1989 Was a Watershed Year
Two Lifeworlds, One Double Question Man
In the East-West Mirror Phase of 1989
Jaspar LAU au Kin Wah
History is like the lake of mahjong. If it can prove that you are a criminal then it also can prove your innocence. If it can prove that you are a rapist, then it also can prove that you are a lover. The tragedy for human being is: that the environment around us cannot prove that we are its rapists. Therefore, we can never become its lovers.
Wu Shanzhuan, Today No Water ― The Power of Ignorance[1]
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IJust in the short space of a During the few years following years in China spanning the period between following the rise of the “‘New Wave of ‘85”’ art movement in Chinaand the seminal events of 1989, Wu Shanzhuan had already clearly developed, as art critic Li Xianting put it, “‘a firm creative grasp of the Chinese cultural climate.”’ It is ironic that, given the exhibition slogan of “‘No U Turn’, ‘China/Avant-garde’, held in Beijing in February 1989, was turned itself into a sort kind of retrospective platform. Wu Shanzhuan, however, had no interest in exhibiting his past work for the occasion. Instead, on the opening day of the exhibition, he insisted on setting up a stand right in the lobby of the gallery where he hawked fresh fresh shrimps trucked in from his hometown of Zhoushan. Not long thereafter, in the wake of the events at Tien’anmen during the spring and summer of 1989, Wu Shanzhuan departed for the West, and thus disappeared for a time from the contemporary art scene in mainland China. In the meantime, the term “‘Political Pop’” gained wide currency as a result of the “‘China’s New Art Post-1989”’ exhibition, (which opened in Hong Kong in 1993 and subsequently travelled internationally). Wu’s work, included in the exhibition under the Political Pop label, consequently became trapped within this identification. While it certainly can be said that Wu’s art helped to inspire the Political Pop movement, his cultural vision goes far beyond it.
After leaving China, Wu lived briefly in Iceland, subsequently settling in Hamburg, Germany. Although during this period he was labelled as an “‘overseas Chinese artist”’, it was in fact not long after settling in Europe that he created “‘Red Humour International”’; a conceptual banner that tweaked his previously conceived notions and gave them a global dimension, creating a comparative understanding between East and West. It was also at this time that Wu became a close collaborator of {with???} the Icelandic artist, Inga Svala Thórsdóttir. The Western art world, regrettably, was largely unfamiliar with Wu’s ‘deficit’ artistic vision, which was born specifically out of the condition of scarcity (“cultural and material alike) in China. The East’s eagerness to be accepted quickly into the Western mainstream lead many artists to compromise by accommodating the Western Orientalist perspective, yet a critique of the West has not been thoroughly discussed. As a result, Wu Shanzhuan’s enlightening vision for both the East and the West suffered from serious critical neglect. Because of the aura of humour surrounding his work, people tended to read the ‘exoteric’ rather than the ‘esoteric’ message in his art.
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Even from his earliest period, Wu Shanzhuan had a strong tendency to incorporate the (external) forms of readymade (pre-existing) objects from the non-artistic arena into his work. This tendency was in large part derived from an appropriation of the German philosopher Karl Popper’s “‘Theory of World 3”’, which Wu came into contact with during the period of intellectual openness that characterised China in the 1980s. From the charged colour spectrum of red, white and black to the logographic forms of Chinese characters, from big character posters to the representative objects and behaviours of the “‘Big Yes Big No”’ (Da Shi Da Fei) political line, throughout his artmaking Wu tracked the course of China’s emergence from the crimson sequelae of the Cultural Revolution into the period of open-market reforms. In particular, Wu used the synthetic language of his “red/deficit characters” to characterize the essential deficit of meaning in the ideological rhetoric of Chinese socialism (bright, big and shining/false, big and empty), and at the same time to expose the complete inability of officialdom’s petrified policy-making systems to keep up with the booming myriad forms of self-motivated economic activities emerging during this period.
