhang Jian-Jun and Zheng Shengtian.

through an exhibition format, the ambivalence between individual and collective, possible exchanges
beyond a capitalist mode, the normalization reflected in early exhibitions and the notion of solidarity as
a connection point, among many others. By featuring both artist research and responses alongsidearchival materials, Just as money is the paper, the gallery is the room further aims to complicate thestory of some seminal art works and our encounters with them as a public.
The structure of the exhibition is dynamic and is developed in conversation with the invited local andinternational artists over the exhibition period and beyond its temporal existence. Featured works andartists include 3-ply from Australia and their ongoing Re-print series, which reintroduces out-of-print artist
publications to a contemporary audience by exploiting the character of the reprints to intervene inpublic archives. In particular, 3-ply will re-publish the Shanghai First International Fax Art exhibition
catalogue from 1996. IRWIN from Slovenia will revisit their unrealized proposal from 1992: theestablishment of an NSK Embassy in China, and will test the ground for its opening. Auckland/Frankfurt
based Luke Willis Thompson’s Untitled, on the other hand, seeks to find parallels between theconditions that informed conceptual and performance practices in Shanghai during the years of its
prefiguration and the inequities of other cities globally. Lastly, the visual experience of the exhibition isconceived in collaboration with architect Ségolène Dubernet.

ABOUT THE CURATOR
Biljana Ciric is an independent curator based in Shanghai. Her recent exhibitions include a solo
exhibition featuring Tino Sehgal held at the UCCA Beijing, an exhibition hosted by Times Museum
titled One Step Forward, Two Steps Back—Us and Institution / Us as Institution and Alternatives
to Ritual presented by Goethe Open Space and OCAT in Shenzhen. In 2013, Ciric initiated From
History of Exhibitions towards Future of Exhibitions Making, an ongoing seminar platform that
proposes to revisit the importance of exhibition making; the seminar platform will specifically belooking at the history of exhibitions in China, South East Asia, Australia and New Zealand. In 2011,
Ciric initiated the project Taking the Stage OVER, a year long, ongoing investigation related to theperformative aspects of art. She was co-curator of the Asia Triennial in Manchester (2011) andpresented the exhibition Institution for the Future. Upcoming publications include Active
Withdrawal: Weak Institutionalism and the Institutionalization of Art Practice co-edited with Nikita
Yingqian Cai, to be published by Times Museum and History in the Making: Shanghai 1979-2009
published by Black Dog Publishing. Ciric is a regular contributor to Broadsheet and Yishu Journal.
She was nominee of the Independent Vision Curatorial Award by Independent Curators
International in 2012 and was on the jury for the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award in 2013.
ABOUT OSAGE ART FOUNDATIONThe Osage Art Foundation was established in 2004 with three main goals - Creative Communities,
Cultural Cooperation and Creative Capacity and has since played an active role in developing
education and training of young people, broadening cultural awareness and participation in artistic
endeavours, nurturing creativity and critical thinking and fostering international cultural exchange. TheOsage Art Foundation is now widely recognised by the local community and internationally as having
initiated many pioneering projects of international calibre.
The current focus of the Osage Art Foundation is on developing deeper discourse in and around thearts in the wider community. We believe that research, analysis, examination and promulgation ofissues pertaining to society, contemporary culture and value by artists, writers, critics, curators andcommentators will build better understanding of regional perspectives throughout Asia and beyond.
In order to better contextualize the work of the current generation of Asian contemporary artists, theOsage Art Foundation has helped to introduce a number of seminal contemporary Asian masters tothe wider international art world. For example, Roberto Chabet (1937 - 2013) made an unparalleledcontribution to Philippine contemporary art as an educator, mentor, visionary, conceptualist,innovator, alchemist, poet and tireless promoter of younger talents, but until recently was not as wellknown internationally.
In 2014, Osage Art Foundation co-presented Market Forces | Erasure: From Conceptualism toAbstraction, curated by Charles Merewether with the City University of Hong Kong, and Just as moneyis the paper, the gallery is the room, curated by Biljana Ciric. In 2013, OAF presented It’s Me, Goodbye:
Andy Warhol’s Cinema, jointly presented by The Andy Warhol Museum, one of the four Carnegie
Museums of Pittsburgh. Osage also presented the second in its series of non-profit Market Forces
exhibitions that draw attention to the non-commercial intrinsic values of art: The Friction of Opposites,
which opened in Hong Kong in May 2013, coinciding with the commercial art fair Art Basel Hong Kong.
In May 2013, The Osage Art Foundation was honoured at the Hong Kong Arts Development Awards
with an Award for Arts Sponsorship.
For more information, please visit the website www.oaf.cc.

MEDIA ENQUIRIES
Chloe Chu (Osage Hong Kong):
chloechu@osagegallery.com | +852 2389 8322 | +852 2172 1619
Elva Xie (Osage Shanghai):elvaxie@osagegallery.com | +86 135 8192 9608 | + 8621 5448 5098

The exhibition is
supported by

Public programming
supported by