Pao-chen Tang Seeing the Forest and the Trees: Art and Ecology in ’s Forest Project

“ an art inspire conservation? Can conservation inspire art?” These questions motivated the formation of the interdisciplinary art Cproject Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet, co-organized in 2003 by the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the conservation organization Rare, based in Washington, DC.1 In 2004, Human/Nature commissioned eight renowned artists to travel to UNESCO- designated World Heritage sites and create works of art in response to their traveling experiences. Xu Bing was one of the eight chosen,2 and he willingly accepted the invitation because the form of the project reminded him of the days when he practiced “delving into life” (shenru shenghuo, 深 入生活), in the 1970s, during the .3 As an artist who has engaged with live animals in the process of his artistic creation since the early 1990s, Xu Bing was most interested in visiting —a land that, in his imagination, was “full of wild animals.”4 Xu Bing’s eventual response, Forest Project (2005–ongoing), however, expressed its main concern not so much in the form of animals as in that of trees. In Xu Bing’s own words, this was because “everything there is related to trees: politics, economics, and the lives of people and animals.”5 Forest Project thus aimed at creating a recursive system that could initiate and sustain processes of afforestation and reforestation.

At first impression, the eco-oriented Forest Project seems distinct from Xu Bing’s creations that famously explore the composition of Chinese characters (, 1987–1991), the communication between the English alphabet and Chinese calligraphy (Introduction to New English Calligraphy, 1994–1996), and the visualization of language (Book from the Ground, 2003–ongoing). Eventually operating on an international scale extending beyond Africa to include Latin America and Asia, Forest Project also seems oblivious to the context of the post–Cultural Revolution world, and Xu Bing’s engagement with that context—an apparent lack of Chineseness on both national and individual levels. While I acknowledge these characteristics of Forest Project, this essay seeks to place Forest Project back into the context of contemporary Chinese art and Xu Bing’s oeuvre and writing. By so doing, I propose that Forest Project in effect reflects Xu Bing’s grappling with, and rethinking of, the function and purpose of contemporary art in relation to ecology and traditional Chinese visual culture. In this respect, Forest Project does not merely illustrate a

86 Vol. 15 No. 1 Xu Bing, Book from the Ground, 2003–ongoing, online project. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

certain political agenda of conservation ecology; rather, it demonstrates how this kind of ecology can be carried out in the very act and process of artistic creation.

A Forest of Networks

Xu Bing, logo for Forest The logo for Forest Project is Project. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. composed of three vectors in dark green that point to one another, mimicking the familiar recycling symbol in the shape of a triangular Möbius strip and framing the characters “XU BING” in the centre In clockwise order from the apex of the triangle, on the surface of each vector is respectively an icon of a man, a symbol of dollar, and a Chinese character for “wood” or “lumber” (mu, metonymically standing in for “tree”)—in oracle bone script. Those familiar with Xu Bing’s work will recall that the recycling symbol, the icon of the man, and the dollar symbol are components of a repertoire of images in his Book from the Ground. The central characters spelling Xu Bing’s name are written in Square Word Calligraphy, Xu Bing’s 1994 self-invented and self-designed writing system that transforms English words into rectangular arrangements that resemble Chinese characters. The use of the ancient oracle bone script also alludes to the processes of relationships between signs and real-life entities in his 2001 artwork The Living Word.

Since its inception in 2005, Forest Project has had four major installments: in the Mount Kenya region, in 2008, in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, , in 2009, in São Paulo, Brazil, in 2012, and in Pingdong County, Taiwan, in 2014. Each installment operated within similar procedural formats. First,

Vol. 15 No. 1 87 Xu Bing, The Living Word, 2001, painted acrylic, fishing line, wood plinth. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

Xu Bing, Forest Project 1 (Kenya), 2008, ink on paper, 146.5 x 341 cm. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

Xu Bing visited the selected regions Xu Bing giving lessons to children in Kenya for Forest and conducted on-site lessons with Project 1, 2008. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. local children between six and twelve years of age on how to depict trees creatively. Subsequently, he selected some of the drawings by the participating children and placed them on an online platform for auction. The funds that the auction collected were used to purchase seedlings for forestation in those regions. Before these drawings went on sale, Xu Bing would would copy, juxtapose, and compile each of them onto a long, scroll-like length of paper. As we will see, Xu Bing’s act of copying is by no means intended to be a faithful imitation; rather, it is his reflection upon and practice of the traditional Chinese aesthetics of linmo (臨摹), the deeper significance of which lies in bettering one’s own artistic development through apprehending the forms of others. Xu Bing’s copies aim to transform and reinterpret the children’s drawings into his own artistic visions and, as I will argue, into social critiques.

The structure of Forest Project mobilizes, configures, and reconfigures the resources of American museums and environmental NGOs, local people and schools, and global auction websites. Xu Bing, who initiated each installment of Forest Project by traveling and teaching, also brought it to a conclusion through copying and juxtaposing the children’s creations. These operational procedures of Forest Project form a structure of virtual circulation bookended by Xu Bing’s physical presence and manual labour.6

88 Vol. 15 No. 1 Xu Bing, Forest Project 1, The Forest Project’s logo thus succinctly visualizes these procedures by 2008, installation view at Museum of Contemporary centering Xu Bing’s name in the middle of the Möbius strip—an emphasis Art, San Diego. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. on his role as the author within the interconnected forces of manpower, money, and art.

