Institute for Provocation, the Independent Art Space That Gives City Life a Fragile Vitality | Great Little Studios

"We're all young people, so it's not really that big a favor — we just need this kind of atmosphere"

The most recent event notice from Institute for Provocation was headlined Simon Wald-Lasowski Artist Talk & Farewell to Heizhima Hutong. The description read: "Institute for Provocation sincerely invites you to attend Simon Wald-Lasowski's artist talk this Saturday (March 30). At the same time, due to circumstances beyond its control, Institute for Provocation will soon be bidding farewell to No. 13 Heizhima Hutong."

Institute for Provocation is an art curatorial platform. It moved into Heizhima Hutong in Beijing in 2011, but its predecessor, Theatre In Motion, had been organizing art projects since 2008. Back then the only people running events were the architect Chen Shuyu and Els Silvrants-Barclay, a sinologist from Belgium. Most projects were exchanges between European and Chinese artists, with a focus on body performance and work that intervened in social space.

The name "Institute for Provocation" came into use in 2010. In 2011 the people running it stumbled on this three-courtyard siheyuan and rented it from the Ministry of Coal Industry. One of the main rooms became a shared work area; the room next to it was extended into a two-bedroom apartment where artists in residence could stay short-term. Sesame Space, beside the apartment, had been a boiler room, left empty after the hutong's heating system was changed. They saw that its exposed beams were high enough for an exhibition hall, and turned it into what is now Sesame Space.

The courtyard is more than 300 years old. It first belonged to the governor-general of Sichuan; during the Republican era a foreign minister lived there; after 1949 it came under the Ministry of Coal Industry, which gives it something of the feel of a compound for employees' families. So besides Institute for Provocation, plenty of ordinary residents live in the courtyard too. The Institute's events have always been open to the public, and sometimes the neighbors get curious and come by to look at an exhibition or join in.

The space has almost no visible signage. The address in an exhibition listing will tell you which courtyard in the hutong it occupies. For a first-time visitor, the stop-and-start soundtrack of a video work drifting across the courtyard is sometimes what points the way to Sesame Space.

Over ten years, Institute for Provocation has run 45 artist-in-residence projects and held many nonprofit screenings, talks, and reading salons. From performance to installation art, from interventions in public space to sharing anthropology and sociology, the place always seems able to hold a wider range of cultural and artistic activity than you would expect.

One thing that defines how it works: it does not stop at helping artists show finished work, but trades ideas with them as a collaborator. And it does not work only with established artists; it is just as open to young ones.

Hu Wei, one of the people running the Institute, once put it this way: "We wanted to build a platform where artist friends and art lovers could gather and where discussion could happen. The members running it are learning too — constantly refining the theory, which complements the artistic practice."

From December 29, 2018 to January 3, 2019, Dennis de Bel's exhibition "Ease Up a Bit" — Squatting Between Frequency, Facial Recognition, and Feces was shown at Sesame Space.

The work grew out of the AI-controlled toilet-paper dispensers that Beijing's Temple of Heaven Park installed in 2017 to limit how much paper visitors took. Dennis spent six months in residence in Beijing making it; by the time it went on show, every automated dispenser in the park had disappeared.

So he exhibited his own "knockoff facial-recognition toilet-paper dispenser" and invited visitors to try the exchange between human and machine for themselves. He wanted the piece to ask "how legacy technology, ideology, language, and code have together produced our current technological condition, and how our bodies are separated by layer upon layer of opaque technological curtains."

Song Yi, another of the people running the Institute, said "help" is the wrong word for how the collaborations work, because the word is too heavy. "We're all young people, so it's not really that big a favor — we just need this kind of atmosphere." Many young artists' work, she said, doesn't have to wait for the right moment to be shown, because it is only by being shown, again and again, that the maker can adjust.

On March 1, 2019, the young artist Kou Ta's solo project 《丿皿》 opened at Sesame Space.

The white wall nearest the door carried the video. It begins with a doctor bleeding a patient, then follows the forms blood takes inside and outside the body. Kou Ta narrated it herself, drawing metaphor after metaphor from those forms until the images become a kind of symbol, mostly for the relationship between the movement of blood and death.

Song Yi's assessment: "The strength is that the artist handled her own sensitive material pretty well, and she had good control of the texture of the materials in the video."

Kou Ta is not only the maker but also, at present, one of the Institute's staff. As for the weaknesses, Song Yi puts them down to inexperience: "Because she's a young artist, she has her own metaphors and her own understanding, but some of the feelings attached to them aren't especially clear yet." She will wait until the show closes before raising any of this with Kou Ta. For the Institute, that the work gets made matters more than what exactly gets made — the problem is real, but it is one the maker should solve on her own, in the next piece.

The Institute's staff is now mainly five people — Hu Wei, Dai Xiyun, Song Yi, Kou Ta, and Cai Xinyuan — coming from video, curation, writing, and other backgrounds. Hu Wei said the place now works more like a collective, with no deliberate division of labor: whoever has a part they want to take on, and a concrete idea for it, raises it, and then everyone talks through how to push the project along.

