Inside Art Economies Beyond Pattern Recognition

November/December 2009 | Volume 8, Number 6

Everyone Curates: From Global Avant-garde to Local Reality

On Connoisseurship in the Marketing of Contemporary Chinese Art

Orientalism and the Landscape of Contemporary Chinese Art

Artist Features: Li Dafang, Gao Weigang, Shu Yong, Xu Jiang, Gao Shiqiang, WAZA

US$12.00 NT$350.00

VOLUME 8, NUMBER 6, November/December 2009

CONTENTS 2 Editor’s Note 41 4 Contributors

6 Art Economies Beyond Pattern Recognition Biljana Ciric

20 Everyone Curates: From Global Avant-garde to Local Reality Meiqin Wang

33 On Connoisseurship in the Marketing of Contemporary Chinese Art 61 Robert C. Morgan

41 Orientalism and the Landscape of Contemporary Chinese Art Danielle Shang

51 The Value of Painting as That of Cabbage and Thieves: On Li Dafang Carol Yinghua Lu

61 Blind but not Foreign: Gao Weigang and the New Insider-Outsider Art 68 Robin Peckham

68 Shu Yong: Mediator of Bodies Erik Bordeleau

77 Salvation and Return: An Analysis of Xu Jiang’s Recent Work Sun Shanchun

86 Gao Shiqiang: Agonized Subjects in a Rapidly Changing Society 86 Kim Hyunjin 100 Floating and Theft in Wuhan Stacey Duff

109 Chinese Name Index

100

Cover: Li Dafang, Fumin Brand Dried Noodles (detail), 2009, oil on canvas, 165 x 130 cm. Courtesy of Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne.

1 Editor’s Note YISHU: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art president Katy Hsiu-chih Chien It has been repeatedly proclaimed that the   Ken Lum economic crisis of the past year changed  Keith Wallace everything in the art world, yet Sotheby’s October   Zheng Shengtian 2009 art auction in Hong Kong witnessed prices   Julie Grundvig rebounding, and even on the increase, for Kate Steinmann contemporary Chinese art. In spite of that, the editorial assistant Chunyee Li blip that did occur gave rise to a much-needed circulation manager Larisa Broyde reality check about what is genuinely important in   Joyce Lin web site  Chunyee Li contemporary art, resulting in artists and thinkers embarking on a journey in search of other realms of art that are less submissive to the market than advisory  Judy Andrews, Ohio State University they were during the past decade and more Melissa Chiu, Asia Society Museum focused on exploring what it means to be making John Clark, University of Sydney art in society today. Lynne Cooke, Dia Art Foundation Okwui Enwezor, San Francisco Art Institute Britta Erickson, Independent Scholar & Curator Each of the first four texts in Yishu 35 address Fan Di’an, National Art Museum of China Fei Dawei, Guy & Myriam Ullens Foundation this particular historical moment relative to Gao Minglu, University of Pittsburgh contemporary art in mainland China. Some of the Hou Hanru, San Francisco Art Institute Hu Fang, Vitamin Creative Space and the shop ideas and approaches presented may appear Katie Hill, University of Westminster unfamiliar, unformulated, or even naïve, but they Claire Hsu, Asia Art Archive are ideas in process and very much connected Martina Köppel-Yang, Independent Critic & Historian Sebastian Lopez, Institute of International Visual Arts to their communities, and that is what makes Lu Jie, Independent Curator them provocative, exciting, and part of an Charles Merewether, Critic & Curator Ni Tsaichin, Tunghai University inevitable ongoing evolution. Biljana Ciric Apinan Poshyananda, Ministry of Culture, Thailand organized a conference that brought together Philip Tinari, Independent Critic & Curator Chia Chi Jason Wang, Independent Critic & Curator primarily younger artists who are proposing Wu Hung, University of Chicago alternative strategies within the current mainland Pauline J. Yao, Independent Scholar Chinese art system; Meiqin Wang explores the significant influence that independent curators  Art & Collection Group Ltd. wield within the art world and questions 6F. No. 85, Section 1, where that influence currently resides; Robert Chungshan N. Road, Taipei, Taiwan 104 C. Morgan offers a reminder about the role Phone: (886)2.2560.2220 connoisseurship can play regardless of the Fax: (886)2.2542.0631 E-mail: [email protected] tenuous thread that appears to keep its existence intact, and Danielle Shang challenges an often    Leap Creative Group leaden view of contemporary Chinese art that exists in the West and how the new generation   Raymond Mah art Director Gavin Chow of artists and the current art system needs to be designer Philip Wong acknowledged as it really exists. webmaster Website ARTCO, Taipei

A number of the issues brought forth in these  Chong-yuan Image Ltd., Taipei texts resonate in the artist features that follow.  - In their artwork, as varied in aesthetic and intent as it may be, Li Dafang, Gao Weigang, Shu Yong, Xu Jiang, Gao Shiqiang, and the collective WAZA Yishu is published bi-monthly in Taipei, Taiwan, and edited in Vancouver, Canada. The publishing dates are January, March, all address a post-Cultural Revolution reality and May, July, September, and November. ways that history, the issues that exist in its wake, and the changing social structures play into All subscription, advertising, and submission inquiries may contemporary Chinese experience. be sent to: Yishu Office 200–1311 Howe Street Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 Keith Wallace Phone: 1.604.649.8187; Fax: 1.604.591.6392 E-mail: [email protected] Web site: www.yishujournal.com

Subscription rates: YISHU EDITIONS 1 year (six issues): $84 USD (includes $24 for airmail postage); Now available: Five limited-edition prints by in Asia $78 USD (includes $18 for airmail postage). some of the most important Chinese artists. 2 years (twelve issues): $158 USD (includes $48 for airmail postage); in Asia $146 USD (including $36 for airmail postage). Please see back cover for images and contact information. No part of this journal may be reprinted without the written permission from the publisher. The views expressed in Yishu are not necessarily those of the editors or publisher. 2 Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 典藏國際版‧第8卷第6期‧2009年11 - 12月

典藏國際版創刊於 2002年5月1日 2 編者手記社長：簡秀枝總策劃：鄭勝天 4 作者小傳創刊編輯：林蔭庭（Ken Lum）

主編：華睿思 (Keith Wallace) 6 藝術新經濟副編輯：顧珠妮 (Julie Grundvig) 史楷迪 (Kate Steinmann) Biljana Ciric 編輯助理：黎俊儀 (Chunyee Li)

20 人人策展—從國際前衛到本地實際行政：藍立杉 (Larisa Broyde) 網站編輯：黎俊儀 (Chunyee Li) 王美欽（Meiqin Wang）廣告：林素珍

33 對當代中國藝術的鑒賞顧問：王嘉驥田霏宇 (Philip Tinari) Robert C. Morgan 安雅蘭 (Judy Andrews) 巫鴻東方主義與當代中國藝術景觀林似竹 (Britta Erickson) 41 范迪安尚端（Danielle Shang）招穎思 (Melissa Chiu) 洛柿田 (Sebastian Lopez) 51 繪畫的價值等同於「白菜」和「騙子」胡昉侯瀚如的價值 — 談李大方徐文玠 (Claire Hsu) 盧迎華（Carol Yinghua Lu）姜苦樂 (John Clark) 姚嘉善 (Pauline J. Yao) 倪再沁 61 盲而不異：高偉剛和游移於局內外高名潞的新藝術費大爲楊天娜 (Martina Köppel-Yang) Robin Peckham 盧杰 Lynne Cooke 68 舒勇：身體的斡旋者 Okwui Enwezor Katie Hill Erik Bordeleau Charles Merewether Apinan Poshyananda

77 拯救與回歸：對許江近作的分析出版：典藏雜誌社孫善春 (Sun Sanchun) 台灣臺北市中山北路一段85號6樓電話: (886) 2.2560.2220 傳真：(886) 2.2542.0631 86 高士強—巨變社會中的痛苦主題電子信箱：[email protected] Kim Hyunjin 編輯部： Yishu Office 200-1311 Howe Street, 100 流竊武漢：「30個中國內地 Vancouver, BC, Canada V6Z 2P3 流浪藝人的媒體生命」電話: (1) 604.649.8187 傳真：(1) 604.591.6392 Stacey Duff 電子信箱: [email protected]

訂閱、投稿及廣告均請與編輯部聯系。 109 中英人名對照設計： Leap Creative Group 印刷：中原造像股份有限公司

網址： www.yishujournal.com 管理：典藏雜誌社

國際刊號: 1683-3082

本刊在溫哥華編輯設計，臺北印刷出版發行。一年6期。逢1、3、5、7、9、11月出版。

售價每本12美元。訂閲：一年84美元，兩年158美元（含航空郵資）。亞洲地區一年78美元，兩年146美元（含航空郵資）。

封面：李大方，富民牌挂麵（局部），2009，布面油畫， 165 x 130 公分，麥勒畫廊（北京/琉森）提供訂閱單可從本刊網址下載。

3 Contributors

Eric Bordeleau is pursuing a doctorate Kim Hyunjin is a curator and a writer in comparative literature at Université de based in Seoul. She was a co-curator of Montréal. His research is concerned with the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008) and the relationship between anonymity and has worked as a curator for a number of political resistance in contemporary Chinese institutions, including the Vanabbemuseum, art and cinema. He has contributed to Eindhoven, and the Artsonje Center, several magazines, including Espai en blanc Seoul, as well as the Insa Art Space. She (Barcelona), Fata Morgana (Italy), and Hors- has written for numerous catalogues and Champ and OVNI (both in Montreal). has also contributed writings and reviews to various Korean art magazines including Biljana Ciric is an independent curator Wolganmisool, ArtinCulture, and Vmspace. based in Shanghai. She is also Artistic Her most recent publications include Director of Ke Center of Contemporary Arts Movement, Contingency and Community and the executive curator for the Intrude (Seoul: Darun Books, 2008), Jewyo Rhii Public Art Project, presented by Zendai (Seoul: Samuso/Darun Books, 2008); MoMA. She was Director of the Shanghai Haegue Yang (Berlin: Wien Verlag, 2007); Duolun Museum of Modern Art Curatorial Dolores Zinny and Juan Maidagan (Bilbao: Department and Net-Working Curator Sala Rekalde, 2007). She has recently (China) for the Singapore Biennale 2006. begun work on her Ph.D. in the Curatorial Her ongoing Migration Addicts project and Visual Knowledge Department at was presented at the Venice Biennale 2007 Goldsmiths College, London. Collateral Events and the Shen Zhen/Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism and Carol Yinghua Lu is an independent curator Architecture. She is a regular contributor and art writer based in Beijing. She is the to several Chinese and international art founder and co-editor of Contemporary publications including Yishu, Flash Art, and Art & Investment magazine and a frequent Broadsheet. She has an M.A. from East China contributor to a number of international Normal University, Shanghai. art magazines such as Frieze, Contemporary, and e-flux. A graduate of the Critical Studies Stacey Duff is a Beijing-based poet and program at the Malmö Art Academy, Lund writer. He graduated with an M.F.A. in University, Sweden, she was the China Creative Writing from Brown University in researcher for Asia Art Archive from 2005 1997 and has been the art editor for Time to 2007. Her recent curatorial work includes Out Beijing since 2005. SUITCASE ART PROJECTS, a project space

4 of Today Art Museum that follows the He is also an organizer of the Society for Situationist tradition to engage and exist in Experimental Cultural Production. the intellectual and physical multiplicities of urban reality. She was a fellow of the ZKM Danielle Shang is an independent Summer Seminar 2009: Contemporary contemporary Chinese art critic, curator, Art and the Global Age led by Hans and consultant. She lives and works in Los Belting and is the international advisor for Angeles, California. Contemporary Art Museum, Kumamoto, from 2009 to 2010. Sun Shanchun is an associate professor at the Research Center for Cultural Robert C. Morgan is an international critic, Studies, China Academy of Art, Hangzhou. artist, curator, and essayist based in New His research interests include German York City. He holds an M.F.A. in sculpture philosophy and aesthetics, particularly and a Ph.D. in contemporary art history and the writings of Walter Benjamin. He was currently teaches at Pratt Institute and the a member of the curatorial team for the School of Visual Arts in New York. Professor third edition of the Lianzhou International Morgan has curated over seventy exhibitions Photography Festival and has written critical and has had numerous exhibitions of his essays on art and culture to publications such own work in painting, photography, and as Art World and the Oriental Morning Post. performance. In 1999, he received the first Arcale Award in International Art Criticism Meiqin Wang currently teaches Asian from the Municipality in Salamanca (Spain) art history at California State University, and a Fulbright senior scholar award in 2005 Northridge. She is an art historian to conduct research on the traditional arts specializing in modern and contemporary and their influence on the Korean avant- Chinese art. Her research interests include garde. He has authored many publications, contemporary art of the Asian world and including The End of the Art Work (1998), international exhibitions. Her dissertation Bruce Nauman (2002), and The Artist and and published materials focus on the Globalization (2008). institutional frameworks and presentation of contemporary Chinese art in a global context. Robin Peckham is a Hong Kong-based writer researching the structural history of art systems in the greater Chinese world.

5 Biljana Ciric Art Economies Beyond Pattern Recognition A Public Program of Performative Lectures Related to Art and Economy at Osage Gallery, Shanghai, June 13, 2009 Speakers: Liu Jianhua, Birdhead (Song Tao, Ji Weiyu), Jin Feng (BizArt), Hu Xiaoqian (Observation Society), Shao Yi (Small Production), Shi Yong (Shopping Gallery), Tang Dixin (Street Gallery), Gao Mingyan Performance: Shuang Fei Collective, Hangzhou

This series of talks concerns the issue of the economy today in the cultural and Shuang Fei Collective backstage before performing visual arts. The talks included different sectors, from non-profit to commercial, Shuang Fei Art Centre at Art Economies Beyond Pattern and different investments, from alternative artist/curator-initiated projects Recognition. Courtesy of through large-scale investment strategies. Discussions also included how Osage Gallery, Shanghai. the role of non-profits have changed in the past ten years and how artists’ individual projects question the economy and institutional approaches.

Artists were free to invite guest lecturers, other artists, curators, or anyone whom they thought was relevant to discuss the issue with them. Discussion could take the form of performances, talks, screenings, experiments, or any other kind of audience involvement. At the same time, the lecture/performative sessions aimed to develop new forms of discourse and to emphasize its importance in articulating ideas and points of view in approaches to art making in mainland China.

The artists’ projects aimed to develop broader communication between different cultural circles with their different approaches and interests, creating an environment for the artists that allowed them to work in a self-reflective way relative to art production.

6 The first evening concentrated on artists’ initiatives and their survival strategies. From the end of the 1980s until today, artists are still the main activators of ideas, and the role of the artist in mainland China has become much more complex. Invited speakers discussed how artists’ strategies have changed, and introduced a young generation and their vision of the role of artists, artist-run spaces, and artist-initiated projects. Their presentations follow.

Liu Jianhua, artist, Shanghai

Biljana Ciric: Good evening. Welcome to our very first lecture series on the topic of art economies. Today we will talk about artists, their initiatives, and spaces. We invited artists and art spaces from Hangzhou, Guangzhou, and Shanghai to discuss their projects. Let me introduce you to Liu Jianhua as the first speaker. In a book project related to the same topic as this symposium, he presented the issue of artists and their multiple roles in the art system. Today, artists are no longer simply creating artworks, they are also playing the role of organizer, curator, collector, and dealer. Liu Jianhua speaking at Art Economies Beyond Pattern Recognition. Courtesy of Liu Jianhua: Good evening, Osage Gallery, Shanghai. Drawing by Liu Jianhua from everyone. I am pleased to be here a book in which he illustrates the roles of artists within the today. I feel like we are having a art system. Courtesy of the conversation instead of me giving artist. a lecture about a certain topic. In fact, at the very beginning, when I received the invitation from Biljana, she said that within art economies, what is on the surface is also what is beneath it. However, I think that after the financial crisis, contemporary art has changed drastically. In China, I feel that art, life, and the economy have come closer together. The development and operation of contemporary Chinese art is in the same place as Chinese society.

I will mainly talk about the role that we artists are playing. Today, as Biljana pointed out, we are not only artists, but also curators, gallerists, collectors, brokers, and even senior curators of museums that have undergone some profound and difficult changes. Why do I say this? The Chinese economy has been rapidly developing since 1979. The greatest contribution of China to the rest of the world is that it has provided a novel form of capitalist and economic operation. Although art is part of a process of humanist development, it also runs parallel and is inseparable to the development of society during this time. So that’s why the evolution of contemporary art in China is completely different from that of other countries. Several years ago, we talked a lot about issues like the market, the academies, and the economy, issues that are closely connected to the overall Chinese society.

To be more specific, I would like to choose a number of time frames in which to elaborate on this. From 1979 to 1989, Chinese society was rather idealistic, spiritual, free, and ostensibly democratic. The period from 1990 to 1999 was a time of preparation in terms of academic and commercial

7 aspects. Then, at the beginning of this century, especially in the years 2005, 2006, and 2007, it was in an almost purely commercial stage. I remember that in the mid-1990s, artists still talked about gaining recognition through academic achievement. Then, in more recent years, artists mainly talked about some kind of economic recognition. A lot of them would have delusions or some very obscure concepts about what that meant. In fact, in either supporting or opposing such concepts one can neither ignore the context of environment, economy, and society, nor the link between individuals and their communities. Since I am an artist, I am very aware of

this connection. The identity of artists has changed greatly, and this change Birdhead Affordable Game installed at Osage Gallery, is very unique. You can’t simply say the change is good or bad, superior or Shanghai. Top row, left to right: Shi Yong, Zhang Enli, inferior, since the whole economy is being pushed forward based on this Ding Yi, Shen Fan, Liang Yue. Bottom row, left to right: Xu development, and that creates a new form of art economy. Biljana Ciric Zhen, Zhou Tiehai, Hu Jieming, wanted me to say something about the book I gave her, as well as express Yang Zhenzhong, Yang Fudong. Courtesy of Osage my personal opinions. Of course, I believe a deeper discussion requires Gallery, Shanghai. more time and other opinions, demanding us to observe the essence of certain matters.

Audience member: In the 1990s, what was the line between the purely commercial and the purely academic?

Liu Jianhua: I don’t think China was badly affected in the 1990s, which means there were powers that forced it to develop in a particular direction.

8 In fact, from today’s perspective, a multi-dimensional culture is the best choice. It does not matter whether it is purely commercial or purely academic; I think it’s all okay. But also, in many ways it is contradictory. Identity is a very nebulous concept, so from the current point of view, the future may be even more so. However, as culture develops, the academic realm might also become more diversified. There isn’t a clear-cut line defining commercial as commercial and academic as academic.

Song Tao and Ji Weiyu, Birdhead, Shanghai

Birdhead: We will introduce our new project tonight called Birdhead Affordable Game, which you can also see on the Web at http://www.bagart.org/.

The two of us have been working together for five years now, mainly with photography. We felt that displaying our exhibitions in formal gallery settings was boring. Thus we started to print our photos on very inexpensive paper, and then we pasted them outdoors as interventions on the streets. During this process we realized that since you can paste them outside, you can also paste them in people’s homes.

Then, two months ago, in a discussion with Biljana Ciric about our motivation to host an exhibition related to art economies and its new possibilities, we kicked off the idea of the Birdhead Affordable Game. If we can print our own photos, why not print some photos or paintings by other Birdhead (top: Song Tao, artists? Having this direction roughly in mind, we set to work. The result bottom: Ji Weiyu) talks about Birdhead Affordable is what you see today. We have posted on our Web site artworks by various Game. Courtesy of Osage Gallery, Shanghai. artists. This project will grow as we plan to add new partner artists every month, and we will also take this plan to other cities. We would like to talk to various institutions and individuals about various possible city sites representing us. They don’t have to be art agencies.

The steps to accessing the Birdhead Affordable Game are clearly shown on the Web site: step one, select the artwork from the ones offered. Then press “Start Game.” The selection you make will become a part of your life, and the idea is that the artwork, 50 x 60 cm in size, will be pasted directly on a wall in your home, so if you change your mind you might have to repaint the whole wall. For now, we are providing one artwork by each of our ten partner artists (Ding Yi, Hu Jieming, Liang Yue, Shen Fan, Shi Yong, Xu Zhen, Yang Fudong, Yang Zhenzhong, Zhang Enli, Zhou Tiehai). Part of the Birdhead project is that we also provide specially designed frames for each artwork, in a choice of several colours, that is spray painted right on the wall. We also provide a service to install the artwork.

Biljana Ciric: Will you add your own photos to the project in the future?

Birdhead: We haven’t decided which ones to use yet. There are too many of them. Maybe we’ll do so in the future.

Audience member: How about including our own photos? Is it possible to have them as part of your project?

9 Birdhead: We wouldn’t accept that. We are looking for interesting and expensive works of contemporary art and making them affordable.

Biljana Ciric: How do you set up an agreement with the artist? Like Ding Yi, for example—is there a limited number of pieces, or is there no limit?

Birdhead: The limit is not in quantity but in time, which means our cooperation with Ding Yi or Shi Yong is for one year only. Then, for instance, we will have to visit Shi Yong the next year and persuade him to agree to a second year of cooperation. But we’ll choose another artwork of his for the second year. Since we have so many artists with such an extensive reservoir, it’s an inexhaustible mine. For consumers, it means that you should hurry, buy every one you want, and pay for them soon, since the one you might want will be gone the following year.

Jin Feng, BizArt, Shanghai

Jin Feng: I think for me, the only interesting thing about the topic of BizArt and its future is that a lot of people wonder how BizArt has survived to the present day. I think this topic might be quite appropriate today. In 1998, an Italian, Davide Quadrio, came to China. Before 1998, I was in Shanghai, too. I saw the work of Davide Quadrio in an exhibition of abstract art. It was something about ink wash painting. The idea of art centres being based in the loft district was still fresh back then, and we didn’t have enough money to secure a permanent base for BizArt. I think it was about the same time Jin Feng speaking about as Beijing 798 was developing. Anyway, using a loft as an art centre is now BizArt. Courtesy of Osage already quite popular. Gallery, Shanghai.

When talking about BizArt, there are several people that one must mention. One is Davide Quadrio, another is Xu Zhen, and another is Jin Liping. In 1998, Xu Zhen was in Niu Cun (near East China Normal University, where many artists lived in the late 1990s). I remember BizArt at that time very clearly, since I had been observing these kind of art centres back then. BizArt’s first formal exhibition was the solo exhibition of Zheng Guogu, and I went to see it with Xu Zhen. The Zheng Guogu exhibition can be seen as a benchmark for BizArt, and it has been using such standards ever since. BizArt is not very good at economics, but might be slightly better at politics. Then our standard became the standard of BizArt. After becoming involved with BizArt, we started to feel like a family, and our only concern was to maintain our principles in art. Since 2004, I have called it the “BizArt community”—a rather strange way to put it, but I think it’s most appropriate. The family style of BizArt’s management and maintenance truly affected not only BizArt itself but the people around it—all of them artists, like Song Tao, like Gao Mingyan, Shi Yong, Zhou Zixi, and myself, etc. We are all artists who joined this family with different purposes. Thus, people tend to think that there’s an inner circle here. And while we thought we were living a difficult life, people from the outside thought we were living a wonderful one.

BizArt had the dream to become a non-profit organization (NPO). In 2004, BizArt set up a foundation called ArtHub, and since the day BizArt officially announced the establishment of Arthub, it became a NPO. BizArt

10 Birdhead installing artwork could barely survive, so its participants thought about its connections by Zhang Enli and spray painting the frame. Courtesy with the art community, and after they arrived, BizArt assumed a new of the artists. identity. Maybe not the obscure role the community perceived it to possess, but an official one with a certain reputation. Even until today, BizArt continues to survive in a delicate state, although people have become increasingly aware of what BizArt does. And even though it’s very difficult now, BizArt hasn’t changed its standards. BizArt has already become an indispensable part of the industry and the art market, and though its place in the market is not necessarily through transactions, it’s still playing a major role. I described BizArt very simply; all in all, the aspect of family remains very important to its function. BizArt asked me to be its spokesperson today, but, in fact, BizArt’s boss is present, BizArt’s employees are present, and BizArt’s family is present. Can one believe a relative of the family such as me to be spokesperson?

Liu Jianhua: You said it’s more appropriate to describe BizArt from the political perspective instead of the economic one. Can you explain?

Jin Feng: It’s my fate to be asked this question by Liu Jianhua. In reference to politics, people say BizArt consists of a small circle of friends. But what

11 kind of resources does BizArt really have—do I really have to answer? Just let the community tell the story. BizArt actually has a very tell-tale poster. It was 2004, the milestone year I mentioned. That year, BizArt designed a poster using a photo taken at the Great Hall of the Forbidden City during their trip to Beijing. There’s a board above the hall, saying, “to live another year.” That became the BizArt greeting card of 2004, with the text “one more year.”

Hu Xiangqian, Observation Society, Guangzhou

Hu Xiangqian: Coming to today’s symposium is rather unsettling to me. Because what I have to say is not such a big deal. To put it simply, I had been working in Guangzhou for two years since graduation. Our space, Observation Society, just came into existence this year. The location of the space was previously a hair salon; they had been there for a year, then went bankrupt. So they leased the space to us very inexpensively. The space was jointly established by me and three other independent curators and artists (Anthony Yung Tsz Kin, Doris Wong Wai Yin, Lin Jingxin) from Guangzhou Hu Xiangqian speaking about and Hong Kong. Our first exhibition was with work of mine called Knee Observation Society. Courtesy Jerk Reaction. In Cantonese, “thinking with one’s knee” is a way to tease of Osage Gallery, Shanghai. people, suggesting they can’t quite think straight. I had been creating art for some years before this exhibition, and then this exhibition came to mind. What I exhibited was not quite the same as my previous works. My art is not very imaginative. When Observation Society was established, we all said that we would like to create some level-headed work, to be very cool and calm. That’s the principle of the four of us. Since I think today’s society is very strange, I don’t think my art is strange at all. That’s my view of art. Just now, Liu Jianhua talked about his predictions for art, the future, and the economy. But what we usually discuss is the unpredictable part. If art becomes a trend and predicable, I won’t subscribe to it. Now I’ll introduce some of my previous work. This work is called The Sun. Guangzhou is a city with a particularly large number of black people; I heard it’s the city with the highest number of black people in China. It’s very confusing to me. So I made such a work. My studio is located on the twentieth floor and has a balcony. For months, I exposed myself to the sunshine almost on a daily basis. I made a video about this and cut it down to a ten minute film. That simple. My art. Not strange at all, at least to me.