There are subtle differences among the four installments of Forest Projects. The lesson primers used in each of the different countries are translated into different languages, and they include drawings produced in previous installments as artistic inspirations. The 2014 primer for the Taiwanese children, for instance, includes some of the Kenyan children’s drawings from 2008. The inclusion of previous drawings introduces a temporal dimension into Forest Project, thus transforming it from a unified structure that keeps on repeating itself into a cumulative example of teamwork that allows two types of communication: communication between Xu Bing and the children and communication among the children in different installments. I will elaborate upon these two types of communication later in this text, especially the first type. Here, however, I want to pause for a moment to think about the structure of repetition, specifically its relationship to a broader discourse surrounding the network of aesthetics in contemporary Chinese art.

In After Art, art historian David Joselit calls for a revision of critical approaches to contemporary art that corresponds to the shift from “an object-based aesthetics in both architecture and art to a network aesthetics premised on the emergence of form from populations of images.”7 In a world with Google and of globalization where images travel and are reformatted and disseminated across borders effortlessly, “network” has become not only a buzzword in theoretical writings but also the ultimate art object, one that artists consciously seek to produce. If art traditionally refers to the processes and results of artistic production, then art with the

Vol. 15 No. 1 89 Xu Bing, Forest Landscape: The Blue and Green World, 2014, ink and colour on paper, 98 x 744 cm. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

90 Vol. 15 No. 1 Vol. 15 No. 1 91 prefix after implies “a life of images in circulation following the moment of production”; “what results after ‘the era of art’,” Joselit goes on to argue, “is a new kind of power that art assembles through its heterogeneous formats. Art links social elites, sophisticated philosophy, a spectrum of practical skills in representation, a mass public, a discourse of attributing meaning to images, financial speculation, and assertions of national and ethic identity.”8 Thus while Xu Bing asks, “Is this thing [Forest Project] that I’m working on a work of art? I can’t tell,” Forest Project embodies, consistent with Joselit’s view, the very condition of contemporary art making.9

When Joselit provides examples of contemporary artistic practices that best exert art’s “new kind of power,” surprisingly, he does not list works by artists working in the digital medium. Instead, Joselit selects works by internationally renowned Chinese artists such as Wang Guangyi and Ai Weiwei—figures who consciously and constantly negotiate their Chinese identities to manipulate and be manipulated by Western discourses. The work of Ai Weiwei offers an interesting point of comparison with Forest Project. According to Joselit, art’s power reaches its peak in Ai Weiwei’s work as Ai Weiwei radically levels his art objects with other components in the network that he lays out: “Ai Weiwei has speculated on the international profile he built through his notoriety in pioneering new exhibition models and working environments for artists in China and his success in the Western art world of museums, galleries, and biennials.”10 Indeed, Ai Weiwei’s work has never simply dwelled on or departed from art objects; rather, it is created through venues of connection and circulation that Joselit lists: exhibitions, museums, galleries, and biennials. Ai Weiwei’s goal is to exploit art’s power and formulate multidirectional forces through a carefully constructed network rather than creating material, discrete objects— indeed, he “speculates on” art’s power.11

When Joselit’s schema is brought to bear in an analysis of Forest Project, the situation gets tricky.12 Even though Joselit’s creative reading of Book from the Sky as a battery that stores “image currencies (image power)” might hold true given the fact that Xu Bing’s later artworks indeed respond to or revise the semiotic vista laid out in Book from the Sky, Joselit’s interpretation does not account for Xu Bing’s act of copying in Forest Project.13 Why would Xu Bing, after formatting a perfect network that connects manpower, money, and art like Ai Weiwei does, physically jump back into the scene and meticulously copy one tree after another by hand? Do not the large- scale paintings that comprise Forest Landscape (especially Forest Landscape: The Blue and Green World which is 98 centimeters high by 744 centimeters wide) directly contradict the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s description of contemporary society as liquid modernity, wherein “[t]raveling light, rather than holding tightly to things deemed attractive for their reliability and solidity—that is, for their heavy weight, substantiality, and unyielding power of resistance—is now the asset of power”?14 If, as the curator of Forest Project in Taiwan, Shin-Yi Yang claims, “Forest Project embodies an attitude of the artist’s engagement with globalization,” exactly what kind of attitude does Xu Bing’s act of copying reveal?15

92 Vol. 15 No. 1 Into the Woods According to Joselit, Ai Weiwei’s network aesthetics is a set of carefully arranged procedures that aim at exerting maximal influence in a global art world. Forest Project also constitutes such an attempt, on political grounds. Due to Kenya’s colonial past, in the eyes of the West the country is often seen as “primitive, savage,” Xu Bing notes, and supposedly can grow out of this underdeveloped state only with the help of the West’s “sympathetic” hand.16 Many Westerners who come to Kenya to do humanitarian work end up as full-time fundraisers, raising money from the West in order to support all kinds of local activities. Fundraising is thus now a common profession in Kenya, but by no means is it an easy task. According to Xu Bing, this type of fundraising sometimes fails to sustain the source of income because of its unidirectional nature—the West gives, Kenya receives. It is also not cost- effective given the costs, human labour, and traveling time involved in the fundraising process.

