MoMS' China space will launch on October 10th and 11th with a 2-part event - 别有洞天.
As part of a unit called ‘Maps and Networks’ unit, 3rd year Digital Media Arts (DMA) students at the Institute of Creativity and Innovation (ICI) - at Xiamen University's Zhangzhou campus - recently took part in a short workshop where they were tasked with creating a site-specific artwork for a pair of white Croc-style shoes. A globally popular shoe-form, their signature holes have been transformed into portals for customization due to the emergence of ‘croc charms’ (also known as ‘jibbitz’). For 别有洞天, students have worked to extend this notion of customization, with a focus on the critical, conceptual and creative possibilities of this shoe-as-site.
In her 2002 book ‘One Place After Another: Site-specific art and locational identity’, Miwon Kwon examined site-specificity as related to the unstable relationship between location and identity in the era of late capitalism. For Kwon, it is a dialogue between art and spatial politics. With the rise of globalization and communication technologies, site-specific art shifted form and became less about an integrated whole and more tied into a global network of distribution.
We can understand site-specific artworks as dynamic relational networks. Site-specificity is produced as a network of functions and the meaning of the artwork is created via the interactions with this network. With the purpose of extending the exploration of ‘context’ that frames the DMA 3rd year ‘Maps and Networks’ unit, these plastic white shoes provide a form of double-layered ‘site’ to respond to. At first, they are an object upon which an artwork may be situated, a wearable mass-produced version of the white cube gallery space. But at the same time, they can move through and within a space or geographical location, given their function as footwear. With this in mind, students have been asked to create work for this site-within-site in any way they find interesting and meaningful.
Whilst some crocs will be rendered unwearable through this process, others will be activated through performance and walking. With 103 students participating in the workshop, the range of works produced respond to varying characteristics of the site, from the materiality and from, to the global distribution and now-iconic status in the fashion world. There is also no doubt those who will reject any given or implied meaning embedded within this site. The exhibition takes place in a shop unit in Dajing Village, with works spilling out and into the streets. Named temporarily as the ‘Museum of Modern Shopping’, this shop unit will present a series of exhibitions and events connected with the architecture – physical, virtual, psychological, economic, social – of shopping, over the coming 6 months.
