The real creativity of an artistic practice usually isn’t on display in a gallery, fair, or museum. It happens in private, often long before supposedly “artistic” work has begun. We’re talking about processes like negotiating rent; getting or quitting part-time jobs; putting in the hours of writing applications or finding supporters; making or breaking budgets.
Duchamp famously reduced his appetites to a bare minimum, often smoking instead of eating, so that he wouldn’t have to go to work. What are the strategies available to us today? Inventing lifestyles that make art-making possible is the most serious challenge facing artists today. That’s why the ways that artists get by and stay creative is the subject of this survey.
In this collaboration between New York-based SCREEN and Beijing-based I: project space, a group of young artists in New York, Berlin and Beijing will respond with images and links to a questionnaire on their living and working conditions. This survey will be published on SCREEN’s website and I: project space’s Wechat channel. The season will then culminate in a three-city screening series curated around the theme of stories of survival.
SCREEN is a New York-based curatorial collective and media art platform that fosters critical voices and new forms of exhibition for media-based practices.
I: project space is a Beijing-based platform for international art discourse and exchange, which also hosts a residency program.
Follow on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter for immediate updates.
Where are you now?
Who do you share those places with?
What do you do when you aren’t working?
What keeps you up at night?
A way to make time for yourself?
Show us what you think of the art world.
Advice to someone just beginning to study art?
Aspartime is an artist duo established by Fengya Liu and Xiao Qu in 2012. Fengya Liu was born in Shangdong Province and studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design and at Chengdu Academy of Fine Arts. Xiao Qu was born in Zhejiang Province and studied at the Chelsea College of Art and Design and at Central Academy of Fine Arts. Their recent exhibitions and art projects include What Makes Today’s Life so Different, so Rich with Magic? (Ying Space, Beijing); Get It Louder (LD Design Center, Beijing); Playground (RE-C Art Space, Chengdu); Make Up (V Art Center, Shanghai); and Nowhere to Live (Star Gallery, Beijing).
www.aspartime.com