Xu Bing and Children’s To avoid said problems, the circulative system of Forest Project Forest Project (Taiwan), 2014, National Museum of acknowledges, practically if not cynically, as skeptics would likely argue, History, Taipei. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. that give-and-take is a better fundraising strategy than one-way solicitation. It is easier for people to pull out their wallets when they receive concrete objects they can own and admire. What serves such a purpose better than hanging a painting in one’s living room made by a poor Kenyan child? Better yet, in the case of Forest Project Taiwan, for the price of 1000 NTD (about $32 USD), parents could sponsor tree planting by directly purchasing their children’s paintings, which were made under the guidance of an internationally renowned artist and had been hung on the wall of National Museum of History, one of the local organizing institutions that

Vol. 15 No. 1 93 hosted a special exhibition featuring the children’s creations. Forest Project Xu Bing and Children’s Forest Project (Taiwan), also acknowledges that donors, whether for the Kenyan or Taiwanese 2014, installation view, National Museum of History, projects, want to know about and see the results of their charitable acts. Taipei. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. Originally Xu Bing planned to install large LED boards in museums and public libraries in New York, keeping people up to date on the number of trees being planted in Kenya. This plan was not put into practice, but in subsequent installments, it did assume different forms. In Taiwan, for instance, the Forest Project’s official Facebook page has constantly updated information regarding the number of participating children, the number of the paintings sold, and pictures illustrating on-site tree planting.17

Behind all these strategies of fundraising, the Internet plays the key role that enables Forest Project’s enactment. Xu Bing’s reliance on the Internet recalls Ai Weiwei’s famous tweet that declares “My motherland, if I have to have one, would be the Internet because it can fulfill the space and boundaries of my imagination. As for the other so-called countries, you can have them.”18 This is not to say, however, that the world is now flat and that Forest Project dwells in a virtual sphere; rather, Xu Bing uses the Internet and the familiar notions associated with it, such as instant transformation and its relatively low cost to foreground substantial differences in economic conditions between regions. “Two dollars which can cover the fee of planting ten trees in Kenya,” Xu Bing writes, “can only pay for a subway ticket in the US.”19 Unlike Ai Weiwei, who abandons traditional boundaries between nations and calls the Internet his “motherland,” Xu Bing’s Internet is not the destination for his project, but a platform for his deployment of the classical economic principle of comparative advantage to achieve conservation goals.

One would not necessarily be unreasonable to criticize that all the aforementioned moves are feel-good gestures and illusions that satisfy the patron-donor in the name of art. However, as if Xu Bing feels the need of self-defense, his writings constantly reveal the political and ethical

94 Vol. 15 No. 1 Xu Bing and Children’s Forest Project (Taiwan), 2014, installation view, National Museum of History, Taipei. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

implications that Forest Project carries. As he notes, the Kenyan government used to have a policy that encouraged forestation: the government offered farmers land for tree nurseries, which was closely associated with their own farming and living; when the trees matured, the government offered the farmers new lands; and the cycle repeated itself thereafter.20 The policy was abolished when Wangari Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, implemented her grassroots environmental policy as supported by the National Council from the late 1970s onwards. Maathai’s policy of forestation aimed at restoring original landscapes that were previously undisturbed by human activities. The trees that her project planted and nursed were thus trees native to the land, rather than those otherwise related to the farmers’ lives. Some local people criticized her policy as “idealism” in the sense that it excluded human activities such a farming as part of the bigger picture. Siding with these local people, Xu Bing has further pointed out that Maathai’s strict ecological view is a product of Western ivory tower ideologies that ignore the needs of the people on the ground (indeed, Maathai received degrees from Mount St. Scholastica (now known as Benedictine College) in Kansas and the University of Pittsburgh. He noted that “[s]upporting Maathai more or less bears the trace of a value system of Western intellectuals.”21

Herein lies the radicalism of Forest Project in Kenya: it does not represent an ardent tree-hugger who seeks to return to a golden age before the Anthropocene, that is, an ecology without human beings. Rather, it foregrounds local people’s agency and needs and believes in the possibility of peaceful co-existence between people and nature. This is not to say that Xu Bing does not care about restoring lost or demolished natural landscapes. Forest Project in Taiwan, for instance, expressed less concern for fostering human-tree co-existence than for restoring natural landscapes in Sandimen County, a region destroyed by Typhoon Morakot in 2009.22 Judging from its different goals in each installment, Forest Project is a flexible matrix that mutates into distinct shapes corresponding to distinct needs.

