[excerpt from CNBC] “If you’re a white guy in China and you own a suit — Congratulations! You’re hired. There’s an odd trend brewing there, where companies hire fake executives from the U.S. and other Western nations to attend events, give speeches and generally just to give that appearance in the community and in the business world of that connection with the western world.

‘I think it says a lot about the business culture here,’ said Mitch Moxley, a freelance writer living in Beijing who was hired to be a fake businessman for a high-tech company building a factory in Dongying, five hours south of Beijing. ‘Face is hugely important in China, and having foreigners in suits I guess gives some credibility to the companies. You’d be amazed how often this happens.’ Moxley said he, along with five other guys, was hired to be a “quality-control expert” for $1,000 a week, though it was made clear to him at the time of hiring that they wouldn’t be doing any quality control. The job would entail attending some dinners, going to a ceremony and touring the factory once a day. The rest of the time, he and the other “executives” sat in fly-ridden office, where they slept, read magazines and joked around.”

[In process / from Statement] This is a solo exhibition that takes the form of a group exhibition in which works evoke the atmosphere of the work of an absent self, but the show will not contain literal illustrations of my oeuvre or specific aspects of my practice. By shifting the spotlight from a well-established format to related artistic practices, this exhibition not only seeks to redistribute agency, but also engender a critical interrogation of the format of the ‘solo show’.

Many of the works in the exhibition are minor interventions or poetic gestures, which will ultimately be “distributed” as rumours or linger as hearsay. Through their ephemeral and minimalist characters, these works share an affinity with my way of working, but a deeper reading hopefully reveals deviation of, variation in relation to or even confrontation with my standard practice.

My question: is documentation the only valid means of reviving or representing once-only occurrences? Separately, there is an attempt to interrogate the nature of a “real” encounter with performances on a personal level or in a particular situation. And still other pieces will question the meaning of minor interventions in an institutional context and in the public sphere, and explore the limits of political efficacy when their singular gestures are infused with a broader social meaning.

I watch these stars for another moment, my throat tightens; I write “21h00 swell increasing. Heart labouring and taking water on her decks. Battened down the coolies for the night. Barometer falling.” I pause, and press the pen, “nothing whatever will come of it.”

But I resolutely close my entry “every appearance of a typhoon coming on.”

There were more of you, underfed, agile and sly.
Authority was no more – you were altogether almighty
where you were. And mechanised – coated
in a rusty scabbiness, from the old metal.

You ate war. You knew: whose aeroplanes were overhead,
what type of bomb . . . you said you had code names for yourselves
gleaned from a half-burnt history book. Who was the Jew
amongst you – who understood Russian? Verbissen you called him
but his code name was Titian. After the war
he became a metalsmith of sorts. One day
with a whitehot iron he burnt
the Star of David into his arm,
lest he ever forget.

I bristled, now the apprentice
to nail the every world to its sentence.

David handed me
a copy of Heaney’s ‘Nerthus’.

I read.
From Heaney-soil, that concrete dark,

an unseen ash-fork staked in bog:
my first portents of a winter north.

I had heard the name
but not Heaney’s Great Chain of Verbs.

I stall. And can not fathom
the quiet mesh of kesh and loaning

that lull and push of middle-voice
that verb say

the long-grained never static
of the poem’s non-finite aesthetic.

And then you were gone

Even in that incapable state, however, I recognised a lazy passenger standing before me: nautically clad in a suit of shaggy blue, with a wool hat. But I was too imbecile, although I knew it to be he, to separate him from his dress; and tried to call him, I remember, the pilot. After another interval of total unconsciousness, I found he had gone, and recognised another figure in his place. It seemed to wave and fluctuate before me as though I saw it in an unsteady mirror; but I knew it for my father; and such was the cheerful influence of his face, that I tried to smile: yes, even then I tried to smile. I saw by his gestures that he addressed me; but it was a long time before I could make out that he remonstrated again my standing up to my knees in water – as I was; of course I don’t know why. I tried to thank him, but couldn’t. I could only point to my boots – or wherever I supposed my boots to be – and said in a plaintive voice, “rubber soles”: at the same time endeavouring, I was told later, to sit down in the pool.

Finding that I was quite insensible, and for the time a near maniac, he gently led me below.

You from Britain, take Venus,
And share it with the Germans and the Boers.
(You whites-who-do-not-know-how-to-share-anything
Learn to share it with the Boers and the Germans).

I will hold on to the June star,
That group of seven stars,
Is the star by which I count my years now,
I count the years of being a hunter,
I count the years of adulthood,
I can go on and on,
but here I will stop.

ek wens ek kon opstaan soos gister
gaan was, aantrek, gaan werk soos gister
maar
vandag is ’n ander gister
vandag is alles wat mooi is lelik
en alles wat lelik is ek
miskien is môre beter
as ek net deur die gevaar
van vandag
kan kom

Here’s what they did say:

“Just want to feel loved”

“For the thrill”

“Unstable home life”

“To escape the mundane”

“To boost the ego”

“To avoid costly divorces”

“To lavish my hard earned money on someone”

“I’m entitled to it” (!!!!)

“Because I can”

“Peer pressure” (wtf?)

Obviously though, perhaps I’m just not reading between the lines. Maybe the longer version of the Goldman Sachs employee’s response “just want to feel loved” is “just want to feel loved; wouldn’t have to B my L on some T’s that don’t belong to my W if the public would stop hating on me…” Regardless of your decision to d** your wic* in someone strange, take heart! You no longer have to hide it from your colleagues. Everybody does it and they want you to talk about it:

Said one respondent: “Where I work, many of the tops dogs are open about their affairs. Having a mistress is like having a flash car.”

Bloody hell.

No, no, no…Gary, pivot a little in your chair. Yes, right there. Hold it! See? In the mirror? My tie is metallic pink. A power tie. A tie not to be trifled with. Yours is just bloody salmon-colored. And you know where salmon go? They swim against the current and they die. Is that the message you want to send? Really? Why do I even waste my time with you?