The speakers'comments overwhelmingly, if not overtly, confirmed that the mainland art scene is riddled with hype, greed and corruption-both practically and spiritually-and that the time has come to clean house. art asia pacific issue 64, 2009
Welcome to the once official website of LIPF !
歡迎瀏覽LIPF連州國際攝影年展昔日官方網站
Why are you reading this? 為何你要瀏覽此網站 ?
The Festival failed to pay salaries for the 2007 event. Demands for payment have been generously ignored by the people who were in charge. 此攝影展打從2007年起拖欠工資，而負責人亦未有就此事進行解決及負上所有相關責任。
Last year the suggested new theme of the fourth edition of LIPF “My Money and I – Photography in the Midst of Greed and Ignorance” finally interrupted the silence of the organizing company Chuanyu Media including Tomo Art Centre Beijing (formerly known as Hanyu Media Ltd and Hanron Media Ltd) and encouraged a response. Not to claims of unpaid salaries though but to the usage of the domain name lipf.cn. A simply rude and uninformed solemn statement was published on their current website.
Here is what happened.
In its four year history LIPF has been present online using three domain names. (LIPF2005 www.lzphotofestival.com, LIPF2006/2007 www.lipf.cn, LIPF 2008/2009 www.lipf-foto.com) The domain names were registered in the name of the organizing company, not the festival. The 2005 domain name was cancelled under Chinese regulations with the renaming of the company from Hanron Media to Hanyu Media. Hanyu Media then made no effort in paying the annual fee to renew the domain name lipf.cn in 2008 but instead chose to register a new one. As a result www.lipf.cn became available again and could be purchased by anyone. This is standard procedure. Domain names cannot be held hostage by companies or individuals as suggested by the organizing company.
誰是負責人 ？
Who was in charge?
After statements like “I’m very poor” made by both Duan Yuting from China and Wei Han Chan from Canada and a passing around of responsibilities among the two, an entire year passed during which both ignored the matter entirely.
What to do?
While it’s easy to blame the foreigner, this website in its current form only exists due to the denial of the organizing company to pay salaries and its inability to deal with the situation. Naturally, it does not reflect nicely on Lianzhou nor the festival but that is something the organizing company had more than year time to avoid but chose to ignore. It should be fairly simple for a professional company like Chuanyu Media Ltd (formerly known as Hanyu Media Ltd and Hanron Media Ltd), to provide proof of payment of salary. This could be done for example by presenting copies of salary pay cheques or bank transfers.
Why is it so difficult to pay people for their work?
The Lianzhou government generously sponsors the festival with millions of RMB every year. If statements like “I’m very poor” are anything to go by, the question of where the money went that was allocated for salary payments remains unanswered. Was it accidentally spent for something else?
As both Duan Yuting from China and Wei Han Chan from Canada had to explain themselves to the local authorities in Lianzhou in regards to this matter one has to wonder if friendly faces and creative story telling is simply enough to allow them to go on like nothing happened.
As the festival has so much to offer, greed, ignorance and attitude do prevail. And in a grand finger pointing gesture ‘lipf style’ one can only ……… hope and urge the organizing company to pay salaries and cease all illegal acts as soon as possible, and in fact do resort to Chinese labour law!
Related Links
http://hk.youtube.com/watch?v=em-FyhSjnvU
http://hk.youtube.com/watch?v=m3MHptWvC-s
http://hk.youtube.com/watch?v=EuAVgWJ28Hw
http://hk.youtube.com/watch?v=FcIszzV-WrY
如要查詢有關昔日連州國際攝影展詳情， 請傳送電郵至 dumped@lipf.cn 而非投稿人或主辦單位。而如需查詢今屆攝影展資料，則可瀏覽visit www.lipf-photo.com
Feel free to contact the now rather unpopular ex-festival contributers and organisers at dumped@lipf.cn and if you were actually looking for information about last year’s festival
you may want to visit www.lipf-photo.com
The domain name www.lipf.cn is now for sale! |