Hu Xiangqian, 0:1, 2009, installation at Observation Society. Courtesy of the artist.

12 Hu Xiangqian, The Sun, 2008, video. Courtesy of the artist.

Shao Yi, Small Production, Hangzhou

Shao Yi: Small Production is extremely simple. It doesn’t have too much to do with exhibitions, curators, or galleries. It’s a return to a very original state of creation, and I would like to talk about this kind of practice. At the very beginning, artists in Hangzhou were working this way, then some young people in Shanghai joined in, then some from Sichuan, from Beijing, they also participated. Now there are these or those stories about Small Production. I would encourage you to ignore them. They are not true. What’s wrong with Small Production? It started in last August, and Shao Yi speaking about Small Production. Courtesy of Osage in a rather desperate condition. At the beginning, we didn’t even have the Gallery, Shanghai. name of Small Production. Small Production is in fact not important, and the name even less so. But because holding an event needs a name, we just casually said, “Just call it the Small Production.” Since we can’t afford a big production, let’s just start with a small one. So we came up with the product. Later, with the second and the third event, we didn’t name it the “Small Production.” But after that, bit by bit, people would always say, “Oh, your small production this, your small production that.” So in the end, we were forced to live with the name. It just happened. Then we said that we can’t let the activity cool down and can’t let ourselves become sluggish, so we made an arrangement to produce one event every month. It’s roughly at least once every month on average, sometimes two or three a month. Then we made events several times in Shanghai, and several times in Hangzhou. It’s not important how often. We were talking about it just now, and it’s August again, our anniversary. In fact, when talking about it, I felt that the one year anniversary is kind of a big deal. But it’s not. Do this or that, just do it if you want to. That’s still my attitude.

Audience member: Did you organize a team?

Shao Yi: No, everyone just volunteered. I do want to stress one thing: that is, we don’t consider ourselves owning Small Production. At the very

13 beginning our events were held in Hangzhou a couple of times. And if Small Production event at 25 Lao Fuxing Road, Hangzhou, there’s anyone in Shanghai willing to hold a Small Production, you are free June 14, 2009. Courtesy of to do so. It is the same in Beijing, Guangzhou, Sichuan, or anywhere else, Small Production. even abroad. If you want to do it, just do it. Anyone can do it.

Shi Yong, Shopping Gallery, Shanghai

Shi Yong: Talking about the economy here is unrealistic, but let me say something about the background of the Shopping Gallery. At the very beginning, we wanted to set up a gallery as a platform of transaction in order to support some art exhibitions or Web sites. There are two stories going around. One is that the model of the Shopping Gallery fit perfectly into the current sluggish economy, that the characteristics of the Shopping Gallery emerged because of the current economy. With very young artists and very reasonable artwork, it has great potential. In fact, the other version is the real one. The shareholders are all here today. What is the real version? Shi Yong speaking about Shopping Gallery. Courtesy of We wanted to support our art practice with it, but, unfortunately, it turned Osage Gallery, Shanghai. into yet another art centre. We still don’t have money, neither could we get any, we really can’t. And who are the collectors or traders of these works? They are all our own coteries.

So their interest is not in a particular artist but our collective of thirteen shareholders. It’s trust. They trust that things will go smoothly with so many shareholders. But in fact it’s most problematic! Just think about it, thirteen

14 Entrance of Shopping Gallery, Shanghai. Courtesy of Shopping Gallery.

shareholders and thirteen brains. It’s very difficult to settle anything. Then we decided to take turns running it. Now the thirteen shareholders trust Xu Zhen and me to operate it for two years, and the other shareholders will keep quiet. Two other shareholders will be chosen for the job after our two years. This is our model. We completely rely on our feelings. We don’t believe that a gallery needs to do this or that kind of market research. It has nothing to do with it. Just think about it, with all the money you pay for one single work of an established artist, you can buy a year’s exhibitions from our Shopping Gallery. Maybe one or two of our artists will become well recognized in the future. And you can trust us, because all thirteen shareholders are quite established in the art community.

The reality is always different between imagining ideals and the actual operation. We are aware of it, so we are not afraid. Why? Because we have these shareholders, we can always be flexible in the end. If one exhibition doesn’t sell many works, and the gallery is having some financial difficulties, we can ask Liu Jianhua to buy two works. So then we can operate a bit longer. Taking turns, the shareholders can support us for a while, right? That’s why I say our gallery is not based on the concept of market economy, but more like a collection of thirteen lunatics. And there’s something even more important I want to say about our shareholders. In fact, even if in the future the Shopping Gallery can generate three billion dollars a year, we won’t take a cent. We signed a contract for it. All the money will go to the art exhibitions and Web sites. So, in fact, we think that we are very noble.

15 Tang Dixin, Street Gallery, Shanghai

Tang Dixin: Hello, I am Tang Dixin, CEO of the Street Gallery. I run an ordinary street stand. You’ve all seen street stands before. People from the bottom of society fill a box with goods cheaply bought that will be cheaply sold, earning a tiny profit. Art is the only thing different between these people and me. Why would I want to make a street stand-gallery? It’s because we young people are also from the bottom, with little money. But we want to make art, and want to find our own stage. But some of us are still a long way away from entering galleries, art exhibitions, and any Tang Dixin speaking about other more conventional institutions. So I make such a stand. There’s only Street Gallery. Courtesy of one thing to do while running a street stand, and that’s to go outside. The Osage Gallery, Shanghai. artworks are not all mine. I asked a lot of artists to join in. They are all young people around my age. They pack my box with their works, then I present the box to the public.

The first appearance of the Street Tang Dixin with the Street Gallery. Courtesy of the artist. Gallery project was at a party of the Mommy Foundation. There were some acquaintances and some people interested in art there, so that was the most successful day ever. I sold twenty- four works and earned 888 RMB. So I was confident. The number 888 is very lucky for the Chinese. And when I set up on Fu Min Road, where all are common people, the sale result was zero. And I set up once at the Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art. It was the opening day of the solo exhibition by Yang Fudong, so I sold seven works and made 170 RMB.

I like to go out, just randomly roaming around various places. I just want to look around. It’s a “random lab” in which we can observe the survival state or response to artists’ works in different locations. People have different responses to what I am doing. Some may find it interesting, some think I am crazy. Sometimes people just pass by. I set up a stand just outside the Au Fu Lu Theatre. I thought theatre had something to do with the arts. There were lots of people that day, young people. They went by and didn’t give much of a response. They just smiled and passed by. Maybe they thought it wasn’t much of a big deal. One aspect of business performance is connected to the location, and another is the weather.

Audience member: So how do you settle with the artists?

Tang Dixin: It is a 50/50 split because I am a real, original gallery.

Audience member: Is the Street Gallery facing some competition?

Tang Dixin: In fact, I want to further define these ideas of “rambling around.” I don’t want to go around only the art centres, art museums, and theatres in Shanghai, but also all around the world. If possible, I’ll take it everywhere I go. I am having some financial difficulties now, but I still have

16 ample physical strength. The future is unsure, but I think I can still make it now. And if it grows, I will need to find a secretary.

Audience member: Do you have any future plans?

Tang Dixin: I am planning to go to Beijing and set up my stand there. I’ve never been to Beijing. I want to go. I want to check it out and see how I would do there. I have been in Shanghai for eight years, I went to art school here, and have been doing art or business ever since.

Audience member: What if someone wants to return the goods?

Tang Dixin: I think the thing about a street stand is that its business is person to person, without any intermediaries. We settle the money face to face. I think that if I gave you some counterfeit notes, it isn’t my business. You can sue me, or you can punch me, whatever you want. I take the money, and that’s it. I am the boss, and I am the employee.

Audience member: Are you afraid of the city inspectors?

Tang Dixin: No. I have never had any encounter with them. The installation I have takes some time to assemble. I counted the time, it took five to ten minutes. I definitely can’t outrun the city inspectors. They have four wheels. They can definitely grab all my stuff. Losing the artwork would be my biggest fear. I need to take responsibility, otherwise I won’t have any money, and I don’t have much to begin with.

Audience member: You were never busted by the city inspectors?

Tang Dixin: Never, really, never. Because the locations I choose are relatively safe. I think other places might have the potential of earning more money. The places often checked by the city inspectors are where people make a fortune. As for being busted, I think I need to bear some risk. In general, one needs to bear some risk doing business. I don’t want to be busted, but I really want to find out whether the places where I am more likely to be busted are also more lucrative.

Audience member: Do you have a business scheme?

Tang Dixin: I haven’t thought about that yet. I hope there can be some cooperation. But I want to say one thing very clearly. No matter what, I won’t be acquired. It means that I will be at the same level as you are. I think that in terms of cooperation, I can accept a logo. Which means that if I set up outside your gate, I can accept adding your logo to my stand. I think that is cooperation. If an art gallery asks me to set up a stand inside, I won’t accept, because it’s against the spirit of my partner artists. We uphold the spirit of street stands. We are grass roots and just like to be there.

Audience member: Do you think your street stance is original?

Tang Dixin: Whether it is original or not is for you to decide. It depends on whether you’re interested in it. I think it’s very difficult to define the

17 things I have here. You may say I’m crazy. I don’t care. It all comes down to Opposite: Audience at Art Economies Beyond Pattern perspectives. It’s for you to decide how to view it, whether to buy it. I think Recognition throw their shoes at the ceiling. it’s free will. This stand is a casual thing. I wander around, look around, buy or sell some stuff, deal with the passersby casually. They can buy or not buy, it is that simple.

Audience member: It sounds like most of your art is sold to acquaintances, seldom to strangers.

Tang Dixin: So the question is not only about me. I think all artists who take part in this stand should think about this. Because it is a question for all of us. I can only think about how to make a nicer box, where to go next, and arrange the location. For instance, I can make a poster about the stand, so that it will make more sense to outsiders. I am the operator. I can’t just arrange all the works inside the box. That would be boring. We just play together. I think it is more fun playing with all the artists together.

Audience member: In your opinion, how do you use the minimum amount of investment to earn a maximum return?

Tang Dixin: I think it’s very simple. I think that as long as you can create good art, it’s a lucrative business. For instance, oil paintings by some artists can be sold for millions of USD while the painting materials only cost a few hundred.

Gao Mingyan, Shanghai

Gao Mingyan: I am Gao Mingyan. I work as an artist based in Shanghai. I usually hang out with artists around my age, young artists. We all enjoy entertainment other than art, and think about what’s fun other than karaoke or snooker. Though we can’t live without art. Youth is a time of indulgence anyway. And identity also plays a part. I have a video clip about a performance we made in April called Jump. We discussed the idea of making it into an exhibition. But after extensive discussions, we gradually realized that it would lose something if it became an exhibition. I don’t know whether the viewers of the performance had a good time, but all the Artists (left to right) Lu Pingyuan, Gao Mingyan, participants did. They were artists living in different places and creating and Hu Yun introduce Jump. Courtesy of Osage Gallery, art in different ways. This event may have stimulated them somehow. No Shanghai. matter if this stimulus is useful or not in one’s life in art, it’s a valuable life experience. At least I heard some positive feedback. We have organized other events, we just held a midnight event. We started recruiting at twelve o’clock, then went walking all night and to all the fun places in Shanghai, and came home by morning. And I also found something interesting during it. Those experiences can’t be brought to us by art, but we can bring them back to art. And we got this idea recently, it’s called the Li Qiang Grand Competition. The Li Qiang Grand Competition is just a name. Who is Li Qiang? You don’t know, neither do we. We are grateful to Biljana Ciric, the curator of this exhibition at Osage Gallery, and to all the staff. So we’d like to do something now. Anybody can play this game. Let’s take our shoes off, then throw them up to the ceiling of Osage. The one who reaches the greatest height will win an award.

People start to play. . . .

18 19 Meiqin Wang Everyone Curates: From Global Avant-garde to Local Reality

ontemporary Chinese art since the 1990s has evolved across multiple geopolitical, economic, and cultural spheres. The Cinteractions of different individuals, including artists, curators, critics, collectors, dealers, news reporters, officials and policy makers, in these spheres add to the complexity of the art. This essay focuses on curators as the object of investigation because of the significant contribution they have made in the development of contemporary art in China. In the past two decades, the accumulative efforts of curators from disparate backgrounds and motivations have contributed to the rapidly growing landscape of contemporary Chinese art and its visibility in the global art world. These individuals, together with the institutions they have collaborated with, have defined scopes, shaped meanings, and formulated theoretical frameworks for contemporary art from China that we now consider as a serious academic subject.

In his effort to identify effective methodologies for researching contemporary art from China, art historian Wu Hung proposes three of the most important spheres that condition the nature, characteristics, and meaning of this art: China’s domestic art spaces; the global network of multinational contemporary art; and individualized links between these two spheres created by artists and curators.1 These overlapping but functionally distinct spheres generate different standards, structures, and significance in contemporary art making, and each could serve as a useful framework for art historical narratives. In this text, I focus mainly on the processes, relationships, and phenomena that take place within China’s domestic art spaces. However, considering that the idea of the curator as a new arbitrator of the contemporary art world is itself an imported concept grown out of the global network of contemporary art and that individualized connections have played a determinative role in the world of Chinese curators, it is necessary to consider these two spheres as well.

From Global Avant-garde to Local Authority The term “curator” is not of contemporary invention; it has existed for many years, referring to individuals working in a broad range of fields such as museums, libraries, zoos, or other places of exhibition. Museum directors could be referred as curators; librarians responsible for organizing slides, films, and other visual materials could also be referred as curators. The independent curator, who came to the fore in art circuits as an avant-garde figure at the global level, however, is a phenomenon of the 1990s, when the rapid globalization prompted new ways of thinking about, making, and viewing art. These independent curators are not only the by-product of this

20 transformation, but also active participants in and contributors to it, as well as keen promoters of a new global art system.

Many have pointed out that a major development in the field of contemporary global art since the 1990s is the proliferation of large-scale international art exhibitions, often in the formats of biennials or triennials. These exhibitions, which can take place in any part of the world, have often been conceived by individual curators possessed of an avant-garde idealism who endeavour to break old boundaries and systems, promote the most cutting-edge artistic practices, and foster new relationships between art and society.2 In the eyes of these curators, international biennials or triennials serve as transnational platforms where new artistic discourses can be fostered, new critical theories can be explored, and new structures and institutions of the art world can be built. Many nations and cities have come to see these international exhibitions as an important apparatus through which they mark their local names on the map of global culture. As a result, many more of these exhibitions have appeared, which has further enhanced the scope of influence of these curators.

It is thus appropriate that the American critic Michael Brenson used “the era of the curator” to refer to the 1990s, when independent curators became increasingly influential in the global avant-garde art world.3 In comparison with earlier curators affiliated with various cultural institutions, this small group of curators enjoyed a much higher level of independence as well as social influence. They no longer operate invisibly behind the artworks; instead, they have become the “central player in the broader stage of global cultural politics.”4 They now maintain contact with numerous locations across the globe, stand at the forefront of various exhibitions, giving meaning, raising issues, interpreting artworks, and defining the nature of contemporary art. Drawing upon multiple cultural backgrounds and transnational experiences (which is actually a natural thing to do since several leading curators, such as Hou Hanru and Okwui Enwezor, are themselves emigrants), these curators have contributed to a rising global curatorial discourse.5 But this discourse is by nature not limited within a particular country or location; thus “international curators” has become another term referring to these individuals who travel constantly around the world and work with global networks. International curators have been respected as new cultural elites whose intellectual engagements possess the quality of avant-gardism and are imperative for the progress of contemporary art.

The emergence of independent curators in the 1990s and the “curator fever” phenomenon in the past couple years in China have to be understood in this context where international exhibitions and their curators have become the principal arbitrators of the global art world. The term, independent curator, together with its newly gained significance, was imported to China partially as a byproduct of the rise of contemporary Chinese art in the international art world, which itself is a perfect case testifying the scope of influence of international exhibitions and individual curators. The story is well known now, so I will only give a brief account here. In 1993, at the Venice Biennale, the curator Achille Bonito Oliva, working with Francesca

21 dal Lago and Li Xianting, exhibited an impressive number of contemporary Chinese artists. The debut of contemporary Chinese art in this highly profiled international exhibition marked the beginning of a “Chinese fever” in the global contemporary art world. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Chinese artists had become omnipresent in major international exhibitions of contemporary art, including the long-established Venice Biennale, documenta, and the Sao Paulo Bienal, as well as the more recent Havana Bienal, Manifesta, Johannesburg Biennale, Kwangju Biennale, and many others.

Simultaneously, as Chinese art saw itself circulating in the international art world, art professionals in China started to encounter the idea of the curator as a central figure in contemporary art circuits. These encounters were the result of multiple flows of people and ideas, such as international curators visiting China seeking new artistic trends, Chinese artists anticipating a role in the international art world, and art professionals aiming to build up a supportive system for contemporary art in China. Fundamentally, the concept of curator was introduced into China as a new global trend and the avant-garde art world greeted it with great enthusiasm. Independent curators appeared in the second half of the 1990s, consciously bearing the title of curator when they organized exhibitions. By the turn of the new century, the idea of curator acting as an avant-garde figure pushing forward contemporary art was firmly established in the Chinese art world.

Many pointed to the third Shanghai Biennale in 2000 as the watershed for the formal establishment of the curator system in China. The Shanghai Biennale was the first government-sponsored exhibition that employed, among others, two independent curators (Hou Hanru and Toshio Shimizu) from abroad. After that, the significance of the curator became widely agreed upon, and many people started claiming the identity of curator, regardless of what titles they might have carried previously. Beijing, as the long-claimed cultural centre and now headquarters of contemporary art in China, is where the majority of curators congregated. Media reports and art magazines started to celebrate famous independent or international Chinese curators.

The 2000 Shanghai Biennale was also the exhibition in which the legal status of contemporary art was first acknowledged in China, for the exhibition included contemporary media such as photography, video and installation, along with conventional art forms such as painting and sculpture. After that, governmental and private support poured in to initiate contemporary art projects. As the primary promoter of contemporary Chinese art, the influence of independent curators grew dramatically along with the rising international and national interest in contemporary art.

In practice, the establishment of the curator system created a new power structure in the Chinese art world. Art critic and curator Jia Fangzhou pointed out in 2003 that the current system of curatorial practice involved “power criticism,”6 in which curators compete for available resources and for establishing the authority to define what accounts for the most cutting- edge artistic practice and the most valuable works. In an interview, the famous independent curator Gu Zhenqing states:

22 Curators are very well respected in the cultural and art circles. The identity of curator gives the individual a sacred halo, making him/her the central figure who possesses all the resources. Artists who have good relationships with curators can certainly participate in their exhibitions and become famous.7

He even asserts: “curators are the most dictatorial individuals in the art circles and the curator system is itself dictatorial.”8 Gu’s view actually represents a common understanding of the authority curators have acquired in the Chinese art world and reveals an inherent problem of the curator system as it is practiced in China, where personal politics might overshadow academic integrity.

This understanding of the centrality of the curator explains the rapidly growing number of curators in China. All of a sudden, every exhibition needs a curator. Some artists have developed the habit of first asking who the curator is before they consider participating in any exhibition. Newly built museums and galleries fight to get famous curators for their shows, often paying high fees. So many exhibitions are mainly known by the names of curators rather than by the artists or even the art itself.9 As such, curators have been steering the direction of contemporary Chinese art practice for the past decade. The interest of leading curators has largely determined or influenced many artists’ thinking about the content and style of art. Initiated as a representation of a global avant-garde concept that aims to break established boundaries, institutions, and authorities, independent curators have grown into a new authority for the contemporary Chinese art world.

From Art Criticism to Art Curating and to Curator Fever The evolution of the curator as the central figure in contemporary Chinese art production and circulation, however, is not entirely an internationally prompted phenomenon. In the late 1980s, and particularly in the 1990s, many individuals were working like independent curators in the art world, proposing ideas, contacting artists, finding sponsorship, locating exhibition spaces, setting up artworks, etc. The China/Avant-garde exhibition, organized by critics Gao Minglu, Li Xianting, and others in 1989, was the first example. Many more of this kind of exhibition, in which critics played a crucial organizational role, appeared in the early 1990s. Beijing West Third Ring Art Research Documentation, by Wang Lin, in 1991, 1992 and 1994; Guangzhou First 1990s’ Biennial Art Fair, by Lu Peng, in 1992; China’s New Art, Post-1989, by Li Xianting in collaboration with Chang Tzong-zung, in 1993; and The Feminist Approach in Chinese Contemporary Art, by Liao Wen, in 1995, are but a few early examples. All these individuals were critics who called themselves secretary general, coordinator, convener, or organizer when they were working on these exhibitions. The exhibitions organized by these critics in the 1990s actually responded to the changing condition for the practice of art criticism in China and provided much-needed support for contemporary Chinese art.

In the 1980s, writing on art was the major method through which Chinese art critics engaged in art criticism. It was through their writing that they defined, interpreted, and promoted Chinese avant-garde art practice. This

23 method worked because many critics were editors of the then-leading art magazines and newspapers such as Meishu Sichao, Zhongguo Meishu Bao (Fine Arts in China), Meishu (Fine Arts), and Art Monthly.10 Their official position as editors provided great advantages as well as opportunities to disseminate their critical writing, to publish avant-garde artworks and reviews of them, and to gain attention from various art circles. A nationwide readership allowed their critical voices to be heard broadly. Many of these critics maintained direct contact with artists and stood at the forefront of Chinese avant-garde art, interpreting, explaining, and theorizing about the art. Their writing and publishing greatly shaped the discourse of contemporary Chinese art history.

In the aftermath of 1989’s Tian’anmen, many editors were removed from Zhongguo Meishu Bao (Fine Arts in China), issue their positions or even lost their official jobs. Among these were the two no. 21, 1986. most well-known names, Li Xianting and Gao Minglu, who then embarked on totally different career paths as unofficial figures. The above-mentioned magazines and newspapers were forced to either change their attitudes towards avant-garde art or be suspended. Meishu even became the major voice in which contemporary art was condemned in the 1990s. Writing and publishing as a form of engagement with the avant-garde world was no longer efficient or even possible. In other words, many critics lost venues in which to vocalize and practice art criticism. As an alternative, some of them turned to working on exhibitions, which became a new platform for critics to introduce new art, raise issues, and discuss problems. For them, curating exhibitions served as an extension and transformation of critical writing and was also an efficient way of engaging in the contemporary art world.11 It was also through catalogues and other exhibition-related publications that critics could continue to disseminate their thinking.

24 The rapid transformation of Chinese society since the 1990s has created a fertile environment for the growth and practice of curators. To facilitate economic development, the government has largely relaxed its control over individual employment and mobility. As a result of the market reform, the work unit system, in which the state assigns individual jobs and thus determines everyone’s career and residence, is no longer the only way for one to seek career success in China. Other types of employment, such as those in private and foreign invested sectors or self-employment, have provided Chinese people with more freedom in pursuing personal career and in choosing places of residence. Many new occupations and professions emerged when China’s society opened up and globalization speeded up economic development, and one of the new jobs that emerged at that time was that of the curator. In the meantime, many domestic entrepreneurs accumulated great wealth and started to invest in art and culture. Some built the first private art museums, such as the Dongyu Art Museum in Shenyang, the Taida Art Museum in Tianjin, and the Shanghe Art Museum in Chengdu, all in 1998, while others opened art galleries. Together with museums and galleries supported by overseas investment, these structures created an increasing need for curators who were hired to organize exhibitions and to promote the institutions. These curators thus became mediators between the new rich and the still-struggling artists, acting as important resources for both.

Xu Zhen, Rainbow, 1998, The exhibitions organized by single-channel video, 3 mins. 23 secs. Courtesy of critics-turned-curators provided the artist and ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai. many contemporary artists with spaces and opportunities to survive outside the official art system and to continue their avant-garde art practices in China. Moreover, these curators contributed to connecting domestic avant-garde art with that of the rest of the world through various personal networks they built through their activities. Both were particularly meaningful in the context of the 1990s, when contemporary art was not allowed to enter the public space in China. The work of curators opened up alternative spaces for artists to exchange ideas with fellow artists and viewers, to receive theoretical support from art critics, and to be exposed to the international art system and market. It was in these exhibitions that many now internationally acclaimed contemporary Chinese artists made their first impressions: Fang Lijun and Yue Minjun in the 1993 Venice Biennale; Sun Yuan, Weng Fen, and Yang Fudong in the 1999 Post-Sense Sensibility: Alien Bodies and Delusion in Beijing; and Xu Zhen in the 1999 Ideas and Concepts in Shanghai are a few examples.

