Digital Asia
With the assistance of Cornell alumnus and Goldsen Advisory Board member Shin-Yi Yang (PhD 2006), Goldsen has pursued a fifteen-year effort of creative affiliations with Asian institutions and artists, leaving the Archive with the most diverse and unique collection of Asian video art, new media, and artistic ephemera in the West. Goldsen’s first institutional partnership was with the Dongtai Academy of Art, Beijing, China, directed by Wen Pulin, to digitize and house 360 hours of rare videotape documenting Chinese contemporary art and video from 1985-2002.The Archive’s most significant archive from a single artist is the Yao Jui-Chung Archive of Contemporary Taiwanese art. Goldsen hosts the A. D. White Professorship-at-Large of Xu Bing, and houses the digital archives of artists from Korea, China, Taiwan, and Japan, with additional works and documentation from Southeast Asia.
A unique archival venture between the Goldsen Achive and the Dongtai Academy of Art, Beijing, China, directed by Wen Pulin. In 2004, the Archive and the Cornell Library's Wason East Asia Collections engaged in one of the first extensive international video preservation projects by digitizing Wen Pulin's collection of 360 hours of videotape that documents Chinese contemporary art, installation, performance, video, and rock ‘n' roll from 1985-2002. Shot and preserved by Wen Pulin, the tapes provide rare evidence of the events that helped shape Chinese contemporary art, such as the Great Earthquake performances on the Great Wall in 1988 and the 1989 China/Avant-Garde Exhibition, whose closure by the government helped to catalyze the Tiananmen Square incident. Footage from that period is followed by invaluable documents of installations, concerts, and artist interviews during the period in the 1990s when international art markets opened themselves up to Chinese contemporary art. The Archive includes extensive footage of Chinese rock ‘n' roll concerts.
The online catalog of holdings, which are all available for viewing in the Kroch Library, includes links (in red) to abbreviated segments available to Cornell users over the internet: http://asia.library.cornell.edu/Wen/archive.php.
Yao Jui-Chung, “Heaven,” from catalog, Taiwan, 2001. Gift of the artist. Part of the Yao Jui-Chung Archive of Contemporary Taiwanese Art.
A unique archive of the artists’ work and publications, digital files of Taiwanese performance and video art, press and ephemera, plus 8,000 digitized images of Taiwanese contemporary art exhibition invitation cards since 1992.
Wen Pulin, Action in China: Performance Art from the 1980s to 1990s, catalog. China, 2002. Gift of Wen Pulin.
Song Dong, in Wen Pulin Archive of Chinese Avant-Garde Art, DVD. China, 1996.
Various artists, Vital Signals: Early Japanese Video Art (1968-83), DVD. Japan, 2010.
A survey of the vibrant, interdisciplinary video art scene in Japan in the 1960s and '70s, featuring sixteen works by fifteen Japanese artists, among them key figures such as Takahiko Iimura, Mako Idemitsu and Toshio Matsumoto. The DVD is accompanied by a 100-page, bilingual (English and Japanese) illustrated printed catalog.
Xu Bing, Book from the Ground, book. China, 2014.
A graphic novel composed entirely of symbols and icons that are universally understood, by the Goldsen Archive’s A. D. White Professor-at-Large and Chinese artist, Xu Bing. Xu Bing spent seven years gathering materials and arranging thousands of pictograms to construct this readable story without words, an account of twenty-four hours in the life of “Mr. Black,” a typical urban white-collar worker. The protagonist's day begins with wake-up calls from a nearby bird and his bedside alarm clock; it continues through tooth-brushing, coffee-making, TV-watching, and cat-feeding. He commutes to his job on the subway, works in his office, ponders various fast-food options for lunch, waits in line for the bathroom, daydreams, sends flowers, socializes after work, goes home, kills a mosquito, goes to bed, sleeps, and gets up the next morning to do it all over again.
Chineseness: Xu Bing, DVD. China, 2013. Gift of Shin-Yi Yang and Jing & Kai, Ltd.
Documentary series by Discovery Channel Asia on the evolution of Chinese contemporary art as seen through the example of Xu Bing.
USB Drive of Kim Hung Su’s works, South Korea, 2014.
Various artists, Beautiful New World: Contemporary Visual Culture from Japan, catalog. Japan, 2007. Private collection.
Digital China, special issue 29 of Neural: hacktivism, e-music, new media art. Italy,2007.