X_Field Beijing: Jumping City

RESEARCH BACKGROUND: 'X_Field Beijing' is a curatorial collaboration that facilitated cultural exchange between creative practitioners in Beijing, Seoul and Melbourne. It aspired to create and define an international community of scholarship between practitioners from art, architecture and design. The rationale for this project was to support the fledgling practice-based design research community in Beijing. RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION: The added theme, 'Jumping Cities', is a critique of the rapid development in Beijing where citizens currently can only expect to live in their homes for five years before they are slated for re-development. This bottom-up critique of Beijing urbanism is rare in China and the social and political agendas were made more powerful by the performative and physical works by invited media artists and industrial designers. The 'archived' X_Field work foregrounded sympathetic social, political and urban agendas from the Seoul and Melbourne practitioners and to demonstrate the common ground and nuanced cultural differences. RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE: The project received funding from VESKI (Victorian State Government: $20,000 for four exhibitions). It was exhibited by invitation in CU Space Gallery, the first architecture gallery in China in the prestigious 798 Art Zone. The exhibition and symposium were widely peer-reviewed in the Chinese architectural journal Urban Flux vol 20 (2011). As a result of this exhibition, two of the invited artists curated 'Always on My Mind: Home' at the Museum of Art at Seoul National University with significant international grant funding, and invited three other X_Field practitioners to participate.