If serious art criticism was a major motivation behind many contemporary art exhibitions in China during the 1990s, this is no longer necessarily true. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, exhibitions of contemporary art have been conceived for various purposes including art criticism as well as commercial, political, or personal gains. In recent years, caught in the excitement of a rising international reputation and skyrocketing sale prices of contemporary Chinese art, many more young hopefuls eagerly joined the

25 army of contemporary art making as professional artists. Accompanying the Weng Fen, Untitled, 1999, video installation. Courtesy of growing number of artists, curators have also seen their numbers multiply. the artist. The joke that “there are more curators than artists in Beijing” that circulated at a symposium in Beijing a couple of years ago may be an exaggeration, but “curator” has indeed become a title that many people are interested in bearing. The rapid personal success of wealth and reputation that a few early critics-turned-curators have achieved made curating exhibitions a seemingly rewarding career; thus “curator fever” appeared. Victoria Lu, the Taiwan scholar who in the 1980s translated the word curator into Chinese as cezhanren, once admitted to being extremely surprised that the profession of curator would become so trendy in the Chinese art world.12

There is no single set of categories that differentiates types of curators in China. In one case, where there is a focus on the scope and network of curators’ operations, they may be referred to as domestic or international curators. A second case applies to the idea of affiliation, so that there are freelance curators, museum curators, gallery curators, official curators and such. The third considers the intensity of involvement, as found in temporary curators, part-time curators, or professional curators. The fourth defines the position of curators according to the content and potential viewers of their shows, producing Chinese card players (curators who exhibit artworks that carry stereotypical Chinese symbols or ideas), curators who combine a global perspective with Chinese content, and curators who primarily draw their inspiration and materials from the Chinese reality. From a methodological perspective, there are curators who see exhibitions as a tool to define existing artistic trends and to theorize about their significance, curators who seek the possibility of starting new trends and

26 Sun Yuan, Honey (detail), practices and opening up new artistic directions, curators who attempt 1999, two cadaver specimens, bed frame, ice. Courtesy of to verify the art establishment and authority in their exhibitions, curators the artist. who explore in exhibitions their views about art and its place in society, and curators who simply see exhibitions as a prelude for selling art or for building up personal fame.

The nature of curators is also under dramatic reconfiguration. Beside critics, many emerging curators could be at the same time artists, gallery owners, governmental officials, museum or gallery staff, writers, film directors, or any other kind of professionals, which has greatly complicated the condition of the contemporary Chinese art because of the various backgrounds and motivations behind individuals who choose to bear the title of curator. As the number of curators increases, the world of the curator itself becomes a society of complexity.

Official and Market Turn The authority and influence of independent curators reached the highest level in China at the beginning of the twenty-first century. To a large degree, most of what they had been fighting for in the 1990s, such as achieving a legal status for contemporary art, building up a financially supportive structure, and challenging the established art system, were materialized. First, in 2003, with the establishment of the Beijing Biennale and then the founding of the Chinese Pavilion for the Venice Biennale, many curators and contemporary artists cheered at the full-scale victory of contemporary art in China. On the one hand, the international biennial as an exhibition format was embraced by the art establishment as seen in the Beijing Biennale;13 on the other hand, the Chinese government changed its long

27 28 A corner of the gallery complex at the Caochangdi Art District. Photo: Meiqin Wang.

Sunshine International Museum at the Song Zhuang Artist Village. Photo: Meiqin Wang.

Opposite top left: A studio and hostile-attitude toward contemporary art and formally incorporated it living complex at the Song 14 Zhuang Artist Village. Photo: into the overall national cultural project, as seen in the Chinese Pavilion. Meiqin Wang. Second, contemporary Chinese art has achieved wide spread market success, Opposite top right: Entrance to the Suojiacun Art District. and many artists have been able to greatly improve their living and working Photo: Meiqin Wang. conditions. Many contemporary art districts and villages have appeared, Opposite middle left: Artist Zhong Biao’s studio in the where local governments or private developers built massive studios and Heiqiao Art District. Photo: Meiqin Wang. living quarters for artists to rent. Private museums, art spaces, and art Opposite middle right: The galleries have opened one after another to house the work of contemporary archway over the street leading to the Song Zhuang artists. Third, contemporary art has left behind its previous marginalized Artist Village. Photo: Meiqin status and entered into the mainstream art system. As if to compensate for Wang. Opposite bottom: A studio its underground past in the 1990s, when there were rare opportunities for complex, Caochangdi Art contemporary art to be exhibited or published within China, in the past District. Photo: Meiqin Wang. couple years new exhibitions and art magazines are predominantly about contemporary art. Many of these exhibitions were held in state-run or subsidized museums. Also, at the moment one can easily find more than thirty different magazines in circulation, all concerning contemporary art in one way or another.15 The majority of them only appeared two or three years ago.16

29 The emergence of “curator fever” in the A few examples of mainland Chinese contemporary art early 2000s is certainly evidence that magazines. signifies the success of contemporary art in China. Censorship of contemporary art has not totally disappeared and occasionally one may still see the hand of the state authorities intervening in exhibitions of contemporary art; however, it is not as constant and severe as it was before. It would be reasonable to argue that the ideal carried by many independent curators in the 1990s has been largely realized. Ironically, the double results of this success, the “official turn” and “commercial turn,” also tarnished the prestige of being a curator. The challenges, including political, institutional, and financial, that contemporary art once encountered gave meaning and significance to the work of independent curators. Now that many of these challenges have been overcome, contemporary art is enjoying the support from government, various institutions, and the art market. “Curator” is less a title associated with avant-garde ideals in the mindset of many contemporary Chinese artists, and the cultural significance of the curator as an avant-garde figure has diminished. This change, however, does not automatically mean the decline of the importance and influence of curators in the Chinese art world. On the contrary, the position of curators, especially the established ones, as an arbitrator in the power structure of the art world remains strong. In fact, many curators have now become part of the new art establishment in China. Artists still want to affiliate themselves with certain curators and the number of curators continues to grow.

Many curators have indeed become part of the system that values personal gain more than art itself. They select artists for exhibitions from their own personal circles, or artists from galleries they work for, or artists who pay them personally. Some even charge artists directly for writing about their art.17 Because of the greatly commercialized operations that many curators have introduced in their exhibitions, many artists have lost their faith in curators. The now-contaminated reputation of curators reached its height during 2007 and 2008, a period when the market seemed to be the only driving force for contemporary Chinese art. A widespread debate exacerbated the situation. It began when Zhu Qi, a leading critic and curator of contemporary art, published in his blog a series of texts exposing how the price of contemporary Chinese art had gone abnormally high and detailing the collusion of artists, dealers, collectors, art critics, auction houses, media, exhibitions, and others in making contemporary art purely a profitable commodity.18 As an insider and beneficiary of the success of contemporary Chinese art, his texts in May 2008 came as a surprise and generated fervent debates within contemporary art circuits, resulting in a few active critics and curators making vehement accusations against each other. The whole scenario had two major effects: first, Zhu Qi’s texts brought to public attention some of the problems lurking behind the seemingly successful marketing of contemporary Chinese art; second, the mutual accusations also contributed to the declining respect from artists toward these leading figures and their exhibitions.

30 As a matter of fact, some curators themselves have lost faith in exhibitions as an efficient way to engage with avant-garde art, and a few once-influential curators such as Li Xianting and Pi Li have become suspicious about the function of curators in China. In their eyes, the majority of curators are no longer at the forefront working with avant-garde artists to challenge the art establishment; rather they are now part of the new establishment and they work to maintain a system that positions them at the centre. As one of the earliest and most influential curators, Li Xianting has expressed his disappointment at the commercialization of contemporary art in many interviews, and he rarely curates new exhibitions.19 Pi Li, once celebrated as the youngest critic and independent curator in China, says that he is now ashamed to be associated with the term “curator” because so many curators are morally flawed.20 In 2005 he co-founded UniversalStudios-Beijing, a non-profit experimental “space”21 for exhibitions, and in 2007 he stopped curating exhibitions for other institutions. Since then, Universalstudios- Beijing has been transformed into a commercial gallery called Boers-Li Gallery. Interestingly, he argues that the gallery provides a better place for him to carry out his ideas about contemporary art, thus defending himself against the accusation that he finally gave up his idealistic pursuits in art and resorted to a commercial gallery.22 Several other well-known curators have also founded their own exhibition institutions, often referred to as a “curator’s space,” where they continue to hold serious exhibitions. For example, Gu Zhenqing established Li Space in 2008. It is in this space that he continues critical engagement with contemporary art, and his curator’s space provides serious young artists with opportunities to carry out their artistic projects.23 He admits, however, that he sometimes still curates for galleries or museums in the name of an independent curator in order to bring in money to support the viability of his space.24

Entrance to the Li Space, Caochangdi Art District. Photo: Meiqin Wang.

In the end, the practice of independent curators, who were once thought to be culturally advanced and part of the artistic avant-garde, has greatly lost its significance in today’s thriving contemporary Chinese art scene. Discussing the condition of art criticism in China, Pauline J. Yao states: “Let’s be clear about this: contemporary art in China is run by the art market. Independence from it exists only in shades of grey.”25 Similarly, as wealth becomes the primary goal for so many art professionals, the work of curatorship shows no escape from the rampant commercialization of the art

31 world. It is a sad but realistic turn as China has transformed into a society that empowers wealth over other things, as argued by David Goodman in his recent edited volume on the new rich of China.26 That is where the “official turn” and “market turn” of contemporary art meet.

Notes 1 Wu Hung, “A Case of Being Contemporary: Conditions, Spheres, and Narratives of Contemporary Chinese Art,” Wu Hung on Contemporary Chinese Art (Guangzhou: Lingnan Fine Arts Publishing House, 2005), 23–46. 2 Tim Griffin, “Global Tendencies: Globalism and the Large-Scale Exhibition,” Artforum 42, no. 3 (November 2003), 152–67. 3 Michael Brenson, “The Curator’s Moment,” Art Journal 57, no. 4 (winter 1998), 16. 4 Mari Carmen Ramírez, “Brokering Identities: Art Curators and the Politics of Cultural Presentation,” in Reesa Greenberg et al, eds., Thinking about Exhibitions (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 21–22. 5 A good case in point is Hou Hanru, an international curator who emigrated from China to France in 1990. He sees himself as a globalist curator who promotes an entirely new type of art that can transcend all established boundaries and become multidisciplinary and multitranscultural. Hou and other international curators such as Francesco Bonami, Okwui Enwezor, and Hans-Ulrich Obrist are leading a global curatorial discourse that has exerted considerable influence on the reformation of the global art world today. For Hou Hanru’s main ideas about global art, see the anthology Hou Hanru: On the Mid-Ground, ed. Yu Hsiao-hwei (Hong Kong: Timezone 8 Limited, 2002). Other curators’ remarks can be seen in Griffin’s “Global Tendencies.” 6 Jia Fangzhou, ed., Era of Criticism: Selected Works of Chinese Art Critics at the End of the Twentieth Century (Nanning: Guangxi Fine Arts Publishing House, 2003), 8. 7 Xiao Chunlei and Ruan Meiling, “Curator System and Others—Interviewing Gu Zhenqing,” Xiamen Evening, January 13, 2007. 8 Ibid. 9 The following are just a few examples: the Second Hand Reality and To Each His Own, by Gu Zhenqing, in 2003 and 2006, respectively; The Wall: Reshaping Chinese Contemporary Art, curated by Gao Minglu, in 2005; Archaeology of the Future: The Second Triennial of Chinese Art, curated by Qiu Zhijie, in 2005; Painting-Unrealism, curated by Huang Du, in 2005; Under the Sky above Beijing, curated by Gao Ling, in 2005; Self-Made Generation: A Retrospective of New Chinese Painting, curated by Zhu Qi, in 2006; Fragmentation, by Feng Boyi, in 2007; The 2nd Documentary Exhibition of Fine Arts: Forms of Concepts, curated by Pi Li, in 2007. 10 Jia Fangzhou, ed., Era of Criticism, 6–9. 11 Ibid. 12 Lu Yuan, “How Can Chinese Curators Become ‘International’?” Art Observation no. 3 (2007), 92–96. 13 For detailed discussion of the first Beijing Biennale, see Meiqin Wang, “The Beijing Biennale: The Politics of Chinese Characteristics,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 7, no. 4 (2008), 20–31. 14 For detailed discussion of the first Chinese Pavilion for the Venice Biennale, see Meiqin Wang, “Officializing the Unofficial: Presenting New Chinese Art,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 21, no. 1 (spring 2009), 102–140. 15 Most of these publications are promotional rather than critical, in which artists often have to pay both the magazine and the writer to be published in them, and the writers are paid to write a positive, promotional text. 16 Based on my personal research. 17 Based on my research findings in summer 2009. As these kinds of practices have now become the norms in the Chinese art world, it may be unfair to single out curators in these cases. For instance, artists also pay university academics to write about their work in order to have an academic stamp of approval. These cases signify the ethos of the era of an unbridled market economy that has reshaped the relationship between artists and scholars who write about them. 18 The series of texts that Zhu Qi published in his blog in May 2008 is titled “‘Faking Sky-high Price’ at Contemporary Art Auctions and the Games of High Profit.” The text was later published in an art magazine, and many reporters from major media interviewed Zhu Qi, who claimed to receive many death threat messages because of it. See his original text at http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/ blog_487f2fc601008zvu.html (accessed July 15, 2009). 19 Li Jiang and Li Yan, “It is Difficult for Chinese to Make Curator a Profession,” Beijing Business Today, July 24, 2008; Wu Youming, “Li Xianting Interview: We Have What Kind of Art Here,” http://bbs.artintern. net/frame.php?frameon=yes&referer=http%3A//bbs.artintern.net/viewthread.php%3Ftid%3D4693 (accessed March 21, 2009) 20 My interview with Pi Li, July 24, 2009. 21 “Space,” or Kongjian in Chinese, has been used to describe a new type of exhibition institution emerging in recent years. It is different from a museum in that it provides only for temporary exhibitions; it is also different from a gallery in that its primary goal is not to make financial profit, but to provide a space for the display of new art of an experimental nature. Because of its less profit-geared and more new-art-oriented implication, “space” has become a term that many newly established art institutions across China have adopted. 22 My interview with Pi Li. 23 My interview with Gu Zhenqing, August 12, 2009. 24 Ibid. 25 Pauline J. Yao, “Critical Horizons—On art criticism in China,” Asia Art Archive PERSPECTIVES, December 2008, http://www.aaa.org.hk/newsletter_detail.aspx?newsletter_ id=592&newslettertype=archive (accessed June 21, 2009). 26 David S. G. Goodman, ed., The New Rich in China: Future Rulers, Present Lives (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 1–2.

32 Robert C. Morgan On Connoisseurship in the Marketing of Contemporary Chinese Art

hile much attention has been paid to the market value of Chinese figurative expressionists since 1989, much less effort Whas gone into understanding these works from the position of connoisseurship or understanding their qualities as works of art.

A careful scrutiny of Chinese painting may suggest that the much- deserved attention being given these artists is not merely a market-driven phenomenon, as some Western gallerists have proclaimed, but a bold new aesthetic and material direction for art in China. When shown together, as they frequently are, the works by these artists constitute a remarkable chapter in the ideological breakdown of the myths and legacies associated with their recent history. One might perceive in these paintings a perspective on reality in which reconfigurations of existential philosophy and psychology coming from the West during the post-World War II era have collided with traditional Chinese values in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. In the current, somewhat diluted context of globalization, these legitimate aesthetic concerns have been bulldozed by the shallow, commercial media-driven attitudes of financial speculation in both Western and Asian publications.

In recent months, as the investment value of figurative expressionism in contemporary Chinese art appears to have weakened, we are offered an opportunity to analyze and re-assess the balance between the pragmatic concerns of collectors and some of the perennial aesthetic traits and influences inherent in Chinese painting, going back to the Tang dynasty, if not further. Amid this vacillating crisis, one might take a little more time to review these paintings more closely, to see them from a different perspective, keeping in mind a more rational incentive toward collecting. In doing so, we might awaken the prospect for giving less emphasis to buying on impulse and more attention to the meaning and interpretation of quality based on actual experience. Consider that not so long ago, connoisseurship was distanced from, if not rejected by, the avant-garde movements in Europe and America. But the times are different today. Due to the accelerating international market in contemporary art over the past three decades, the role of aesthetics and criticism has taken a back seat to an increased emphasis on speculation and investment, often neglecting the evaluative foundation for why some works of art are more important than others, and how the absence of this factor justifies the amount of money being spent. We might define connoisseurship in art as a step-by-step process, a detailed investigation, interpretation, and evaluation. Each work

33 may be judged according to its deployment of material, technical virtuosity, formal acuity, and conceptual coherence.

Investors in contemporary Chinese art now have the opportunity to slow down and to develop a discerning eye in order to acquire truly superior works of art. For the Chinese art world in the twentieth-first century, this may actually constitute a new idea. It is not insignificant to consider that when the Chinese market emerged, European postmodern theory was in the saddle and was involved in a battle with academic modernism. Generally speaking, the trend was one of rejecting issues of quality in art in favour of developing theories to augment the presence of emerging artists in the marketplace. The notion of discerning superior work from mediocre work appeared to be no longer of interest within the market. The point was to sell work from the broadest base possible.

The rejection of “quality” in art—especially from a Greenbergian perspective in the seventies—was initially understood as a political issue and, thereby, the antithesis of the burgeoning position of postmodernism. However, as the modernist presence began to subside in the eighties, smothered by simulated images derived from popular culture and second- rate expressionism, it became evident (to some) that the evolution of this work as a marketing phenomenon was instrumentalized by major players within the market itself. The use of theory in the marketplace became a convenience in order to justify works considered “postmodern,” and this flew in the face of Greenberg’s previously staunch modernism. Almost anything could be justified in relation to theory, because theory was both exclusive and neutral. Yet, in the long run, theory could not make mediocre work into a lasting investment. Instead of functioning as an external critique of art, postmodern theory began to function as a means for describing ideological concerns that were presumably hidden within the work.

In writing these remarks, I have deliberately refrained from mentioning the names of Chinese painters or titles of specific works, realizing that these could easily be misinterpreted as endorsements of certain artists to the exclusion of others. This is not the point I am intending to communicate. Rather, I am suggesting that certain attitudes, perceptions, and reflections might be useful for collectors in rehabilitating a market for significant works of advanced art in China, without necessarily theorizing quality, as is often done, on the basis of the artists’ age, gender, ethnic background, or sexuality. While the chance of a recovery is possible without reflecting on the failed marketing strategies of the recent past, my prognosis is that unless a more rational focus is given to the subtle coherence of the aesthetic, technical, and conceptual aspects of the work, the duration and consistency of any market recovery will remain limited.

By 1964, the late American critic Harold Rosenberg understood that the avant-garde was gradually moving into the ranks of a politically distanced form of academic stylization. He was often critical of works by second

34 generation “action painters” who were less involved with revolutionizing the aesthetics of abstract painting than in finding a secure style that would identify their presence in the galleries.1 Since Rosenberg, this stylized form of avant-gardism, especially in American academic institutions, continues to regurgitate pseudo-radical forms with such rationalized criteria as “if it looks new, it must be art.” This, combined with the deployment of the trend-setting market term “cutting edge”—a term exempt from any historical or political function—virtually prohibits a clear grasp of work that might be considered qualitatively significant. Works associated with this de-politicized, stylized tendency, disguised through quirky signs of commercial kitsch, have begun to de-stabilize the contemporary art market throughout China. As these kitsch forms move increasingly towards narcissistic display, and thus further away from the complex contra- aesthetic associated with the historical avant-garde, which initially rejected notions of connoisseurship, the market remains flooded with works based on an endless appropriations, repetitive ideas, academic theory, multimedia effects, and the inventive seduction of marketing trends.

The term “avant-garde” began in the Napoleonic Wars with the invention of the fixed bayonet employed by the infantry that marched in front of the cavalry. The term fell out of favour after the early nineteenth century and later re-emerged in another guise during the brutally repressed working- class uprising of the Paris Commune in 1872. According to Roger Shattuck, the “avant-garde” was again revived in the experimental theatre of Alfred Jarry during la belle époque, where it eventually wound its way into music, poetry, and the visual arts by the beginning of the twentieth century.2 Because the field of contemporary art—designated as taking place after 1945 in the West, and after 1979 in China—is presumably tied to the avant-garde, the notion of retrieving connoisseurship through attention to materials and concepts might offer an unprecedented step in bringing confidence back to the market. With the economic changes in the international financial markets over the past year, there has been a concomitant shift away from major investment and speculation on artists’ works that are promoted as cutting edge. This retreat suggests a need for a replacement that is not simply market-based, but offers an emphasis on rethinking the complex aesthetic reception of contemporary art, especially given the enormous diversity that exists within the burgeoning transcultural environment.

In accepting connoisseurship as a means of evaluating works of art in contrast to merely following the language of postmodernism or postcolonialism, one might consider the ironic premise that throughout history—whether it comes from the north, south, east, or west—all art has been at some point contemporary. This being the case, it would be absurd to claim that what is contemporary is synonymous with the politics of the avant-garde or with the commercial tendencies of the cutting edge. None of these terms have a necessary claim on one another. In our rush to discover what is new, we may have lost the pulse that helps us discover substance in a work of art. Put another way, we might say that truly important works of art identify us in the manner of a consumerist mentality rather than

35 our deciphering what might truly coincide with our identity. History is inextricably bound to art not simply in terms of an academic inquiry. Ultimately, it is the substantiality of a great work that ensures its longevity and, therefore, its investment potential, even if the importance of the conceptual intention loses its significance over time leaving only the visible physicality of the work in its wake. Even this substantiality may erode over time depending on the quality of the materials and to the attention given to craftsmanship. This would seem to resurrect the notion of culture as a sequence of traces by which works of art represent who we are in relation to what we have been in the past. Even so, such a presumably traditional idea of culture would allow for a broader scope of human identity to exist in tandem with the marketing of advanced art within the transcultural present.

In the absence of critical inquiry based on the actual physical materiality of the artwork, generalized notions based on the artwork’s investment value quickly become understood through the media’s idea of art. What commercial media describes as “new” is most likely a recapitulation of the immediate past. The art media always repeats itself. However, for contemporary Chinese art to enter the realm of connoisseurship—a point of view entirely opposite from the manner in which the media regards art—requires a critical inquiry that is both culturally and aesthetically informed. From a Northern Song dynasty perspective, the notions of form, space, and brushwork in ink painting are finally accompanied by spirit—a concept less known or understood in Western painting. Once the substance and presentation of a work of art are established, the trained viewer may proceed toward finding the work’s signifying power, or, for that matter, it may happen all at once. Some viewers are immediately struck by how an artwork speaks to them before they begin to approach an analysis of why this might be the case. For a non-Chinese viewer to assume that he or she understands the intricate symbolic meanings that underlie the context of figurations, images, and events represented in Chinese painting would be presumptuous. Therefore, the degree of cultural, historical, and ideographic assimilation cannot and should not be disregarded as one engages in a process of connoisseurship. Interpretations and judgments about that which one does not know are not connoisseurship. Rather, both subtle and not so subtle forms of arrogance have occasionally entered into the process of selling and buying Chinese art that are often made visible by collector tourists who have helped make the 798 district in Beijing what it is today.

The position I am taking indirectly implies a rejection of reception theory, which has become popular in recent years, and which acknowledges an understanding of art that is based on individual subjectivity (often confused with knowledge) and impulses (often mistaken for experience) rather than with clear insight based on a highly attentive point of view. While some will equate aesthetics with objectivity in art, which is not altogether untrue, the question arises of what is meant by objectivity. Perhaps, objectivity might be seen in terms of a reflective distance that allows the mind to catch-up with the seduction of visual trends. Commercial marketing trends dissuade viewers from seeing the connection between the historical and cultural

36 aspects that frame the work in direct relation to the present. In this sense, feeling can be more objective in relating to a work of art than opinions or what is erroneously called subjectivity. Opinions in art are like any other opinions; they are basically insignificant. In contrast to having an educated point of view, opinions are a function of the commercial media. For example, brain surgeons generally do not have opinions about their patients’ illnesses. Rather they make decisions based on what is known through a research analysis. In some instances, their remedial decisions may have an element of intuition, but—assuming the philosopher Blaise Pascal is correct—intuition does not negate knowledge. Comparatively speaking, this would suggest that if the collecting of contemporary Chinese art is to be taken seriously, why should the manner in which we address the aesthetic components in a work of art be considered any differently?

From another angle, one might say that to arbitrarily exaggerate the meaning of a work in relation to its media exposure can be a disservice as it potentially encourages a lack of knowledge of the culture in which the artwork was conceived. Meaning in a work of art as derived from a singular point of view can be valuable in coming to terms with a work of art. Given the pervasiveness and hidden promotional aspects of media coverage in the art world today, it is difficult for this kind of understanding to occur. Whether political or economic, these pressures for particular understandings are very real, yet they are often unrecognized by the general reader. There is a striking absence of coherent criticism being published in China for a number of complex academic, political, and commercial reasons, not only for professionals, but for interested readers who want to understand something about art. While historically, connoisseurship functioned within the realm of the powerful elite, today it is possible for connoisseurs to develop acuity through education, self-learning, and the application of a sensitive intellect. Instead of the privileged elite of former times, we may now speak of the potential for a conceptual elite. The positive implications here are insurmountable and are already happening in many places—as for example in Iran, Pakistan, and Indonesia—in the former “third world.”

The culture in which a work is conceived may or may not be important for some artists, but generally speaking, in China, it is. Even so, most sophisticated connoisseurs that I know look for a combination of the following: a clearly incisive conceptual inventiveness, evidence that the work is well made and that the condition of the material is durable and in generally good condition, and that there exists a clear formal grasp of how the parts of the work cohere. According to postmodern theory in the 1980s, the new world order had revealed a meta-language in which global awareness of cultural difference had irrevocably changed the way art was being conceived, produced, and distributed. Given these complex differences, it became increasingly difficult to justify quality in art, given that quality was designated as both elitist and culturally specific. Connoisseurship became the adversary in the trade. The result has been that the overflow of mediocrity accompanied by endless theories

37 espousing cultural difference went beyond the control of the market to the point where decisions about quality and price structure took on a certain arbitrary veneer.

At the same time, collectors in the global art market—or “clients,” as they came to be known—were equally incapable of making a distinction between the actual significance of contemporary works of art and their relatively distorted market value. While market speculation proved necessary for global investors, it also prevented the general audience from seeing clearly what was important amid the evolving plethora of artists, in China as elsewhere, advocating “cultural difference” as the prerequisite password for ensuring sales. To be clear, the argument is not against cultural difference as such: rather, it is the problem of how the market has manipulated issues of marginality, including cultural difference, as a central selling point, regardless of the quality of the work. While the identification of cultural traits and current political struggles within those cultures is important, to hear the phrase “cultural difference” in a sales transaction may obscure, if not erase, any need to investigate the quality of the work on the basis of connoisseurship.

