China, Asia, Climbing and Fixed Gear Bikes

Today we went to the opening reception of the art exhibition of my Chilenean cycling friends nicoykatiushka (NyK) called „Pause“. It was at the Lan Club (LAN 蘭, designed by Philippe Starck) in Beijing and their artwork will stay displayed until February 28th 2010.

NyK’s creative work is based on a collaborative method which they have been developing since their wedding day, on June 20th, 2003. For the past 6 years, nicoykatiushka have developed a system of art and life incorporating factors that are determinant throughout their process based methodology. Influenced by daily life as well as their nomadic lifestyle which fluxes between Beijing, New York and Santiago (Chile), NyK conduce a fresh and active dialog that allow stimulation from outside their close knit nucleus.

NyK explore notions of relationship and experimentation with installations that combine aspects of performance, video and photography. Within the mixing of mediums one will often be confronted with the image of NyK as the protagonist of these experiments. Pause presents a temporary stop, a moment to look into past and recent works created in and out of China. Recent works exhibited will include Eye Shift (revisiting Steve Reich), Whisper and Fuck Beijing.

NyK’s work has been shown extensively, showing in galleries and museums such as Exit Art (NYC), The Artist Space (NYC), Kuandu Fine Arts Museum (Taiwan), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chile), Aratoi Museum (New Zealand) and Ex-Teresa Arte Actual (Mexico).

In 2006 NyK formed NYKFFA (nicoykatiushka Foundation for the Arts), a mobile platform for collaborative artistic projects, supporting the idea of artist communities and networks by hosting video festivals and exhibitions run by artists. NyK recently created Antenna, a non for profit organization whose main role is not only to create a framework and a stage but also to bring together different cultural experiments and to collaborate with artists and curators to produce one moment of potentiality.

I like their work. I personally liked „Eyeshift“which is the visual version of what the composer Steve Reich was doing to music in „Music for 18 Musicians“. We used to listen to that piece in school in music class while we were all lying on the ground. I loved those music classes.

It is Liman’s birthday. She is one of those people that do not tell others when her birthday is and rather not have any celebration. So I did not know until her boyfriend invited me a few days ago to a surprise party. So he arranged that all of her friends meet at a friends place and prepare a cake and flowers. She thought she was going to see a movie and just drop by that friend on the way to the movie theater. But we were all there when she came.

She was really moved by this. And it was a very nice party with nice people and it lasted quite long.

Wow, more snow! This is great! It is unusual to have so much snow here in Beijing but it is really nice.

As I had grown up in New Jersey as well as in Southern Germany I am used to lots of snow in winter. And from early childhood I learned how to make proper snow mans. But there are other people that did not learn how to roll snow for a snow man. Like some neighbors that told their children to make this kind of snow cone snowman.

The good think about this style is that the children properly cleaned the surrounding area from the snow.  But it just does nto look like a snow man to me.