Forest Project’s recognition of human agency and local needs is informed by Xu Bing’s belief that aesthetic value derives not from art objects but their embeddedness in ordinary life. “The source of natural beauty,”

Vol. 15 No. 1 95 Xu Bing says, “lies in the objective connection between life and nature, and the most direct connection between natural things and life is at its strongest in the things commonly seen surrounding people. In reality those ordinary objects often hold great aesthetic value and fascination.”23 This view of art reflects that of as articulated at The Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, in 1942: Simply put, art is not an object of objective, external contemplation, but a way of being in and acting upon the world. As the son of a “reactionary” father and a sent-down youth (zhiqing) during the Cultural Revolution, from 1974 to 1977 Xu Bing lived in Shoulianggou Village, a rural area about forty miles north to . Although he was not sent to Shoulianggou Village for disciplinary re-education, his stay there turned out to be a crucial period that shaped his views on the relationship between art and life.24 According to Xu Bing:

It could be said that my earliest lesson in art “theory” and the founding of artistic ideals took place on a mountain slope facing Shoulianggou. There was a grove of apricot trees on the mountain there, a little sideline for the village. Guarding the trees was an offensive task, and nobody wanted to go. So I said I would do it. That summer, the mountain slope became my paradise. First off, I never ate even a single apricot. That brought with it the satisfaction of self-control. Otherwise, I focused on enjoying the changes taking place in the natural world around me. Each day I brought my box of paints and a book to the mountainside.25

In addition to demonstrating Xu Bing’s determined abstinence, this anecdote reflects something of the living conditions in Shoulianggou Village—conditions so materially deprived that the almost trivial act of self- restraint represented by refraining from eating an apricot brought immense satisfaction. His experience of living such a poor part of China during the Cultural Revolution significantly shaped Forest Project’s conception. When he was teaching Kenyan children in 2008, he wrote:

I’m sitting in a garden hotel of extremely colonial style, but my gaze differs from other tourists for I used to worry and live together with people poorer than the Kenyan. That experience makes me less curious and sensitive to the wasteyard-like markets of daily goods and the medieval pastoral life of people in Marseille taking place now on Nairobi streets. Rather, it allows me to bypass the seduction of these wonderfully artistic and picturesque scenarios and capture the parts of life closer to people’s survival.26

It is noteworthy that even though Xu Bing cares about poverty, he is not interested in representing poverty from the distant observatory for, as he notes elsewhere, “as a poor country, we [China] used to be gazed upon in such a way.”27 Having lived through Mao’s China does not thus leave

96 Vol. 15 No. 1 Xu Bing traumatized or aloof; rather, it formulated his sensitivity to and wariness about class and culture hierarchies as reflected in his continued respect for Maoist ideas, his efforts to enact positive changes in people’s living conditions through art, and his encouragement of the viewer’s active participation in many of his works.28 Indeed, when Xu Bing was once asked in New York: “Why do you work on something so experimental when you come from such a conservative country?” He simply responded: “You guys were taught by Joseph Beuys, I was taught by Mao Zedong; Beuys pales in comparison with Mao.”29

While Xu Bing believes in the Maoist tenet that art should serve the people and society, he also experiments with them to explore new forms of interactions between art and life. As I briefly mentioned earlier, Forest Project engages with the people; the people’s agency and needs in return shape the end result of each Forest Project installation in subtly distinct fashion. In leaving room for the human variables in his neatly constructed framework, Xu Bing has aligned himself with a trend of contemporary art devoted to the exploration of intersubjective communications—a trend that his own works helped to foster, particularly those that engage with live animals.

Xu Bing, Case Study of Dialectics of Control and Transference, January 22, 1994, performance Chance presented at Han Mo Arts Center, Beijing. Courtesy of “Human intelligence orbits, Xu Bing Studio. contemplates, and comprehends through a set pattern of habits and concepts,” says Xu Bing; “this kind of fixed pattern of habit and inert intelligence are in particular need of being interrupted and disrupted. When intelligence is re-shuffled, new lines of thought open up.”30 The non- or pseudo- language in Book from the Sky is certainly a means of enacting such interruption and disruption, and the use of animals, which has played a crucial role in Xu Bing’s work, is another. Distinct as animals and words are, they both lead to realms of the outside that cannot be fully grasped by anthropocentric patterns of thinking. As Xu Bing puts it, “I’m basically exploring the same thing from two poles of extremity. Words refer to a concept, a symbol of civilization; animals are something primal.”31 As I will discuss this section, these two vectors can be seen respectively as the disciplinary force of pre-planning and the unruly energy of spontaneity. Together they shape Forest Project’s formation.

In 1994 alone, Xu Bing presented four artworks involving the use of live animals: A Case Study of Transference, Cultural Animal, Parrot, and American

Vol. 15 No. 1 97 Xu Bing, The Parrot, 1994, live parrot, cage. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

Silkworm Series Part I: Silkworm Book. Each of them required an immense investment of time and attention. Cultural Animal, for instance, as Wu Hung points out, refers to the post–Cold War geopolitical interaction between China and the West, animal-as-art’s challenging of human viewers, and Xu Bing’s challenging of his own aesthetics. Additionally, Cultural Animal reveals “Xu Bing’s fascination with the control of animals. Because this and similar works required animals existing in special states, how to control animals and induce such states became a goal of his artistic endeavours.”32 To successfully enact his control, Xu Bing placed himself in the position of animals in order to observe and learn their behaviours. For instance, he mentions that the preparatory work for Silkworm Book included:

Xu Bing, Cultural Animal, January 22, 1994, performance presented at Han Mo Arts Center, Beijing. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

reading many books, counseling many specialists, and raising two groups of silkworms at the same time. In America, I had to purchase the silkworm eggs from “child education department” and place them in my fridge. Before officially starting to work on Silkworm Book, I had to document every period of their growth, such as their changing colour after feasting on a certain number of mulberry leaves—silk spinning—cocoon forming — breaking through the cocoons—egg laying—and hatching