By foregrounding the standardization of art according to market demand— and, concomitantly, foregoing a critical awareness of substantial issues emanating from a work of contemporary art—we tend to overlook the discrepancies between aesthetic content based on the cultural context in which the work was created and the quality of the work in coherent conceptual, material, and formal terms. Just as social ideas and mores from the two hemispheres do not always merge seamlessly into one another, one may assume that content in art varies according to specific cultures, regions, or aesthetic preferences. Individual experience also varies according to awareness of significance in art and according to the historical period in which the work is seen. The overwhelming split between market value and aesthetic significance in contemporary art in recent years—a split as evident in the West as in China—offers one of the surest signs that globalization may be in direct conflict with indigenous cultures throughout the world. Numerous examples of this conflict range from the growth of the tourist industry in Bali and Kuala Lumpur to the destruction of historical landmarks in Hong Kong, Beijing, and New York, replaced with signature architecture assembled in glass and steel at breakneck speed. For example, in Bali—a place that I know and about which I have written3—if a major hotel franchise wants to build a glass and steel tower adjacent to an ancient Hindu temple still being utilized as a place for daily worship by the Hindu community of the region, it is most likely these entrepreneurs will succeed unless the government intervenes. By intervening in such a proposal, the Balinese government may incite disfavour from the corporate sector, which in turn may disrupt the capital growth of the tourist industry.

While all of this may appear outside of contemporary art, one cannot deny the increase of joint ventures between signature architects and artists. As this interdisciplinary, yet often understated commercial tendency,

38 emerges on a global scale, such “creative” proposals could, in fact, work in opposition to preserving monuments and territories used by indigenous cultures. If aesthetic connoisseurship were applied to such developments in conjunction with consultants in regional environmental stability, perhaps the mindless space filling for profit would take a different turn. In such conflicted situations, connoisseurship does not simply end with a traditional (or conservative) idea of the art object as serving a purely formal, self-contained, or isolated function. The larger point is that such interdisciplinary projects—as they extend into the “expanded field” (Rosalind Krauss)—would need to take the mixture of qualitative, commercial, and environmental concerns into full account, thereby redefining the meaning of connoisseurship in terms of having a more contemporary activist function.

Where are we today with regard to the determination of quality in art and the kind of market manipulation that carries us in a very different direction, one contingent on specularity, sensation, and entertainment? One might say that the intervening variables that prevent connoisseurship from taking a strong hold in the new global art world are as much political as they are economic. Given the disappearance of the cultural trace in urban centres throughout the world, as public services become increasingly privatized and exclusive, defined according to various brands of surveillance, the notion of a global culture or “transculture” becomes highly problematic with respect to people who require some sense of spatial intimacy within standardized environments that have become overdeveloped and saturated with advertising. The pressure emanating from the international media in its persistent emphasis on conforming to the inevitability of “progress” has taken culture outside the premises of identity and reconstituted it as “global culture.” By emphasizing conformity and ultimate consensus about artists considered worthy of investment—whether in Europe, America, India, Africa, or China—does not allow for the kind of environment conducive to advanced art making.

At this juncture, I want to be clear about my critical position with regard to the kind of encroaching conformity and homogenizing effects that globalization has produced since its inception, in that it ignores the cultural needs and realities of indigenous people under the banner of imposing shared resources in order to obtain prosperity for all “third-world” nations. Economic policies do not merely produce economic results; they also impinge on the way people have chosen to determine quality in the way they live their lives. This qualitative factor is not a standardized system of livelihood, but quite the opposite. While Greenberg may have understood quality in monolithic terms, I do not. Quality—the basis of connoisseurship after postmodernism—is sustainable only through the recognition of cultural difference. At the same time, those works of art that possess significance appear to move on a vertical axis between the “deep structure” of language (Derrida) and the emancipation of feeling through a sense of coherent form. This may vary from culture to culture, and from individual to individual, but it does not preclude the potential of art becoming

39 universal and extending to those outside the boundaries of the artist’s origins. This kind of transmission is often unaccountable, and yet on some level is objectively understood. Perhaps, in some way it is close to Husserl’s idea of “transcendent intersubjectivity” where, simply put, there is an agreement as to the power of a thought that extends beyond the mundane appearance or surface reality.

In essence, there can be no connoisseurship in contemporary art if criticism is censored or excluded from the market. If criticism remains outside the global marketing of art—as might be the case in global financial centers such as Dubai, Mumbai, or Singapore—an aggressive global market will inevitably re-appear. In such a global environment, prices of works of contemporary art—which, in addition to the cities listed above, include Beijing, Hong Kong, London, and New York—tend to become arbitrary. This further suggests that there is an agenda that wishes to sustain the arbitrariness of these price structures that will eventually take control of arbitrating which artists are aesthetically significant on a global scale according to a market standard. Such arbitration fails to pay attention to the artworks themselves, and only serves to enhance the mystique of the artists who produce them. If a new approach to marketing art does not evolve, the market will continue to resume its previous course and will inevitably succumb once again to another cycle of collapse and temporary recovery.

Such machinations may be good for the market but are not in the best interests of a living culture. The question in this specific case is whether China wants to sustain its culture or to continue an agenda that refutes tradition in favour of the superficial “avant-garde” trends in recent decades by giving art over to a market that suggests entrepreneurship without connoisseurship. This current direction would appear to have very little to do with quality of life, which has been in ages past the source in justifying respect and dignity for one’s culture.

This essay evolved from a lecture and a panel, delivered on two separate evenings, at the Core Club in midtown Manhattan at the outset of the 2008 Asian Contemporary Art Fair. In addition to Morgan, the panel included Charles Merewether and Richard Vine. The lecture was also given at Tainan University of Technology on April 22, 2009 at the invitation of Professor Hong-wen Lin.

Notes 1 Harold Rosenberg,” Action Painting: Crisis and Distortion” in The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience, (New York: Horizon Press, 1964). 2 Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Arts in France, 1885–1918, (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1958). 3 Robert C. Morgan, Made Wianta: Wild Dogs in Bali, (Singapore: NFS Press, 2005).

40 Danielle Shang Orientalism and the Landscape of Contemporary Chinese Art

“I went to China, I didn’t want to go, and I went to see the Great Wall. You know, you read about it for years. And actually it was great. It was really, really, really great.” 1 –Andy Warhol

He loved that everyone there dressed alike. He loved that Mao Zedong, whose face he painted in 1972, was still popular six years after his death. That was Andy Warhol in 1982, when he visited China. In the eye of an extraordinary artist of the twentieth century, China was reduced to merely three things: the Great Wall, collectivism, and Mao. Twenty-seven years later, Warhol’s attitude towards China is still shared by many in the West who read China through the lens of politics and Mao fetish. Some Western artists are so impressed by the bombastic images of fascist-like revolutionary women and men from Mao’s regime that they have created their own lines of fashionable pseudo-propaganda posters and made a good living from it.

Edward Said’s critique of the set of beliefs known as Orientalism comes to mind. Orientalism is a manner of regularized writing, vision, and study dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to promote antagonism—deliberately highlighting the difference between the familiar (the West) and the strange (the East). When it comes to contemporary Chinese art, Orientalism is about Western visions of China, narrating Chinese history according to Western perceptions and the desire for primitive, Western-art-reminiscent, and exotic Chinese art. From the Orientalist perspective, the essence of contemporary Chinese art has been mainly placed within the concept of Chineseness, a term that started to appear in the 1990s. Many collectors, curators, scholars, and dealers in the West look for the codes of Chineseness in Chinese art—Mao, Tian’anmen, concubine-looking young women, and metaphors for suppressed individuality. The Orientalist concept of Chineseness positions art from China in opposition to art in the West to affirm the West’s power of pluralism; that is, to allow a certain existence of art from the non-Western world by virtue of the West’s recognition and tolerance. The ultimate goal of Orientalism is for the West to dominate and possess the East economically, culturally, and politically. Art that is independent of Western theories and terms, just like other forms of independence, can only “be wished for so long as it is the kind of independence we approve of. Anything else is unacceptable and, worse, unthinkable.”2 Hence, the job of Chinese artists is to deliver their non-Western identity “either for analysis and judgement or for satisfying the exotic tastes of European and North American audiences.”3 The curatorial approach to contemporary Chinese art in the West has

41 Wei Dong, Butcher, 2007, oil on canvas, 168 x 76 cm. Courtesy of Chinese Contemporary.

exercised a double standard by placing the narrative of politics and the image of an exotic China above the merits of art. It seems that Chinese art must be politically motivated and scarred by its revolutionary history; it must be sadomasochistic and sexy; it must be anti-communist and anti- collectivist. Clearly, contemporary Chinese art has been in vogue during the past few years, and its popularity encouraged Orientalist attitudes both from within China and from the West.

These inaccurate assumptions about contemporary Chinese art have led to deep-seated misunderstandings. The possibility that not all Chinese art is ideology-driven, and that not all Chinese art concerns Mao and the Cultural Revolution, are often ruled out. The international art market has relentlessly pageanted for over ten years the same repetitive images coming from China: endless Mao portraits, bloodlines, gaudy and sexy women, grinning faces, and masks. And many Western collectors and institutions have been, and are, determined to carry on collecting them at any cost. Framing Chinese art within the limitations of Western fantasy is exactly what Edward Said

42 objected to in his theory of Orientalism thirty years ago. For today, with all the opportunities for intercontinental travel, with the Internet and cellular phones, a great gap still exists between how the West perceives contemporary Chinese art and what contemporary Chinese art truly is. Will a painting by an American artist be evaluated based upon whether it depicts Mickey Mouse or Barack Obama? Must all German art reference the atrocities of World War II?

Song Kun, Qiyunshan, 2008, An extreme example of these misunderstandings: I recently accompanied oil on canvas, 45 x 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist. a well-respected American curator, critic, and writer, whom I will refer to as Mr. X, on a visit to a few young Chinese artists in Beijing, all of whom were born after Mao’s death. To my surprise, and to all the artists’ surprise, whenever Mr. X saw a painting depicting a figure in water or a figure standing on elevated ground with his back towards the viewer, Mr. X would identify the figure as Mao Zedong, no matter how firmly the artists protested against his assumption. Mr. X insisted that he was able to detect the presence of Mao underlying the paintings’ images because Mao was deeply imprinted in all Chinese artists’ consciousness and was haunting their art. How did he know about all Chinese artists’ consciousness? Because he frequented China, his wife was from China, and he had curated contemporary Chinese art exhibitions? After a heated argument with one of the artists, Mr. X decided that young Chinese artists were either ignorant about Chinese history, or in denial about the truth of their art. “Everybody in the world would be reminded of Mao Zedong swimming in the Yangtze River or Mao Zedong going to Yan’an in such paintings,” he said. When asked who everybody was, he first stated everybody except for the aforementioned young Chinese artists. Then he changed his mind to everybody in his generation who was aware of Mao. Later, he redefined everybody as people in the West.

43 Mr. X is a person with a big heart and is very knowledgeable about art. However, he is among many who contribute to an Orientalism that is based upon an implicit assumption that only Westerners are able to point out the noteworthy aspects of Chinese art and possess the authority to theorize about it. It is true that Mr. X visits China frequently. But like many other Westerners visiting China, instead of interacting with the common Chinese and paying attention to matters that the Chinese care about, Mr. X creates a vacuum around him when he is in China. He checks himself into an expensive hotel, he watches CNN, he dines out at fancy restaurants where the menus are printed in English, and he hires a car to take him from the hotel to galleries and studios. Mr. X has indeed befriended a few Chinese artists, ones who grew up in Mao’s regime and create art concerning Mao and China’s political situations. But the artists born after 1976, the year Mao died, have different life stories that influence the context of their art. “If you really want to discuss politics, let’s discuss Deng Xiaoping and his policies of Economic Reform. Our generation was brought up under Deng,” said an artist who was born in 1977. But Mr. X brushed her off. The lack of language skills and the lack of cultural sympathy prevented him from understanding in a broader scope how Chinese art is related to a society that is moving forward at a breakneck pace. The trips to China serve only to confirm his preconceived ideas about China and Chinese art instead of assisting him in learning about Chinese art on its own terms. This is neither to suggest that there is, nor has been, no contemporary Chinese art that sincerely investigates China’s political history, the collective memory of Mao, or an idealism promoting social improvement. The pioneers of the ‘85 New Wave Movement, for instance, dedicated their art to such themes. They were the first generation of contemporary Chinese artists to enter the international art realm in the 1990s. Their art, expressed primarily in two particular styles, Political Pop and Cynical Realism, was immediately embraced by the West as a symbol of resistance within the communist structure. This was problematic from the start: Chinese art was applauded primarily for its political value. It is worth pointing out that such an approach is not only employed for contemporary Chinese art, but also for art from other non-Western countries. The Chelsea Art Museum had a contemporary Iranian art exhibition this summer titled Iran Inside Out. The exhibition was obviously timed to give prominent display to the Iranian social causes dear to American hearts. The New York Times admitted, “Even when politics are elusive, this is a committedly political affair.”4

A prominent gallerist in New York, who represents big-name artists in the world, including a handful of the best-known Chinese artists, such as Zhang Xiaogang, recently wrote: “[Chinese art] is the art of a subculture that propagandizes free thought and originality rather than collectivis[m]. These essentially Chinese paintings were now being presented in Western styles. They were reminiscent of . . . Chuck Close and . . . [Gerhard] Richter.”5 This is an example of a stereotypical interpretation of “essentially Chinese” art, which is of a politically charged subculture and an adoption of Western art references. In the article, the “essentially Chinese” paintings referred to were those of Political Pop and Cynical Realism, and many Chinese artists who developed these two styles have long stopped advancing as artists. For more than ten years, motivated by their commercial success, they have stuck with their signature motifs and largely have been reproducing the same iconography over and over again.

44 Dadongan Cigarette Poster, Da Another trend welcomed in the Dong, c.1930s. West is to eroticize a China that is undergoing Westernization. It is often presented in paintings that depict young Chinese women’s sexuality and its association with Western lifestyle and products. Images of tobacco advertising posters featuring Chinese pin-up girls from Shanghai’s colonial era come to mind. The Chinese were introduced to cigarettes only in 1905 by British American Tobacco. Tobacco seller, James Augustus Thomas engineered the assimilation of the Western product and pastime into the world’s oldest culture by his innovative advertising posters featuring young and exotic Chinese women smoking. It promoted the idea that under Western influence, China was transformed into a modernized, civilized, and “sexy nation” at the beginning of the twentieth century. And by 1920, China was smoking twenty-five billion cigarettes a year. Today, when paintings of young Chinese women semi-naked, styled in Western fashion, and charged with sexiness are being eagerly painted and collected, I question how much further the expansion of such economic and cultural colonialism will be allowed. Does it mean that contemporary Chinese art has to depend on Western blessings? Has Chinese art been collected as pseudo souvenirs to prove how much China wants to adopt Western values of democracy, capitalism, and Christianity? (Since China opened up to the West, more than seventy million people in China have become Christians, now as many as there are Communist party members.) The artists who have succumbed to this colonial context and Orientalism continue to supply the West with works that are imbued with the ideologies of the Cold War and the fantasies of a communist society immersed in the economic boom. Some artists who benefited from the fabrication of China by the West have been acclaimed as the best avant- garde artists from China, their repetitive work considered to be “essentially Chinese,” resulting in frequent exhibitions at commercial galleries and public institutions both in the West and in China. These are the artists who have become the newly rich: driving Ferraris, drinking vintage cognac, and building lavish homes. Given that postmodernism was constituted through a series of anti-establishment movements beginning in the 1960s, isn’t avant-garde art supposed to be anarchistic in nature? If so, how is the art of these Chinese artists in opposition to today’s established mainstream? Does their art have sustainable value?

It is necessary to clarify that not all Chinese artists create art with the obvious and simplified trademark of Chineseness. But the popularity of Political Pop, Cynical Realists, and Gaudy artists in the West, and their increasing influence in China, overshadow the many Chinese artists who strive to create art that is not marginalized by being “Chinese,” but, rather, art that is in tune with the currents of society, informed by individual experiences, and reflective of China’s engagement with a global vision. It is not my intention to present Chinese artists as victims. They are by no means the victims of the dialogue between the West and the East. Because

45 of Political Pop, Cynical Realism, and Gaudy Art, contemporary Chinese art was in the first place given a chance to play a role in the international art world. However, this is not to claim that Chinese art should simply play by the rules and terms of reference dictated by the West. And it is not to

Ling Jian, Propoganda Party, 2008, oil on canvas, 190 cm. diameter. Courtesy of the artist.

claim that the goal of contemporary Chinese art should be set to fit within a Western agenda. Numerous exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art in the West have implied the Orientalist view of China’s art as the art of “others,” for example, the exhibitions Inside Out (1998) and The Revolution Continues (2008).6 The titles themselves bring up questions. Who is on the inside? Who is on the outside? The New York Times remarked: “No one from the outside (the superstition ran) could get in; no one on the inside could get out. A battened-down version of Marxist communism, culminating in the fanaticism of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s, was in place, as elaborate in its hierarchies and protocols as any religion or imperial dynasty. Devotion was obligatory; dissent could be lethal.”7 And which revolution continues? Why did the art exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery in 2008, thirty-two years after the end of the Cultural Revolution, need to go hand in hand with Mao’s Revolution? In the catalogue, it explains that Mao’s dictum to rebel is written into every piece, his legacy provides a young generation of artists with layers of visual complexity derived from reflection, reinterpretation, and redefinition, and with a hunger for radical change. Mao’s spirit of rebellion has continued in a subversive form of creativity that distinguishes the new Chinese art. This awkward politicized vision of Chinese art reveals just how little Chinese art is valued in the West, except for confirming the illusion of a strange and ideologically ill China. Anna Somers Cocks, the general editorial director of Art Newspaper brought forth the question of colonializing art from the East. She asks: “Is Western prejudice about what counts as art making itself felt here?”8

46 Yue Minjun, Hats Series— It is not only the West that is to The Lovers, 2005, oil on canvas, 170 x 140 cm. blame. Chinese artists are also Courtesy of the artist. responsible for the distortion that has informed their practice. If artists’ creations comply with visions of hegemony, where is integrity in their art? The current financial downturn is a much- needed wake-up call. Concepts of identity, pluralism, and antagonism, under the dim light of the global economy, are now rapidly losing their appeal. Today, one year after the Saatchi exhibition, The Revolution Continues, Sotheby’s is busy putting many pieces from the show in its fall auction. Meanwhile, the media have begun to predict the next hot trend from the East. Is it Iranian art? Is it Indian art? With the ultra-hype about contemporary Chinese art quieting down, resentment has begun to arise. Many collectors regret having paid too much for badly painted pictures of laughing faces. British Newspaper Telegraph put out a sour review immediately after Saatchi’s contemporary Chinese art show opened in October 2008, accusing “a lot of Chinese artists produce nothing more significant than skillfully disguised imitations of commercially successful Western art.”9 The New Republic published an article right before the Beijing Olympics warning that “the work that is being promoted around the world as the cutting edge of new Chinese art is overblown and meretricious. . . . Much of the work is powered by a startling and completely delusionary infatuation with Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution.”10 The accusation that the art is meretricious might be too harsh, but the integrity of many artists is questionable. I will not doubt that certain artists have compromised their conscience to produce works that can tempt the market and bring them approval in the West. To make Chinese art relevant to the world, Chinese artists must first look closer to home: is their art relevant to China and China’s own artistic development?

It has become clear to many that the purpose of contemporary Chinese art is neither to highlight ideological contrasts nor to exploit a certain portion of history to entertain Orientalist curiosity, or to achieve selfish personal gain. Many Chinese artists and institutions have begun a process of self- reflection, looking deeper into China’s pressing reality. Since 2003, N12, an artists’ group consisting of twelve young artists in Beijing, has collectively put together four D.I.Y. group exhibitions outside the commercial and academic spheres. With each exhibition, the twelve artists explore the process of art making within the context of their personal histories against the background of a fast-changing world. In their work, they turned their attention to their existence within current society. They empowered their work with China’s own history and traditions. They examined their personal relationships with the world and their cultural heritage. At the 2008 Guangzhou Triennial, Farewell to Post-Colonialism, artists, curators, and researchers from Asia, Latin America, Europe, and North America questioned Western authority in interpreting and theorizing art and challenged an ideology-based art practice through exhibitions, projects, panel discussions, and critical writings. More and more Chinese artists now

47 Qiu Xiaofei, Almost 7 O’clock, installation, 2005. Courtesy of the artist.

are voicing their desire to be viewed and judged as equal members within the global art community, and to push the boundaries that have been mapped out by socio–political discourses. This departure should not be seen as a rejection of dialogue with the West, but, rather, as a beginning of establishing a healthier global art system, in which all art has its equal place.

Skepticism in reaction to Orientalism can be easily reversed with the assumption by many Chinese that only Chinese can understand China and its culture, and that no foreigner can possibly understand it, is equally ill informed and unproductive. For one thing, Chinese intellectual and cultural tradition cannot be disentangled completely from its Western counterpart. There is a certain degree of common ground shared by Western art and Eastern art. The modern Chinese history of art has, unlike in the West, been severely interrupted. China’s own visual art tradition was nearly wiped out for three decades during Mao’s era. All the artistic styles up to the 1990s were derived from the West—Socialist Realism from the Soviet Union, Pop Art from America, Cubism and Dadaism from Europe, Fluxus from Europe and America—without going through the linear modernist and postmodernist narrative that constituted those styles in the West. Only very recently, have some Chinese artists, such as Liu Wei, Chu Yun, Qiu Xiaofei and Shi Jinsong, started to break away from explicit imported Western styles and are concerning themselves with no particular methodologies or grand schemes. Their trajectories are encouraged by galleries, such as Vitamin Creative Space, Platform Art China, and Boers-Li Gallery. By stepping outside the box of identity, pluralism, and antagonism, their work demands to be viewed and analyzed within the context of visual art, utilizing the

48 Shi Jinsong, Three Trees, installation view of one of the three trees, 2005–2007. Courtesy of the artist.

same set of standards that apply to art made in the U.S.A., Europe, and the entire West. China is undergoing dramatic political, economic, and cultural transformation. China’s significance in the international world is increasing rapidly, and this will help attract scholars, critics, artists, and collectors to learn about China and Chinese history beyond a superficial understanding. An understanding of the heritage of Chinese artists is essential for coming to grips with their art in a contextualized reality. One day, perhaps the art world will raise the bar for Chinese contemporary art exhibitions, and avoid clichéd motifs, symbols, codes, and series from becoming confused with anti-establishment art, and not measure art, be it Chinese art or any other art from Asia, from the bias of Orientalist perspectives.

To install a cohesive and consistent art system in China is no small task. It needs support not only from the artists, galleries, collectors, and, critics, but also from the government and institutions. As gallery owner and scholar Pi Li pointed out: “Without support from an establishment, contemporary art is rootless and vulnerable to manipulation by others.”11 Such support is often interpreted as censorship or dictation by the Chinese government. The Chinese pavilion of the 53rd Venice Biennale presented seven Chinese artists, Fang Lijun, He Jinwei, He Sen, Liu Ding, Qiu Zhijie, Zeng Fanzhi and Zeng Hao whose work did not represent the level of achievement that contemporary Chinese art is capable of. The selection process in China alone was problematic; the curators, Lu Hao and Zhao Li, were appointed by the state’s Ministry of Culture, and the artists were selected by China Arts and Entertainment Group, a state-run enterprise. This skewed mechanism produced a regrettable result. With a play-it-safe approach and an exhausted theme of modernization and tradition, the Chinese pavilion, like a spent and forgotten ghost, was rarely a part of any conversation at the Biennale. China urgently needs legitimate state programs, museums, and organizations to nurture, promote, interpret, and conserve its own contemporary art, which has been left to survive on its own, occasionally used to promote political propaganda, and almost always treated as a commodity. Without the state’s regulation and guidance, anybody can rent a space and hang a few pieces of art and call it a museum in China. Nanjing Sifang Contemporary Art Museum, a self-titled museum, opened in 2005. The so-called museum has asked many young artists to

49 donate works in order to build its permanent collection. In the spring of 2009, Sifang Museum dumped a significant number of paintings that were donated by artists at Poly Auction House’s spring auction. Without regulation, “museums” in China, teaming up with auction houses, play a big role in sabotaging artists’ careers and manipulating prices. Without regulation, even the state-run museums, such as the National Museum of Fine Art in Beijing, are willing to install paid exhibitions for profit. Without a state-supported or philanthropic model of cultural infrastructure, many well-wishing private organizations in China are scrambling to secure funding to support their own programs. Their initial intentions of seeking independence from the state’s control and from the dictates of the market are compromised when they have to subject their curatorial principles to raising funds. When Boers-Li Gallery opened in 2005, it was a not-for-profit space, funded by a few grants from Europe. Two years later, when the grants stopped coming in, the gallery had to change its programs to become a commercial gallery in order to survive. Most museums, self-titled or state- run, lack conservation, research, education, and publication programs. This lack seriously jeopardizes the future of contemporary Chinese art. The urgency of introducing an institutional system that protects and promotes contemporary art and China’s cultural heritage, as well as providing guidelines and financial resources, can no longer be ignored.

The Orientalist attitude towards contemporary Chinese art is not only a result of Western bias, but also a consequence of decades of interruption within China’s own art and cultural system. The absence of an established point of reference and the inconsistency in historical development in Chinese art present obstacles for artists, critics, collectors, and curators to appropriately position and evaluate contemporary Chinese art. However, such obstacles are not impossible to overcome. Western art critics, curators, and collectors need to read Chinese art on its own terms and analyze it based upon contextual and aesthetic significance instead of through the lens of socio-political bias. For Chinese artists, the art community, and government, the task is greater. Not only is an art that is honest to the artists’ own visions needed, but it is also urgently necessary to create an art infrastructure that regulates, protects, conserves, promotes, and interprets contemporary Chinese art.

