FORGET ART IS an independent organization established in 2009 by the artist Ma Yongfeng. Doubling as a loosely defined creative collective, it came to notice after engineering the project “Location: Dragon Fountain Bathhouse” in September 2010. For this project, participating artists adopted a strategy of “microintervention”— launching artfully insinuated threats and acts of resistance against specified pre-existing spaces, while their interventions themselves faced the danger of disappearance. It was precisely this duality that converted the Dragon Fountain Bathhouse, located in the Beijing art district of Caochangdi, into a site ripe for exploration of the boundary between art and life— a place where one could consider the conditional significance of artistic practice all in terms of the paradoxical relationship between the visible and the invisible. This year, Forget Art’s new project “Guerilla Living Syndrome” attempts to break free from the framework of the typical artistic project, moving towards a new social model of “micro-practice.”

Meanwhile, Forget Art moves forward with yet another round of experimentation. This specially commissioned LEAP portfolio, entitled “Save Amateurism!” embodies more powerfully than ever a kind of “guerrilla” spirit— a degree of flexibility and agility, a situational mode of action. And yet each participating artist approaches the problem from a distinctly unique perspective. In their ultimate display, on-site photographs of each work are randomly paired with quotes from different artists— indicative of and corresponding to Forget Art’s aesthetic temperament, principle of practice, and mode of reflection: all born out of engagement with the tenuous boundary between art and life.