98 Vol. 15 No. 1 Top: Xu Bing giving lessons again. Only by so doing could I match the opening of the to children in Taiwan for Forest Project 3, 2014. exhibition with the times of taking the eggs out of my fridge Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. or from underneath my bedclothes.33 Xu Bing, American Silkworm Series Part I: Silkworm Books, 1994, live silk moths laying eggs on blank book, 33 x 27.9 x 5.1 cm. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

In other words, Xu Bing’s tight control over the animals was based on his intimate encounters with them. Before turning animals into Cartesian automata that acted according to his plans, he had to first meet his animals halfway (or under his own bedclothes). His top-down control was thus also a bottom-up process; the use of animals as media entailed the pre-medium condition of being-with-animals.

Similar approaches appeared in Forest Project, but the level of interaction shifted to the human realm. To achieve his fundraising goal, Xu Bing started by traveling to countries to meet and teach local children. His primary means of directing the children was embodied in strategies of transforming signs and symbols into pictorial trees; these strategies were laid out in

Vol. 15 No. 1 99 the primer lessons. (Here I do Xu Bing giving lessons to children in Taiwan for Forest not intend to conflate children Project 3, 2014. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio. with animals, even though I am consciously referring to the widely discussed notion in animal studies and the studies of western children’s history and literature that childhood is a special kind of conceptual category that lies between nature and culture, and between animality and adulthood. Based on this notion, children and animals are analogous and sometimes overlapping figures in literary and visual representations as well as philosophical and legal discourses.)34 The English version of the lesson primer, for instance, provides seven specific strategies for children to use in making their tree pictures: 1) “use the original shape of letters in a word”; 2) “use the lines of the English letters to create leaves and branches of varied shapes”; 3) use a flat brush to create Arabic calligraphy, which has a long history of being used for decorative purposes; 4) create “‘concrete poetry’” by combining “literary and visual expression”; 5) break down Chinese characters, which “began as pictographs,” into radicals or symbols for inspirations; 6) “use pictures to make letters and words”; 7) use “[c]ontemporary pictographic symbols” repetitively to create a “rhythmic image.”35

Just as Xu Bing’s approaches to the interiority of animals in his pervious artworks came without any guarantee of the animals’ eventual cooperation, it was not up to him to decide the final contours of the children’s drawings in Forest Project either. And while there were processes of selection before putting the drawings up for sale, he could neither singlehandedly decide which drawings to select, nor could he predict the outcomes of the online auction.36 As previously mentioned, Xu Bing did not predetermine what kinds of trees to plant in the final act of planting, either. Aleatory and unpredictable movements are allowed in this highly structured composition and consistent framework wherein the external artist plays a role in triggering the release of the internally determined actions of the children, online buyers, and local conservation organizations. No single element in this recursive mode of organization exists in its own right or serves as the basis for the others, and collectively they respond creatively to the organization’s outside.37 This complex interplay between pre-planning and spontaneity does not cause anxiety, however; instead, Xu Bing relishes it: “I like to work on something challenging, something that is difficult enough to stimulate my involvement. Otherwise there is no reason to spend my time on it.”38

Amid all the elements in Forest Project, the children’s artistic agency best embodies the element of autonomy. According to Xu Bing, “each child has his or her own tempo, which belongs to a part of his/her personality and physiology. This is the source behind each child’s unique formal quality and brush stroke—an internal clue.”39 Autonomy manifests itself when the child seeks a reason to bring forth and materialize this inner tempo. Yet

100 Vol. 15 No. 1 this reason comes not from Xu Bing’s instructions but “out-of-nowhere”— whether it is unconsciousness or human nature, this reason is the “internal clue” that Xu Bing as an outsider attempts to grasp.40

Indeed, while the children rely on his seven strategies, they also depart from them in creating all kinds of motifs and compositions that the primer lesson does not suggest. “No existing theory and analysis can explain the children’s fantastical imagination,” Xu Bing writes; “the visual knowledge and experience you possess appear passive and fall behind the children’s steps. Their drawings better my eyes.” He goes on to say that the real trees native to Kenya look equally fantastical to him, but this alone does not account for the children’s wildly imaginative drawings, for they are not realist depictions of the nature, but the results of “knowledge’s acceptance of soul’s inspiration” and the “commingling of written signs and nature in the raw.”41 The deepest, most internal secrets are embedded in the external world. The Kenyan children depict things, their hands transforming them into incandescent images.

Syntheses through Copying In one of his compilations of the children’s drawings, Forest Project 1, Xu Bing inscribed on the paper “I have copied the work of these children just as if I were copying from a book of old masters. I haven’t dared make any changes; to me, like real trees, they are a part of nature, you must perfect them.” Several Chinese words, including lin (臨), fang (仿), and mo (摹), can be translated as “copying,” but each may have a specific meaning in a particular context. Xu Bing’s inscription was originally written in Square Word Calligraphy, so he literally used the word “copied” in English. In the article “Zhaohui dasenlin,” on Xu Bing’s official website, however, he quotes this inscription and translates it into Chinese himself. The specific word he uses for copying in this case is linmo. As I have pointed out, the traditional aesthetics of linmo involve not simply faithful imitation, but linmo active engagement with and transformation of existing images. Contra his statements of “I haven’t dared make any changes” and “you must perfect them,” he did not faithfully reproduce, but rather transforms the children’s paintings.