Notes 1 Paul Taylor, “Andy Warhol: The Last Interview,” Flash Art, April 1987, page 41–44. 2 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, (New York: Vintage, 1994), xviii. 3 Ibid. 4 Holland Cotter, “Iran Inside Out,” New York Times, July 23, 2009. 5 Arne Glimcher, “How China conquered the Art World,” Daily Beast, March 11, 2009. 6 Inside Out, at the Asia Society Galleries, New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1999. The Revolution Continues: New Chinese Art at the Saatchi Gallery, London, 2008. 7 Holland Cotter, “Art That’s a Dragon with Two Heads,” New York Times, December 13, 1998. 8 Anna Somers Cocks, “Are we colonialising Middle Eastern art?” Art Newspaper, July/August 2009. 9 Richard Dorment, “Review: The Revolution Continues: New Art From China at the Saatchi Gallery,” Telegraph, October 7, 2008. 10 Jed Pri, “Mao Crazy,” New Republic, July 9, 2008. 11 Pi Li, “Between Scylla and Charybdis: The New Context of Chinese Contemporary Art and Its Creation since 2000,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Summer/June 2005, 56.

50 Carol Yinghua Lu The Value of Painting as That of Cabbage and Thieves: On Li Dafang

t which point could we say that the art of an artist has reached maturity? And what does maturity mean in terms of art? Forceful Astrokes? Perfect presentation? In-depth exploration of subject matter? A signature stylistic quality? Conceptual consistency? Aesthetic identity? Material recurrence? A consistent way of working? A positive review? Museum shows and market recognition? Or even inclusion in the writing of art history? These are tough questions for art critics. What the nature of art is has been defined, questioned, and then reformulated, and sometimes when we spot it, we know it. It is always thrilling when realizing that the work of an artist has reached maturity.

This is often less a safe bet than it is a risky professional calculation. There are too many things to tint our judgments and decisions: our historical outlook, our professional qualifications, our mood. This by no means assigns too much importance to the work of an art critic; instead, it reminds us of the daunting responsibility of such a job. We are not out to verify an artist’s work, but perhaps to put our own learning and practice in context and, more importantly, to view an artist’s work in a context that is much more complex than the physical confines of a studio or an exhibition space. Like an art critic, an artist works in active relationship to a vast diversity of things—his or her upbringing, schooling, professional training, interests, temperament, way of working, world view, and much more, and all should be considered accordingly. In the 1980s, both German philosopher Hans Belting and American art critic Arthur Danto proposed the end of art or art history, an explosive philosophical take on art that made it impossible for artists to search for their success within the set value system of existing art history. This perspective puts art in a forever fluid and open state of being rather than within the linear logic of a singular art history in the modernist fashion. The aesthetic, stylistic, narrative, and conceptual attributes of art are seen as particular to specific places and times rather than as essential or timeless.

Li Dafang is an artist who belongs to his studio, where he paints hour after hour, day after day; it’s no understatement to say that Li is disciplined and steadfast. He has developed a daily routine for work that he happily and faithfully adheres to. This mode of production, with long studio hours and intense concentration, is effective, and it stands in contrast to certain recent trends in artistic production—inspired by the market craze for contemporary Chinese art in the past few years—characterized by the separation of the conception of work by the artist and its actual execution by hired help.

51 Li Dafang in his studio, August 2009. Courtesy of Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne. Opposite: Li Dafang, Small Ogive, 2009, oil on canvas and painted wood, 190 x 130 cm (painting), 78 x 130 x 59 cm (staircase). Courtesy of Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne.

Li Dafang’s work is manual, persistent, time-consuming, and process- based. More importantly, the level-headedness of his working style gives form to a highly distinctive visual language that is impossible to replicate. He painstakingly applies each single stroke, line, and dot onto the canvas. Their accumulation creates precise and detailed depictions such as a tree, woods, a bush, and their surroundings. Sometimes the density of his strokes is such that it creates a blurred effect. The inexhaustible variation of his brush strokes, which cover the full spread of his canvases and leave no space untouched, contributes to the unique appeal of his paintings. One could almost say that Li’s paintings are full of paintings.

Li Dafang’s paintings are specifically regional. They are related to the geography of where the artist has come from. He was born and grew up in Liaoning province, in northeast China, where the high altitude and long, harsh winters have created a rough and grey landscape. He lived in Beijing for the first time between 1993 and 1997, and for the second time in 2003. Since then, Beijing has become home. Li Dafang’s paintings breathe in the dry dust and cool climate of north China and absorb the geographical, social, and cultural temperament integral to this region. The realistic landscapes and imagery of his paintings are unmistakably northern: unkempt bushes and forests, cityscapes, roads, vistas of fields and open lands, the deep colour of the earth, the stocky appearance of buildings, and industrial leftovers. In Small Ogive (2009), the painting is physically placed atop a three-stepped deep green stairway and depicts two lush, tall pine trees standing so closely together that they are merged into a symmetrical shape. Behind them, a field overgrown with grasses stretches towards a distant horizon with blurry images of trees. In the foreground, a man dressed in a blue outfit carries a boat on his back and stands among a group of blue buckets. It’s an indistinct scene with an uncanny scenario, yet, at the same time, everything looks so familiar. The sites and scenes in Li Dafang’s paintings tend to be removed from the urban side of the contemporary city, but they are sights familiar to those who travel frequently to the city’s forgotten corners, where it meets with rural areas, or to those who witness transitory moments of urban and economic development. They are often considered lesser places, safely residing between the real and the fictional in the space of Li’s paintings.

52 53 In the 1950s, Li Dafang’s hometown, Liaoning, was designated as a major Top: Li Dafang, Zhang Hongbo, 2009, mixed media installation, centre of heavy industry by the government to produce the country’s 4 x 12.5 x 5 m, oil on canvas, 310 x 950 cm, 5 panels each first steel, machinery tools, locomotives, and airplanes following the 310 x 190 cm, life-sized human founding of People’s Republic of China in 1949. The switch to a market sculpture. Installed at Art Unlimited, Art40Basel, 2009. economy in the late 1970s, however, drove most of the area’s large-scale, Courtesy of Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne. state-owned manufacturers to bankruptcy. As a result, many factories and Bottom: Li Dafang, Clip, 2009, workshops were abandoned and became dilapidated, stacked with sad, silent oil on canvas and painted wood, 60 x 150 cm (painting), machinery: a sight well known to the artist, who was born in 1971, and a 96 x 186 x 32 cm (wood frame). Courtesy of Galerie Urs Meile, visual motif to which he would continue to return in later years. In fact, Beijing-Lucerne. some of his paintings have an unambiguous industrial flavour. Clip (2009) is framed in three levels of green wood, which extends the perspective of the canvas and gives a certain degree of formality to a scene of dilapidated and hollow Soviet-style factory buildings. Dried yellow grass covers its front yard, where a tiny figure crouches with his or her back facing the viewer. Otherwise, the site appears to be undisturbed and gloomy. On the triptych canvases of Bai Xiao Guang (2009), the two concrete pillars that form the gateway to a compound of office buildings bear evidence of a shut-down business: engraved names of the company are missing many characters. A monstrous concrete structure has landed onto the road inside of the gate, yet the few individuals standing outside the entrance surrounding the mouth of a long tube seem to be distanced from and unaware of its presence.

Li Dafang is unwavering about what he paints and how he paints, and he is not apologetic about returning again and again to the same type of visual and material environments that, in the majority of his paintings, provide

54 the many motifs he likes to repeat. The forest, for example, has become something of a signature that, for the artist himself, sets the stage for the rest of what goes onto a canvas. He also aimlessly drives around Beijing, mostly to the outskirts and wastelands, to deserted factories, sites of demolition, and roadside constructions, where real life unfolds quietly in the aftermath of drama or trauma. Houses have been pulled down, factories have been shut down, roadsides are deserted. There is no way to gauge the intensity of what has happened in these places and scenes, where a factory space of

Li Dafang, Bai Xiao Guang, dishevelled and unmanned machinery, for example, offers the perverse 2009, oil on canvas, triptych: 350 x 570 cm. Courtesy of attraction of being formally theatrical and attractive. He takes photographs Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing- Lucerne. of these places and recollects childhood memories, both of which contrive Next Page: Li Dafang, to leave marks on or find their ways into the content of his paintings. Li Beneath the T-shaped Wall, 2009, oil on canvas, 180 x Dafang’s project Zhang Hongbo for Art Unlimited in Art Basel, 2009, took 180 cm. Courtesy of Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne. its title from the name of one of his childhood teachers. He painted the lower part of the walls in the project space in a retro light green and created an enormous panoramic painting of an open field freshly furrowed by tractor wheels. This painting was placed against the middle wall of the room on a rectangular base made of piles of thousands of sketch paper sheets splotched with ink and pencil drawings. An anonymous human figure, like those that are often present in his paintings, appears as a life-sized sculpture in this room, which itself evokes the image of an old-style school classroom. There was no other reference in the work to the real person of Zhang Hongbo other than its title. The ambiguity of everything in this site-specific installation continues to remind us of the absurdity of his paintings.

There is, at the same time, no guarantee of consistency in his representation. Li’s work is derived from and dependent on reality, on his experience and

55 acute perception of it. However, as much as his paintings conform to the technical means of realism and are convincing as representations, the artist consistently plays with visual tricks that reveal his deliberate disregard for the authenticity and coherence of his plots: improbable props, abrupt sweeps of bright colours, nonexistent creatures, and inaccurate proportions that bring a misty and melancholy quality to the surface of his paintings as well as an overstated sense of isolation in time and place. They suggest an absurd reality, yet the artist fiercely reinvents the plots and their reappearances on canvas until the specificity of their references and emotions are drastically reduced.

From very early on, the artist revealed his grand ambition to carve out a space for drama and storytelling, the flat surface of his canvases are the equivalent of a theatrical stage. He recalls his childhood exposure to, and fixation on, theatre and literature. He paints human figures, depicts scenarios, creates tensions, invents dialogues and monologues for his characters, gives out clues, designs plots of suspense, and emulates the effect of the long exposures found in movie making. He is the scriptwriter of all the absurdities in his paintings; he has tight control over the narrative structure and won’t let it run on its own free will. Yet, the artist will hasten to add that the narratives in his paintings are not to be trusted. They simply make no sense, and it’s no use trying to piece a story together from what he chooses to paint in such meticulous detail. No one other than the artist can figure out the puzzles or bring any logic to his images.

However, the discrepancies between the depicted and the actual in Li Dafang’s paintings, although it’s often an impossible task to gauge the degree of absurdity between the two, are almost imperceptible and securely contained within the space of his canvases. It’s no surprise that Li Dafang is a fervent admirer of Alfred Hitchcock, whose strength lay in his ability to formulate suspense through the extension of time and the closing in of space in his story-telling. The simultaneous depiction of everyday situations and hints of potential danger, which Hitchcock even spelled out by writing such lines as “Watch

56 57 your back, there’s someone there” on the posters for his movies, as well as Li Dafang, Quarrelsome Elder Sister Bola, 2009, oil on canvas the obliviousness of his protagonists to their immediate jeopardy, played and painted wood, 190 x 310 cm (painting), 80 x 310 x 60 cm masterfully on the fear that exists deep within our subconscious minds. (staircase). Courtesy of Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne. But Li Dafang’s paintings are far away from playing exclusively on instinct. The artist is confidently in charge of bringing together various possible elements of theatricality despite their obvious incompatibility with each other. His recent addition of wooden stairways and ladder-shaped podiums to support the canvases, or enlarged and elaborate wooden frames, defies easy classification or interpretation. It’s another Hitchcock-esque strategy. Images of staircases often play a central role or are featured prominently in Hitchcock’s films; his stylistic interest in staircases can be attributed to the influence of German Expressionism which often featured heavily stylized and menacing staircases. Yet the staircases in Li Dafang’s painting installations are more stylistic than symbolic. They are bulky, artificial, and conspicuous, lending a solemn and monumental quality to Li’s canvases, yet they bear no responsibility in conveying meaning. As the artist points out, they are, instead, an embodiment of his attempt to understand and exercise perception about what is painting and what is art:

Works with staircases have appeared in my work since 2007; I want to try and explain [them]. Initially, I wanted to explore a playful possibility for painting. The world inside of my work is an independent world. The environments surrounding it change; our world changes also. Combined with stairways, [my paintings] have the possibility to be viewed and appreciated. This conforms to my perception of art. Especially during the past two years, I am looking for a presumption of art, which is specificity. To place sensible or insensible objects next to each other serves a certain special purpose that is tangible [in intellectual terms]. It is also related to my understanding of painting. For me, painting is a word, a memory. My thoughts

58 and actions, or a certain purpose born out of it, or a certain reason are what I consider in painting. This assembly of things could appear to be rather absurd at times.1

These statements deflate any temptations for one to read too many sociological, philosophical, or psychological connotations into Li Dafang’s paintings. Li Dafang’s paintings have departed from the new generation of figurative painters such as Liu Xiaodong and filmmakers such as Jia Zhangke, who have emerged in the spotlight since the mid-1990s. At that time, there was a collective return by the artistic community to everyday life which was extremely dramatic and dynamic in itself. What the artists had to do was to extract samples from this social reality and then represent them without, in my opinion, having to demonstrate any critical or analytical position. But the temptation and need to truthfully document and expose a fast-moving and powerful reality is less urgent today, as exemplified by artists such as Li Dafang. For Li, what connects his art to his own being is less the subject matter his paintings depict or its relationship to society than the possibility of experiencing and reflecting through the act of painting on what painting means to him on an individual level:

I suppose that art is described as having a certain purpose, something small, something specific, that art is practical from an individual point of view yet useless for others or of not much use, or that art exists in an incomprehensible form. I think this is the position that art deserves. It is around but there shouldn’t be too high an expectation of it. The higher the expectation, the more ambiguous it becomes. It should have such specific value as that of “cabbage” or “thieves.”2

Li Dafang strongly advocates the withdrawal of any expectation that art should have a function. The attempt to resist such expectations is exemplified in Painting Is an Aversion to all that Glitters, the subtitle of his 2009 solo exhibition at Urs Meile, MAKE WAY! MAKE WAY!

Li Dafang presented in that exhibition a series of seven works completed in 2009 that were created through an expression of attitude rather than a theme. There is no radical stylistic rupture or conceptual transition from his paintings of the last few years, but more of a continuation. His detailed brushwork is unmistakably Li Dafang, the foggy quality is enduringly present, the trees cannot be mistaken, and the senseless scenarios are still perplexing. One might even suggest that this latest series of paintings isn’t necessarily a step forward from his previous works in terms of their technical or aesthetic proficiency. And Li might just agree with not applying the logic of evolution or progression to art.

It’s true to the intention of the artist to simply describe his paintings as they are rather than trying to analyze and interpret them. But I question the necessity even of my own descriptions at this point of writing. It excites no one to simply repeat what is clearly evident. Beyond description, I can’t tell you what each of his paintings actually means, or offer any plausible plots to connect them, and each viewer will bring their own meaning to them. What I propose, instead, is that at the end of working on these paintings, Li Dafang has reached a deeper understanding of his own expectation of painting and the specific value painting could have for him.

59 The definition and historical understanding of painting as an art medium have experienced many turns, overthrows, limits, and transcendences in the context of art history. But the transformation of Li’s own understanding of painting has its own course and process. I suggest that Li Dafang’s paintings function as his own personal tool for understanding painting and contemporary art—a kind of self-discovery. In the context of this aim, Li Dafang’s paintings have served the very specific purpose the artist has wished they would.

The obstruction for contemporary art is that people have too high an expectation. Talk of “innovation,” “progression,” and “overthrow” are too highbrow. The same situation is taking place in every field. Innovation is generally considered as the right direction. Thus individuality often becomes laziness or casualness. I want to take the wrong turn, to support “regression.” It’s easier to be bad than to be good. We can’t give so much weight to art but we have to carry it along still. So let’s press on in an ordinary way.3

Art itself, or the means of representation in art, is not so much the subject of scrutiny as in modernism, but more about how the artist discovers and establishes a certain relationship with, and perception of, art in his or her own practice. The technical experiments and conceptual reinventions of the medium of painting itself can barely raise any excitement. It’s an immense relief that today’s artists can finally abandon the ambition to create something new. In the context of art history, there is no idea that has not been contested, no theory that has not been challenged; every stone has been turned over.

It is a vain attempt to allocate Li Dafang’s practice, or that of any artists active today, into any category of contemporary art or any position within the chronology of the existing art history. After all, how can we possibly categorize contemporary art today? By its medium? By its subject matter? By its concept? None of these make sense. We have long since arrived at the end of the narrative of art history and have exhausted the possibility of contextualizing an artist’s work within the historical narrative of art. What Li Dafang’s practice does offer, together with that of his peers and colleagues all over the world, are rich, specific case studies. They do not exist as isolated cases, but they are certainly independent and specific to each of their own contexts. They shed light on how the artist strives to develop and formulate his or her own way of working and deepen an understanding of what he or she does as time moves forward. They raise new concerns and challenges in terms of curatorial and critical practices, and, in light of this, it’s perhaps as important to present and discuss the contexts of the work of the artist as it is to discuss single or particular pieces of artwork. It is therefore as important to look at each individual piece of work by Li Dafang as it is to understand the complexities of his opinion about painting and the rationalities that form the very context of his practice.

Notes 1 E-mail message forwarded to the author from Li Dafang, August 20, 2009. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid.

60 Robin Peckham Blind but not Foreign: Gao Weigang and the New Insider-Outsider Art

ao Weigang is an anomaly, a supreme practitioner of artistic pragmatics. Having toiled away in relative obscurity as a teacher Gof oil painting in Tianjin, he accidentally found himself in Beijing a few years ago to close a real estate deal for an artist friend, and while there, he decided to show his work to Ai Weiwei, having long admired the more established artist’s efficiency in getting things done. One thing led to another, and Gao Weigang was eventually offered his first show at China Art Archives and Warehouse (CAAW), in Caochangdi. That was 2008; a year later, he had another solo exhibition in Magician Space, the small 798 gallery owned by the artist with whom Gao Weigang had come to the city just three years earlier. These two exhibitions could not be more different from each other: one is all about exploring craft and material; the other is about enforcing concepts and relationships. For the artist, this is partially in order to maintain his creative energy, a process that involves moving from one work to the next without looking back. Mostly, though, it’s all about keeping himself amused.

Foreign Body, Gao Weigang’s exhibition at CAAW, was striking for the way it literally inserted what appeared to be a complex and mature body of work into the discourse revolving around the art exhibited at CAAW, with which it had previously had almost no contact. The works were all produced between 2007 and 2008, during which time the artist participated in literally no other exhibitions. And yet here—on the outskirts of Beijing during the capital’s Olympic year—this artist demonstrated new directions for Chinese conceptual painting and issued a challenge to the more highly professionalized corners of the broader art world.

The work in Foreign Body ranged from straightforward oil-on-canvas works to paintings on rocks, paintings with rocks attached to the canvas, sculptures consisting of electric fans, and paintings on half-destroyed pieces of furniture. Perhaps most interesting was the fact that with this intelligent approach to painting, and despite the artist’s professed boredom with two- dimensional work, he remains willing to experiment with the figurative while avoiding iconicity. The admirable subtlety evident in the two major paintings of futuristic interiors is also reflected in their conceptual rationale: here, Gao Weigang demonstrates a play between inside and out—those two key terms of Chinese contemporary art history—by imagining spaces of always-already-existent science fiction. The sterile interior of the gallery space is projected into a future—here reminiscent of Jamesonian temporality—and the technes transforms the present without having to enter it. In other works presented in Foreign Body, the artist experiments

61 Top: Gao Weigang, Jerusalem, 2007, oil paint and rock on canvas, 120 x 200 x 19 cm. Courtesy of the artist and China Art Archives & Warehouse, Beijing. Middle: Gao Weigang, A Rock with a View, 2008, oil paint on rock, 17 x 25 x 10 cm. Courtesy of the artist and China Art Archives & Warehouse, Beijing. Bottom left: Gao Weigang, Toxic, 2007, acrylic paint on books and found wooden furniture, 230 x 208 x 33 cm. Courtesy of the artist and China Art Archives & Warehouse, Beijing. Bottom right: Gao Weigang, The First Weng Weng Weng, 2008, electrical equipment, steel, 270 x 270 cm. Courtesy of the artist and China Art Archives & Warehouse, Beijing.

with an expanded realm of painting that borders on both sculpture and installation while retaining a strong sense of medium specificity.

For his 2008 solo exhibition at Magician Space, Blind/Bee, Gao Weigang replaces the object with action. If in Foreign Body he displaced his desire for cognitive experimentation onto the material world, tearing into specific objects with a furiously transformative energy, in this exhibition he grapples

62 Gao Weigang, The First Interior with this same energy in an attempt to interpolate the audience into the View, 2007, oil on canvas, 200 x 380 cm. Courtesy of the space between the artist and his work. Likewise, the emphasis on craft is artist and China Art Archives & Warehouse, Beijing. replaced by mass production values and manufactured simplicity—though the comparison may be critically facile, it would be difficult not to link an immaculate upright vacuum cleaner on a pedestal against a white wall with Jeff Koons’s vitrine-encased Hoovers from the early 1980s.

The premise of the central piece, Bee, is simple: at the end of each day, Gao Weigang vacuums the floor of the gallery space, emptying the collected debris into a sealed glass vial displayed in a row of sixty such vessels on a shelf against the wall, each one labeled with the date of its collection to emphasize the temporally discrete nature of any individual visit to the gallery. In this piece, the artist makes a complaint about the quality of

Gao Weigang, Bee (detail), 2009, vacuum cleaner. Courtesy of the artist and Magician Space, Beijing.

63 64 Gao Weigang, Bee, 2009, artist audience engagement achieved in Beijing, claiming that Bee forcefully vacuuming the floor. Courtesy of the artist and Magician incorporates them into both the physical format of the exhibition and the Space, Beijing. social structure it implies. Participation is both coded and negotiated as failure. Ultimately, the piece absorbs all traces of organic activity within an architectural structure—the key concept is that this activity is spurred on by the exhibition itself, leading to conceptual feedback loops far more complex than the one-size-fits-all ideal allowed for under the regime of relational aesthetics.

It would be possible to speak of the piece as an experiment in the production of social sculpture in that the artist makes an indirect physical connection with the audience and then transforms the evidence of such a relationship into an art object. Gao Weigang, however, is looking for something very specific here: far from calling into being a relationship between specific viewers, this work actually anonymizes them categorically, reducing them to a single set of subjects that are diagrammatically in opposition to the label “artist.” Participation is therefore accidental, and indeed almost surreptitious. Gao Weigang refers back to bees: though split into distinct classes with separate functions, all are biologically equal—that is to say, members of the same species—just as all viewers are made physically equal by virtue of their bodily residue left in the gallery.

In the next room, a black granite sculpture entitled Blind hangs on one Left: Gao Weigang, Bee, 2009, detail of collected debris. Courtesy of the artist and Magician Space, Beijing. Right: Gao Weigang, Bee, 2009, detail of glass vials. Courtesy of the artist and Magician Space, Beijing.

wall. Two dimensional, it has a crisply hexagonal silhouette reminiscent of a honeycomb, and it is backlit by pure white fluorescent lights. Its surface finish is more or less matte, but movements and figures can be detected when the overhead light strikes its face at the proper angle as the viewer moves by it. This piece feels significantly more physical than the vacuum cleaner, and rather out of place amid the general atmosphere of gestural conceptualism, almost like a foreign body within the exhibition. Blind ultimately instigates a move of interpellation. The viewer stands blinded before it, unaware of his/her own reflection in the failed mirror that one faces. Whereas Bee creates a physical relationship with the audience, this piece creates a specular one. The opacity of the black object calls attention to the existence of both the mirror and the vacuum cleaner as tools, configuring their relational functions within the rubric of the technes explored in Foreign Body.

On the floor against the wall separating the two installations there

65 is positioned a single line of heavily theoretical text ending with the declaration: “The tragedy is rooted in being controlled by others and oneself. No exemption.” Dissatisfied with visitors’ tendencies to ignore curatorial wall text, Gao Weigang decided to incorporate his artist’s statement into the physical design of the exhibition, once again forcing his audience into social participation by requiring their physical negotiation

and ambulant exploration. Like the vacuum, text is a tool. But where the vacuum piece seems so direct, the effects of the discursive baggage thrust on the exhibition through this textual aside are ambiguous at best.

However, none of this criticism will matter to Gao Weigang. The artist has already moved on: the only aspect of his practice that interests him is whatever comes next. Any given work is dead as soon as its exhibition has passed. Curatorial work and exhibition design should be merely instrumental, and methods of display—from vials to vitrines—are never part of the work itself. Though it would not be incorrect to draw parallels with the Small Productions group in Hangzhou, Gao Weigang insists that the artist should never conceptually restrict him- or herself—his working method involves moving on, but without clinging to preconceived notions of how this practice should function. Formal restriction will always devolve into an end in and of itself, and this is creative failure. Every work should be seen as its own project; the artist need only organize his oeuvre from time to time and move on.

That is to say, art should be produced practically. For Gao Weigang, Adorno’s absolute art and Henri’s total art are irrelevant. The idea of life functioning as art is a fantasy at best; art is an activity like any other that must take place within a reasonable territory—albeit a romantic one. Philosophical pretension, political punditry, and social responsibility

66 Gao Weigang, Bee, 2009, should thus play no role in the art world; instead, art should exist for the detail of text installation on the gallery floor. Courtesy of amusement of the artist. the artist and Magician Space, Beijing. This attitude towards artistic production is increasingly common among young artists in China. It would be too easy to link this to failed art education during the auction market bubble, or even to a jaded reading of the pseudo-political art produced by an older generation of artists. I would like to propose that this mode of production may become the norm for internationally operating Chinese artists, and will exert a positive influence at that. Effecting a counterinfluence against the increasingly referential insularity of conceptual work in centers like New York, this model offers an autonomy for the artwork while denying the autonomy of art. Furthermore, it transforms art as practice into a socially embedded activity that may operate on a plane immanent to infrastructural logistics, manufacturing, textual criticism, urbanism, art history, media production, and so on, without requiring any of these social constellations to act as a prior term.