Among the work by young Chinese artists, Hu Wei said quite a few projects stayed with him. Take the Institute's collaboration with Ma Jianfeng in early 2018: Ma doesn't paint on conventional materials, and once they learned that, they found it very interesting.

It was Chinese New Year, and Sesame Space happened to have a gap in its schedule, so the Institute gave the gap to Ma Jianfeng. For that stretch, Sesame Space became his studio. He worked directly in the exhibition hall, and the work that came out of it had a strong sense of process; he also tried video, which he had never worked in before. Hu Wei said, "What we hope is that artists here can put down some of their baggage and do the things they've thought about but never actually done. That's what makes it interesting."

Between August 2018 and January 2019, the Australian artist Tessa Zettel ran an "informal" reading group at the Institute on the theme of extinction.

It met 10 times. Zettel picked the researcher Thom van Dooren's Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edges of Extinction and the essay collection Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death, and Generations as the main reading, and used the group to work through questions around the "sixth global mass extinction." Over the 10 sessions, the artist and her readers went to Suzhou Zoo to "visit" the Yangtze giant softshell turtle, of which three are left in the world, and the endangered South China tiger, and to Nanhaizi Park in Beijing to see the Père David's deer.

Looking back on it, Hu Wei said Zettel writes well and knows a great deal of critical theory, and could supply firsthand material directly. For exactly that reason, many readers found it hard to get inside. At the start attendance churned — people came a few times and stopped — but because the group ran so long it eventually found a steady core, and the last few discussions went surprisingly deep.

Hu Wei said, "What makes it different from scientific research is that she wanted to find, in plants and animals, the parts where the human and the mythic come together, and in that way give artists something to feed on. That's also different from plain environmentalism."

There is no "standard" for which artists the Institute works with. When a project comes to them on its own, finding it interesting is more or less an instinct; if you insist on something measurable, seriousness and sincerity are what the Institute weighs most. Any work that carries those two qualities, without too obvious a taste for the exotic and without an outrageous production cost, will be considered. "It's not that we run some rigorous screening and pick the best one at the end," Song Yi said. Beijing has plenty of spaces that show work already selected and polished, she said, and far fewer that can take in artists' tentative, experimental work — and the more important thing is to get those ideas out into the world first.

From July 9 to July 14, 2017, the artist Johan Kleinjan's exhibition Precision Demolition was shown at Sesame Space. Johan came out of picture books; over four months in residence in Beijing he walked the city's hutongs and neighborhoods and drew more than a hundred pictures of people and buildings of every kind.

Alongside the drawings, he built an architectural installation for the show. His stay in Beijing coincided with the campaign to tear down shopfronts and wall up the holes. He combined that with a visit to an old Beijing "Communist-era building," built a scaled-down high-rise inside Sesame Space, and brought it down in a performance at the opening. The exhibition preview explained the piece this way: "This performative gesture finally realizes the precision demolition he dreamed of carrying out as a child, and at the same time shows the artist's observations of Beijing today."

More than influence, what Sesame Space's existence amounts to is a kind of vitality.

The Institute's main operating money comes from art grants that support foreign artists coming to work in China. That income covers the residencies without much trouble, but any extra project means going out to find extra funding. The other difficulty, shared by every independent art space, is that in China such a space has no formal status.

"Put it plainly: you're an unlicensed product with no standards and no manufacturer, or you have no status at all, and that means you run into limits everywhere." Nonprofit spaces exist abroad, Song Yi said, but whether ordinary people in China recognize the thing depends first on there being a policy for it — "whether that policy is meant to regulate you or to support you."

In effect this forces an art space to pick an identity somewhere between a state institution and a commercial one. Becoming a state institution is basically impossible, Song Yi said, and becoming a commercial one would mean chasing money constantly and being pulled into the rules of commercial competition. "That runs against the whole point of a nonprofit space, so there's that kind of social pressure." And having no status leaves an independent art space fragile, unable to plan far ahead.

The most pressing problem right now, though, is a notice from the property management company: all public-rental housing inside Beijing's Second Ring Road is being reclaimed. So the small courtyard rented eight years ago has to say goodbye on March 30. The show at Sesame Space, Xie Yi Solo Project: V-Ray Chengzhu — A Concrete Rehearsal, was the Institute's last exhibition in Heizhima Hutong; in it, Xie Yi used painting to look at labor in artistic practice.

They will definitely not look for another place inside the Second Ring Road, Song Yi said, because the risk of being cleared out again is too high. But outside the Second Ring it is all commercial storefronts, and the 798 Art District is a bit expensive. Where they will land, nobody yet knows.

"A city can't be all material things and no spiritual life, and spiritual life can't be made up entirely of National Centre for the Performing Arts-type things either. If a city can't give the people living in it a rich inner life, people get sick easily," Song Yi said.

Cover image and all photos courtesy of Institute for Provocation.