In 1986 Wu had written a short text entitled “‘A World 3 Theory Concerning the Expansion of the Territory of Painting”’; a crucial document in understanding his artistic philosophy. In 1994 the artist revisited this text, replacing all the every mention of the word “‘painting”’ wordings with the word “‘art”’, thereby reaffirming and expanding the interpretive power of the text. In Popper’s “‘Theory of World 3”’, World 1 refers to the objective world of material things, World 2 to the subjective world, and World 3 to the world of objective products of the human mind, which once produced become detached from human subjectivity and attained an independent existence (hence as -if “‘discovered”’). Wu Shanzhuan considers the state of the “‘forms”’ imprinted in World 1 by “‘things”’ of World 3 to therefore be “‘at large”’ (since the otherworldly idea that once lent the object its original existence is autonomous, its material “‘copy”’ in our world cannot be “‘reined”’).
In his early works, Wu Shanzhuan regards the logographic forms of Chinese characters as productss of World 3. Relocating them in the concrete Chinese context, they highlight the deficit of meaning in their usage.[2] Like the political propaganda slogans painted on street walls, the overloading of meaning onto words reduces them instead to pure gestural signifiers that follow the official political line. This phenomenon is similar to the situation that existed in communist Eastern Europe, exemplified in an anecdote writer Václav Havel relates about the manager of a fruit and vegetable shop “‘who placed in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “‘Workers of the world, unite!”.’”’[3] In Wu Shanzhuan’s work Swearing in front Front of the flag Flag with false False Chinese characters Characters, (1988), the discrepancy between its “‘Big Yes Big No”’ rhetoric and the senseless words is clearly demonstrated. Art historian Boris Groys’ observation of how the artistic practice of Soviet artists was imbued with a bureaucratic (rather than an individual) language, finds echo in the “‘rigid forms (for form’s sake)”’ of Wu’s work “The Meeting.”[4] Wu’s stamping of his official chops onto everyday objects and vegetables (such as cabbage), or the displacement of the temporal and linguistic context of the “‘Today No Water”’ notification, both create a kind of détournement (or absurdity).
Wu’s “red/deficit characterss,” is relatesd both to aspects of politics and of daily life: these ; they are very much interrelated because they are both “‘hangovers”’ of the planned economy. In his “‘Daily-Life-Arts(-ism)”’ philosophy, Wu turneds the language of doctrinism into a language that “‘promotes daily life’.” In this shift, Wu is sharply delineated the cultural (political) factors involved in the economic development:, for example, seeing how the value of a Renminbi banknote is guaranteed by the faith in “‘the solidarity of the workers, farmers and solidiers”’, reveals a legitimacy crisis of the reforming political economy.[5] The 1988 photos of “‘standing and falling”’, “‘borrowing and lending”’, “‘buying and selling”’ (as a series) has a deep symbolic significance as an exemplary demonstration of the ethics of fair trade, and even of good deeds beyond the sole pursuit of commercial interest. While Political Pop merely juxtaposes political and consumerist symbols side by side on the canvas, in Wu’s “Selling Shrimp,” the artist in a sense actualizes an economic activity, turning the art space into a real market space, hence revealing a far deeper understanding of one’s own (commoditized) condition.
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Socialism was fundamentally a revolutionary proposition put forth in the West as a response to early capitalism. Consequently, China’s attempt to take a shortcut through the stages of social development posited by Marx has proved to be a failure. Materialism ironically created a deficit of material (goods), while idealism turned out to be less than ideal (as compared with capitalism). The insistence on taking a “‘socialist path with Chinese characteristics”’ in truth constituted a reversion to capitalist society; thus China’s contemporary time-space displacement has become ever more dramatic. Even though the Tien’anmen democratic movements of 1989 ended in bloody suppression, in their wake they helped to bring about a wave of democratic reforms in the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. It was just at this time that Wu Shanzhuan, with his “red/deficit character” artistic worldview, emergeding fromout of the social context of China and, walked straight into the completely alien life of the West. Yet, quite unexpectedly, out of this additional layer of displacement, Wu successfully made use of his experiences of displacement to created the unique double vision of “Red Humour International.”