What such a model might offer emerging artists at this particular moment is a shortcut to relevance that avoids becoming embroiled in an overly academic field of art historical discourse. The merits of begging for inclusion in this Western-centric narrative of the contemporary far exceed the limitations of this brief sketch, but the fact remains that, following this model, Gao Weigang has been able to execute conceptual artwork legible within a porous discursive sphere populated by Mandarin-speaking artists and curators, international observers versed in the Chinese artistic vernacular, and local Beijing audiences. Perhaps the success of discreet cultural production relies on nothing else.

67 Erik Bordeleau Shu Yong: Mediator of Bodies

68 Shu Yong, Chinese Myth— What are theories of the media, if not propositions meant to explain the how The Carp Jumping Over the Dragon Gate, 2006, oil and the means of the interconnection between different existences within the on canvas, 200 x 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist. same ether? –Peter Sloterdijk1

69 The Bubble as Evolutionary Medium Shu Yong, Bubble at Office 1 (detail), 2000–08, lightbox, Born in Xupu, Hunan province, in 1974, Shu Yong has developed an 56 x 120 x 38 cm. Courtesy of the artist. intensely media-oriented (and mediatized) art practice founded on direct interaction with the public. Himself the owner of an advertising agency, he treats Chinese society as a laboratory, operating either through social events or directly through the mass media in what he calls, following Joseph Beuys, “social sculpture.” While the association with Beuys may verge on the presumptuous—Shu Yong is light years away from Beuys’s “broader concept of art” or his search for a third way between communism and capitalism2—one can nonetheless say in his defence that he does indeed seem to be particularly responsive to the social processes of “evolutionary warmth” so dear to the master from Krefeld. For several years now, Yong has been working with a powerful intuition of what Gaston Bachelard had called “the intimacy of roundness,” evinced in his most recent work by a fondness for the figure of the bubble. In the series of oil paintings titled China Mythology (2007–08), for instance, Yong revisits ancient Chinese

Shu Yong, Chinese Myth—A Good Harvest, 2007, oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

70 Shu Yong, Bubble at Office mythology in colourful, fairy-tale-like surroundings, where mythological 2 (detail), 2000–08, lightbox, 56 x 120 x 38 cm. Courtesy of characters appear in an environment populated by soap bubbles. Soap the artist. bubbles are also in evidence in his photo-performance project Bubbles in the Office (2000–08), where Shu Yong would show up and blow soap bubbles in the offices of wealthy businessmen in the Pearl River Delta region of Guangdong province, provoking surprised, sometimes even angry reactions.

From the arcana of ancient Chinese mythology to the hyper-energetic entrepreneurial life of a region justly dubbed the “workshop of the world” (economic production in 2009 may well surpass $512.1 billion USD), Shu Yong’s bubbles seem to undo the world, to take it into an evanescent spatiotemporal continuum; they form a kind of ethereal superconductor for a globalized world that is becoming unified as it dematerializes. One might say that the bubble is to Shu Yong what fat is to Beuys, a sculptural expression of uncondensed social existence, a trans-individual kind of gel nurturing and protecting life—a media? Note that in Mandarin, the word “media” (meiti) is translated as—literally, “mediator of bodies.” In a way, Shu Yong’s work strives to interrogate the media phenomenon at the confluence of the organic and the ethereal.

In view of customary denunciations of media control in China, Shu Yong’s work provides an occasion to up-end familiar Western attitudes regarding the Chinese “mediascape.” I would like to investigate this body of work in light of Peter Sloterdijk’s theory of the media. In his three-volume Spheres trilogy, subtitled respectively Bubbles (Blasen), Globes (Globen), and Foam (Schäume), Sloterdijk broaches the topic of the human social fact from an immunological perspective, that is, from one in which a certain inner closure is the precondition for the possibility of any opening.3 Incidentally, China plays no small part in the development of Sloterdijk’s thought. His theory of media, for instance, contributes to what he himself describes as an Asian renaissance: “a Chinese ingredient comes through, in subtle

71 pulsations; one can hear a barely perceptible fetal music of the spheres.”4 And in his magnificent Bubbles, Sloterdijk claims to be inspired by what he calls the “Chinese continuum”—“Has China not been, right up to the threshold of our century, a monstrous artistic exercise on the theme ‘to exist in a space without exterior by closing oneself off’?”5 His is the perfect opportunity to ask ourselves how contemporary China reconciles government censorship and hypermodern media practices, how it becomes one with its body.

Plastic Biopower and Mammary Advantages For Sloterdijk, the social sphere is a psycho-political continuum. He seeks to produce a general theory of public space, adapted to an era of total mediatization, developing an ontology of media flow that he calls “theory of spheres.” Spheres are defined as “loci of inter-animal resonance where the manner in which living creatures are together transformed into a plastic power.” 6 Sloterdijk often describes human spheres as “erotico- aesthetic greenhouses,” underlining their role in the production of comfortable interiors favourable to growth. In a spherical perspective, the human situation is indeed the outcome of a “fertile self-generated plastic evolution”; Sloterdijk, unabashedly jubilant, can’t help but remark that following the favourable conditions that presided over human greenhouses, “mankind is on the road to beauty.”7 As an example, Sloterdijk mentions human faces, which, he says, “have, one after the other, raised themselves above the animal form simply through reciprocal contemplation,”

concluding that it is “in the facial commerce between mothers and children, Shu Yong, Bubble Woman, 2006, lacquered stainless steel in the field of transition between the animal and the human, that we see the and bronze, 200 x 360 x 250 cm. Courtesy of the artist. first true plastic surgery among human beings.”8

Spherical luxuriance and its anthropogenetic (human-producing) effects obviously go beyond the face; if the realm of the sphere is where one lives to the fullest, it is also the place of predilection—and of selection—of

72 Shu Yong, Bubble Woman 1, 2006, lacquered stainless steel and bronze, 90 x 50 x 80 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Next Page: Shu Yong, The National Anthem, 2009, colour photograph, 100 x 150 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

formosa, of the beautiful, round form. Such is the context in which I would like to investigate what is likely Shu Yong’s best-known series of works to date: Bubble Woman (2007). The series presents a pair of blown-up breasts of extraordinary size (1.8 meters in diameter), attached to, if not born by, diminutive Barbie-sized female figures. Depending on one’s point of view and the posture given the figurines, these almost-autonomous, monstrous globes may make the chest seem like a bodily extension thrust purposefully forward, like a massive weapon of seduction, or may have the opposite effect of casting the poor figure as a woman suspended and immobilized by her burdensome load. Either way, spectators are momentarily transfixed by the improbable mammary spheres; only afterwards do we question the role of the female figurine in the background. Until very recently, one could see ads promoting breast implants on Chinese television networks any time of the day. Shu Yong remarked how fascinated he was by these images, where “a flat chest slowly changes into round and full breasts, like blowing up balloons.”9 In a highly competitive job market, in a society where images of Western women tend to be presented as models of prestige and beauty, plastic surgery is often considered a means of improving one’s employability. Chinese authorities estimate that around 2.4 billion dollars are spent on plastic surgery in China every year—the equivalent of more than a million operations. Besides breast implants, the relatively simple and similarly affordable operations of eyelid surgery and nasal bridge enhancing rhinoplasty have also become popular. By asking the question “How Big Do We Want Our Breasts To Be?” (the title of one of the exhibitions in which he

73 presented this work), Shu Yong says he wishes to cultivate an appreciation for the natural and more discreet curves that characterize most Chinese women.

It is no coincidence that the most mediatized of contemporary Chinese artists chose to thematize the unique situation of these sculptural outgrowths. In view of a strong theory of the media, Shu Yong’s outlandish chests seem at once to be nearly autonomous and intrinsically relational—the feminine breast as pure media element? In his production, and beyond the civic and moral values he attributes to his sculptural interventions, Shu Yong follows an intuition that resonates silently within the very concept of media in Chinese. He seems to have managed to all but explicitly render this intuition in a recent exhibition he curated, Body Media (shenti meiti), and presented at the Duolun Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, in April 2008.10

Shu Yong’s intuition of the media-body is marked by profound ambivalence, one that echoes the ambivalence in the relationship between immunity and com-munity. In “Body Media,” the text that introduces the exhibition catalogue, Shu Yong advocates a liberation of corporeal potentialities through the media. After having stated that “since the beginning of human civilization, [the] body has never acquired real freedom,” and that the media are “public tools,” Shu Young goes on to declare: “The reason why we clearly promote the concept that body is a medium is to make the individuals and groups in this society reuse the concept of media, emphasize the new thinking of body. . . . When [the] body is drastically developed as a cultural and spiritual resource, the powers of body will show up.” 11 (My emphasis.)

I read in this excerpt an attempt to express something like a bodily power capable of resisting and interrupting the flow of mass media. I assume this is what Shu Yong is trying to say when, a little further on, he declares “the coming of [a] personal medium era.” Yet such an interpretation has the disadvantage of going against the eminently mass-media nature of his own practice. The solution may lie in an enigmatic passage, one imbued with the awkwardness that characterizes the concluding portions of his text: “We believe that the personal medium will become a mature medium and harmonically coexist with all kinds of mature media in the future.” To make some kind of sense from this mishmash, one should realize that when a film or a work is censored in China, it is often said to be not “mature” enough for public consumption. And the reference to harmony doubtless echoes with Hu Jintao’s government insistence on an harmonious society, which is also a key signifier traversing Chinese political history.

Shu Yong may simply be trying to blur his tracks, to preempt censors’ condemnations. But one might also read in this apparent confusion the signs of a national will and feeling that has been, without a doubt, the underlying tone of Chinese life in recent years, and with which Shu Yong, by the very nature of his work, can’t help but have deep affinities. I would tend to favour the latter interpretation, especially when considering The National Anthem, one of his latest series of public performances. Wandering into a Christian church one day, Shu Yong was suddenly struck by the power of the religious hymns that he heard. “Once ritualized and popularized, this simple thing creates such an incredible effect and sense of power.” He then began to organize collective performances that involved no more and no less than singing the Chinese national anthem. “Many of us haven’t had a

75 chance to sing the national anthem since we left school. . . . I wish to make Shu Yong, The National Anthem, 2009, colour the ceremony of the national hymn a daily ritual and to have it continually photograph, 110 x 160 cm. Courtesy of the artist. realized in living environments.” One might do well to recall that Shu Yong had once expressed the wish that the act of blowing soap bubbles would become a collective ritual, that is, “an action that purifies the soul and builds faith.” Endless conjectures attend any attempt to comment on Shu Yong’s extraordinary forthrightness in conceiving his role as artist-mediator of bodies in China’s magico-national bubblescape.12

Translated from the French by Ron Ross

Notes 1 Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären I: Blasen, Mikrosphärologie [Spheres I: Bubbles, Microspherology]. Translator’s note: All quotes from Peter Sloterdijk are necessarily our own, since much of this contemporary German philosopher’s work—including his major œuvre, the Spheres trilogy, from which most of the quotations in this essay are taken—has not been translated into English. Furthermore, as neither time nor individual ability permit translation from the original German, these translations are based on the French translations provided and cited by Erik Bordeleau, informed, where possible, by available discussion (articles, interviews) of his work. 2 On this topic, see Joseph Beuys and Volker Harlan, What is Art? Conversations with Joseph Beuys (East Sussex: Clairview Books, 1992). 3 “The concept of autopoietic closure must be understood as the recursively closed organization of an open system. . . . The new vision postulates closure as a condition for opening.” Niklas Luhmann, L’autopoïèse des systèmes sociaux, cited in Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: Protezione e nagazione della vita (Turin: Einaudi, 2002), 56. (Translator’s note: Our translation, from the French.) 4 Sloterdijk, La mobilisation infinie (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 17. 5 Sloterdijk, Sphères, Tome I: Bulles (Paris: Fayard, 2002), 68. 6 Ibid., 42. 7 Sloterdijk, La domestication de l’être (Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2000), 54. 8 Sloterdijk, Sphères, 180, 187. 9 Quoted by Kitty Bu, “Bigger is not better for China ‘breast’ sculptor,” Reuters Life!, Beijing, April 30, 2007, http://uk.reuters.com/article/outsourcingNews/idUKSP15075920070430?pageNumber=2&virtual BrandChannel=0. 10 Note that the expression “media body” in Chinese is almost a redundancy: the first character, 身shen, means (living) body, while another character, ti, meaning “substance body,” occurs twice. 11 Shu Yong, ed., Body Media (Beijing: Tang Contemporary Art, 2008). This and the following quotes are all from the text of this catalogue, which is available on the Web at: http://www.tangcontemporary. com/en/exhibitions/zl1.asp?id=45. 12 On December 28, 2008, Shu Yong and several hundred guests dressed in red togas singing the national anthem during a wedding in Beijing. We do not know whether the artist presided over the ceremony.

76 Sun Shanchun Salvation and Return: An Analysis of Xu Jiang’s Recent Work

I. Among Xu Jiang’s new works, immediately grabbing our attention are those depicting the sunflower—or, more exactly, those depicting fields of sunflowers, row upon row, serried together in a solid mass, their wasted heads propped up on sagging stems. According to the artist’s own introduction, these sunflowers are native to the grasslands of Asia Minor. “I discovered them on the plains near the ocean in Turkey,” says the artist, “endless, like a great ocean of molten gold.”1 These plants, resembling so many wounded soldiers, deeply affected Xu Jiang. The sunflowers in his paintings flaggingly drag along their own debilitated bodies on the point of expiration. It is a landscape on the verge of disappearance, effecting a return to the silence of earth. No doubt these phantasmagoric plants have, by now, become so much composted matter. But under Xu Jiang’s brush they live again, standing in front of us, observing the observer. They have not yet passed away. In fact they are the vista of history, in decline, but clinging to life.

In one of his most famous works, “On the Concept of History” (1940), Walter Benjamin spoke at length about the flower.2 He said that all flowers possess a kind of latent “heliotropism,” a consuming desire to reach up to the flaming sun in the sky. We all know that the sunflower is the classic example of this tendency. Compared with other flowers, its thirst for the sun is that much more intense and sustained. Without sunlight, they would wither into weeds. In Benjamin’s view, human history manifested this solar fetish in its ardent wish to illuminate the span of time. The true historian, therefore, is the sun, which has the power to rescue history. From this point of view, we cannot help but see the sunflower as a symbol of historical thought that demands the past never be forgotten. I believe the reason the sunflower forests of the Asia Minor grassland had such a deep impact on Xu Jiang is inextricably tied to the artist’s historical subject material: a history that awaits salvation, just as the flower seeks out the sun.

This is not mere over-interpretation. A comprehensive look at Xu Jiang’s works over the last twenty years clearly shows that he is a contemporary artist possessed of historical consciousness. Irrespective of whether he can profitably be labelled a “historical painter,” clearly the sense of history manifest in his works marks Xu Jiang’s signature style. From his exploratory works of the late 1980s to his gallery pieces of today, one can say that it is history above all else that provides a constant focus. Take his Chess Match series from the late 90s, for example. This series won considerable acclaim for the artist and had a great impact on the Chinese art world. Critics of

77 every persuasion carried out detailed hermeneutic analyses, and the bold brushwork elicited much discussion of and reflection upon the artist’s imposing style and its strength, depth, and intensity. But, aesthetics aside, these works represent a powerful, extended meditation on modern history. It is precisely because of its depth and breadth of thought that the Chess Match series was able to have such startling visual impact.

It is undeniable that traditional Germanic artistic thought has exerted considerable influence on Xu Jiang. For Xu Jiang, art and thought are contiguous, even though, as Heidegger once suggested, they occupy neighbouring mountaintops and observe each other from afar. Thought alone, however, has never been able to transcend the “situatedness” of

history. No matter to what subject matter Xu Jiang turns his brush to, Xu Jiang, Sunflowers, 2008, oil on canvas, 280 x 900 cm. nor how the gods above are thrust into this unfinished game of chess, Courtesy of the artist. the thinker in the Heideggerian sense must face it with the Gelassenheit attitude. As an artist, however, Xu Jiang must work to make the historical process experienced visible(macht sichtbar) in such a way that they are not swallowed whole in the storm.

In this series of Chess Match paintings, ruined cities also play an important role in spurring the imagination of the viewer. From any point of view, history overflows with ruins. History never ceases building, only to send that which has been built hurtling into oblivion in an endlessly repeating cycle of creation and destruction. One can say that in facing these “ruins” the artist and the historian face the same task: to repair and rescue. In Benjamin’s mind, making ruins whole again was the unavoidable fate

78 allotted to the “Angel of History” as well as to the historian.3 Xu Jiang’s series on ruins causes us to reflect deeply on the painter’s enunciative position and historical responsibility.

Some scholars have taken Xu Jiang for China’s foremost “painter of ruins.” But it must be pointed out that ruins under Xu Jiang’s brush do not simply reveal the grand stage where history’s great wars and political power plays take place. The story his brush relates is not simply the magician’s sleight of hand, producing clouds with one hand and rain with the other. His work enlightens us to how our twin identities of “observer” and of “doer” unite in one body. But he goes further than this to propose a question: tossed on the torrential current of history, how can this body “act?” Who can escape the

vista of history with its generative power coupled to a destructive urge that sweeps the living along its currents?

When speaking of his own creations, Xu Jiang does not avoid this sense of anxiety, which, he says, comes from vague, unplaceable historical disputes and conflicts. We see these concerns emerge blurrily in his paintings. In the end, these concerns are rooted in his own sense of destiny and historical consciousness. He is completely aware of the plight of his generation—one can say that Xu Jiang is an artist possessed of a clear impulse to get involved, he takes up the brush and pursue a world that is slipping away, while simultaneously holding firm to the boundary of self-belief. History, in the end, may well fall into a pile of ruins; but for the living, history needs to become landscape, to be seen and thought about, and the artist is fated to attempt its rescue from total oblivion. In facing the ruins of history, we

79 need Benjamin’s “Angel of History.” Thus, do Xu Jiang’s paintings of ruins Xu Jiang, Chess Match of the Century—Steles, 1998, oil on admonish the viewer to reflect carefully on his/her own historical situation canvas, 132 x 210 cm. Courtesy of the artist. rather than sinking into the easy acquiescence of mere looking? Xu Jiang’s historical landscapes call forth the eyes and heart of the thinker/viewer.

Throughout his more than twenty years of artistic practice, Xu Jiang has carried out manifold explorations. Even from the perspective of today, the formalism and mediation evident in his works from the late 1980s are still considered avant-garde. These works earned considerable attention; critics proclaimed that they had “gone to the edge of painting.” We notice that Xu Jiang has not ventured into the realm of the so-called postmodern. He says, “Postmodern art is largely imitation, parody, and replication. The power and persuasion of modern art, conversely, reside in salvation and redemption.”4 These few words illuminate the crux of Xu Jiang’s creative project. What concerns him is redemption: rescuing both history and art from falling into the postmodern routines. In Xu Jiang’s art, these two impulses unite into one. And the painter’s path to salvation is, of course, to paint.

II. Xu Jiang’s path toward salvation has not been without complication. In fact, as many critics have already noted, in Xu Jiang’s recent works a relatively clear tendency towards “return” has emerged. His early avant-garde artworks were ripe with a kind of conceptual and symbolic energy. In the mid-1990s, he undertook a more synthetic approach, bringing together his various influences. Today Xu Jiang has returned to a sort of traditional painting that emphasizes the “painting” in the artwork. This “return,” though profoundly significant, has confused a number of critics. However, if we have a clear grasp of the historical continuity of subject matter in Xu Jiang’s works, and an understanding of their modernist perspective, then we can see that this “return” has its own internal logic and necessity. Through this “return” we are able to suss out an artist’s intellectual exploration into

80 Xu Jiang, Ruins, 2003, watercolour on paper, 45 x 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

historical consciousness. In a theoretical article, Xu Jiang makes continued reference to the thought of Heidegger. The artist says:

In the German language, history (Geschichte) and destiny (Gechick) are related. History, from any point of significance, can be called the roost of destiny. . . . When we speak about history, a sense of inevitable “final return” is produced. The process of opening the doors of the heart and coming to terms with the world is also the process of paying close attention to this sense of “final return.” It is the process of following heaven’s will and calmly experiencing. It is a process of simple, direct observation. And letting that which will come, come.5

The theoretical underpinning of his artistic return partakes precisely in this process of “simple, direct observation” and “rising to the moment,” requiring that all presupposed concepts and symbols be discarded as we face things as they are. This very process of observation and practice is painting. When reflecting on his early period, Xu Jiang is quite willing to discuss the conceptual traces to be recovered in his work. In a piece written in 2001 in Berlin, he addressed the relevance of conceptual art and new media art to modern art, wondering if they genuinely represented modern art’s future.6 Of course his subsequent works provide an unambiguous answer. That moment of “rising to the moment” is precisely related to Xu Jiang’s historically imbricated “destiny” discussed above which needs to be given some thought. To be an artist possessed of a profound awareness of salvation, he must listen intently to destiny, echo its call, or, to use Heidegger’s term, “acquiesce” to this destiny. But the problem remains: to what destiny must we acquiesce?

III. Let us briefly consider a film, Until the End of the World (1991), by Wim Wenders. Even today this film still possesses a momentous, prophetic power. In the film, Wenders portrays an American scientist who has withdrawn from the world and taken up residence in the primitive wilds of the Australian outback. He lives in a cave, working day and night on an invention that can collect electromagnetic radiation and turn it into nervou impulses. The machine is meant to allow the blind to see the world. But he is not satisfied with this. His ambition leads him to modify the machine in such a way as to allow a person’s thoughts to be instantiated in images that can then be projected onto a screen. In this way we might project our dreams onto a screen and marvel at them as if seeing an ancient painting. After he succeeds in inventing the machine, the other characters in the film become obsessed with it, spending day after day lost in the contemplation of their own internal fantasy, unable to extricate themselves. Wenders sets the film against the backdrop of a world destroyed by nuclear holocaust. The one character in the film who does not become addicted to the machine is a writer who utters this startling phrase, “In the beginning, there were words. In the end, there are only images.” The world Wenders has portrayed is precisely the “Age of Image” described by Heidegger, where all the images in the world have been appropriated by shallow intellectuals in the academy and turned into a trivial everyday show with little existential meaning.7

In this film, Wenders also touches on the theme of salvation. In order to rescue a woman who has been lost to the image machine, the writer sits in front of his typewriter and writes a story. Even though well aware that the Age of Image has arrived, he still believes in the liberating power that lies latent in the written word. In fact, he has no other choice. The irony of the film is that Wenders, as a filmmaker, relies on images to interrogate the Age of Image. Today, the Age of Image is our inescapable historical destiny.

If we want to have a complete understanding of Xu Jiang’s “return,” we must first come to terms with the destiny implicit in the Age of Image. Because of rapid technological and economic development, China has been unable to avoid stepping into the historical dilemma at the heart of the Age of Image. As one of China’s foremost philosophers, Xu Jiang is well aware of this situation. As an artist, he uses his art to enact critical reflection and poses the questions: how can art find its own space and move forward in a world inundated by a flood of images; how can art act independently? Xu Jiang’s creative practice is an answer to these pressing problems.

Without question Xu Jiang has faith in the mysterious, redemptive powers that exist in painting, just like the writer in Until the End of the World. Painting is not a metonym for “image.” Many times in the past Xu Jiang has expounded this principle. “Painting is not the same as an image. Just like cooking is not the same as a banquet. Cooking relies on a particular kind of culinary culture and requires a highly refined sense of taste.” 8 The meaning at the root of painting lays in “critical observation and reflection.” Only then “can painting obtain reprieve in the Age of Image and seduce us into its artistic core.”9

In his theoretical articles, Xu Jiang has often lamented the endless proliferation of images in today’s world and their concomitant devaluation. But it must be pointed out that Xu Jiang has never adopted an elitist position to attack art in the age of mechanical reproduction, as if the two were completely separable. His lament has never slid towards pretension and cynicism. Xu Jiang’s works, since his return to re-find and present his direct experience of who he is, have told us simply that he finds himself in Heidegger’s “gloomy mood” carrying out his tireless pursuit of art. Yet, when considering the disquiet condensed in the historical landscapes of his

82 early works, a certain disjunct appears. People are inclined to believe that Xu Jiang’s art has become “small,” turning from the magniloquence of his previous work and becoming what can genuinely be called “fragmented scenes.” Gone is the grand style closely related to his historical subject matter, and history itself, too, seems to have fled. Xu Jiang’s works have seemingly shifted from reflecting “grand history” and have turned to that which Cézanne called “little moments.”