But regardless of its truth claim, copying indeed serves as a way for Xu Bing to approach the children’s interiority. According to his inscription on Forest Project 3, in the process of copying he discovers that “each tree contained in it the secret of a child.” These secrets, however, do not solely exist within the children’s minds; rather, they constitute part of the long flux of Chinese visual culture of which Xu Bing sees himself as a member. He points out that the stylized brush strokes with which the children depict tree leaves share many similarities with the traditional wrinkle method cun fa (皴法), and this propels him to rethink “the origin of the conventionalization of .”42 In rethinking the tradition of Chinese painting, Xu Bing also places Forest Project into dialogue with his previous work The Mustard Seed Garden Landscape Scroll (2010), a scroll produced by photocopying pictures from The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting onto polyester

Vol. 15 No. 1 101 Xu Bing, The Mustard Seed Garden Landsape Scroll, 2010, wood block print mounted as a hand scroll, 32.2 x 847 cm. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

102 Vol. 15 No. 1 Vol. 15 No. 1 103 Xu Bing, Forest Project 3, 2009, ink on paper. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

sheets, which he then assembled into a large composition and printed as a scroll painting.43 But against the “detachment of Xu Bing’s identity from the landscape image as the most important aspect of the project [The Mustard Seed Garden Landscape Scroll],” his copies in Forest Project present themselves as interactions between Xu Bing and the children.44

Additionally, as my next analysis would propose (and there I take Forest Landscape: The Blue and Green World—created for Forest Project in Taiwan—as a case study), copying provides a space for Xu Bing to engage art with ecological politics. Among all of his copies, this painting stands out for three reasons. First, it is about two times longer than the other ones. Second, it is the only coloured (blue-and-green) copy. These two aspects draw a connection between the form of the painting and that of ambitious blue-and-green works by the old masters such as Wang Ximeng’s One Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains (1113). Lastly, it presents a composition with flexible use of picture planes, which are unseen in the other copies where trees are rigidly placed next to one another with outright frontality. Closer scrutiny of this painting, I believe, reveals Xu Bing’s latest reflections upon traditional Chinese painting, contemporary political ecology, and the ways the two of them can be thought through together.

In attempting to view Forest Landscape: The Blue and Green World, one immediately encounters a basic problem: the order in which one should view the various components. Standard viewing procedures tell us that scrolls are viewed from right to left, as one reads in (traditional) Chinese.45 Xu Bing’s inscription on the top of the painting, however, is written in Square Word Calligraphy and moves from left to right. Taking this cue, my viewing starts from the left section of the painting, where a cluster of trees floats midair. Here, a mist of blue and green pigments blurs the boundaries between the figures. The singularity of each tree, insect, animal, and child as established by the contour lines is deemphasized in the service of an atmospheric rendering of the Pingdong forest in Taiwan, destroyed by and still recovering from the devastating typhoon in 2009. At the right end of this cluster, the top of a tree branches out of the blue-and-green mist—lines arise out of colours. Below the protruding lines is a block of freestanding hue unattached to any line. This small block of colour mirrors the quickly and spontaneously applied block of translucent hue that occupies the left edge of a second cluster of trees in the background. In this area, colour ostensibly expands its territory into fields exterior to the trees’ contours, freely taking up blank spaces and creating an illusion of a forest. Drawing a vertical axis from the point of the outstanding tree braches in

104 Vol. 15 No. 1 Xu Bing, Forest Landscape: The Blue and Green World (detail), 2014, ink and colour on paper, 98 x 744 cm. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

the foreground to the point of overshadowing blue-and-green cloud in the background, one witnesses a dimensional drama between two picture planes as well as a pictorial interplay between colour and line, themselves in dialogue between the clarity of a particular tree and the overarching colour that blends individual trees into a unified whole.

Further on, while the first cluster of trees disappears, the second cluster persists. A large piece of rock appears idiosyncratically in the foreground, emphasizing a third cluster of trees. The contour line of the rock neatly frames two colours—dusky blue and latte brown—within separate domains. Even at the bottom of the rock, where the lines fail to extend, the two colours hold their shape all the way down to the bottom edge of the scroll, as if following an invisible guide. Next to the rock, the trees, for the first time in the scroll, appear to stand upon solid ground.

Xu Bing, Forest Landscape: The Blue and Green World (detail), 2014, ink and colour on paper, 98 x 744 cm. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

Moving further to the right, the ground again disappears and the trees in the foreground float in midair. Despite this groundless quality, however, these trees distinguish themselves from their equally groundless counterparts in the background in the relationship between line and colour. Similar to the rock that marks the beginning of the third cluster, the colours used to depict the trees in the foreground are so densely applied that they immediately attract the viewer’s attention. With respect to the line-colour relationship, here the colours stay inside the lines. On the rare occasions when the colours are not delineated by lines, they read as representational objects, as in the fruits and leaves on the sixth tree from the left. Elsewhere in the foreground, to the right of the central vertical axis of the entire painting, stand four tall flowers depicted in white. Their stems are so thin that the white pigment used to colour them becomes the contour line. Such emphasis on a linear quality through the use of colour lends each tree a particular individuality, creating a sharp contrast with the atmospheric rendering of forest in the background.