In an age nearly given over to a belief in the end of ideology (the triumph of the market), a reiteration of “Red Humour International” ― calling to mind the Communist Third International ― doubtlessly demonstrates a kind of untimely humour. But as Li Xianting has said of described new Chinese art in his article “‘Departing from National Ideology”’ (Zouchu guojia Guojia yYishi xXingtai), “‘What is political about it is just that it is apolitical”’.;[6] Yet more and more Wwestern intellectuals point out a reverse concern. Theorist Slavoj Žižek, for example, queries: “‘wWhat if the political gesture par excellence, at its purest, is precisely the gesture of separating the Political from the non-Political, of excludsing some domains from the Political?”’. [7] In his eyes, “‘the very gesture of stepping out of ideology pulls us back into it.”’[8] Exactly because of the displacement that occurs between East and West, the ideological critique launched in Wu Shanzhuan’s artistic vision of the “red/deficit character” remains effective and even timely in a Western context.
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The first work Wu produced in the West was “Selling Oneself at Large”, conceived and enacted in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1990. In this work, Wu walked to the local black market with a sign hanging from his neck stating that he was selling himself for the daily market price (with an additional discount). By positing a human being as a saleable commodity, the work can be said to be the Wu’s first response to thea sudden confrontation with the full-blown market economics, which resulted in a “‘wholesale”’ personal surrender (especially as compared to Wu’s later works, which traded labour for earnings). With Selling Oneself at Large Wu creates a depiction of the extreme contrast between the powerful market system of the First -World and a powerless individual of the Third -World (categorized as “‘developing countries”’). In the marketplaces of the West, all things become commoditized, and everything wears a price tag; at the most extreme end, even people are not excepted. As sociologist Georg Simmel suggests, the all-pervasive money “‘is the equivalent for anything and everything”’, measuring each “‘with merciless objectivity”’.[9]
Wu Shanzhuan soon came to realize that nothing better demonstrated Western market economics and yet was closer to daily life than the consumer heaven of the supermarket. In his work “Red Humour International Supermarket,” Wu covered photographs of shelved products in a particular supermarket with red paint. By marking everything in red, Wu created a strange space in which a wealth of material goods was contained within uniform packaging (or perhaps a uniform brand). This space corresponded partly to the East and the West, but fit in to neither. However, instead of viewing it as positing a third, alternative choice, this work can rather be viewed as a criticism that aims to kill two birds with one stone. With the uniform application of red paint, Wu addresses to the uniformity imposed by ideology. As such, he points out that by putting a price tag on all things, the Western market in fact is no more than another kind of hegemonic system in which market economics and money are in total command.
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Drawing from his experience of using red/deficit characters to highlight the ideological excesses of Chinese society, Wu Shanzhuan saw a role he could play as an artist working within the context of a Western society characterized by anwith abundant material wealth and a recessionding of ideological critique. In her Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, Susan Buck Morse not only characterizes both the ideological propaganda of socialism and the commercial advertisements of capitalism as empty promises in which no one believes anymore, but she also attributes the failure of socialist imagery to the fact that “‘because it mirrored the dreamworlds of capitalism too faithfully.”’[10] From this perspective, in the absence of a foundation of both popular culture and a consumer market, the positioning of Chinese Political Pop art as a “‘commodity”’ bears more similarity than difference to the empty political discourse.
Conversely, before his departure to the West, Wu Shanzhuan had already embarked on began promoted his concept of “Userism” and “‘Ddaily-Llife-Aarts”(-ism)”’, and allowed his works to assumed the role of commodity (as in “Selling Shrimps”). In this way he touched on the political implications of a more fundamental integration of art and life. If the genealogy of contemporary art really suggests that Marcel Duchamp paved the separate ways for Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol, then Wu Shanzhuan, far more than Political Pop, was in line with Beuys’ counter-reaction to Duchamp’s “‘Golden Touch”’ nomination of everyday objects as “‘readymade”’ artworks, even though Wu and Thórsdóttir used a statement of the most banal common -sense ― that “‘Most people (owners of things) choose not to be artists”’ ― to refute Beuys’ dictum ‘that ““Everybody is an artist”.”’