Xu Jiang, Mirages in Water, 2009, watercolour on paper, 45 x 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

IV. In Xu Jiang’s new works, we see a great number of small scenes, avenues and bricks, withered grass and dead lotus, nondescript buildings reflected in puddles of water by the side of the road, even things that rarely get into paintings by traditional standards, things like power lines and pedestrian bridges. But, upon closer examination, we find that these things seem to have all been selected and arranged by a robotic eye. Thus they appear as real fragments cut from the fabric of the age of technology. Of course, this kind of painting cannot be measured by the standard beauty of classical art. If we say that the Age of Image is the destiny we must accept, then these works are indicators of Xu Jiang’s acquiescence. In German, “acquiescence” (Überwinden) also implies overcoming. No matter what, overcoming is predicated on first accepting and then acquiescing to this historical destiny. Otherwise, no one, in the act of meditation, can discover his or her own path. It is precisely in the sundered fragments of history where Xu Jiang begins his critical inquiry into painting as a process. He says, “A painting changes every minute, every second. There is no need for us to insist on completion, just that it reveals, reveals itself, and reveals its singular power of attraction. We seek this attraction in the first instant of the emergence of form.”10

Xu Jiang’s quest occurs as we acquiesce to our historical destiny. Thus, even though these fragments bear the undeniable print of the Age of Image, for those eyes that desire “simple, direct observation,” the image can be no more than an “observable symbol, a street sign.”11 Contemplating Xu Jiang’s small landscapes, one cannot but be drawn by the traces of constantly shifting implication. As such, a latent sense of the individual is seduced into being, anticipating a deeper, more varied penetration into the world, pointing

83 toward as yet untheorized possibilities of exploring time and space. In Xu Jiang, Landscapes of History—Treacherous Pass, the midst of this process of observation, the viewer also obtains a kind of 2001, oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist. “possibility,” that of overcoming the lax habits of “looking” or “feeling” by which he or she has been habituated. Thus we draw ever closer to an originary space where self and object reflect each other. This is precisely what Xu Jiang tirelessly seeks on his “return” path, that of “little moments.” In an ocean of images, this is a life raft.

Given all this, it is evident in these new works that Xu Jiang’s historical drama has not yet left the stage; rather, they simply provide another method of disguise. The essential point is that no matter whether one is criticizing or rescuing, first and foremost is the project of waking people from their slumber and doing away with old habits. Only then can historically invested vision and thinking occur. It is in this context that Xu Jiang speaks to the destiny of an artist:

We are lost in images, lost in a world that has become landscape. We have no idea where we reside. Is it images that have sparked revolution in our ability to sense the liquidity of time? Or is it we who face this two-dimensional world and revolt?12

V. In 2001, Xu Jiang created his Landscapes of History series; among them was a piece entitled Treacherous Pass. It is said that a German artist raised the following question: “Is the ‘disappearance’ in question here, in the end, a natural disappearance, or has it been made to disappear?”13 This little intervention deserves serious contemplation. This German, celebrated for his use of words, has made us fatally aware that the landscape of history can disappear and can also be made to disappear.

84 We thus hearken back to the sunflowers with which this article began. Walter Benjamin knew quite well that, in reality, history is under the constant threat of eradication and that it must be “rescued.” If there were not the wise eyes of the Angel looking back, those flowers which seek the light of history would crumble into smoke and dust. For the artist who desires salvation, “clear eyes and nimble hands” are the most pressing need, so as to hunt the countenance of this endangered history. Thus gripped by unavoidable historical destiny, rescuing history, rescuing art, and rescuing the self are inextricably bound together. So Xu Jiang, when looking upon the sunflowers in the plains of Asia Minor, could only be moved like this: “Face to face with these decrepit, old plants patiently awaiting salvation, no artist who holds history dear could ever remain aloof and indifferent.”14

Aside from sunflowers, Xu Jiang has painted a number of other kinds of plants and vegetation. Examining them carefully one is reminded of the following Zen Buddhist parable the artist once used in an article:

Question: What is the Buddha? Answer: Spring comes, the grass turns green.

Spring comes. The grass turns greens. This is the Dao of nature, the Dao that cannot be spoken. So, in the monolith of historical destiny, we see spring coming and the grass turning green, we listen intently and echo back the news of nature. Perhaps history is like this: it carries danger, but also holds out the promise of salvation and new life. In Xu Jiang’s new works, we savour his intoxication toward life and all that is vital. What is painting? It is the constant change, the changeless constant of “spring coming and the grass turning green.”15 Perhaps proclaiming this fresh illumination is the path of salvation.

Thus the artist steps on the path of return, toward the place where feeling resides, sometimes hidden, sometimes in view. As Heidegger once suggested, the poet’s task is to return home.

Notes 1 Xu Jiang, “Istanbul Diary,” in Vigil at One Meter (Shanghai: Shanghai Calligraphy and Painting Press, 2005), 194. 2 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 1940, trans. Dennis Richmond, http://www.marxists. org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm. 3 Ibid. 4 Xu Jiang, “Messages of Spring,” in Vigil at One Meter, 104. 5 Xu Jiang, “About Painting,” in Vigil at One Meter, 17. 6 Xu Jiang, “Berlin Winter,” in Vigil at One Meter, 140. 7 Xu Jiang, “About Painting,” 46. 8 Ibid., 15. 9 Ibid., 12–17. 10 Ibid., 13. 11 Ibid., 46. 12 Xu Jiang, “Scenery and Landscapes,” in Sight Seen Cities (Shanghai: Shanghai Calligraphy and Painting Press, 2003), 123. 13 Xu Jiang, “The Loud Anthropophagy,” in Vigil at One Meter, 162. 14 Xu Jiang, “Istanbul Diary,” 194. 15 Xu Jiang, “Messages of Spring,” in Vigil at One Meter, 105.

85 Kim Hyunjin Gao Shiqiang: Agonized Subjects in a Rapidly Changing Society

igorously working on a cinematic scale with video and film narratives during the past five years, Gao Shiqiang observes Vthe shifting values of society and individuals and what appears and disappears with the changes in contemporary China. The historical discontinuity, cultural rupture, and deepening conflict between generations that have been imposed on most Asian countries through the turmoil of the twentieth century are also unquestionably found in Chinese society, although in a different way; that is, the absolute value of a period vanishes fleetingly or is judged from another perspective, and what was a legend at one time is degraded to a transient past or a failed present for the next generation. Gao’s works concern the ambivalence about historical events that are forgotten or devalued in this way and the drifting individual subjects behind those histories; they also explore the all-too-frivolous human desires or “vanitas” present in the material yearnings that represent China’s capitalistic growth.

In his recent works, Great Bridge (2007) and Red (2008), Gao brings out the story of both the zealots and the victims of earlier political struggles in Chinese communism and the scene of its perfunctory symbols of modern state-building, with a view to shedding light on the lives of individuals who were disregarded after the huge historical events that characterized the Cultural Revolution and who have been left behind in the current upheaval. Great Bridge is a commissioned work for an exhibition in memory of the Nanjing Changjiang Bridge which was completed in 1968 as a symbol of socialist construction projects during the height of the Cultural Revolution. However, this bridge does not appear in the film; it is mentioned only in the conversation between the characters as an image of an element of conflict. Although the actual bridge shown in the film carries similar symbolism, it is really the Qiangtangjiang Bridge, the first steel bridge built by the Chinese before 1949. These two bridges are literally the “great bridges” of the former Chinese communist society.

The film begins with the melancholic sound of dripping water and a voice quietly whispering “great bridge,” just like a lonely-looking man’s physical infirmity in his middle or late fifties who actually receives an I.V. drip. Then, a small group of young people argue about the Changjiang Bridge. Each expresses his or her own view on the reopening and removal of the bridge, which helps the audience to understand that though the symbolism of the bridge is no longer relevant in the face of the rapid economic development, it is still constrained by the complex and delicate power relations in the real politics of local government that exceed the bridge’s actual use value.

86 Gao Shiqiang, Great Bridge, However, gradually losing their points or interest on this heated discussion, 2007, HDV, 27 mins. 50 secs. Courtesy of the artist. they all disperse with the excuse of busy lives, leaving their chairs vacant as if demonstrating that the bridge exists in name only. The discourse about the significance of the bridge is nothing but an empty grand narrative of the past, forced out by the small narratives of everyday life. In this way, the artist continues to show the various memories of anonymous people and their attachment to time and inner conflicts, rather than providing images of the great bridges that adorn the history of nation-building. A dialogue between a father and daughter who lost their wife/mother in an accident at the Changjiang Bridge, and the regretful soliloquy of an old man who laments how time is fleeting and complains about youth, reveal the sufferings and unhappiness caused by obsessive attachment to memories and the past. Their agonies and fixations form a contrast to the flux of the ever-running river. Interestingly enough, China’s modernity as represented by this

87 bridge is also visually epitomized by the interior of an old, humble socialist Gao Shiqiang, Red, 2008, HDV, 49 mins. 54 secs. Courtesy of modern-style house, and the mixture of its furniture and household goods the artist. in both Asian and Western designs. In comparison with this indoor scene, outside nature is in a state of constant change, most particularly the river that flows under the bridge, suggesting a sense of transition that is opposite to the vain desire of human beings to seize and hold on to memory.

Motifs of nature such as mountains, woods, rivers, and streams are also found in Gao’s other works, in particular water, which appears conspicuously in the background. The artist lives in Hangzhou, known as the city of water because of the beauty of West Lake. As if inspired by the image of the slow movement of this wide lake, he has contemplated water as a metaphor of the contrast between what flows and transforms and what remains at a standstill.

The History of Negation and the Space of Antagonism Red begins with a scene of a tranquil riverside, where red flags flutter in the wind and an old, exhausted looking man (a Red Guard) stands. His dark and dismal shelter, which possesses no clear indication of any particular time, is visited by a few young men and women. It is only their contemporary dress and free-spiritedness that tell the audience that the time and space of the old man’s existence, as he wipes dust from the frame of Mao Zedong’s picture, remain in the past like an old cave. Time in this film is mixed up and confused. Against a natural wild background of magnificent crags, dim caves, desolate plains, and rivers, both estranged

88 people and a marching unit of Red Guards appear and disappear in a non- chronological order as if performing a play that represents the overthrow of tradition and the deposal of knowledge and intellectual value during the destructive period of the Cultural Revolution. Though the revolution, both as the culminating point of antagonistic class struggle and as a historical blemish that devastated Chinese society, is flowing with the current of the river as a part of the long procession of the boats representing historical events, the audience sees only the journey of the old man, the protagonist of this film, who rows against the current to explore his forgotten past. Nevertheless, he has lost his way, burdened with an extreme sense of shame and regret, isolated from the present society as an Other. The existence of this man who stands alone in the dreary red field is irredeemable.

The Red Guards were the leaders and the victims of the antagonistic politics that characterized the Cultural Revolution. Gao’s Red is a dramatic rendering of a person who victimized others and yet was sacrificed by the re-evaluation of history; that is, Chinese society’s loss of tradition and intellectual continuity. On the other hand, the work conveys not only the symbolic space of historic failure, but also the tragic place of the Red Guards who, as a self-proclaimed young militant group for Mao, had once played a leading role in the revolution but were then outlawed and abandoned to the countryside after their political operations ceased. In this sense, this depressed bleak riverside connotes a drastic severance from civil culture. Through the devaluing of an individual’s life, and his remorse, the artist attempts to interpret a critically monstrous moment when history is plundered by the violent two-sided division of a hostile political struggle.

89 Segment (2004), produced before Red, deals with the everyday antagonism Gao Shiqiang, Segment, 2004, DVD, 21 mins. 22 secs. and distrust prevailing in current society. The first scene shows one man Courtesy of the artist. caring for another who is lying on the street and suffering from hunger. However, after awhile, it becomes apparent that the two of them are continually and excessively cautious and defensive towards each other. They carry out their respective jobs near a house that looks like a small warehouse and is surrounded by woods, keeping their distance from each other. They also play a kind of basketball game, but play only defensively so that the purpose of the game becomes ambiguous. Meanwhile, at the

90 beginning and the end of the film, a child’s narration relays an absurd tale in which a man who found and saved a dying snake is bitten and dies after the snake recovers. This scenario serves to detach the film from any particular social background or context and convert it to a symbolic narrative of hostility and mistrust between two men who co-exist in a space of negativity while simultaneously living in absolute isolation.

Lee Jin-Kyung, one of the leading philosophers and intellectuals in Korea, says that the politics of antagonism “takes the enemy as its primary concept,” and, thereby, “the politics of antagonism is not a politics of affirmation but is defined by negation and is a politics of negation that operates by the strength of negativity.”1 While in the ideal form of democracy, antagonism takes place between adversaries as friendly enemies2 who aim at organizing their shared symbolic space in different ways, the politics of modern society has been largely the history of power struggles between enemies. Furthermore, the repetition of this history has resulted in the internalization of antagonism to such a degree that it permeates our daily lives, reproducing only a space of negation where affirmation cannot arise between individuals in a society, and everyone is considered a potential enemy by everyone else.

This negative relationship between hospitality and restraint also appears over and over again in Gao’s other works. The discussion among the young people in Great Bridge mentioned earlier is laden with disagreements and animosity. The suspicious and hostile encounter shown in Segment is nothing less than the negative protection that is spreading among contemporary individuals and its resultant sense of isolation. The artist often depicts individuals as disconnected from each other. They speak alone or one-sidedly, even in the midst of throngs of people. While their conversations occur in the same place, they do not meet on parallel levels. In this way, the audience is constantly confronted with solitary and defensive individuals and their disrupted communities, which are dominated by heightened individualism accelerated by the discord and contention prevalent in daily life rather than by friendship, which would imply affirmative interaction with others as well as accepting the differences of other views or opinions—in other words, not demanding homogeneity among society’s members.

The Spectacle of Landscape as the Stage of Delusion and Solitude Another of Gao’s works, Revolution (2007), is both an allegorical burlesque and a satirical drama that tells of humankind’s desires and follies. The backdrop of this film is a spectacular scene with massive high-rise buildings under construction. This huge construction site, crowded with architectural scaffolds and unfinished concrete outer walls, is ironically associated with the ruins of an urban future like that found in sci-fi movies. The rooftop of one of these skyscrapers presents a kind of disquieting, exhausted stage on which a tyrant, beggars, agitators, restless people, and complaining dogs are positioned among all kinds of rubbish and junk. Amidst the various noises of the construction and traffic heard from below, those on the rooftop desire the freedom and the sovereignty of the people in the world beneath them. Deploring their

91 situations, such as poverty, stress, too much labour, undesired sexual duty Gao Shiqiang, Revolution, 2007, HDV, 55 mins. 54 secs. to breed, lack of autonomy, and so on, some of them argue about how the Courtesy of the artist. circumstances of this rooftop world can be improved or altered. Ultimately, they start a revolution in the hope of living a new life free from tyranny, but which, unfortunately, begins to run counter to each of their interests. They become disunited and even nostalgic for a past stained with illusive and deceitful propaganda. By the end of the film, the revolution is declared successfully concluded with the death of the tyrant, but it is immediately followed by a sudden police raid that reveals the revolution itself was nothing but a reversion to another governmental or institutionalized form of power. In the last part of the film, Gao adds an interview with the actors and the actress about their understanding of and individual opinion on private vs. public interests. Rendered in a sarcastic tone, this prudent interview discloses the conflicting desires of real humans who intervene in the film as the voices of those who live below on the ground.

Among the most remarkable formal aspects found in many of Gao’s works is the reference to a theatrical stage, the use of soliloquies and colloquies that sound like stage talk, and static but profoundly dramatic camera work such as close-ups. As a result, his films are full of contemplative and dramatic aspects. His earlier photographic series, Biceps Brachii, which used strong lighting contrast, and Chamber Theatre, which presented widely imaginative directing, suggest that his shooting style is influenced by still photography. On the other hand, the natural and urban spectacles used by Gao are more like a stage background or theatrical mise en scène that is artificially arranged in order to express and enrich dramas and conflicts in the real world. For example, the spectacles of nature found in Red and Butterfly Lover are not plausible as the sites of the events depicted. However, they exist as settings for the symbolic or metaphoric space of the narrative. Thus, the static and dramatic landscape images and the stiff acting in Gao’s films might be more clearly understood in relation to the features

92 of traditional drama, in a use of landscape as mise en scène, as well as the methods of staged photography found in his previous works.

The magnificent, extensive, but dreary nature or a modern urban landscape provides the artist with the stage or background where he can speak about the conflicts and desires of modern men and women. He overlaps the traditional and the modern spectacles that have unfolded in contemporary Chinese society with human desires, fantasies, and delusions that are egotistical, vain, short-sighted, and fundamentally similar throughout all times and places. Likewise, love, or the human virtue that is invariably idealized more than any other, is extremely vulnerable to worldly constraints. Thus, Butterfly Lovers (2007), featuring a couple escaping to nature in the form of a grand mountain, reinterprets an old Chinese romantic story in the new context of modern society, reorganizing it in a meditative way. It juxtaposes the class conflict hidden in the relationship between a young man from the countryside and a young urban woman with an idealized love story that has been passed down through the ages, and it serves to bring to the surface the obvious discrepancy between ideal and mundane desire. Refracted into reality, their romantic love is secularized through the polarization between rich and poor, urban and rural, and the collision between traditional and modern perspectives on the formation

Gao Shiqiang, Butterfly Lovers, 2007, HDV, 46 mins. 50 secs. Courtesy of the artist.

of family. Though the spectacle of a great and high mountain seems to function as a noble background dedicated to the ideal of love and its sublime drama, what really come into play are, in fact, the very concrete and practical problems of lovers—personality differences, discontent with their partner’s physical appearance, and material conditions. As these worldly affairs take on an increasing presence in the film, the background shifts from the lofty mountain to ground level of a village or rural community.

The highly intensified relationship between the lovers, however, is thoroughly antisocial. Maurice Blanchot said that the moment a couple

93 falls in love, they are given the potentiality of betraying all the other social relations and, therefore, a couple in love comes to achieve a supreme sovereignty through this antisocial passion that is so extreme as to be close to death.3 However, the lovers in Butterfly Lovers are disturbed and troubled by the institutionalized relation of love (that is, conjugal relationship) that was displaced with passion and fantasy. They express the gap between the realities inside themselves and love, or their hypocritical hopes that are tied to mundane desire in the sentence “if my love (wife/husband) is . . .” The power of lovers, which could go against all kinds of social restraints, is frustrated within an institutionalized and socialized relationship, or the marriage, and the pure passions and ideals with which they could look down at the world from the grand mountain are fruitlessly dissipated into a vain past or fantasy.

On the other hand, the film’s script again tends to consist of asides or soliloquies rather than dialogues between the characters. These asides and soliloquies in have an important role as formal devices that express individuals’ solitary introspection on complex issues such as anguish, conflict, loss, depression, and estrangement from their community. For instance, two lovers stand side by side, gazing into the distance, or stand diagonally opposite each other without exchanging glances and, consequently, their lines sound like monologues. It is impossible to discern with whom they are talking. An insurmountable abyss of alienation intervenes in the relationship between them. Similarly, like in Great Bridge or Revolution, frequent full close-ups by the camera, and straightforward film directing and editing have the effect of separating the characters who are the subject of an abrupt switching of sequences, again resulting in a heightened state of solitude.

Untouched Realities or the Pitfall of the Ethnographic Observation In 2008, in this politically sensitive time, Gao visited the Tibetan Plateau in western China and made use of what he observed for Faint with Oxygen (2009). The title is taken from the story about Tibet natives, who, living at an altitude of 5,000 meters and with less oxygen in the air than at sea level, fall almost unconscious owing to the sudden increase of oxygen when they come down to plains. This ironic title also implies the huge breach between different socio-cultural conditions. In this film, Gao shows three different places located at three different altitudes. The first part was set in the 5,000-meter-high Tibetan highlands known as the Roof of the World. Here, the artist came to hear from a guide about his cousin’s story (the narration of which is heard again in the second part) and created a fantastic imaginary filmic tale based on real events. In the second part, the camera scans through Yushu city at 3,600 meters, where Tibetan and Chinese cultures collide, and where the traces of a strong traditional religion is found alongside urban modernization. It too is accompanied by the guide’s narration. The guide, who is revealing the supreme simplicity and limitation of life in the Tibetan Plateau, can be revealed as an actual native informant between China and Tibet and the artist, who works with his story, performing the role of information receiver/transmitter. The third part of the work briefly describes Hangzhou, a highly modernized city lying at an altitude of between 20 to 60 meters. The camera comes upon a Tibetan antique shop in Hangzhou, where the audience can witness how one place being shown in the film, Tibet, is exotic in the commercialized

94 culture of Hangzhou. These three spaces follow the transition from a society where pure nature is a condition of life to that of a rapidly developing urban society. The movement from the place at the highest level to the one at the lowest parallels a process in which population becomes increasingly dense and buildings soar higher and higher. Faint with Oxygen can be regarded as a new ethnographic project for the artist, since he observes and records three different local communities while exploring the cultural aspects of Tibet.

Gao Shiqiang, Faint with In the first part of this film, the Oxygen, 2008, HDV, 28 mins. 58 secs. Courtesy of the artist. camera work captures figures, objects, and landscapes in a static manner and makes a nonfiction story occurring at an altitude of 5,000 meters into a film marked by poetic sentiment. The camera probes every corner of the inside of a Tibetan tent house, taking close- ups of the expressions on the faces of the family who silently gaze at the camera. Among them, a man is deep in thought, holding to his ear a transistor radio which continuously transmits in the Chinese language. Even during his watch over a herd of sheep in the middle of the snowy plateau, he is listening to Chinese with the radio to his ear. After his father destroys the radio, he closes his eyes and recites the language that he learned, being absorbed within his own imaginings of the world outside. It is said that this film is based on a true story of a Tibetan nomad who learned Mandarin through listening to the radio. Here, the Chinese language represents a longing for the external civilized world. As is suggested by this man with an aspiration to participate in modern civilization, and who learns a language that is useless to him, the highlands are transformed into some primitive place in Asia, a tourist destination, that displays both primordial nature and religious mystery and is pushed out to the periphery of development. Like the coercion of the father who crushed the radio of his son—so that he would not leave home—mother nature might also be a merciless and violent place for some Tibetans in that it blocks and deprives one of various chances in life to enter into contemporary urban culture. On the other hand, it still can be beautiful to other Tibetans who have accepted this as their fate. The artist reveals an absurd reality where Tibetans become the object of tourism by being seen as mystical and exotic Others, even though they have only lived in conformity within their given environment.

Occupying more than half of the entire film, the first part is replete with the unique and ethnic aura of a Tibetan family, which certainly arises from the

95 peculiar beauty of their life. However, as if unsatisfied, the camera zooms in on the rough skin of their face with an indifferent gaze, decorations inside of their pao, and the everyday landscape through dramatically tight close- ups. These images tend to exaggerate their mystique and invite the viewer into an recondite and spectacular experience of the landscape not unlike that often found in National Geographic. Yet aesthetic expression centered on ethnic fantasy seems to be inadequate and even problematic. This is because the images in this film are not a betrayal but, on the contrary, they critique the established ethnographic stereotype of this region that has degenerated Tibet into an image of wild nature and its spiritual exoticism. Meanwhile, the artist sketches the increasing unrest and traces of collisions of politics about Tibetan independence through the disquieting red propaganda banners in Yushu city. And he accurately reads one of the crucial aspects of this region’s marginalization from modern development in the yearning of the young man who is fascinated by the outside world through Mandarin radio broadcasts. Nevertheless, in the present situation where sensitive political issues related to the Tibet-China conflict exist, this fanciful representation of ethnographic observation, as well as the proposition of the question of cultural otherness, though valid in itself, could, unfortunately, promote the depoliticization of the precarious reality of Tibet in a subtle and insinuating way. As Hal Foster has asserted, “the quasi-anthropological role set up for the artist can promote a presuming as much as a questioning of ethnographic authority, an evasion as often as an extension of institutional critique.”4 Gao’s works are never free from this paradox. It is highly likely that the artist’s serene description of the young man’s somewhat extraordinary story will encourage the avoidance of what is going on in the other side of Tibetan society; that is, the very scene of radical struggle in restoring its sovereignty. Likely, this is the reason the fanciful images and lyrical beauty of this film instill hesitation and doubt.

Gao Shiqiang, installation view of The Other There, 2009, HDV. Courtesy of the artist.

The Scene Left Behind Development The Other There (2009) has a structure similar to Faint with Oxygen in that it simultaneously observes and contrasts the levels of development in three different spaces. Gradually moving from Weidonggou, a small rural community situated on the border between China and Russia, to Mudanjiang, a city lined with factories—the foundation of China’s heavy industry in the past—and again to Hangzhou in the southwest, the region of global urban economy, Gao compares three different modes of existence using black-and-white film: first, a dead zone devoid of modernization and surrounded only by nature; second, the regression of the space of modern industrialization; and, finally, a city that is saturated with global consumer

96 Gao Shiqiang, The Other culture. The artist presents the rural village as an unchanged, timeless There, 2009, HDV, 49 mins. 31 secs. Courtesy of the artist. landscape, while the industrial machines in the factory city became relics of the past as a result of Chinese modernization. Now those plants, which had once represented the ideal of socialist progress, have become a playground for a child who has nowhere else to play. The camera then records the home appliances inside of a home in Hangzhou, which is also overflowing with books, toys- for a beloved city-born single child, and consumer goods that represent Chinese urban life, as well as artificial scenes of the downtown packed with new global luxury stores. The scenes of such dissimilar social spaces in this film expose the asymmetry not only of development in Chinese society, but also the ill-balanced situation of a “distribution of wealth,” which was once one of the major principles of communism, although the Chinese government now focuses on the “production and creation of new global capitalistic wealth.” And by presenting a contrast between the peace of an inland village surrounded by nature with the noise of an artificial city, The Other There makes an indirect comment on another imbalance—that of ecology. Here, the artist neither presents change merely as negative nor remains in a state of nostalgia for the past. As is suggested in the last part of the film, it is, after all, only the natural law of change that a child might depart from the village. Nevertheless, Gao at least takes a step back from the tempo of quick change, creating a space of contemplative reflection in the film.