Vol. 15 No. 1 105 A fourth cluster of trees emerges to serve as a bridge between the foreground and background, and the distinct styles of these two components of the painting begin to merge. The trees in the foreground increasingly overlap with one another; their similarly tall, slim shapes and intertwining branches make it difficult to individuate them. And while the trees in the background are still covered by the misty hue, there are areas that open up to create blank spaces between the trees and thus differentiate one tree from another. Instead of an overarching blue-and-green band covering barely legible lines, there are now several umbrella-shaped colour blocks encircling the trees. In addition to this stylistic merging, the foreground and the background have also been moved closer together. Toward the right end of this cluster they converge into a middle ground where neither lines nor colours dominate. Each tree here is depicted with carefully delineated contours and gently applied colours that are neither atmospheric nor graphic.

Xu Bing, Forest Landscape: The Blue and Green World (detail), 2014, ink and colour on paper, 98 x 744 cm. Courtesy of Xu Bing Studio.

Up to this point, the painting has presented two dialectical processes—a formal one between colour and line and a symbolic one between the collectivity of a forest and the singularity of its trees—and has generated two syntheses, if not one synthesis with twofold significance. The first dialectic presents Xu Bing’s engagement with the traditional aesthetics of painterly and linear qualities. From the wild lines that penetrate blocks of colour from within and the volume of hues that exceed the linear confinement in the first three clusters to the carefully delineated and coloured trees in the fourth cluster, Xu Bing has arrived at a fine balance between the two pictorial qualities of line and colour. As my analysis suggests, Xu Bing’s emphasis on either line or colour in the first three clusters respectively draws our attention to the specificity of individual trees (if not branches) or, alternatively, to the homogenizing force that groups trees into a forest. However, he pays equal attention to both line and colour in the fourth cluster, and here gives equal weight to the singularity of trees and the collectivity of the forest. Recalling the division between forestation policies in Kenya, this move signifies an ecological middle ground, itself literally the perspectival middle ground within the painting’s composition. In this both conceptual and pictorial middle ground, the conservation policies of Maathai—the radical creation of a native forest—and Kenyan farmers’ need to live with particular trees meet each other halfway. The double harmonies in the fourth cluster also signify that the gap between art and ecology is not as wide as it might seem. Tensions between different

106 Vol. 15 No. 1 formal devices share similar concerns with those between different conservation strategies. In this light, the unity of content and form in the fourth cluster is so airtight that one cannot tell if the means has determined the end or the other way around. A stylistic arrangement is at once an ecological choice; they are very much one and the same, and through them, we catch a glimpse of the indexical trace of Xu Bing’s creative mindset.

Further to the right, the fifth and final section of the painting adds another layer of significance to this twofold synthesis. A magnificent tree flourishes; lurking behind it are a bandaged tree and a man strolling under it with his wheelchair nearby—damaged nature and vulnerable people. A solid piece of land, like the one in the third cluster, encloses and provides physical support for all of these components. While the twofold synthesis gives positive answers in response to the two questions that open this essay—“Can art inspire conservation? Can conservation inspire art?”—the final section stands as a reminder that connections between art and conservation in the age of globalization cannot exist in virtual spheres or in idealism without paying attention to the physical, material “globe” made of trees, soil, and stones, where people, especially those at the bottom of the economic well, dwell. Through this final section of the painting, itself the final stage of Forest Project’s latest installment in Taiwan, Xu Bing grapples with the material and corporeal conditions underlying the online network and shows how the Forest Project’s connectivity differs from the connectionist network aesthetics embodied in, say, Ai Weiwei’s work. As such, it states that Forest Project will continue to see the forest for the trees and the trees for the forest as future installments pick up where Forest Landscape: The Blue and Green World leaves off.

Notes

1. “Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet,” UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/human_nature/. 2. The seven other artists and their artworks are Mark Dion’s Mobile Ranger Library—Komodo National Park, Marcos Ramírez ERRE’s Shangri-La: el sueño volatil, Ann Hamilton’s Galápagos chorus, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s Juggernaut, Rigo 23’s Sapukay—Cry for Help, Dario Robleto’s Some Longings Survive Death, and Diana Thater’s RARE. 3. For details of Xu Bing’s “delving into life,” see “Zhaohui dasenlin” [Retrieving the forest], Xu Bing, http://www.xubing.com/index.php/chinese/texts/zhao_hui_forest/. This article has three sections. According to a note on Xu Bing’s website, the first two sections were based on an interview of August 8, 2008. The final part was added a year later, on October 8, 2009; this part briefly discusses the goals and development of Forest Project after its first installment in Kenya. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. Aside from personal observation, Xu’s interests in the trees’ role in Kenyan society came also from conversations with local institutes devoted to forestry and to the protection of native wildlife and forests. 6. Not to mention the labour of the children, which is not monetarily compensated. 7. David Joselit, After Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 43. 8. Ibid., 90–91. 9. “Xu bing tan chuangzuo” [Xu Bing on creation], Xu Bing, http://www.xubing.com/index.php/chinese/ texts/xubingoncreating/. 10. Joselit, After Art, 93. 11. Ibid., 94. 12. Joselit admits that “[n]ot every artist has the opportunity and capacity to speculate on art’s power exactly as Ai has done, but all can—and I think should—do so in some way.” Ibid. 13. Ibid., 53.