A country or a society that has undergone a rapid structural change on account of economic growth is bound to witness many cultural and historical contradictions that coexist uneasily irrespective of their time differentials and gaps. Development can involve social absurdity, abuse, labour exploitation, and, simultaneously, the pursuit and expectation

97 98 Gao Shiqiang, The Other of profit and an improved quality of life. Thus, Gao Shiqiang neither There, 2009, HDV, 49 mins. 31 secs. Courtesy of the artist. denies the necessity of change nor ignores the problem of human beings who are caught up in the confusion of identity that can come with such change. Through the allegorical use of both the spectacles of nature and urban space, he represents adaptation and desire in the high capitalist era as well as confusion, emptiness, and gloominess. Static camera shots or slow motion are a means of providing close observation of the fissures within Chinese society where past and present are overlapping, mixed, and complexly complicated. Moreover, they also function as a critical device that is opposed to the desire for capitalist production and consumption. Therefore, the aesthetics of slowness in his moving images, as well as the soliloquies and asides that suggest a space of isolation, can be regarded as important formal elements paralleling the artist’s reflection on society today. The conflicted, agonized, and schizophrenic subjects of today are representative of the ruptures inside the a society that is swiftly turning to high capitalism. His series of films bring together a lyrical and philosophical meditation on landscape, a lesson from traditional stories, the dramas and melancholia of mundane life, and the visible and invisible gaps that exist in social classification, alienation, and ethical apathy. His works are not mere comments on the various symptoms of a society in transition, but are rigorous studies that constantly induce different deliberations and reflections on civil society. Exploring not only the stories of powerless individuals, but also the contradictory aspects of a globalizing Chinese society, the artist calmly considers and intervenes in the totalizing grand narrative of the myth of growth and its monstrous desire.

Translated from the Korean by Gwak Jae Eun

Notes 1 Lee Jin-Kyung, “The Politics of Antagonism, the Politics of Friendship,” in Goh Byung-kwon and Lee Jin-kyong, ed., Communalism Manifesto: The Politics of Friendship and Happiness (Seoul: Gyoyang- in, 2007 ), 82–87. 2 Chantal Mouffe describes what she calls ”agonism” as ”a different mode of manifestation of antagonism because it involves a relation not between enemies but between ‘adversaries,’ adversaries being defined in a paradoxical way as ‘friendly enemies,’ that is, persons who are friends because they share a common symbolic space but also enemies because they want to organize this common symbolic space in a different way.” See Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verson, 2003), 13. 3 Maurice Blanchot, “The Community of Lovers,” in The Unavowable Community (New York: Station Hill Press, 1988), 27–56. 4 Hal Foster, “‘The Artist as Ethnographer,”’ in The Return of the Real (Cambridge, Mass., and London: The MIT Press, 1996), 197.

99 Stacey Duff Floating and Theft in Wuhan

WAZA, Floating Chinese Musicians, 2009, site-specific installation with 30 speakers and a chicken. Photo: Stacey Duff. Courtesy of WAZA and ChART Contemporary, Beijing.

n August 14, 2009, I accompanied a group of mainland Chinese and China-based international journalists to Wuhan, the Oprovincial capital of Hubei province. Gradually, we made our way from the centre of this sprawling city across the Yangtze River to the outskirts of town where we arrived at an abandoned drive-in movie theatre on the shores of the East Lake. The site had not been in use as a movie theatre since 2002 (before that, the area had been a state-owned fishery), and it now consisted of an empty parking lot, a concrete stage, and a single two-storey building that had previously served as a refreshments room and later a bar (on the first floor) and the projection room (on the second floor). The structure is now inhabited by squatters who have been hired to keep watch over the premises.

Prior to our arrival, the local art collective known as WAZA1 had set up an installation on the parking lot pavement. The centrepiece of the work consisted of thirty speakers, each with an MP3 player placed in a light green triangular-shaped box and supported on white metal poles. The sound that was coming out of the speakers consisted of thirty separate recordings from local migrant—or “floating”—musicians, which WAZA had re-mastered and combined with its own soundtrack of original electronic music. The effect was at once eerie and beautiful, with human voices and an array of instruments emerging now and then from an overpowering high-pitched whine.

A single chicken coop—enclosing a chicken—had been placed on the pavement beside the group of thirty speakers. Fifteen articles of clothing had been neatly placed on the pavement a few meters away from the speaker

100 WAZA, Floating Chinese Musicians, 2009. Photo: Stacey Duff. Courtesy of WAZA and ChART Contemporary, Beijing.

group. WAZA had stolen the clothing from both the floating musicians, who were ostensibly the focus of this work, and the people who lived in the areas where the musicians played. WAZA also utilized the two-story structure located in the center of the parking lot, where they installed a video and audio work, drawing again on the sound of the musicians as well as their own remixes. Images for the video portion of the work did not display the floating musicians but had been taken in 2005, using the video recording function from a mobile phone. The interior of the structure was cluttered, chairs and sofas were stacked in corners and the walls had been decorated years before with wallpaper—now ripped and peeling—that reproduced Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'Avignon.

Floating Chinese Musicians, as this project was officially titled, functions on several levels. First, it operates as social documentary and commentary; second, it serves as an example of artists transforming and reconfiguring documentary field work into a work of art; third, it highlights questions of authorship between the artists and the musicians, who in effect became their unknowing collaborators, since, as we shall discuss in detail in a moment, the musicians knew that they were being recorded, but they had specifically asked for the recordings not to be published, and it remains unclear after interviews with the artists and curators, whether the floating musicians knew their own music was being used in an artwork; fourth, the on-site installation itself works as pure fiction; and, finally, the project and certain aspects of the way it was conducted underscore the ethical boundaries artists may cross when making a work.

Recording the Musicians: Art as Documentary and Social Commentary According to the brochure accompanying the installation, “Floating Chinese Musicians is a sound installation and media archive of thirty folk musicians who are preserving a dying tradition while surviving on China’s periphery.”2 The aim of WAZA was not to record musicians who predominantly used traditional or rural Chinese instruments, so it may be fitting to adjust this definition slightly and describe the musicians as urban folk musicians. Classical Chinese instruments, including the gu zheng, san xian, jing hu, er hu, and the suo na, were used by some of the musicians, but traditionally non-Chinese instruments were used as well, including the saxophone, guitar, electric piano, and maracas.

101 The aim in recording the musicians was not to capture some innate Chineseness, but to capture a slice or cross-section of sounds from local street musicians who happen to be Chinese. There was no overall theme to the selection process. “We didn’t have any set criteria,” says WAZA, which nonetheless cited two basic requirements. “First, the thirty musicians we picked needed to have a complete set of materials, including text and music—although in some cases, we really liked the music, and so even if they did not have an extensive set of materials, we recorded them anyway. Second, the musicians had to be willing to cooperate with us. We didn’t want to do anything that they are not comfortable with.”3

Megan and KC Vienna Connolly—the show’s curatorial team4—did cite a distinction in quality, however, between the musicians recorded by WAZA and the average street musician in Wuhan who performs in the city’s more popular tourist areas, which they describe as “horse-and-pony shows.” They also differentiated between sham artists who were producing music only to make quick money, and the “floating musicians” recorded by WAZA. The floating musicians had lost their previous means of employment, so they began performing music on the street as a means to make a living. Also, many of the floating musicians had previous musical training before they became street performers. “Many of the floating musicians recorded for the project had previously been members of local cultural troupes or had come from musical families,”5 says Megan Connolly. Compared to the average street performer in Wuhan who is not placed in such circumstances, KC Vienna Connolly adds, “we feel that their reasons for making music are more noble.”6

Although some of the musicians were trained either by their families or by local cultural troupes, many of them were forced into playing music on the street after their “real jobs” had been taken away from them, either because of personal injury or because of restructuring in the Chinese economy. One of the musicians, a former truck driver, began playing music after he was in a crippling automobile accident (he was at fault as a drunk-driver, so he did not report the accident or seek compensation). Another musician began playing music after he lost his job at a local watch factory. Yet another was formerly a member of Wuhan’s Chemical Industry Cultural Troupe; after the troupe dissolved, she began performing for a theatre troupe on the outskirts of Hubei province. The actress, born in 1964, was fired at the end of the 1990s because of her age, after which she began performing on the streets of Wuhan as a floating musician.

Sixty percent of the performers, says Megan Connolly, are from Hubei, with the remaining musicians coming from other parts of China. “Many of the musicians,” says WAZA, “are laid off workers. They come to Wuhan by train. The city is like a hiding place—the city is dull but relatively secluded.”7 WAZA began mingling with the musicians by offering them favours, such as asking whether they needed help carrying their instruments. After befriending the musicians, WAZA convinced them to make recordings of their music in local karaoke bars. The recordings were made in the months leading up to the Olympic Games. Just before the Games began, authorities in Wuhan, as in other cities in China, began removing beggars and other «undesirable» people who were considered to give China a negative image. The floating musicians in Wuhan were among these. The last recording of a floating musician was made on August 7, 2008, the day before the Olympics

102 officially opened. So in addition to providing a documentary or archival function, the Floating Chinese Musicians project also serves as a dystopic reality check that deflates, or at least provides a counterbalance to the pomp, grandeur, and idealism of the Games.

From Documentary to Artistic Expression an Questions of Authorship It is important to note that at the site in Wuhan, it was virtually impossible to distinguish the recordings of individual musicians. WAZA had remixed the recordings from each musician with its own selection of other electronic sounds. The effect here was adversarial to a traditional documentary form in that it had the effect of diluting or covering up individual voices, preventing viewers (and listeners) from engaging with each musician, and his or her recording, in tandem. The speaker boxes, painted in a pale green commonly seen in Chinese hospitals, were not unpleasing aesthetically, but, ultimately, they produced a sterile, distancing effect from the individual lives of the musicians, who were not present at the event. The work then was unsettling—for this viewer at least—in that it managed to be both lyrical and impersonal.

The artists had both paid tribute to the musicians they recorded and

WAZA, Floating Chinese reduced them to impersonal objects: speaker boxes placed on poles. Again, Musicians, detail of speaker. Photo: Stacey Duff. Courtesy this is contrary to a traditional documentary form that might have supplied of WAZA and ChART Contemporary, Beijing. videos, for instance, of each musician in performance. Jian Cui, a Beijing- based Chinese journalist, noted after our visit to the site, “The sound of the overall installation represents the chaos of Wuhan.” I would add that it also expresses the desperation and helplessness of its migrant population as a whole, rather than through specific, individual cases. Since the musicians are themselves “floating,” and in effect migratory, WAZA has allowed us to eavesdrop on that portion of the migrant population that expresses itself through music. While the work is based within a documentary process, the on-site installation in Wuhan presented WAZA’s personal interpretation

103 and reconfiguration of the floating musicians’ work. WAZA, at the event in Wuhan at least, is more like a group of conductor-collaborators than one of author-composers.

The floating musicians who participated did so with the provision that their work would not be published. On the basis of my interview with the artists, it remains unclear when, if ever, WAZA obtained permission to publish or broadcast the musicians recording as part of an artwork. Although WAZA say the musicians were invited to see the installation, not a single musician was present at the opening or available for interview. Curator Megan Connolly said that, to her knowledge, the musicians never knew that their recording would be included in an artwork.8

Many of the musicians were uncomfortable when WAZA approached them to be recorded. “They would say ‘fuck off,’ or punch you, or slam the door in your face,” said WAZA.9 Many of them did not want to attract negative media attention, either, because they did not have proper residency permits, or because they had previously committed some form of crime or misdemeanor. “A lot of these street performers,” said Megan Connelly, “are tough guys. A lot of them have been in jail. A lot of them, they steal. They’re tough guys. But the ones that are part of this project have a very strange and wonderful talent.” WAZA also implied the semi-criminal, seedy, peripheral, or underground nature of the musicians by adding that a few of them were “involved” with gambling joints.

According to research conducted by WAZA, “Local media reports that involve the floating musicians are of two types: one is to simply report on a particular show or performance in which they participate and that is organized or founded by an institution—whether a business or government institution. The second type of reporting focuses on the negative influence of floating populations.”10

Also, many of the musicians did not want to be recorded, possibly as a result of artistic attitude, or posturing, much like young and petulant rock stars. In other words, they wanted to project an attitude that conveyed their importance and celebrity status. In that case, WAZA had to promise something in return, like, for instance, a CD of their recorded music. “Some of the artists had demands,” said WAZA, “like ‘sure, you can record my voice but you have to give me a copy, and you can’t publish the music’.”11. WAZA provided the requested CDs, but they did not adhere to initial requests that the music not be published (as it was later as part of the artwork).

It is clear that WAZA was careful in persuading the musicians to record. In no instances did they record the musicians in stealth or against their will: “If they did not agree to a recording, of course there was no way we could record them,” said WAZA.12 But again, it remains unclear whether or not the musicians were aware that the recordings would later be used in an artwork, since there are contradictory statements from the artists and the curator.

Irrespective of their cognizance of it, the musicians are in fact—along with WAZA—co-authors of the installation.13 If the musicians are unaware that their recordings are being used in an artwork, the viewer is confronted with an ethical issue. The artists have drawn attention to a disadvantaged

104 group of people through an artwork. As viewers of both the artwork and having reviewed materials that introduce the project, we sympathize with the musicians, whom we might not have known without WAZA's effort. At the same time, the means employed in making their situation known seems to take advantage of the group in that their recordings are being used in the artwork either without their cognizance or even against their will. The ultimate ethical question is whether the good achieved by the project outweighs any wrongdoing in the process of making and presenting the final work. Also, viewers might also consider to what extent the ethical ambiguity surrounding this project affects their ability to fully appreciate the work on an aesthetic level.

Thirty Fictional Lives Left: WAZA during an interview in Wuhan, Left: Hu Ge, Right: Wang Huan. Photo: Stacey Duff. Right: Floating Chinese Musicians press conference, Wuhan, August 14, 2009. Left to right: Vienna Connolly, Megan Connolly, Hu Ge, and Wang Huan. Photo: Stacey Duff.

In order to confirm the nature of WAZA's relationship to the musicians, I would have liked the opportunity to speak to the floating musicians themselves, but this was not possible at the event. ChART Contemporary did come down a week before the show to find the musicians. “They’re gone,” said Megan Connolly. “These recordings were done in 2008 and what happened after the Olympics was that the Wuhan government really cleaned house.”14 By “cleaning house,” Connolly means that the musicians were not allowed to perform on the streets of Wuhan. They either returned home or were sent to temporary detention centers. The effort of the Wuhan authorities, as mentioned above, may be seen as part of a nationwide effort to remove migrants and the homeless off the streets in advance of the Olympic Games.15

WAZA itself, while acknowledging the “clean-out,” also suggested additional reasons for the absence of the musicians. WAZA had previously told one of our team that the musicians probably wouldn’t show up because they were afraid of “getting caught.” On the day of the event, however, WAZA said, “We invited them to the opening, but their reaction made us somewhat afraid—because they might ask whether we had published the work.” If the musicians were invited to the opening, this implies the “clean-out” was temporary and that the musicians were allowed to return after the Olympics. Although, as mentioned, I did not have the opportunity to interview any of the displaced musicians, their return to Wuhan would reflect my own observations of similar displaced populations in Beijing: after the Olympic Games, migrant and homeless populations in Beijing, gradually began to filter back into the city.16

Whether or not the musicians have been allowed to return to Wuhan, they were nonetheless absent at the opening. The absence of the musicians—our inability as third parties to confirm either their stories or their identities— leave us the possibility that the musicians don’t exist at all. Or perhaps that they are real musicians whose stories are invented. Naturally, this possibility seems absurd since we have recordings of their voices and music,

105 The Starsky Auto Cinema, Wuhan, site of installation for Floating Chinese Musicians. Photo: Stacey Duff.

and we even have their pictures (although these could be pictures and sounds of actors pretending to be musicians). In the absence of the subjects themselves, in the wake of their supposed disappearance, we must at least admit that the musicians could also be a nest of thirty small fictions, fictions that seem as convincing and moving as flesh and blood, living fictions.

I suspect that their stories and lives are as real as my own, and I do so from a natural tendency to trust the artists. But hunches and tendencies cannot take the place of facts. Rather than being a negative quality in the work, this possibility of fiction adds to its textural richness and provides the degree of ambiguity that characterizes any substantial work of art. Perhaps the Floating Chinese Musicians project is a work of pure fiction; or, perhaps, in a Borgesian sense, it mixes fact and fiction;17 but, in the end, we may also entertain the healthy notion that everything the artists tell us about the musicians is true, since their absence does not necessarily preclude their existence.

Whether the lives of the musicians and their music are fiction or fact, the story itself is as strange and sad as seeing a former fishery turned drive-in cinema turned empty parking lot, then loaded with migratory cries, angry artists, wandering journalists, a chicken cramped in a coop, and a silent display of clothes that were stolen during the night, reputedly from the musicians themselves. Wuhan—with its haze and humidity and unfinished construction projects—has a dream-like quality about it. The atmospheric haze combined with its seemingly endless urban sprawl echoes WAZA's claim, quoted above, that the city is “like a hiding place.” But it also strikes this observer as stifling and overpowering. If the city is like a hiding place, it's not an entirely comfortable one. It is entirely conceivable that making music keeps you alive in a city such a Wuhan: it can help you find money for food, but it also gives you something to listen to on the streets of a tough urban environment. Making music in Wuhan helps you survive in more ways than one.

A Portrait of the Artists as Young Thieves If we take as a given that the musicians are real, we move to another ambiguous issue regarding this project, one that also lies in the border zone between art and ethics.

In order to flesh out the project, WAZA wanted to borrow the clothing of the musicians whose music they recorded. According to the artists, their

106 requests were categorically denied. So where did the clothing of the musicians come from?

“We stole them,” said WAZA, “because they didn’t want to give them to us. So we had to use our own methods to pull this off. You can say there is an element of aggression to this work.”18 ChART Contemporary, while adding that they don’t condone the thefts, also said that some of the clothing came not from the musicians but, in some instances, from people who lived in areas where the musicians performed. The act of theft itself is in keeping with the nature of disenfranchised or disadvantaged urbanites and, ironically, the artists are replicating the actions of some of the musicians (recall what Connolly said above: “A lot of them, they steal.”). WAZA has joined their criminal ranks as a group of casual tricksters, and not because the artists who form WAZA are disadvantaged themselves. The thefts can be seen as an act of play born of a desire to include the clothing in the installation, thereby completing the artwork. The only other alternative to viewing the thefts as an act of play would be to identify the thefts (and the work of art) as an act of crime.

The thefts complicate WAZA’s relationship to the musicians as well as complicate our relationship to the work. WAZA has drawn attention to and has told the stories of a persecuted or victimized group of people. At the same time, they have taken part in their victimization, as either a means to an end or an act of mischief. We must ask ourselves what the act of theft implies. Was WAZA's motive to fulfill the conceptual demands of the exhibition? Did they want to include the clothing as a way to give the musicians a symbolic presence in their physical absence? Does the act of theft express, metaphorically, the victimization of the musicians by society or authority? Or is the theft act a way for WAZA to identify with the musicians?

Any of these options could be viable, but the most convincing one, the one that strikes with the most human and problematic force, is the last option. In other words, by thieving, WAZA has engaged (however aggressively) in antisocial behavior and has identified with its subjects by imitating their behavior. WAZA, like the musicians, has engaged in thieving, even if the musicians who thieve do so out of necessity and WAZA has stolen from a desire to complete an artwork.

Floating—or drifting, and any other form of living on the periphery—is not dissimilar to theft in that they are activities generally looked down upon by mainstream segments of the population and often penalized by authorities. Both floating and theft provide a means of survival frowned upon by conventional society. In the case of Wuhan and this project, thieves, musicians, and artists alike face risks, whether those risks result in prosecution and stigma, or in cynosure and critical acceptance. Choosing to take such risks may be a simple act of survival, or it may be used to draw attention to the disadvantaged, but, ultimately, taking such risks can be a way of reclaiming creative freedom.

For the musicians, choosing to take these risks—whether making music or thieving—stems from economic necessity. For WAZA, choosing to take these risks may come from a desire to document and underscore the plight of the musicians and migrants who live in Wuhan; it may stem

107 from a desire to identify with the artists; or it may come from a simple On site at Floating Chinese Musicians, 2009. Photo: Stacey desire to complete a work of art. In any case, WAZA has chosen to engage in Duff. Courtesy of WAZA and theft of the musicians' clothing, and as discussed above, they have published ChART Contemporary, their music without their consent and, quite possibly, used their music in an artwork without their knowledge. In doing so, WAZA has placed aesthetic considerations above its regard for what is considered normal ethical behavior. While crossing ethical boundaries to complete a work of art, WAZA has both victimized the musicians and ironically drawn attention to their forced removal and disadvantaged status. The lasting question for viewers is to what extent they can accept the work—its documentary aims, its effectiveness as social commentary and its aesthetic merit—in light of its ethical ambiguities.

Notes 1 WAZA is an emerging artists’ collective that currently consists of two members, Wang Huan and Hu Ge. The group was founded in 2002 with seven members, although, according to Hu Ge, “The name of the group was originally used for free creative work in Wuhan. Participants could come and go as they pleased.” In this article, the two artists are referred to by their collective name rather than their personal names. 2 Catalogue brochure provided on site, August 14, 2009. 3 Interview with the artists on site, August 14, 2009. 4 In 2008, the Connolly sisters founded ChART Contemporary, a Beijing-based curatorial lab. “The Floating Chinese Musicians project is,” according to a materials provided on site, “conceptualized by WAZA, produced by ChART Contemporary and supported by Intelligent Alternative.” Also according to materials provided on site, Intelligent Alternative was founded by the Beijing-based art historian Karen Smith, and “was established in 2006 to support artists: to develop projects focused on cross cultural and inter-disciplinary exchange between China and the outside world.” 5 Interview with KC Vienna and Megan Connolly on site, August 14, 2009. 6 Ibid. 7 Interview with the artists on site, August 14, 2009. 8 Phone interview with Megan Connolly, October 4, 2009. 9 Interview with the artists on site, August 14, 2009. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 It should be noted that in addition to original compositions by the floating musicians, the recordings also featured the musicians performing cover versions of famous songs (Interview with Megan Connolly on October 5, 2009). This detail does not negate or override the musicians’ request for the recordings not to be published, but arguably, it does provide an added layer to the project. 14 Interview with KC Vienna and Megan Connolly on site, August 14, 2009. 15 The campaign to remove both migrants and the homeless off the streets was widely reported on in both Chinese and Western media outlets before and during the Olympic Games, including on April 8, 2008, in the People’s Daily (http://english.people.com.cn/90001/6387974.html); and on August 5, 2008, in the Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121788405566611245.html). 16 These observations were made in several different areas of Beijing, including the Xinjiekou neighborhood, where I reside; in the immediate vicinity of the Changchunjie subway station; and in the park area near the Temple of the Origin of the Dharma. 17 I am referring specifically to works—such as the 1935 edition ofA Universal History of Iniquity (Historia Universal de la Infamia)—that read mostly as documentary but have elements of fictional invention added to Borges initial documentary research. 18 Interview with the artists on site, August 14, 2009.

108 Chinese Name Index

Ai Weiwei Ji Weiyu Lu Peng Wong, Doris Wai Yin 艾未未季煒煜呂澎黃慧妍

Birdhead Jia Fangzhou Lu Pingyuan Wu Hung 鳥頭賈方舟陸平原巫鴻

Chang Tzong-zung Jia Zhangke Pi Li Xu Jiang 張頌仁賈樟柯皮力許江

Chu Yun Jin Feng Qiu Xiaofei Xu Zhen 儲雲金鋒仇小飛徐震

Deng Xiaoping Jin Liping Qiu Zhijie Yang Fudong 鄧小平金利萍邱志杰楊福東

Ding Yi Li Dafang Shang, Danielle Yang Zhenzhong 丁乙李大方尚端楊振中

Fang Lijun Li Qiang Shao Yi Yao, Pauline J. 方力鈞李强邵一姚嘉善

Gao Minglu Li Xianting Shen Fan Yue Minjun 高名潞栗憲庭申凡岳敏君

Gao Mingyan Liang Yue Shi Jinsong Yung, Anthony Tsz Kin 高銘研梁玥史金淞翁子健

Gao Shiqiang Liao Wen Shi Yong Zeng Fanzhi 高世強廖雯施勇曾梵志

Gao Weigang Lin Hong-wen Shu Yong Zeng Hao 高偉剛林鴻文舒勇曾浩

Gu Zhenqing Lin Jingxin Song Kun Zhang Enli 顧振清林敬新宋琨張恩利

He Jinwei Ling Jian Song Tao Zhang Xiaogang 何晉渭凌健宋濤張曉剛

He Sen Liu Ding Sun Shanchun Zhao Li 何森劉鼎孫善春趙力

Hou Hanru Liu Jianhua Sun Yuan Zheng Guogu 侯瀚如劉建華孫原鄭國谷

Hu Ge Liu Wei Tang Dixin Zhong Biao 胡戈劉韡唐狄鑫鍾飆

Hu Jieming Liu Xiaodong Wang Huan Zhou Tie Hai 胡介鳴劉小東王焕周鐡海

Hu Jintao Lu, Carol Yinghua Wang Lin Zhou Zixi 胡錦濤盧迎華王林周子曦

Hu Xiangqian Lu, Victoria Yung-Chih Wang Meiqin Zhu Qi 胡向前陸蓉之王美欽朱其

Hu Yun Lu Hao Weng Fen 胡昀盧昊翁奮

109 110

Wang Guangyi (b. 1957) is a central figure of Yishu the Political Pop movement and recognized as a leader of the New Art Movement in China established in the 1980s. He is most recognized for Edition the socio-political paintings and prints from his Great Criticism series begun in 1998. Through his use of No. 5 the Chinese political icons and symbols of Western commercialism, his images respond to the deeply engrained legacy of propaganda experienced in To purchase a Yishu edition China during the Cultural Revolution. Originally print please send your request painted in 2005, in this work the artist uses his own to [email protected] or call 1.604.649.8187 (Canada), name as a substitute for luxury brand names common or contact Katherine Don to his Great Criticism series. By calling attention to 86.158.1018.9440 (China). the consumer legacy of his own commercial success, Wang provides cheeky commentary on the experience Each edition is commissioned of China’s changing society. by and produced exclusively for Yishu; and is measured the same Artwork description size as the Journal. Artist ------Wang Guangyi Title ------Great Criticism — Wang Guangyi (2009) Media ------Serigraph Dimension ------210 x 295 mm Edition Size ------200 Price ------US $300 plus shipping

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