Vol. 15 No. 1 107 14. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 13. 15. Shin-Yi Yang, “Xubing yu ‘mulinsen jihua’” [Xu Bing and Forest Project], Bulletin of the National Museum of History 24, no. 4 (April 2014), 19. 16. “Zhaohui dasenlin.” 17. See, for instance, the 2014 Facebook posts on April 21, April 22, April 25, April 28, May 1, and June 5. 18. Quoted in William A. Callahan, “Citizen Ai: Warrior, Jester, and Middleman,” Journal of Asian Studies 73, no. 4 (November 2014), 903. 19. “Zhaohui dasenlin.” 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. Similar debates have also centred on China’s air pollution problems since the 2000s. To solve the problem, some have proposed shutting down small factories in the northern part of the country. This view has been criticized as neglecting and proposing to sacrifice the local people’s needs. My citation of Xu’s view on Maathai’s policy comes from an interview conducted in 2008, a time when such environmental issues became a topic of heated debates due to China’s hosting of the Summer Olympics in Beijing. 22. One might criticize Forest Project by arguing that it lacks the efficiency to raise signficant funds within a short period. This is true considering that it raised only 379,000 NTD (roughly $12,000 USD) in Taiwan, a number not particularly impressive in itself. Nevertheless, the number becomes significant given the fact that five years had passed since Typhoon Morakot hit Taiwan in 2009. Here Forest Project provides a useful tool to think about strategies of fundraising in areas still haunted by disasters that have been gradually forgotten by mainstream media and thus the general public living outside such areas. 23. Quoted in Shelagh Vainker et al., Landscape/Landscript: Nature as Language in the Art of Xu Bing (Oxford: Ashmolean, 2013), 19. 24. Xu Bing chose to go to rural areas also for practical reasons. “In all honesty,” he admits, “apart from the romantic notion of throwing myself into the vast landscape, I did have a selfish reason for insisting on being sent down. As an educated youth, my chances of getting into the Central Academy were greater than if I had gone on to work at a neighborhood factory in the city.” Ibid., 27. 25. Ibid. 26. Xu Bing, “Yumei zuowei yizhong yangliao” [Ignorance as a form of nourishment], Jintian 105 (February 2014), 25. 27. “Sixiang rang yishu jianjie” [Thoughts simplify art], Xu Bing, 28. http://www.xubing.com/index.php/chinese/texts/xubing_simplifyart/. 29. According to Peter D. McDonald, initiatives like Forest Project and Square Word Calligraphy Classroom are examples of such active viewer participation. See Vainker et al., Landscape/ Landscript, 197. 30. Xu Bing, “Yumei zuowei yizhong yangliao,” 25. 31. “Sixiang rang yishu jianjie.” 32. “Yishu yinggai shi yizhong xianhuode dongxi” [Art should be fresh], Xu Bing, http://www.xubing.com/ index.php/chinese/texts/artshouldbefresh/. 33. Wu Hung, Contemporary Chinese Artists (Hong Kong: Timezone 8, 2009), 34–35. 34. “Sixiang rang yishu jianjie.” 35. See, for instance, chapter 4 in Heather Keenleyside, Animals and Other People in Eighteenth- Century Literature, Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2008. Based on this notion, many writings surrounding artistic performance consider that children are more likely to deliver unpredictable performances. Karen Lury, for instance, points out that “[a]s child actors are unlike adult human actors, there is frequently an uncertainty as to the value of qualitative judgements made about their performance. In the majority of contemporary films, a good performance may be recognised as naturalistic, one that is integrated into the fictional narrative, and in tune with the other actors’ performances. Ridout suggests that this kind of assimilation is akin to the domestication of animals as household pets.” See Karen Lury, The Child in Film: Tears, Fears and Fairy Tales (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 146. 36. See “Primer for Forest Project,” Forest Project, http://forestproject.net/zh/index.php?option-com_ flippingbook<emid=95&book_id=1/. 37. Ibid. 38. Take the selection process of Forest Project in Taiwan, for instance: Five other judges joined Xu Bing to comment on and select the drawings. See, “Xubing yu ‘mulinsen jihua,’” 19. 39. Huang, “Houxiandai de xishua huo hourenwen de lunli?,” 35. 40. “Sixiang rang yishu jianjie.” 41. “Zhaohui dasenlin.” 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. With this leveling, Xu Bing makes not only an aesthetic inquiry but also a political critique. “I worry that trees depicted by Chinese children would be inferior to those by the Kenyan. There are no longer rich and colorful trees in our living environment. The biggest problem is: will our children’s style of depiction all resemble that of the Beijing Olympics mascot, Fuwa?” See the third section of “Zhaohui dasenlin.” This concern is related to the time when Xu wrote this section—October 8, 2009, less than one month before Forest Project’s installment in China, in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, from November 1 to December 6. 46. Vainker et al., Landscape/Landscript, 159.

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